Michael Gove’s History Lesson

Actually By The Daily Mash

Curator’s Comments: As Peabody’s Lament readers know, Mr Gove  is a British MP and the Interior Secretary for Education who believes the television sitcom The Blackadder is ruining contemporary Britain’s understanding of World War I.

GOOD morning class. I’m Michael Gove: education secretary, next prime minister and the man who puts the Gove in government.

Some people – lefties, historians, a 25-year-old sitcom I’ve only just heard of – have been getting history wrong. Here’s what actually happened.World War One: The lie that our troops were “lions led by donkeys” must be overturned. In truth, the lions were the visionary members of the officer class who invented the revolutionary tactic of swamping the enemy’s machine guns with donkey bodies.Wilfred Owen: The poet’s famous line “Gas! Quick boys, an ecstasy of fumbling,” wasn’t inspired by a mustard gas attack but by a fellow soldier good-naturedly breaking wind in his face as a joke, the whinger.The Crusades: Basically a Christian outreach programme, like the Salvation Army, which delivered improving leaflets to the benighted heathens of the Middle East. Created the wonderful reputation white people still enjoy in the region today.

The Revolutionary War: Historians claim that Britain and America fought each other in this war, but that could never have happened because we’re both the goodies. Clearly some kind of administrative mistake.

World War Two: Evidence that the Soviet Union defeated the Nazis on the Eastern Front is obviously false, because they were Communists and only a nation built on free-market principles with privatised utilities could be successful.

Dunkirk: Revisionists have called this a British retreat, but actually it was more like an early D-Day but a little bit slower and slightly more backwards.

Italia ’90: BBC lies that Chris Waddle kicked a crucial penalty into the sky have been disproved by amateur historians on the Daily Telegraph’s comment desk, who uncovered new evidence that he buried it in the net and England beat Argentina in the final.