Churchill’s disagreement with the pre-1939 war policy of appeasement was kept off the air by the BBC…..
“For 11 years, they kept me off the air. They prevented me from expressing views that proved to be right. Their behaviour has been tyrannical.”
The BBC’s own Nick Robinson spills the beans….and a lesson for us all….
‘The way Churchill was handled is a powerful warning of the dangers of the BBC believing it is being balanced by excluding the voices of those who do not represent conventional wisdom….
…he (Churchill) did complain to a young BBC producer who visited him on the day after Chamberlain returned home from Munich. A memo records their meeting. They spent hours discussing the Nazi threat and “Churchill complained that he had been very badly treated… and that he was always muzzled by the BBC”. The producer was called Guy Burgess. The man who would become his country’s most famous traitor tried to reassure the man who would become its saviour that the BBC was not biased.’
Churchill was expressing the voice of the people…a thing that the BBC assiduously works to avoid:
‘After Churchill became prime minister, on 10 May 1940, vast numbers listened to his extraordinary wartime broadcasts. Churchill claimed that all he did was to give voice to the national mood of defiance: “The people’s will was resolute and remorseless, I only expressed it. I had the luck to be called upon to give the roar.” ‘
Now not saying that there is any similarity at all between a dyed-in-the-wool communist traitor like Burgess and any working at the BBC now who entertain anti-war ideas but you can’t help making comparisons……but today of course no one at the BBC is in any way biased…they were in the past but Mark Thompson has assured us that’s exactly that…in the past.
…but it seems further comparisons could be made with today….the BBC’s attitude towards Murdoch and his media ’empire’ may have deep roots:
‘[Churchill] had decided to break the monopoly that his old enemy John Reith had considered so vital for broadcasting. He did so in the face of Reith’s hysterical warning that commercial television would be as disastrous for Britain as “dog racing, smallpox and bubonic plague”. ‘
Hopefully the Savile Shambles may yet bring Nick Robinson around.
For this is a good article, in that I knew none of this.
It is also very telling-if you don`t allow the talk on “not appeasing” Hitler…then “not appeasing” talk of Islam only shows us what will yet be in store for us, if there is no airing of uncomfortable truths in some forum at the BBC.
Global warming, European federalism, unfettered immigration and sucking up to Islam are OUR equivalents of “tumbleweed topics”….and , as Churchill warned: shutting him up only makes the final reckoning even worse for us all.
You can`t explain a Breivik or a Savile if you`re not being truthful to yourself and to the nation-Operation Lennon/Lenin MUST be stopped…and it`s the only game in town for the BBC.
Guy Burgess eh?…they were traitors in our midst way back then too pounce uk!
The establishments problem with Churchill was he refused to be silenced and would tell them what they were loathed to hear. Now in today’s PC world if you say anything even less forcefully than Churchill you are instantly condemned as a raciest, homophobe, islamophobe or Little Englander, by that same establishment.
But they forget that
Silly comment box missing out things again.
Where the ” is should be; “Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it”.
No disrespect intended to Alan but this is by no means a new story – and nor is the BBC’s employment of Guy Burgess.
I hope it wasn’t a new story to Nick Robinson, but so callow are BBC staff these days that you can’t help but wonder.
As for no one at the BBC today resembling Burgess . Oh yeah? I heard some of those ecomia to the Stalinist apologist Hobsbawm.
Quite true about Burgess who famously interviewed Philby for the BBC upon the his (Philby’s) return from observing the Spanish Civil War.
Yes, an old story but you haven’t heard a senior BBC journalist say this too many times:
‘The way Churchill was handled is a powerful warning of the dangers of the BBC believing it is being balanced by excluding the voices of those who do not represent conventional wisdom.’
Voices criticising Europe, immigration, Islam and climate change have all too often been excluded or minimised….though it doesn’t look like either Entwistle or Patten are the catalysts for change on that front.
“David Starkey versus Michael Wood: Popular History for Today”
http://durotrigan.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/david-starkey-versus-michael-wood.html
During the the original banking crash the only person offered up by BBC as counter point to the Labour government was Vince Cable.
Those urging the government to let banks fail we’re ignored.
The BBC has cost us billions of pounds and millions of deaths with their leftist bias.
If I recall correctly, there was a tory blogger allowed on the BBC at the time, who called for the banks to fail. However the interviewer vilified him as being crazy and the “let the failed banks fail” line was treated as a crazy, insane and extremist.
-from today’s ‘Sunday Times’ (£):
“SCHOOLCHILDREN will have to learn about 200 key figures and events in British history, from Anglo-Saxon kings to Winston Churchill, under plans being drawn up by Michael Gove, the education secretary.
“The current national curriculum in history, which has been attacked for emphasising politically correct themes at the expense of deeper knowledge, will be scrapped.
“Instead children will be required to learn a narrative of British history, how it relates to the story of other countries and key international developments.
“Gove’s blueprint rejects rote learning, but emphasises that acquiring a detailed knowledge of history will enable children to understand the ‘how and why of human folly and achievement’.”
“Pupils to learn about 200 key British figures from Anglo-Saxons to Winston Churchill as ‘politically correct’ national curriculum in history is scrapped ”
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2217547/Pupils-learn-200-key-British-figures-Anglo-Saxons-Winston-Churchill-politically-correct-national-curriculum-history-scrapped.html#ixzz29JpPBCfb
Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook
I sincerely hope that Gove’s factual history teaching initiative will be compulsory, and apply to every school, including those of faith persuasion.
What is it going to take to show our nation that the bbc is a force for evil? If Mr Churchill cannot contain this monstrosity, given his powers during the period of the second world war, then who can? We, the people need to rise up and expel this abomination from our midst. If the muslims can spontaneously vent their rage (of course, i don’t believe that for a moment, but the bbc do, apparently) then why can’t we, the normal peoples of England expunge a carbuncle from our midst?
I’ve just found this excellent article and I am not surprised.
The BBC are never wrong – never.
Nick Robinson has a new book out, does he? I hope he spends some time explaining in detail why the BBC kept him from reporting on the rift between Blair and Brown.
He acts like it’s his own fault, but then goes on to say “I can now (report)…”.
Funny how none of this made the main news reports but are hidden away on a web page.
“I can now (report)…”.
Of course, as Deborah has pointed out, even if (eventually) ‘reported’, how the guys in the edit suite choose to see it gets broadcast (or not) still applies. Just ask Newsnight.
So in the 30’s we had a senior politician desperate to warn his country of the ‘gathering storm’, at daggers drawn, frustrated by someone who was little more than a jumped up civil servant…and who, to coin a phrase, clearly ‘didn’t know his place’.
Nothing changes.
A joy to discover that a slew of chinless mid managers at the BBC fearlessly put Savile in his place.
Unfortunately, however, it was Eurovision that overturned Saviles lifetime ban on buying Love Hearts, and so all the BBC did to stymie Sir James of Wood Lane was ruined.
How many doped out old fossils that greased Alan Freemans wig during the Peel years of Freeloving are still willing to put down the Werthers Originals for long enough to tell us that the BBC suffered more than any piece of fluff…not`arf!
Thankfully we do have one question answered….why the News Of The World had to go.
It was that paper that filmed the Top of the Pops DJs in full-on seedball/perv alert back in 1971…and BBC chinless wonders would , no doubt; have some hazy memories about that papers role in grassing the Beeboys up..and being able to still put the skids under them all.
One wonders why poor Harold Shipman got such a hard time-didn`t his milkman once ask him if he wanted full cream or semi-skimmed?
Don`t say that Shipman wasn`t confronted/challenged /tickled by the Milk Marketting Board…far more of a threat than the police!
The Beeb are bonkers…if only Anthony Clare could psychobabble over their conflicting cravenness!
Ok, it’s a stretch, but speaking of the BBC and muzzling…
http://carmarthenplanning.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/foi-cost-of-can-of-worms.html
The BBC’s attitude to FoI requests being well known, one wonders how objective they can be in ‘reporting’ the efforts of others to restrict them… ‘as a cost saving’. I wonder what the legal costs of trying to cover stuff up all the time may be?
BBC-NUJ still has it in for Winston Churchill.
Although ostensibly TONIGHT’s BBC 4 TV programme on 1942 is about the threat from Hitler to Britain and the West, this BBC-NUJ preview makes it sound as though maybe Churchill was the threat:
“Historian David Reynolds reassesses Winston Churchill’s conviction that the Mediterranean was the ‘soft underbelly’ of Hitler’s Europe. Travelling to Egypt and Italian battlefields like Cassino, scene of some of the worst carnage in western Europe, he shows how, in reality, the ‘soft underbelly’ became a dark and dangerous obsession for Churchill.
“Reynolds reveals a prime minister very different from the jaw-jutting bulldog of Britain’s ‘finest hour’ in 1940 – a leader who was politically vulnerable at home, desperate to shore up a crumbling British empire abroad, losing faith in his army and even ready to deceive his American allies if it might delay fighting head to head against the Germans in northern France. The film marks the seventieth anniversary of the Battle of El Alamein in 1942.”
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01ndj09
And just to twist the knife into Winston Churchill,
Mr Reynolds likened the grizzly death of Mussolini and his Roman Empire, to that of Churchill ‘s British Empire in 1945.
Reynolds’ leftist intellectual punchline:
‘Ultimately, the British Empire was a con trick’.
Reynolds is a ‘real’ historian in the Beeboid Schama mould.
It was not only Churchill that was kept off the BBC. Tony Blair made a speech to Congress in Washington in 2004 which had 8 minutes of standing ovation – not reported at all. later In Las Angeles 2006 his speech on 10pm news was reduced to “this is what the PM meant to say”!