I agree that the categorisation and labelling things is a very male view of knowledge. And I'd struggle to name the English monarchs, though I'd make a decent stab at it.
I'd also agree that what matters is the flow of history, of causation - how the Black Death caused the end of feudalism and the Peasants Revolt; how the enclosures led to the Civil War, and, yes, how the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars led to Peterloo, and ultimately (is anything ultimately?) to Chartism etc.
But to understand these things, you would need to know a little bit of the hooks to peg the picture to. You;d need to know the context and what else was happening.
And all culture has a historical/geographical context.
Heaven 17's Fascist Groove Thing is much more significant when you remember the context - that the NF had been on the rise (and on the march) in the late 70s. The unpleasant attitudes expressed by musicians had sparked off Rock Against Racism, an offshoot of the Anti-Nazi League. Thatcher's election in 1979 had been partly on the back of out-racisting the NF and cutting away their platform. The Tories had introduced the Nationality Act, and were working on more measures.
Blair Peach's murder by the SPG, and the abuse of the Sus law (see Not! sketch on Constable Savage) led to a feeling that the state apparatus was being used to create a authoritarian far right-wing state, coming to a head in the summer of 1981, where part of the country was celebrating the royal wedding, and many others were reacting against heavy-handed (and racist) Policing in Handsworth, Brixton, St Pauls, Moss Side, Toxteth etc.
That's the background to a single rejecting the right-wing violence of such as the British Movement, Combat 18 and the fragmenting NF (soon to reform around the BNP), and the music of Oi, as well as the creepy obsession with Nazi imagery flirted with by, among others, David Bowie, new romantics. and other pioneers of electronica.
That song was an expression of the two former Human League members' belief in the possibility of founding a more progressive identity in the renewed modernism of the styles and the times.
And it was banned by the state broadcaster. Well, not banned. They didn't really do that, but it never made the playlist of a heavily playlist-oriented station when some DJs with allegedly dodgy politics disapproved.
But besides all that, that song, and Temptation, which broke boundaries in its own way, are musical classics in their own right, and stand the test of time.
