The Cabinet meeting tomorrow should send all Cabinet Ministers for re-education as the blog of the Minister for Communications and Multimedia, Datuk Seri Salleh Said Keruak on Sunday entitled “What a dictatorship really means” is a shocking revelation of the abysmal educational standards of Malaysian Ministers.

How many of the 36 Ministers would be shocked by Salleh’s blog because it would reveal not only the abysmal educational standards of the blogger Minster but the other Ministers as well?

I believe that the majority of the 36 Ministers would not be shocked at all or see no reason why anybody should be shocked. This is the very reason why all the Cabinet Ministers needs to undergo a “re-education” programme.

There have often been complaints of declining educational standards today as compared to yesteryears, and Salleh’s blog provides the strongest proof of such inexorable decline of educational standards in Malaysia over the decades.

Salleh’s three-paragraph blog on “What a dictatorship really means” is full of fake and false history in every paragraph, which may be the proper background and credentials for one who is to preside over a massive black-ops propaganda campaign of lies, fake news and false information against political opponents.

I will at present confine to the second paragraph of Salleh’s blog, which states:

“The argument that there cannot be two dictators at the same time is also not true. Russia had Stalin and Lenin both dictators at the same time while during the French Revolution both Robespierre and Napoleon emerged as dictators of France. And China saw more than two dictators at the same time while, in Cuba, Che Guevara abandoned the revolution because he did not want to be a joint-dictator with Castro.”

During my school days in the fifties, a well-read secondary school student would have laughed at this paragraph by the Minister for Communications and Multimedia, for it is replete with fake and false history.

Firstly, how many Ministers agree with Salleh that there could be two dictators in a country, a political system or a political party at the same time?

Secondly, how many of the Ministers can see the fallacies of Salleh’s contention that “Russia had Stalin and Lenin both dictators at the same time while during the French Revolution both Robespierre and Napoleon emerged as dictators of France”?

It is downright fake and false history and utter rubbish to claim that Lenin and Stalin were dictators at the same time in Russia.

Stalin became a dictator of the Soviet Union from 1929 to 1953, while Lenin died on January 1924 after suffering a debilitating stroke in May 1922, which caused him to be in convalescence until his death.

In fact, there is academic controversy whether it is correct to call Lenin a dictator. Lenin was the first among equals in the Bolshevik Party, the man to whom others in the leadership deferred. His word, if not law, carried great authority. All the other Bolshevik leaders, including those that disagreed and argued with Lenin, never sought to overthrow him, and their allegiance to him was without question.

Stalin was different because he was never in a position of second in command to Lenin. He wasn’t as popular or as accomplished as other leaders, most notably Leon Trotsky, who was by all intents and purposes Lenin’s second in command. Stalin became Lenin’s successor by deceit, conniving, and backstabbing, and was paranoid and always suspected there were enemies all around him, plotting his demise. In fact, Lenin suggested during his convalescene that Stalin should be removed as General Secretary of the Communist Party.

The example of Robespierre and Napoleon as “dictators at the same time” during the French Revolution was even more far-fetched and bizarre.

Robespierre presided over the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution when the Jacobins whom he led sent thousands to their death under the guillotine in 1793-1794, until he himself was executed at the guillotine on 28th July 1794.

Napoleon was a up-and-coming young general in the French Army in 1794, appointed as inspector of artillery of the French Army in the Alps, and it was not until 1799 when Napoleon was appointed First Consul in a coup d’etat, marking the meteoric rise of the Corsican corporal to French Emperor – but Napoleon was never “dictators at the same time” with Robespierre.

Salleh committed a similar sin of fake and false history with his further claim that “China saw more than two dictators at the same time while, in Cuba, Che Guevara abandoned the revolution because he did not want to be a joint-dictator with Castro”.

Can Salleh name the “two dictators at the same time” in China?

His heresy that Che Guevara “abandoned the revolution because he did not want to be joint-dictator with Castro” will cause aploplexy among the Guevara fans and followers.

All in all, Salleh’s blog is a disgraceful display of the abysmal educational attainments of Cabinet Ministers in Malaysia and why they should all be sent for a re-education programme.