The Mis-Education of Micheal Gove

I'd like to think that bonkers education secretary Micheal Gove was getting more bonkers, but sadly, his latest bit of apparently knee-jerk reactionary-ness is simply part of a greater malaise that afflicts the right. Last week Gove was busy condemning the AQA exam board for a GCSE question which, he claimed, seemed to be seeking to justify anti-semitism. Cue the usual political huffing and puffing and the predictable outrage from all the usual suspects. The trouble is, of course, that the exam question was doing no such thing. It was merely trying to get students to explain the reasons why, in much of 1930s Europe, large numbers of otherwise sensible people held such views. It wasn't asking for a value judgement on them, it was merely trying to ascertain whether students understood how such obnoxious creeds come to have political credence under certain circumstances. But the right-wing never sees it that way, to them, trying to understand something is the same as trying to justify it: just look at their hostility to any academic work which seeks to explain the Russian revolution and the rise of communism in economic, social or political terms. They'd rather stick with the tried and tested old idiocy of ascribing such things as the rise of dictators and genocides to 'general wickedness'.

Except that 'general wickedness' simply isn't very helpful in any attempt to stop history repeating itself. It suggests that these things are inevitable and we should simply endure them when they occur. In reality, though, we have to try and understand the origins of such things as fascism, anti-semitism, Stalinism, racism and all the other ills which continue to afflict us, if we are to have any chance of stopping them from recurring. Take Hitler, for example, there is always a tendency to dismiss any attempt to analyse his rise to power in terms other than simply condemning him as evil, as being some attempt at apologism for the Nazis. Similarly, any attempt to analyse the man himself is condemned as an attempt to 'humanise' him. But the fact is that he was a human being, just like you and I, and it is also a fact that his rise to power didn't occur in a vacuum. He was elected to power in Germany using a democratic system - people didn't see him as a dictator from the off. Obviously, otherwise they wouldn't have voted for him.

Most dictators start as charismatic democratic politicians, using the existing system to build a power-base. Which is, sort of, the point I was trying to make in the Assassination of Boris Johnson story. Johnson has twice been elected as London mayor on the basis he's 'a bit of a character' and is some kind of iconoclast - he's been careful to avoid campaigning on a platform of actual policies, because if he revealed the true extent of his hardline right-wing views, he'd have lost. Just bear in mind that they used to describe Mussolini in similar terms, as a 'bit of a character' and so on - and look how that turned out. So, it's important that we try to understand the rationale behind unpleasant belief systems and the ways in which totalitarians can subvert the democratic process if we are ever to stand a chance of stamping them out. But the likes of bonkers Education Secretary Micheal Gove are, for some strange reason, reluctant for young people to develop the critical faculties necessary to do this - I wonder why?