Reader Alex writes in with some observations from March 31 2005
– Whilst Sky News for the most part treated the Prince Charles story as a bit of fun, The BBC took a very serious tone indeed and on News 24 invited the Royal Correspondent of The Mirror to comment, he took an even more serious line (well, he would wouldn’t`t he). Amongst his remarks was “…they cost us a lot of money”, no mention of the fact that the BBC cost us quite a bit too.
-Also News 24, and who is invited to comment on Blair’s Political Cabinet….Michael White The Guardian. Quel Surprise!
– Later on The World Tonight, invited to give her comments on Terry Schiavos death, why its NPRs` Diane Roberts. D`oh……
– On radio bulletins PM and also on Radio 4 after midnight, a breathy and uncritical piece about the rehabilitation of Stalin across the former Soviet Union. If a left wing genocidal mass murderer is rehabilitated its reported through misty eyes with sentimentality, imagine the outcry had it been Mussolini or Hitler.
your blog does important work, keep it up.
I thought it was just hilarious the way Charles described Nicholas Whitchell (sp.?). He is an annoying po-faced little… what Charles said.
Of course it was somewhat risky of the heir to the throne to speak that way, but the press were being idiotic as usual, and self-important, telling him how he should appear as though he cared for his children at a photo shoot, while the Beeb’s man was asking how they felt and similarly rubbish questions. Whitchell and his less po-faced chums should be grateful he wasn’t ruder.
I slightly disagree that Sky were benignly humorous: the fact is they never laugh with the Royal Family, only at them.
To be accurate, both Hitler and Mussolini were left wing, but very rarely reported/acknowledged as such.
To be accurate, no they were not.
Marty: to be accurate, Hitler’s political party was called the National Socialists. Most people connect socialism with left wing politics.
Anonymous
I think Natalie realises that. As wicked as Mussolini was, his memory is somewhat overshadowed in the west by the sheer scale of Hitler’s evil. The left’s great post-war triumph was to air brush the socialism from national socialism. Our troops never liberated emaciated skeletons from the gulags and few in London and the US ever met survivors from Kolyma so Stalin’s mass murder doesn’t appear as bright on the radar as the holocaust. Ergo, give it 50 years or so and ‘Uncle Joe’ Stalin can be rehabilited. Castro has always been indulged by socialists so no rehabilitation is needed. Pol Pot and Mao? Far, far away and very foreign looking so let’s just draw a veil over those episodes … Hafez Assad and Saddam Hussein? Best refer to them as Baathists rather than the socialists they were. Robert Mugabe? Bad rather than bad socialist, so the story goes. These are merely headline acts, I’m sure you can think of more.
It’s not a case of willing dupes or ignorants but a historical and ongoing rewriting of history.
Don’t speak too soon. One day the left will be forced to acknowledge that old Adolf was one one of their Socialist brethren too (albeit a little nationalist), and then he’ll be ‘rehabilitated’ as well.
(Above comment was posted without benefit of being able to see the previous reader remarks – Thank you Haloscan).
The royals are important to the BBC. Have you noticed how many BBC presenters look posh, sound posh or have posh names? Posh people are over-represented on the BBC, so it’s not surprising that a cringing deference to the royals shows itself from time to time.
Surprisingly the posh ones seem to be the most left wing!
It’s not surprising at all, really, Peter – you have to have enormous inherited wealth to be able to afford to vote Labour. To anyone on a middle imcome, it’s a luxury they just can’t afford.
TCC, I suspect the forthcoming election results might disprove that hypothesis.
Hitler was left wing. Just look at his manifesto. It included pledges such as “banning all animal testing”
(but not human testing. A paradox which still lingers with the modern pro-abortion, pro-stemcell destroying, pro-euthanasia… but anti fox hunting vegan left. Hitler was a vegan)
and “eradication of capitalism and the profit motive”
You should read ‘the road to serfdom’ by Hayek to find out the abundant similarities between Communism and Fascism.
And check out the manifestos of the SWP and the BNP. They are 90% the same. They are certainly not on opposite ends of the spectrum, they are right next to each other.
They are both on the extreme left, with Nozickian libertarianism on the extreme right.
Monkey
Too right. I may start buying up lots of copies of Hayek’s masterpiece just to leave lying around on my travels. I checked out the BNP manifesto before the last general election having heard from someone that it is a socialist party. Well blow me, take away references to repatriation it is, indeed, a socialist manifesto. There is nothing right-wing about them at all. Maybe I should amend my statement above about the left’s great post-war triumph being an air brushing of socialism from national socialism to include a complete hoodwink over what constitutes a party of the right nowadays.
Hitler was indeed a man of the left, an anti capitalist par excellence. I suppose I used him and Mussolini as examples because elements of thier manifestos have been adopted by the far right as much as they have been ascribed to the right by thier opponents. As contemporary battle lines appear to have been drawn, Stalin seems to be given a pass by the liberal media whilst Hitler is the Devil Incarnate. Both are evil Socialists and both should be reviled.
Reader Alex,
You seem to have a lot to say and I do agree with your well-thought out comments. But please stay away from the French language. Quelle surprise!
And the country that likes to call itself “The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea” is actually a democratic republic of the people? Names mean nothing. The Nazis’ actions were so utterly insane that any notions of “right” or “left” are obsolete in their case. They’re simply beyond the boundaries of any political spectrum. Can’t we just call them “nutters”?
From NPR’s employee bios:
Roberts is so peripatetic that she cannot give an accurate count of the pairs of shoes she owns, but she knows it’s at least three dozen, spread out across two continents.
News, indeed. Even if you’re Imelda Marcos…
Dylan Llyr,
Nevertheless, a brief perusal of ‘Mein Kampf’ will swiftly demonstrate that Hitler was essentially a socialist, by modern classification, and that the election of Labour after the war was essentially a Nazi-ward move by the British peoples, which tendency we are still following.
Steve
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