May I commend this excellent post by Daphne Anson on the BBC’s “Horrible Histories”? Do give it a read…
“Manipulative and mind-bending, the BBC nowadays rarely makes a series on British history that is without a political agenda informing the narrative. One series, a gripping and enjoyable one about the glories of Bronze Age Britain, depicted the Roman Invasion as a disaster for the already highly civilised and skilled native population, which for all I know was a fair enough thesis.
But at the end came the propaganda, overtly voiced: since the British had known the sorrows of military occupation it ill-behoved their descendants to militarily occupy Iraq!
Most of the time, however, the agenda is vigorously to push the line that Britain, or at least the English part of it, has always been a multicultural society.
One of the most egregious instances of manipulated history is on the BBC’s website for children, in one of the items connected with the Queen’s Jubilee…”
Britain has always been multicutural!!!
Most of the white people here can trace their dna back to the first people who came here. The Romans were here for 400 hundreds years how come we are not speaking Italian?
Its only post world war 2 that this country has had loads of non-whites coming here. Most of these come from countrys that were part of the British empire and loved Britain. The BBC Cultural Marxists and their ilk hate reality.
One of the low points of the BBC Jubilee flotilla coverage (there were so many but this is down there with Fearne and the sick-bags) was the 2+ minutes nonsense by some idiot in “fun” makeup doing his “Horrible Histories” schtick on Westminster Bridge flanked by a maniacally grimacing John Sergeant. It was outstandingly unpleasant and insulting but I’m sure the BBC juveniles in charge of the coverage considered this rubbish “inclusive”, “entertaining” and probably, God help us, “educational”.
That didn’t happen… It was either Richard E. Grant on Westminster bridge with John Sergeant, or the Horrible Histories man by tower bridge with Sian Williams. Horrible Histories is a great show anyway, it manages to do what the BBC and Lord Reith set out to do – inform, educate and entertain. People really will complain about anything.
Oh you blockhead.
Read Dearys books you numpty…typical Wearside leftie who`s not forgiven Churchill for closing the mines up there.
Hence his perpetually skewered and frankly weird take on history.
We serve this slop to our kids-hence no real history teaching in school(do you do history?..if so, you must know the agenda).
And when it sells and we can sign up a Tony Robinson-out comes the series to reinforce the lefty narrative, albeit with some stinky and bloody bits for the feral and the perverted.
Wake up man!
I do do history, but it’s not like we cover the vast range of stuff which has been covered in the books. It all seemed perfectly fine to me then, and watching the series it still is. It’s a genuinely entertaining and interesting programme which gets kids interested in history – which is a bad thing I suppose?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OsO4_FrtsWM
Watch that and tell me it’s not brilliant.
All the best propaganda is ‘entertaining and interesting’. But that doesn’t make it history.
Yes, but it is history.
Whiteman ever heard the term useful idiot?
Because your trolling here is just being a useful idiot for the left.
You know if you hate the left so much, why use Orwellian as an adjective in your top bar? I hate to tell you, but he was a left winger (sorry).
It’s arguable that Orwell’s enduring legacy in political thought is his opposition to totalitarianism and his loathing of the dishonest manipulation of language for political purposes ( neither of which are exclusively or even characteristically, left wing) rather than his democratic socialism.
Yes, but he believed in Socialism – democratic Socialism. Use Nineteen Eighty Four or Animal Farm for that purpose, but I don’t think the BBC is as bad as Stalin’s Russia quite yet, which is where the majority of Orwell’s criticism was aimed at. He was against the corruption of democracy, and I’m not quite sure whether he would have shared all views expressed on here, as he was a left-winger of sorts, and they get constantly mocked or abused on this blog.
is slim “useful” though?,
otherwise, to call slim that,
would be an insult to “useful idiots” everywhere.
You’re right – mea culpa – but “it” certainly happened with or without Sergeant. Unfortunately we’ll have to disagree about Horrible Histories being informative, educational or (for anyone above a mental age of 10) entertaining.
It’s on CBBC – perhaps you aren’t the main target audience, but it’s certainly more worthwhile than Strictly Come Dancing.
I would have though making a serious subject attractive to ‘reluctant readers’ was a definition of dumbing down.
In his ‘Decline and Fall’ Edward Gibbon used to throw in a salacious snippet or footnote every dozen or so pages to keep his readers interested in what was, after all, a rather depressing ‘register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind,’
If he had just gathered all these together and published them separately, I imagine a lot of people would never have got around actually to reading all that boring stuff about Genseric and Theodoric and Belisarius etc.
Having the sensational bits handed to you on a plate is not real history: a schoolboy should have to wade through the first half of a tedious account of the Thirty Years War before getting to the good bits about fifty three women being beheaded in a church and infants being thrown into the flames at the sack of Magdeburg.
and more importantly, brainwash young children.
But that’s just not true.
E.J.Thribb. 17 & 1/2.
It may inform but what it informs is the problem. I won’t say any more because with those that are indoctrinated it’s a waste of breath trying.
The likes of Sergeant, Paxman are mere ballast and bluster so the BBC can claim that they`re not dumbing down.
Point made-if these leftie handwringing clever dicks from Oxbridge or what have you are the cream of your intellectual pretensions, then you`re stuffed.
No wonder you think Stephen Fry and Simon Schama are brainy…when a Starkey or a Douglas Murray are ignored.
It`ll not last though…Hitler in the bunker had his toadies parroting the party line then, and it didn`t help him in the end did it?
Downfall assured!
uh oh! slim, back from another islam lecture alert
” horrible histories – great show” :-D,
your fave the crusades? … with reference to the Westerners deciding to go to war with the Muslims because ‘they happened to live there’ laced with sarcasm. The rest of the narrative blatantly anti-west … biased broad cresent fully endorse who wrote this script, no doubt … i wonder why? 😀
inform educate entertain? … shoe horn some truth in there, leave out their own narrative, possibly so
http://youtu.be/syhWVqCKIqU
heres a link, see if slims assessment, is correct
I could only take the first few minutes – a seriously misleading travesty.
Coincidentally I happened to catch Horrible Histories ‘covering’ Christianity. What a load of biased, revisionist, nonsense.
You can ‘enjoy’ some of it here.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=4TooOJGKlGc#!
The first part of this is a joke.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=4TooOJGKlGc#!
I mean, it’s literally like Hamas TV.
Honestly, watch this video. This is what they are teaching our children. Unbelievable.
“Hard to imagine, I know.” Wait, is the BBC condemning the part in the Koran about jihad against unbelievers? Racists!
“The Holy Land” is not the holy land for Muslims. Only that one spot is considered special. Not the whole region. I’m going to stop watching now.
Although I think Terry Gilliam might have grounds for a lawsuit there….
Watched a full minute of this wretched tripe before I couldn’t take any more. No mention of the violent rise of the new religion of Islam in the four centuries prior to the Crusades which crushed everything before it and showed no signs of stopping. No, the Arab lands ‘were their holy lands too’, as though it had always been so. Complete, utter, dangerous and sinister brainwashing. Has to be seen to be believed.
I would certainly not inflict this horrible histories on my grand children. It is puerile rubbish. Dumbed down to vanishing point. And of course shot through with the Marxist historical viewpoint that should have been discredited years ago.
The real difficulty for the Marxist liberal elites is the lack of any historical evidence for a multiracial society in England between the Conquest and modern times. Hence the desperate attempts to invent a mythical multiracial past .
Horrible Histories is just part of the agenda. As for Orwell being a lefty this is only true in as much as he put forward what might be called old fashioned socialist views with which many of us concur. He would have had no time for the modern liberal and less time for their denial of reality and disregard for true things..
‘What would Orwell have made of modern Labour’. Discuss. (Only we don’t need to.)
If you read Politics and the English Language, I think he’d be decidedly pissed off with all modern politics, and at Labour for having gone too far to the right.
‘Too far to the right’. Let me see….so that would be mass immigration, ‘multiculturalism’ (but denigrating our own culture at every opportunity), class war, massive increases in welfare spending, a million more jobs in the public sector, huge pay increases for public sector workers, tax, borrow, spend, then tax, borrow and spend some more, decimation of private sector pensions, no reform of public sector pensions (back down in face of union pressure), more power to the unelected socialist government of Brussels, abdicating responsibility for our energy supply under pressure from environmental groups etc etc
Yeh, beginning to see what you mean.
I think it’s ‘too far to the left’ which I’m not quite grasping.
Compared to Old Labour, as it were, they moved far more to the right to make themselves electable, as the Tories moved to the left under Cameron to make them more electable after Thatcher etc. It is a historical fact which most people accept.
I can’t disagree with that – especially the ditching of Clause 4. However, I don’t think it’s valid to say Orwell wouldn’t have approved of that (as an example) as by the time Blair ascended to the leadership, Britain was a vastly different place to the one Orwell knew. Similarly, I think he would have shuddered at the power the unions had assumed by the 1970s, and the way their leaders abused it.
“Orwell was a proponent of a federal socialist Europe, a position outlined in his 1947 essay “Toward European Unity”, which first appeared in Partisan Review.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Orwell
I think this blog would disagree with that, would it not? That’s not even on the agenda now, so perhaps not as old fashioned. He was appalled at poverty in the Road to Wigan Pier, and poverty is still an issue, despite what you may say. He joined the Labour party. It’s hard to say what he would have believed now, but like Christopher Hitchens, he always liked to challenge the status quo in some way or another, as the wikipedia page states. It’s hard to say, but he was a left winger, or is he just another ‘useful idiot’, who you can quote when you want or ignore when you want?
It is you who are making the black or white divisions that you are accusing others of making.
Most would say that “George Orwell” made some penetrating observations about the Left (most of which seem to have gone over you and your English teachers head if you were taught they only apply to Stalin) but some of what he wrote and believed have aged less well.
Exactly, so you select which piece of Orwell you want to quote to try and give your argument some gravitas. He was a Socialist and made observations about Communism. You really have to be able to distinguish between those two, or we’ll turn into America.
Orwell’s socialism, like that of another old Etonian, Clement Alee, were formed by the poverty he witnessed in pre-war Britain. Such harsh conditions vanished in the post war boom period, which took place after his death in 1950. It could be argued that this amelioration had more to do with economic expansion than with any social democratic polices pursued by the state. At some point, Orwell/Atlee type socialism ceased to be able to produce a democratic base – hence New Labour and the plethora of single issue left wing groups.The clause 4 socialism of his day has vanished like last winter’s snow, but totalitarianism and the abuse of language are ever with us – and this is seen as his lasting contribution to political thought by those outside the ranks of the English left. Incidentally, Gollancz, of the Left Book Club refused to publish his ‘Homage to Catalonia’ because of its criticism of the behaviour of the Stalinists in Spain and a left wing critic in the Penguin History of English Literature in the ’60s, dismissed ‘Animal Farm’ and ‘1984’ as mere expressions of cold war hysteria.
It seems that Whitman believes that anybody who does not believe in socialism ought to be forbidden from drawing attention to anything of value in the writings of “George Orwell” – which of course is precisely the sort of Party thinking that Orwell so despised. In short he has read Orwell and all he has extracted is the political message his teachers wanted him to learn – Vote Labour.
Useful idiot indeed. No wonder he loves the BBC.
‘Orwell was a proponent of a federal socialist Europe…’ but probably not the unelected bureaucrat variety we have to suffer now.
I wonder what Orwell would have made of British Marxists deal with Islamism ?
Where to beigin. I haven’t studied him at school, but I’ve read most of his works of my own back. He was left wing though, and anti Communist, anti-totalitarian in Animal Farm and 1984. Keep the Aspidistra Flying criticised the middle classes pretentiousness, Road to Wigan pier criticised left wing groups it’s true. But I’ve not been indoctrinated, I’ve read a lot of his work and it seems clear that he’s a socialist, and what be appalled at every party in the country today. The way they manipulate everything and accept no blame. I’m not saying he would vote Labour today, but when dismissing the left as a bunch of loonies, as is popular, you should remember that Orwell falls into that category.
Socialists of old are fairly incomparable to many you find today. In many cases, today’s socialist writers have been so dumbed down by ideology, people like Orwell look like giants in comparison.
“Keep the Aspidistra Flying criticised the middle classes pretentiousness”
I thought that this was more about the struggle of one man and the distaste for the game we all have to play in life just to get ourselves through. It also seems to be more of a criticism of people who obsess over money, rich or poor, rather than money itself. More than anything it shows how middle class respectability, although pretentious, is important for living a life where “something is happening” and people depend on you. Good book though, probably my favourite of Orwell’s along with 1984.
Harry
It depends how you read it, I see it as a critique of the middle classes who found something romantic in the idea of living in poverty. Eventually it just stifles creativity. Orwell probably knew this from living rough in Paris and London. Therefore it also criticises the torrid conditions that the poor had to live in, and perhaps explains why there were few creatives from the working classes, instead we had the Orwells, the Audens and the Isherwoods.
I don’t think you can read any of Orwell’s work and not see it as a wider comment about society. It’s not usually about solely the struggle of one man.
You seem a nice bloke Mr Whitman, and young enough to be thinking all this through-so much more than most of the kids I teach in school, so that`s a good thing.
Let me leave you with this thought-feel free to correct me too-but I reckon that the lazy “right wing fascist/dictatorship” notion only makes sense if there is a King or a Colonel behind it…say King Fahd, Pinochet or the Greek colonels…and even then, it`s more nuanced than “right wing…I bet the states at the time were quick to transfer moneys from the poor to defence or new palaces etc…which would be tax redistribution, a la Marx.
There are rare birds…far more frequent are the Left wing fascist dicatorships…Hitler, Stalin, Mao…all were SOCIALIST( Nazi=National SOCIALISM, you see).
There were fascists dictatorships, citing the peoples revolutions-but turning their guns and terrorising agents and camps onto any dissenters…show trials etc.
These must make up at least 90% of the revolutions on behalf of the poor and oppressed…Cuba,Venezuela etc today.
If you learn nothing else today-assume all fascists are left wing…and note the few exceptions-when you hear the word “Fascist” or “extreme”…automatically think “Left Winger ” is what must be added.
Just because they have “good intentions”-big words and research grants-all the mass media outlets that count(and will use the likes of Leveson to get the rest)-does`n mean that they`re not eugenicists and Nazis in pastel shades of pink and lime green. They are-and they are FAR more of a threat to us all and our freedoms, than any “right wing” lot.
By their nature, most right wingers don`t gang up and set the hounds onto their critics and dissenters…being free to decide for yourself matters far more than state sponsored terrors.
Hope this helps a bit. Good luck next half-term.
Well said. Unfortunately use of the term ‘fascist’ – especially since since WW2 – has been manipulated by the left to become synonymous with ‘right-wing’, even though ironically both Mussolini and Hitler were socialist in most of their aims.
In reality, taking one of the dictionary definitions – ‘forcibly suppressing opposition and criticism’ – is much more characteristic of the tactics we see in left-wing movements today, for example the BBC/Guardian fighting tooth and dirty nail to prevent any expansion of the right-wing media in Britain -especially if it has the name ‘Murdoch’ attached to it.
However, I think the Climate Change a.k.a Man-Made Global Warming/Green/Environmental movement are the best example of fascism we have in the West today. Their determination to suppress alternative scientific views, let alone debate, scares the hell out of me, especially when you see how much is at stake.
Well you say that about Hitler, but he himself wasn’t particularly bothered by the socialist part. He managed to sweep that away at the night of the long knives, which meant Röhm and that side of the party, so that he could take control, unthreatened by that part of the party. Hitler hated Communism and Socialism, but saw that he needed to get the support of the working class German in order to succeed electorally, which he did. He then dropped it, and pursued policies of the right, rearmament etc. Far right, I should say. I don’t know enough about Mussolini to say anything about him. Having studied Hitler’s reign in detail though, that’s the impression I’ve got. He wasn’t a Socialist, the 45-51 Labour government was properly Socialist, and that benefited the country quite a lot afterwards. But Russia was not Socialist, it was Communist, and like I say, you can’t conflate the two, because they are quite different.
I’ve also read Orwell’s essay ‘toward European Unity’ and it makes for some interesting reading. I highly recommend his essays.
So re-armament is a preserve of the right? Are you serious, or was it just a grammatical slip?
It’s more right wing than left, given the left is more prone to pacifism than the right. The right seems to occupy itself more with weapons and the like.
I think it was c1932 that Stalin gave the instruction that all Soviet funded journalists (and it was of course soon followed by pro-Soviet “progressive” journalists in the West) that the Nazi Party in Germany should be called Fascists. The reason for this is obvious. National Socialism is a pretty accurate description of Stalinism.
The opposite of National Socialism is not Marxism it is belief in a free society. It is because the BBC is (correctly in my view) perceived to be a threat to a free society that it is attacked on these pages – if you think that people here want the BBC to say Vote Conservative at the next election you have completely misunderstood what is at stake.