Wars everywhere, as poodles and ducks go on the march ...

Steady, you might say, what has this World War Two propaganda got to do with Australian politics circa 2014?

Well might you say, but that's what happens when you have an unreformed pugilist and Jesuitical rhetorician as a fearless leader. 

We're in a state of war! There are wars everywhere,  booze wars, history wars and boat wars:

What a humbug, what a doofus. Seeing is believing and you can see him here Waking up Australia on Ten's Wake Up.

So now the poor fuckers trying to get out of war zones and civil chaos are entering a new war zone? 

So now - given Morrison's refusal to talk to anyone about anything - we have to resort to The Jakarta Post to learn about developments? 

Such as the hapless Indonesian military (TNI) commander General Moeldoko getting caught out and suffering a serious loss of face, as you can read in TNI chief denies backing Oz policy?

Remember the days when people used to laugh at the banana republics around the world who used to militarise politics? Uh huh, and now we have an elephant in the room, Australian Defence Force chief General David Hurley, who has caused his counterpart said loss of face. 

Hmm, how else can we advance relations with Indonesia? I know, I know, pick me, we'll get AussiePatriot to write a comment at the bottom of that story:

Australia needs to understand that Indonesia, a Muslim nation, has a vested interest in flooding Australia with Muslim immigrants - it's part of The Hijra, the Muslim Doctrine of Migration.

Now there's a genuine love child of an Abbott and Morrison mating.

Meanwhile, remembering how the United States shot itself in the foot, by declaring everything a war, including a war on drugs that saw people incarcerated and lives ruined for minor offences? Yep, everything is now a war down under ...

Now you might think it was the subbie's fault, but in his usual useless combative way, Abbott provided said subbie with a cue:

''The tragedy is that places that should be entertainment precincts have become on some occasions almost war zones because there is just so much alcohol-fuelled violence,'' Mr Abbott said.

War zones? What the fuck is it with this warrior mentality, this martial approach to everything?

Syria's got a real war going on, so has Afghanistan, and Iraq is currently reviving its war, and let's not even begin to contemplate the recent events in South Sudan.

Does everything have to be dressed up down under as a war to make any action acceptable?

There are simple obvious measures available in relation to booze on the streets, not attempted by various political parties in the pockets of the AHA,  while the poor fuckers trying to flee genuine civil strife are used as an excuse to turn places like Manus Island into a new kind of Guantanamo Bay detention camp.

Meanwhile, the poodle Pyne keeps peeing in the corridors of power, any attempts at toilet training clearly a failure (was it the sight of Gene Hackman's Jack Russell terrier pissing in the corridor of a nuclear sub in the Simpson/Bruckheimer clunker Crimson Tide that triggered this metaphor?)

You see, he's reignited the history wars, ostensibly with the aim of improving Australian education, but in reality to prove he's learnt a thing or two about propaganda from the Jesuits and the Stalinists.

How to reconcile these two stories which turned up yesterday in the Pravda of Holt street, otherwise known as the Oz, the official organ of the government?

He wants to take politics out of the curriculum issue? 

Sorry no link, because the pond was rolling around on the floor with laughter and didn't read any further.  The featureless " " " - couldn't they find a generic picture of a poodle? - wants to be apolitical and take politics out of the issue? After everybody's just spent six years trying to herd state and federal cats towards a shared curriculum?

What's this then?

The appointment of Kevin Donnelly to co-conduct the review is a particular disgrace. 

Donnelly, in his relentless scribbling, has revealed himself to be a partisan ideologue and zealot, remorselessly dedicated to the promotion of the private education sector and undermining the public sector, and rabid about anything beyond the Anglo-celtic pale.

Naturally as the official organ of government - grey apparatchiks in their grey propagandist Maoist Murdochian suits - the reptiles were immediately on the case today:

The best?

So we're worried about physics and maths, and the deplorable reality that the federal government funds schools dedicated to creationism, scientology, or assorted other mumbo jumbos which might lead a writer of an article for the reptiles to declare "There is no fundamentalist Christian or Islamic way of looking at the theory of evolution"?

No, not really, not when Pyne actually got around to blathering about his ill-defined mission statement for the review.

All he could do was come out with half-assed poodle notions reviving the history wars, reminding the world once again that, in the peculiar Liberal bestiary, poodles can indeed also be bears with little brains:

The education minister, Christopher Pyne, says the review will address concerns about the history curriculum “not recognising the legacy of western civilisation and not giving important events in Australia's history and culture the prominence they deserve, such as Anzac Day”. He also wants the curriculum to “celebrate Australia”. 

Oi, oi, oi is an advance to the heights of education?

So will Donnelly put a stop to this "oi" and western civilisation nonsense, and focus on what counts?

One of the two people appointed to lead the review, the conservative education commentator Kevin Donnelly, recently attacked the curriculum for “uncritically promoting diversity” and undervaluing western civilisation and “the significance of Judeo-Christian values to our institutions and way of life”. Donnelly, a former chief of staff to the Liberal minister Kevin Andrews, wrote Why Our Schools are Failing in 2004 and established a think-tank,the Education Standards Institute, in 2008. (Christopher Pyne: curriculum must focus on Anzac Day and western history)

So it's not about maths, physics and the rest of it, it's just the usual guff designed to dumb down Australia and turn it into a servile, submissive copy of the southern states of the good old USA ... where intelligent design roams the corridors and Americans wonder why they're losing their competitive edge in innovation and education.

Now having endured various branches of history for some seven years as a topic of study, the pond is compelled to wonder just what parts of western civilisation we're undervaluing?

World War One, World War Two, or the Holocaust, all with the participation of the home of Beethoven?

Or is it all the colonial adventures that traduced the Middle East and contributed to assorted slaughters in Africa and helped turn the partition of India and Pakistan into a bloodbath?

Or any of the other minor warrior follies, such as Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan?

What particularly irritates the pond is all the relentless blather about Anzac Day, with nary a thought to the lies taught about the likes of Simpson and his donkey, a deserter and trade union activist, and nothing wrong with that.

What's wrong is the way donkeys like Pyne have preferred the myths to the facts.

Of course Australia isn't alone in conservative stupidity.

Britain's education secretary Michael Gove has been in the advanced forces of the celebration of the start of the first world war (mark down 28th July 2014 for the day the ghouls really get going) and already new wars have broken out:

Blackadder has come under fire in the UK in the centenary of World War I for giving children a misguided view of Britain's role in the campaign. 
Only in Britain, perhaps, would the spat pit the Conservative-led government's education minister against a comic actor - Tony Robinson, who played the dim-witted soldier Baldrick in Blackadder Goes Forth, a much-loved television sitcom about the war. 
In an article for the right-of-centre Daily Mail newspaper, Education Secretary Michael Gove said Blackadder and other satires had created a public impression of the four-year war - in which more than 8 million troops and millions of civilians died - as "a misbegotten shambles - a series of catastrophic mistakes perpetrated by an out-of-touch elite." (here)

Yep, we should be grateful down under.

Pyne has fierce competition when it comes to historical twittery as Gove goes about the business of defending an indefensible war conducted by dunderheads on both sides (with a few honourable exceptions like the bold and imaginative Monash).

Meanwhile, conservatives have been at war over the role the colonies played, with David Cameron forced to come out and say that ANZACS would be honoured for their dinkum efforts (here), after Gove stuck a stick in the ants' nest, and caused the likes of Van Badham to scribble Michael Gove, the British education secretary belittling Australia's war dead.

And just like that, by clicking their heels thrice, Pyne and Gove and their cohorts are a long way from any problems with reeling and writhing, though perhaps they might think it gets us closer to the Mock Turtle's definition of the chief branches of arithmetic - ambition, distraction, uglification and derision.

Which brings us to the real scandal of the day. Cue The Guardian:

No, not all the obvious angles. Who can argue that the poodle isn't on about history, he's on a propaganda mission?

You can google such stories at your leisure if you can stand the tedium of discussing the poodle at play.

No, it's that last entry that caught the pond's eye, that bit about the Christopher Pyne quiz.

As explained, the pond fancies itself as history, you know sundry degrees, years of study, almost up itself as Pyne, any quiz would be a real doddle, so we clicked on it here and faithfully answered all the questions to the very best of our ability.

After an early warm-up, the pond bounced out of the gates in style:

Sheesh, this was easy bloody peasy, and that one about Kings Cross was made simple because Tony Abbott explained it's a war zone, where rum rebellions go on 24/7 (without that help we might have got it wrong and voted for running out of bundy and coke on Australia Day). 

Keep rolling them out Martin Farrer, we can handle anything you've got:

Naturally the pond was expecting some sort of prize - after all, who would have caught that clever curve ball, with John Howard disappearing up his fundament at sea on the MV Tampa?

It proved we'd begun our history odyssey under the gentle but firm hand of Ming the Merciless and Harold Holt and Billy McMahon, and we just knew Kevin Donnelly and Chris Pyne would be proud at such comprehensive proof of the benefits of a conservative education. 

Oh sure, the pond's maths and science are completely stuffed - we know climate science is just a global conspiracy involving black helicopters and academic grants thanks to the reptiles at the lizard oz - and we believe in intelligent design, but golly we really nailed that question about the Eureka Stockade because it's all this politically correct leftist talk that's misled the world about the acidification of the oceans.

Time to check the results:

Say what Martin Farrer?

Of course we were trying, we even prayed to the icons we keep in the cupboard of warrior Abbott and poodle Pyne, hallowed be their names.

Oh David Rowe, David Rowe, how you nailed it:

More Rowe here, and as always, David Pope also nails it here:

I know, I know, it's wrong to keep quoting Santayana, but you know with this latest revival of idle PC stupidity, you just have to think he might have been on to something when he said "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

And so we're condemned to go through it yet again with the poodle and Donnelly.

But let's not forget our colonial duty to the motherland, the font of Anglo-Celtic-Graeco-Roman civilisation, with a dash of Jewishness. 

After all, it's Saturday and still not the middle of January in the new year, and all this talk of war on all sorts of fronts has left the pond frazzled and exhausted.

So let's join Steve Bell in celebrating Michael Gove's contribution, as willing as Akker Dakker denouncing Peppa Pig in his denunciation of outrageous entertainments like Black Adder. 

While we have our poodle, Britain has its very own fatuous duck (and more Bell and others here):