A Biased BBC reader writes..
“The BBC’s ‘History of the world in 100 objects’ now escalates its assault on Western culture and values, leaping with enthusiasm from telling us that we must accommodate Islamic principles into our own life if we want lasting peace by adopting pragmatic tolerance and legal equality for Islam to now openly denouncing European history and the ‘Enlightenment’.
The Enlightenment is something that the Left cannot come to terms with because to endorse it and all that follows from it is to deny that every other culture and the practises therein are of equal value, morality, fairness and equal justness….just remember how many BBC staff and other ‘Liberals’ look wistfully to the Chinese way of doing business and tell us that Tibet is all the better for Chinese ‘influence’…that perhaps Democracy is over rated if you want to get ‘things’ done…what things though?
The latest programme is called ‘Exploitation and Enlightenment’….placing them together as if one does not come without the other. A programme that tells us of European’s encounters with non-Europeans in the great Enlightenment Project….the often ‘tragic consequences of European interaction with other cultures….producing a troubling history where many of these dialogues ended in oppression and destruction, the fracturing of whole societies.’
Ironic perhaps that they tell us at the same time that we must conform to the invasive Islamic norms if we want a peaceful society.
The basis of this programme is that we, the Europeans, have written the history and that the BBC is giving voice to the oppressed by using their objects to tell their tales that have remained hidden for all this time.
What objects ?
My most recent intern’s favourite suicide jacket ?
An IED that didn’t go off ?
My BBC pass to Broadcasting House for unfettered interviews for further Islamic enlightenment ?
97 to go and counting !
I agree that there have been tragedies resulting from Europen colonialism. Just look at the disaster areas left behind in places colonized by the French, Spanish, Portuguese. Of course, I imagine your typical anti-Western Civ Beeboid wouldn’t want to compare the current state of places formerly colonized by the British with places formerly colonized by the Ottoman Turks.
But the British were the worst, of course.
INBBC cultivates a sanitised, censored Islamic history, while it relegates Western history and civilisation to a role of infamy.
Over recent years, INBBC has devoted considerable licencepayers’ resources to presenting a Rageh Omaar -Al Jazeera Islamic version of European history and civilisation.
Very few, if any (non-Muslim) INBBC staff seem to know anything about Islamic imperialism, and so it is censored out of existence. I have never heard the phrase: ‘Islamic Imperialism’ used on INBBC. INBBC is in fear of allowing a non-Muslim to present such a series, without the presence of a Muslim ‘corrective’. (There was no non-Muslim corrective allowed on Omaar’s Islamic history of Europe on INBBC. TV.)
A corrective to INBBC’s lies and censorship on Islam’s and Europe’s history:
[Extract from Fjordman article]:
“Paul Fregosi in his book Jihad in the West: Muslim Conquests from the 7th to the 21st Centuries calls Islamic Jihad ‘the most unrecorded and disregarded major event of history. It has, in fact, been largely ignored,’ although it has been a fact of life in Europe, Asia and Africa for almost 1400 years. As Fregosi says, ‘Western colonization of nearby Muslim lands lasted 130 years, from the 1830s to the 1960s. Muslim colonization of nearby European lands lasted 1300 years, from the 600s to the mid-1960s. Yet, strangely, it is the Muslims…who are the most bitter about colonialism and the humiliations to which they have been subjected; and it is the Europeans who harbor the shame and the guilt. It should be the other way around.'”
Europeans As Victims of Colonialism
How INBBC would like to have the following pro-Israel, anti-Islam analysis censored; but unfortunately for INBBC, the word is increasingly getting out:
http://www.newenglishreview.org/blog_direct_link.cfm/blog_id/30072
The positive discrimination school of historicism as manifested by the BBC (and unfortunately by the publishers of history books guided by National Curriculum guidlines) brings into high relief the political role of history in creating the narrative. In this case a deliberate relativisation. Humans are wonderfully gifted and barbarians produce great art. But the new sanitised history is stripped of the vital ‘compare and contrast’ function whereby evidence is evaluated. It is the beautiful objects and noble savage school of history which contrasts the morally iffy if technologically ingenious west with what look like indigenous ‘eco’ cultures.
The meme downgrades freedom, democracy, judeo-christian concept of law, monogamy…all vital to explain the incredible rise of a small European culture threatened by expansive Islam. .
Islam died intellectually in the 12th Century. Its achievements were based on captured Christians, Jews and in the East, Persians and Hindus…and after a couple of centuries ran the captured culture into the ground. Al Ghazzali, a brilliant mind exemplifies this. You see a thinker putting on the ‘mind forged manacles’ of Islam (occasionalism) which killed Islamic ‘culture’ stone dead. The lesson is vital to understanding what happened.
But the BBC hammers on about the slave trade, colonialism like a coffee house Marxist and fails to see that art and objects do not make a desirable or successful ‘culture. Slavery and exploitation of man by ruling elites, shocking Hobbesian lives was normal elsewhere in the world and Europe and Britain broke this state of moribundity. For the sake of ‘inclusiveness’ the BBC(and their historians) emphasize the ‘debt’ owed to other peoples (as if the Europeans devasted communities and pinched their ideas).
Islam switched off its own lights. China turned inwards, burning its trading fleets by imperial edict, the Americas had stagnated. Only the Japanese saw what the West was and said ‘we are having that’. Otherwise the world was stagnant, if not retrograde in most areas.
The BBC narrative suggests a hidden history of cultures damaged by the west to promote inclusivity for the immigrant.
It is a travesty, of course.
I have not seen this series but I assume it is predictable. Everything you say is correct. What is so strange is the self loathing and hatred of their past that afflicts so many Westerners. Future historians will have some answers perhaps but I do not.
Western culture and science is so rich that it must overawe the rest of the world in ways we do not yet understand.
Islam is taking refuge in possessing the “truth” as a way of coping with this..
Other cultures are adapting in different ways but cannot escape the dominance of the Western worldview.
It is just the way things are- the reality of the world -so maybe the liberal Westerners hostility to this reality is just another irrational and occasional moment in history that will pass before it can threaten to destroy us.
dave,
Everything about the BBC is predictable !
It’s shallow and stupid the way the Beeboid Corporation harps on about black slave trade (by us, natch) as if it was the only history there is of Africa and Africans. Not that Beeboids would know.
This hundred objects programme is a typical example of why I cannot listen to Radio 4 for long. It is tediously agenda-led and predictable.
I’d happily bet that when they started this list of objects, they didn’t start in Europe. I can predict that it would be somewhere in Asia or Africa because that is Beeboid mentality these days and it infects everything.
The full list is here, beginning in Egypt with the Mummy of Hornedjitef.
Just had a quick look at the list. On the face of it doesn’t seem to be in strict chronological order.
I love the second section “Food and sex “. That is just so BBC !
All preserved and ‘valued’ by the Western concept of the intrinsic value of human endaevour.
Islamic museums don’t exist. Art is suspect….produced by infidels and polytheists and worthy only of destruction. Clearest example the pure Islamists of the Taliban blowing up the Rock Buddhas. Islam has destroyed enomous quantities of the ‘artefacts’, the West so breathlessly admires.
No atlatl? No range weapons of any kind? That’s a pretty big omission, and reveals a certain bias. The earliest musical instrument is one of those Chinese bronze bells? No prehistoric flute? I guess the African drums can be considered as modern examples of instruments that have been around for millenia.
Isn’t the Rosetta Stone out of place here? It helped our understanding of ancient civilization, but isn’t representative of anything like all the other objects seem to be (if I understand the curator’s goal correctly).
‘Ironic perhaps that they tell us at the same time that we must conform to the invasive Islamic norms if we want a peaceful society. ‘
So… maybe better ‘A history of the world before 10:10 objects?’
This series should be renamed
“A BBC revisionist history of how we imperialists have damaged indiginous peoples”
I had hoped this series would be interesting, but its incessant revisionism and choice of objects to reflect that has driven me away.
Any history item on BBC inevitably links in to a right-on issue, whether it be environmentalism, imperialism, feminism, the superiority of Islam etcetc
Yes , as commented above so boringly predictable.
This critique of America’s ABC TV on Islam, also, I think, applies to INBBC:
“O‘Reilly Slams ABC About Cleric’s ‘Flag of Islam’ Over the White House Vow”
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/muslim-cleric-flag-of-islam-will-fly-over-the-white-house/
“The latest programme is called ‘Exploitation and Enlightenment’….placing them together as if one does not come without the other.”
I wonder why the OP lied about the title, which as actually; “Exploration, Exploitation and Enlightenment (1680 – 1820 AD)“, and referred to it as the title of a single programme when it’s actually a series of programmes?
Could it be that the facts don’t quite fit the narrative he’s peddling so he decides to change them perhaps? On a site supposedly concerned with “bias”? To quote the great Count Arthur Strong; “You just couldn’t make it up”!
You ought to buy some conditioner to take care of those awful split hairs.
How do you know the writer lied?
And are you lying too? The writer did not merely refer to it as the title of a single programme but actually gave the name of the whole at the head of the article (A history of the world in…objects) and subsequently wrote about … Enlightenment as the title of the latest programme. That tells us plainly that there are more programmes. And the initial reference tells us the umbrella title for the whole.