The anonymous editorialist at The Australian, and yet more war-mongering blather disguised as fact gathering ......

"Traffic lights are a Bolshevist menace... Traffic lights are things which are set up to try and control traffic to try and control individuals on the roads," Dr Phelps (NSW Liberal whip in the upper house) told Parliament.

"They are normally programmed by some central planner who will tell you when you can come and when you can go."

Mr Gay (NSW Roads Minister) eventually intervened.

"Tell them I have no plans to remove traffic lights," he told Dr Phelps.

The rebuke did not stop the whip from suggesting an alternative.

"Roundabouts. Roundabouts represent freedom. Roundabouts represent democracy at its finest," he said. (NSW MP sees red over traffic lights).

Pure comedy gold from the archives, and if you want more comedy gold, why not read about Dr. Phelps (history) taking on climate change and the Australian Museum in Phelps v Australian Museum over climate change.

No wonder the muddle headed wombat thought about a career in Australian politics, but sadly we have to leave Dr. Phelps for the even richer comedy stylings of the anonymous editorialist at The Australian, as showcased in Rescuing a vital discipline.

Sadly in a wasted youth, the pond, like Dr. Phelps, once studied history, and lurched away from university with an honours degree in the wretched subject.

As Molesworth once remarked, history started badly and have been geting steadly worse

But could history sink any lower than the effort by the anon editorialist at the Oz?

As the Anzac centenary approaches, educators should capitalise on the intense interest to promote history. Students are sufficiently discerning to expect a factual narrative about the meaning of the anniversary rather than wayward, anti-war interpretations.

Wayward anti-war interpretations? Of a complete and disastrous schemozzle (Yiddish, I'm sure you know, for a mess).

Does the anon editorialist have the first clue of the complete silliness of that notion?

Did he or she ever talk with Gallipoli veterans? Well in the way of things, if you sat down with actual veterans (we even had a couple in the extended family), the most likely interpretation you got from those willing to talk about the experience (not everyone was inclined to relive the horror) would have been a wayward anti-war interpretation.

Never mind that the term "factual narrative" is semantic gibberish, and that "facts" in any decent history are always contested, debated, ordered, weighed, considered, contextualised and sometimes overthrown.

There's no need to be a post-modernist relativist to work out that what The Australian thinks is a "fact" is in all likelihood a handy set of wayward personal prejudices backed up by an ill-sorted assembly of half-truths ...

What the anon editorialist possibly means is that the "factual narrative" should produce some jingoistic nationalistic interpretation useful to nurturing todays's warriors ... and befitting the sort of narrow narrative which generated the Gallipoli legend, and which of late has been driving traffic to Turkey each anniversary in search of C.E.W. Bean's mythology.

This is the kind of fatuous narrative that sees the likes of 'Jack' Simpson and his donkey sanitised into a mythic figure, stripped of his more attractive qualities, which included a wayward inclination to larrikinism, a wayward ability to desert from the merchant navy, and a reluctant warrior attitude which saw him absent himself from his unit.

Simpson also had a wayward capacity to be a radical trade unionist who fervently believed in the need for revolution in England, and who by default would have thought Rupert Murdoch and The Australian and its pathetic anonymous editorialist sucked really big time.

I see that the railway men who get 24 bob a week have got a rise of 3½ percent. I suppose that they must have caught the owners when they were drunk and [in] a generous state of mind to have got such a hell of a rise. I suppose the railwaymen will be going about like Lords now that they have got a shilling a week rise but I suppose the Lords and Dukes will take it off them next year again as the expenses will be too big for them to keep up ... I often wonder when the working men of England will wake up and see things as other people see them. What they want in England is a good revolution and that will clear some of these Millionaires and Lords and Dukes out of it and then with a Labour Government they will almost be able to make their own conditions.

Yeah Jack and while you're at it, clear out the ratbags at The Australian.

Of course none of this is usually mentioned in most wayward Australian histories of Gallipoli, just as most wayward histories fail to mention that authorities had trouble finding fresh willing victims to trot off to the slaughter, and this resulted in two epic pro-conscription campaigns, in which PM Billy Hughes was backed by wayward equivalents of The Australian.

The first in October 1916 failed by a small margin, and a second in December 1917 was defeated by a larger margin (and more in the wiki here).

That's possibly because even the most wayward historian finds it hard to mount a pro-war case for the carnage and slaughter of trench warfare in the first world war. The reasons and the causes of the war, bedded in imperial and colonial desires and contests, and the conduct and strategies of the war shocked the generation involved in it.

Gallipoli was a minor folly up against the activities of General Haig, but a military folly it was, and despite attempts over the years, as a campaign it was as irredeemable as General Haig was as a strategist. Fussell put this well:

... although one doesn't want to be too hard on Haig ... who has been well calumniated already ... it must be said that it now appears was that one thing the war was testing was the usefulness of the earnest Scottish character in a situation demanding the military equivalent of wit and invention. Haig had none. He was stubborn, self-righteous, inflexible, intolerant—especially of the French—and quite humourless ... Indeed, one powerful legacy of Haig's performance is the conviction among the imaginative and intelligent today of the unredeemable defectiveness of all civil and military leaders. Haig could be said to have established the paradigm. (here).

Although one doesn't want to be too hard on Gallipoli ... the strategies have been well calumniated already ... it could be said that quite early in the war it established the unredeemable defectiveness of military strategies for the war, and established something of a paradigm.

While it's hard to be Gandhi-like about Adolf Hitler and the second world war - where better equipment and increased firepower helped generate even more carnage - it's hard to be wear rosy spectacles about the first world war, especially if one wants to honour the feelings and attitudes of many of those who fought, suffered or died in it.

There's more gibberish in the editorial, of course, as if historiography had never been invented. The Australian can't resist being infinitely offensive to the practise of history, as it gets agitated about historians wanting to move away from the "national narrative":

They recommend subjects that "connect this country to the region and the world" and those "like Australian environmental history, which connect Aboriginal, economic and cultural history and historical geography".

Uh huh. We look forward to The Australian's syllabus, which will propose a study of the Australian heritage by way of a syllabus that refuses to connect Australia to the region and the world. Perhaps we could transpose Gallipoli to Bacchus Marsh.

Much would depend on the quality of the new courses, but if students are to understand Australia's past in an international context or the nation's environmental history, such courses would need to be built on solid, factual narratives, not ideology.

Yep, and there we go again, with the notion of solid factual narratives, not ideology, as if within the very words used by the anon edit there's no deeply ideological bias, as if somehow there's a set of "facts" untainted by ideology.

Somehow the anon edit thinks that a Joe Friday - all we want are the facts ma'am - approach to history is viable, and that an intelligent interpretation of said facts will lead to doom and gloom.

Too many university and school history courses built around historical interpretation, thematic strands and teachers' moral perceptions are devoid of rigorous content, leaving many graduates without basic knowledge. They may, for example, have listened to teachers laud anti-Vietnam War protests as social activism, but remain woefully ignorant about colonialism, Communism, the domino theory or the Australia-US alliance. Reinforcing such an approach would be a mistake.

Uh huh. Well scribbling such generalist tosh and expecting it to be taken seriously would also be a mistake, if only because an understanding of Vietnam war protests would necessarily involve an understanding of colonialism, the misbegotten presence of French, then United States and Australian troops in a failed set of colonial wars, and the fatuity of the domino theory ... unless of course you happen to think the United States won the war, the domino theory was viable, and everything turned out jolly well.

Well, if the anon edit at The Australian is so keen on his or her own ideological approach, why then they always have their own Brendan 'if you don't like Rupert Murdoch, start your own newspaper' O'Neill approach.

Yep, if you don't like anti-war interpretations of war, why not head off to Afghanistan, and get involved in a war right now. Then you can regale students in history classes with your very own military experiences.

Then you might discover the truth that Keith Miller noted. Pressure is a Messerschmitt up your arse, playing cricket and writing editorials for The Australian is not ...

Alternatively, you might start reading the poetry of the first world war, much of it produced by poets subsequently killed in action, and most often with a wayward anti-war interpretation. Try a little Siegfried Sassoon, or try a little Wilfred Owen, and you might end up with a wayward response to war and the pity of war, with the poetry in the pity.

Ah well, in the way of these sordid cross-promotional times, the anon edit was just chiming in to promote a piece by Frank Furedi for the lizard Oz's Inquirer section, but I didn't go hunting for the piece, because I have a chance to bash my head with a hammer for several hours this fine morning.

Instead there's a chance to re-run Owen's Dulce et Decorum Est, a poem first given to me by a kindly history teacher intent on going beyond the facts, and evoking the abject misery of trench warfare, a misery my own grandfather rarely mentioned, though he frequently woke at night with memories of the Somme in winter.

It should be included in all wayward interpretations of history - if nothing else, the average student might discover why mustard gas was banned - and why all the idle jolly hockey sticks chatter of the anon editorialist about wayward anti-war interpretations is a kind of obscenity:

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.
Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime . . .
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Put it another way:

"Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori, sed dulcius pro patria vivere, et dulcissimum pro patria bibere. Ergo, bibamus pro salute patriae" In English this is rendered as: "It is sweet and right to die for the homeland, but it is sweeter to live for the homeland, and the sweetest to drink for it. Therefore, let us drink to the health of the homeland.

(Below: found here at an outrageous Beverly Hills High School site with a few wayward views of history).