came with this Radio Times warning:
I strongly suggest you keep your finger hovering over the mute button on your TV remote controls, because you’ll want to silence, yet again, the witless and sneering commentary that’s characterised the series so far.
My time watching the programme was interrupted (“Daddy, I can’t get to sleep”, “Well, come and watch this BBC tosh then, that’ll do the trick” etc.), and I got back to the programme as it reached Richard Attenborough’s classic Gandhi to hear (from memory):
[Gandhi] had been radicalised by his experience of apartheid,
a system that was still getting tacit support during Mrs. Thatchers time…
(or it might have been “from Mrs. Thatcher’s government”)… yet another revisionist BBC sneer-in-passing, aimed at smearing the reputation of Margaret Thatcher and her government.
Update: Ever knowledgeable, Peregrine points out that apartheid wasn’t introduced until 1948, the year of Gandhi’s murder, at the age of 78.
I think the comment was even worse – ‘by the Thatcher government’.
Unlikely that Ghandi was radicalised by apartheid as it was introduced in the year of his death.
Peregrine points out that apartheid wasn’t introduced until 1948, the year of Gandhi’s murder at the age of 78.
Strictly speaking, yes. However, when challenged over apartheid, Afrikaners used to rightly point out that it was the British who introduced apartheid-like separation of the races in the early days before the Nationalists came to power.
“We didn’t introduce apartheid,” went the refrain.
“Yes, but you perfected it,” came the response.”
Bryan, you are right of course, but the sloppiness over dates is typical of the current BBC. History is no longer a treasure trove of events and experiences that can be pieced together to open windows both into the past and future but something to be plundered to find a bauble to decorate a fashionable assumption.
Ghandi was quite supportive of the mistreatment of blacks in South Africa anyway, and was both vocal and explicit in that support.
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mahatma_Gandhi#On_South_Africans
There is no evidence that he ever recanted those views.