The History Curriculum and the Radical Right

It is said that generals always fight the last war. So it is with the current battle over the history section of the National Schools Curriculum. On one hand, federal Education Minister Alan Tudge is fighting the Coalition’s decades-long battle over the domineering Green-Left-Progressivist content of the curriculum. On the other hand, the Left is seeking to retain its iron grip over what is taught in the nation’s schools and further enhance its capacity to promote its iconoclastic, anti-Australian ‘black arm-band’ view of history as it shapes the minds of our nation’s children.

However, apparently unbeknownst to both sides, there has been a fundamental ideological shift in global politics that has, ironically, made the strategy of the Left obsolete, indeed counter-productive from its point of view. So used to trotting out the same old negative arguments, secure in its domination of social media, and confident that it has the state education systems under its thumb, the Left carries on in its long-familiar fashion, denouncing any attempts at curriculum reform as white-washing, racist, populist, fascist, and even white supremacist. It is unaware that it is now fighting a battle in the realm of history on behalf of the very groups that embrace such labels.

As we will see, the Left has been badly wrong-footed: its primary targets, liberal democracy and Western Civilisation, are now also the targets of new versions of the extreme Right, as described, for example, in Matthew Rose, A World After Liberalism: Philosophers of the Radical Right, 2021; and Mark Sedgwick (ed.) Key Thinkers of the New Right: Behind the New Threat to Liberal Democracy, 2019. In fact, the new millennium has witnessed a major ideological shift towards the two extremes of the political continuum (cf. Roger Eatwell and Matthew Goodwin, National Populism: The Revolt Against Liberal Democracy, 2018), and this has led to a convergence of both the far Left and the far Right around a hatred of liberal democracy and Western Civilization. In other words, the Left’s relentless assault on this crucial heritage is serving the strategic needs of its own mortal enemies (or what it would depict as its enemies, given that the totalitarian temptation underlies the extremes of both the Left and the Right, as Communism and Nazism have demonstrated).

In the midst of this ideological struggle between the totalitarians of the Left and the Right, Liberalism finds itself invariably on the defensive. This is despite its immense success over the past 200 years as the ideology that led the successful century-long campaign, along with Nationalism, against the Old Order of Europe. Indeed, Liberalism and Nationalism were the two great, successful revolutionary ideologies of the 19^th Century, a fact the globalist Left seeks always to obscure, given that its political manifestations – socialism and anarchism – never gained political power in that crucial formative period of modernity.

In taking on this fight, Minister Tudge represents moderate Liberalism (although he seems unaware of the underlying ideological dynamics of concern here), and he is to be commended for his recent speech to the Centre for Independent Studies (22/10/21). In that, he warned that the history curriculum proposed by the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority would ensure that

the next generation of Australians will be unwilling to defend their country in a military crisis, because schools are feeding students a negative view of its history and undermining confidence in Liberal Democracy.” — “Schools risk our next-gen security, Tudge warns” —The Australian, 22/10

The notion that the ideological role of the schools has become a national security issue would once have seemed far-fetched, but it is a view shared by Peter Jennings, the executive director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. Because of the abysmal nature of the curriculum, young people don’t see democracy as relevant to them and “if we can’t be bothered to defend it from within, we shouldn’t be surprised” if it’s attacked from outside. (“Pride in way of life ‘a job for schools’”, The Weekend Australian, 23/10) Indeed, Greg Melleuish, a professor of history at Wollongong University, expresses alarm at

The hostility shown in the document to the intellectual and cultural traditions that underpin both our way of life and our fundamental political and social institutions [at a time when] the contemporary world faces threats of authoritarianism and despotism that may yet match those … of the 1930s

He continues:

In the 1930s, the West faced ­opponents both inside and out. Many members of the intellectual class embraced communism or fascism, or even Nazism, as they turned their backs on the civilising values of Western civilisation as expressed in their democratic institutions. Today, many intellectuals embrace doctrines and ways of thought that are hostile to both the values of the West and those of ­Liberal Democracy. They seek to undermine the foundations of our way of life. — “Tudge channels Menzies in pursuit of Liberal education,” The Weekend Australian, 23/10

In response to such concerns, the Left has chosen to ignore the national security dimensions of the issue and relied on its usual abuse.  The education spokesperson for The Greens denounced the minister’s words as an attempt to “whitewash Australian history” and called his “ever-escalating culture war offensive, pathetic and ahistorical.” Similarly, the ALP spokesperson brushed the matter aside, and called for the focus to be on raising educational standards, ignoring the fact that these deplorable results are primarily a responsibility of the states, which have long been dominated by left-wing unions and educational bureaucracies.

The minister lamented that the curriculum “gave the impression nothing bad happened before 1788 and almost nothing good has happened since. It downplayed our Western heritage.” He emphasized that:

We should expect young Australians leaving school to understand how our nation is one of the most free, wealthy, tolerant and egalitarian societies in all of human history, and a magnet for millions of migrants.

Our Western political institutions are not always perfect but think of what they have given us: democratic government; equality before the law freedom of association and speech; universal education; strong human rights.

These are very precious and very rare institutions. If students don’t learn this, they won’t defend it as previous generations did.

Ominously, it seems clear that the history curriculum has failed to ensure this. As the minister noted, “Lowy Institute polling shows 40 per cent of young Australians say that non-democratic government may be preferable or that it does not matter what kind of government system we have,” concluding “that is a catastrophe.”

It is indeed a catastrophe, and one that has taken left-wing academics and political and cultural activists decades to achieve.  A brief excursus into this history is required to comprehend how long this ‘History War’ has raged, and to understand the implications of the recent ideological shift that has now added an entirely new dimension to this struggle for the hearts and minds of young Australians.

THE LEFT have been fighting a war against their own countries for over a century, since the Russian Revolution and Lenin’s realization that his regime would only survive if there was a global Communist victory, establishing Internationalism as the default position of the Left. As the Moscow-controlled Communist International declared at its Second Congress in 1920, its principle aim was to

Struggle by all available means, including armed force, for the overthrow of the international bourgeoisie and the creation of an international Soviet republic as a transition stage to the complete abolition of the state.

All national Communist parties (including Australia’s) were required to adopt and implement this Internationalist/Anti-Nationalist policy in their respective countries. In particular, they were expected to radicalize and recruit writers, academics, teachers, artists, film makers, and intellectuals generally. The vehemence with which this strategy was pursued was well expressed by the French Communist artist and intellectual Louis Aragon in 1925:

We will destroy this civilization that you cherish. Western world, you are condemned to death. We will awaken everywhere the germs of confusion and malaise. We are the agitators of the mind. We are those who will always hold out our hands to the enemy.

These ‘agitators of the mind’ rejected Western Civilization as decadent, philistine, bourgeois, exploitative, repressive, war-mongering, and imperialist. These were views shared later by the New Left, which emerged out the massive expansion of the West’s university systems and the accompanying Cultural Revolution in the 1960s. It was then that the contemporary Left began its ‘long march through the institutions’, as advocated by German Communist student activist Rudi Dutschke in 1967.

This strategy was inspired by Italian Neo-Marxist Antonio Gramsci, who advocated the ‘revolutionary struggle’ for the control of culture, and the Long March of the Chinese Communist Party (1934-5) under Mao Zedong. It was a form of ‘entrism’ that involved radicals infiltrating key institutions and professions, subverting them from within, and using them to advance Socialism and destroy Liberal Democracy.  It was a strategy endorsed by Herbert Marcuse, the most prominent member of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory and Cultural Marxism in Counterrevolution and Revolt (1972) as “the only effective way” of carrying out a Socialist Revolution in an advanced capitalist society.

The New Left’s ‘long march’ in Australia was shaped ideologically by the agit-prop campaigns of the Comintern and its successors, and it was heralded by A New Britannia by Humphrey McQueen (1970). This was a flimsy, shallow polemic – little more than a pamphlet —  but it served as a manifesto for junior academics and graduate students as they began to infiltrate and subvert the universities, most of which were quite new, desperate for staff, and easily penetrated by ambitious Leftists. As a commemorative article in the Leftist magazine, The Monthly enthused in October 2020, A New Britannia “questioned the nation-building myths of the time [and] had a lasting effect on how the Left in Australia came to view its own history.”

Most importantly, it “argued that the formation of the labour movement in Australia was an extension of British imperialism”. This demoted the working class in Communist ideology from the favoured status of ‘oppressed’ to the reviled category of ‘oppressors’, indeed ‘racist oppressors’, according to A New Britannia. This conveniently justified the New Left’s shift in focus away from the Left’s previous concern with the plight of the workers. These came to be ridiculed as racist, sexist, homophobic, Islamophobic, etc., and any concern for their interests came to be denounced as quasi-fascist ‘populism’.  Instead of the proletariat, the New Left turned to the New Social Movements, especially those favoured by the educated middle-class, such as Feminism, Gay Rights, Environmentalism, and Indigenous Rights, out of which it attempted to build an election-winning coalition.  Quite quickly, this coalition evolved its own collectivist ideology, that of the Identity Politics now dominating academic histories, as well as our political system, social media, culture, the arts, and the schools.

Academically, the reach of this New Left generation far exceeded its grasp and it struggled through the 1970s to publish anything of substance or produce any historians of real quality. Bureaucratically, however, its long march was much more successful, as Leftist ideologues took over university history departments. This was vital, as this gave the Left control over the training provided to prospective history teachers, very few of whom demurred from the ideological world-view into which they had been systematically indoctrinated.

This victory for the New Left and Identity Politics was followed by a very successful campaign to ruin Australia’s Bicentenary celebrations in 1988. For this, the Left implemented what Geoffrey Blainey defined as the ‘black arm-band’ version of history. This was exemplified by A People’s History of Australia Since 1788 (inspired by the notorious A People’s History of the United States by American Communist Howard Zinn).  Predictably, this was a massive collection of articles that generally portrayed Australia in the darkest possible light, on what should have been some of its proudest days. 

This ultra-negative ‘black arm-band’ view of history was well characterised by Prime Minister John Howard in his 1996 Sir Robert Menzies Lecture: It “reflects a belief that most Australian history since 1788 has been little more than a disgraceful story of imperialism, exploitation, racism, sexism and other forms of discrimination.” The primary focus of this campaign of denigration became Aboriginal history, with a particular emphasis on assertions about frontier warfare, genocidal acts, allegations that the Aboriginal people had been deliberately infected with smallpox, and what came to be called the Stolen Generations.

The flimsy basis of this was explored exhaustively in Keith Windschuttle’s series of books on The Fabrication of Aboriginal History (2002, 2009).  Windschuttle also contested the lack of balance and pervasive political correctness exhibited in the displays mounted at the new National Museum of Australia while the journalist Miranda Devine exposed how the braille messages permanently encoded on the exterior of the NMA included “sorry” and “forgive us our genocide”. Any resistance to this unbalanced campaign of denigration was denounced by the Left as racism, complicity, and denialism. This dismissive approach was exemplified by Tony Taylor, an historian at Monash University. In Denial: History Betrayed (2008) he equated any doubts about the validity of the black arm-band view with Turkish denials of the Armenian Genocide, David Irving’s denial of the Holocaust, Japanese denials of the Nanking Massacres, Soviet denials of Stalin’s purges and other atrocities, and Serbian denials of its war crimes in the Balkan Wars. Incredibly, Taylor served (1999-2000) as the Director of the Federal Government’ National Inquiry into the Teaching and Learning of History (an earlier iteration of the History Wars that Minister Tudge is presently fighting) and wrote its report, The Future of the Past, a future that has turned out very grim indeed.

Meanwhile, the Left had expanded the focus of its iconoclastic campaign to include Anzac Day, and it implemented a long-term campaign aimed at ruining the 2015 centenary commemoration of the Gallipoli campaign. This assault, spearheaded by then Prime Minister Paul Keating beginning in the early 1990s, was taken up by many academic historians, including some associated with the Australian Defence Force Academy, as well as by the ALP, the Greens, the ABC and other media outlets. This campaign reached a crescendo as the Centenary approached, as detailed by the present writer in Anzac & its Enemies, (2015). Notably, it failed; the first major setback for the black arm-band view and its proponents, and an indicator of the ideological gap that has emerged between the Left intelligentsia and its hangers-on, and the general population of ordinary Australians.

Apart from overseeing the ongoing steady decline in the quality and range of history education generally, the Left’s next notable iconoclastic onslaught has been its campaign over the past five years against the Ramsay Centre’s plan to fund university courses in Western Civilisation, accompanied by generous scholarships for a large number of well-qualified students. The Left’s relentless campaign saw a series of front-rank universities, including the ANU, Sydney, Melbourne, and Queensland all withdraw their previous expressions of interest in joining the scheme. (Incredibly, many of these universities are happy to host the 14(!) notorious CCP-controlled Confucius Institutes, about which their staffs raise no concerns whatsoever.) Fortunately, the program did eventually commence at some universities, although in a somewhat compromised form, exposing it to the same type of subversion exhibited elsewhere in the Left’s Long March through academia.

On the other hand, the Ramsay Centre has recently taken a significant step that may disclose an awareness of the fundamental ideological shift referred to earlier in this article. In August 2021, it threw its support behind the international ‘History Reclaimed’ campaign launched by over 40 senior academics from prominent Anglosphere universities. This promises to confront head-on, the ideological, agit-prop role played by the universities. As the head of the campaign, Robert Tombs of Cambridge University observes:

The abuse of history for political purposes is as old as history itself.  In recent years, we have seen campaigns to rewrite the history of western democracies in a way that undermines their solidarity as communities, their sense of achievement, even their very legitimacy … Whether to ward off criticism or to gain moral advantage, institutions have rushed to embrace the most negative interpretations of their own countries’ histories.

He points out that the impact of such a level of self-denigration on a nation’s social and political fabric is deeply damaging. While Leftists might claim they are merely requiring countries to “face up” to their past, “the real effect — perhaps the true aim — of their actions is nihilistic destruction.” These international historians recognise that “tendentious and even blatantly false readings of history are creating or aggravating divisions, resentments, and even violence.  This is damaging to democracy and to a free society.”

As we have seen, such damage is indeed precisely the point – “the true aim” – of this long-term campaign of infiltration, subversion, and denigration. And it is here that the Left has been caught badly wrong-footed: its primary targets, Liberal Democracy and Western Civilisation, are now also the targets of the new versions of the extreme Right that have emerged in the new millennium. Put another way: the ideological shift to the extremes that has characterised the past two decades has led to the convergence of the far Left and the far Right around a shared hatred of Liberal Democracy and its civilizational foundations.

The history of this convergence is too complex to be described in any detail in the present article. However, it has run parallel to the account of the Left’s assault provided above, and has involved a major shift on the Right away from traditional forms of Conservatism. This has been driven and energised by various events, e.g., the collapse of the Soviet Union; the economic, political, and military rise of China to superpower status; the 9/11 attacks and the emergence of Islamism and Global Jihad; the Global Financial Crisis; the deindustrialisation of the West and the de-skilling of the industrial workforce; the demographic explosion, economic collapse, failure of governance, and massive corruption throughout the non-Western world; the consequent illegal immigration crises in Europe and America (and potentially in Australia);  the increasingly intrusive activities of the United Nations and other super-national agencies; the perceived dominance of Globalist elites, especially in their manipulation of the ‘climate emergency’; the dominance of Irrationalism, Postmodernism, Cultural Marxism, and Critical Race Theory in academia and the media; the corrosive effects of Identity Politics and ‘Wokism’ on civil society; disaffection from mainstream political parties, and the emergence of Populism as a viable political force. To these factors can now be added the COVID Crisis, which has revealed a great deal about contemporary politics, including the capacity of the State to terrorise the population and impose unprecedented levels of authoritarianism, a fact not lost on either the extreme Right or the extreme Left.

WHILE these factors and the reactions to them don’t converge on common diagnoses or strategies they do agree that Liberalism and Western Civilisation are their primary ideological targets. In the Muslim world this manifests as rage, building on the critique of the West promoted by Islamism (e.g., that of Sayyid Qutb), while in the West (our principal concern here) this re-orientation on the Right has built on older forms of radical right-wing thought, e.g., those articulated by Oswald Spengler, Ernst Jünger, Julius Evola, Carl Schmitt, Francis Parker Yorkey, Leo Strauss, and has been developed by more recent theorists. These include, Alain de Benoist, Guillaume Faye, Patrick Buchanan, Aleksandr Dugin, Bat Ye’or, Samuel Francis, and Patrick J. Deneen. To these can be added lesser ideologues and activists, such as Jared Taylor, Richard B. Spencer and others associated with the alt-right.

Many of these thinkers occupy a sort of scholarly ‘no-man’s land’. They hover perhaps on the borderline between conventional categories like Conservatism and Fascism, but are more fruitfully seen as new attempts to combine Nationalist, Traditionalist, and Populist themes with what they see as the valuable (or unavoidable) aspects of Modernity, as described, e.g., in Michael J. Mazarr, Unmodern Men in the Modern World (2007) and Mark Sedgwick, Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the Secret History of the Twentieth Century (2004).

Fortunately, for those concerned about the future Liberal Democracy and Western Civilisation, these developments and the associated activists and theorists have attracted the attention of a number of scholars and commentators. Aside from the books already cited, these include Benjamin R. Teitelbaum, War for Eternity: The Return of Traditionalism and the Rise of the Populist Right, 2020; and Gary Lachman, Dark Star Rising: Magick [sic] and Power in the Age of Trump, 2018. Both these works are rather impressionistic but do illuminate the complex and often surprising intellectual links that exist between these theorists and their predecessors. For example, Steve Bannon, the very high profile Populist and ex-advisor to President Trump, has had a long-term interest in the work of the National Bolshevik and Eurasian theorist, Aleksandr Dugin, and both have been much influenced by the Traditionalist and neo-Fascist Julius Evola, as well as by Martin Heidegger.

The prominence of Heidegger in this ideological constellation is also instructive. Several other recent works explore the philosophical reconstruction of the political realm that the more sophisticated theorists on the far-right are seeking to develop as an alternative to the foundations of Liberalism. These commentaries include Ronald Beiner, Dangerous Minds: Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the Return of the Far Right, 2018; and Michael Millerman, Beginning with Heidegger: Strauss, Rorty, Derrida, Dugin & the Philosophical Constitution of the Political, 2020. They address one of the strangest phenomenon of the intellectual history of the past 100 years, i.e., the way in which Heidegger, but also Friedrich Nietzsche, have been appropriated by the Left, e.g., in Existentialism and Postmodernism, as prophets of personal liberation, when in fact they are best understood in their own terms as fervent critics of the banality and consumerism of the bourgeois civilisation that Liberal Democracy has allegedly imposed on the world.

Neither Nietzsche nor Heidegger were at all interested in egalitarianism and the collectivist solutions of the Left; rather, they advocated the complete deconstruction of the philosophical foundations of the West (i.e., its political ontology) and its reconstruction on the basis of arcane and elitist notions of ‘True Being’ (Dasein) and a hierarchical pagan society dominated by Übermenschen. Whereas Liberalism might trace its roots back to Hobbes and Locke, this tendency goes back to the pre-Socratics, Meister Eckhart, the German Romantics and Richard Wagner! It is a measure of the challenges contemporary Liberalism now faces that such notions play an important role in the thought of many of the thinkers listed above.

AS THIS brief résumé illustrates, there has been a significant ideological shift, especially on the Right, and this has made the Left’s obsessive ‘black arm-band’ view of history not only irrelevant but counter-productive to its own proclaimed interests. The Left’s determination to demonize Australian History and to portray Western Civilisation as a long dirge of wickedness plays increasingly into the hands of a new generation of theorists on the Radical Right who can readily embrace such iconoclasm as they conjure up their own anti-liberal and authoritarian ideologies. The predicament of the Left is that if it is fully successful in undermining the ideological foundations of Liberal Democracy, then the political monstrosity that replaces it will have no room for any of the tolerance, freedoms, and rights that the Left currently enjoys, takes for granted, and exploits to conduct its iconoclastic campaigns. When it finishes its ‘long march’ it may not like what it sees.

To sum up: the Left is presently cutting off the ideological branch on which it is comfortably and complacently sitting. This appears to be a compelling point that Minister Tudge might stress as he pursues his campaign for curriculum reform. 

Mervyn Bendle contributed ‘Medieval Monastic Mysteries to Quadrant‘s September issue