Thread by @libcomorg

While everyone's talking about Michael Gove and David Irving, I found an old article that Michael Gove wrote about David Irving. It gives a real insight into Gove's attitude to Holocaust denial and history more generally.

It begins: "HISTORY is being distorted in a growing assault on truth and memory. Two men have recently tried to grab Justice's sword to refight history's battles. David Irving is a discredited figure of the far Right, Christopher Hitchens a celebrated gadfly of the New Left"

After a couple of paragraphs saying that Holocaust denial is bad, Gove pivots to several more comparing Hitchens to David Irving, because he wrote a book calling Henry Kissinger a war criminal. And bemoaning that criticism of US war crimes was given a platform in the US.

This is consistent with Gove's attacks on historian Richard Evans, (key to the exposure of Irving as a Holocaust denier) who he accused of a lack of patriotism when Evans questioned jingoistic commemorations of WWI.

https://twitter.com/libcomorg/status/1257234312677724160

Gove mounts a staunch defense of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher for 'defeating communism'. This of course included the support and aid of Pinochet who spent his last years being entertained by Thatcher personally.

So Gove is nominally opposed to Holocaust denial, but in this article shows he's only interested in it to the extent that it supports a horseshoe theory of genocide, where the US and UK are liberal saviours against the twin evils of Communism and Nazism.

The British genocide of Native Americans, the slave trade, the bengal famine, concentration camps in 1950s Kenya and Malaya are consigned to merely attempts by Hitchens to make communism look less bad, like 'the protocols of the elders of Zion'.

The piece appears to only be online on Irving's own website, so here's an archive version.

archive.vn/TltEP

Gove is not really opposed to downplaying, minimising or flat out denying genocides, but only when this is done un-patriotically.

One of his own colleagues, David Willets, quoted him saying the International Baccalaureate drives "rootless cosmopolitan education not grounded in the history of this country".

tes.com/news/exclusive…

And this isn't just an interest of Gove's, he tried to impose his imperialist Whig approach to history on the entire British school curriculum.

blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpol…

Wow this thread blew up, checkout my soundcloud.

https://twitter.com/libcomorg/status/1257411356518682624

Back here for some more on Gove's selective deployment of the Holocaust. Several defenders have pointed to his 2014 article 'the necessity of memory' written for Conservative Home.

In that article Gove says "he Holocaust was not just a crime against the Jews. It was a crime against mankind. They recognised that to question that crime, to relativise it, to reduce its significance, was to become an accomplice to evil."

In 2000, Gove wrote a pamphlet, Northern Ireland: the Price of Peace, in which he compared the Good Friday Agreement to Nazi appeasement. Don't know about you but that feels like trivialising the Holocaust to me.

irishtimes.com/news/world/uk/…