Andrew Marr some time ago presented us with his programme on British History…..The Making of Modern Britain.
In the course of this programme we learnt that Darwin’s ideas on the survival of the fittest and the British invention of the concentration camp led to the Nazi ideal of the ‘Aryan Superman’ and the concentration camps in which 6 million Jews were killed…..as the Independent puts it….‘Indeed, it is hard not to avoid the conclusion (watching Marr) that the British Empire was simply a dummy run for the Third Reich, and that, had they known what was coming, many of our grandparents might merely have concluded that “Adolf went a bit too far”.’
Shame someone who presents himself as a historian should get the simplest facts wrong:
‘The first concentration camps were found in Cuba under Spain’s “Reconcentrado” Policy 1896-97. Shortly after similar concentration camps were used by the British in the Second Boer War in Africa around 1900.’
Not only on Wikipedia but in my schoolboy Penguin ‘Dictionary of Modern History’.
He also fails to mention why most of those Boer civilians died in the camps…because the Boer Commandos attacked and cut off the trains bringing in supplies of food and medicine. Bit inconvenient for the narrative of the nasty Brit and the plucky Boer.
Never mind. The real truth is out……
The Spanish are obviously now the ones to blame for the Holocaust.
We Brits can relax. The Empire was Great.
There is of course rather a difference between a concentration camp (particularly those of the late 1800s) and a Nazi death facility wiith gas chambers etc., but if it makes Andrew feel better to imply we’re all actually descended from Nazis then maybe he should make those accusations in the quiet hollow emptiness of his head rather than on national TV.
BBC = Complete Shits
That is the single best comment i’ve ever seen on here.
‘Bland Biased ****s’ if Marr is anything to judge it by.
I’m not an expert on concentration camps, fortunately, but I was under the impresion that their origin is far from clear. I believe the Portuguese and the Americans (in the Civil War) have also been blamed.
Oh, come on, didn’t you know? It’s all our fault. Everything in history is, according to the BBC. Eventually, they’ll find a way to nail us for the demise of the dinosaurs…
“In the course of this programme we learnt that Darwin’s ideas on the survival of the fittest….. led to the Nazi idea”
Wow the BBC slagging off Darwin that’s a first! It wasn’t the term survival of the fittest (even though Darwin did not coin it, only used it) was the problem.
Darwin claimed that all human traits were caused by natural selection, therefore death was the great creator.
So by killing those who are not genetically pure, this will cause human evolution.
We still see this today with our abortion policy.
Steady on, you might wake William Tell up.
Or one of several Tontos (like Lassie, the same but oddly different).
I think they will feel marginally safer here for a while.
Yes their allways a bit touchy about the link
between darwin and the nazi death camps
( even more so about the link between neo-darwinism and racism) yet the most basic internet search(I put darwin and eugenics into btyahoo) comes back with this as the very first item
http://creation.com/darwin-and-eugenics
despite that I see that they are running yet another
‘warning from history’ next week this one called
“The dark charisma of Hitler” can’t help thinking
Emmanuel Goldstein and the Ministry of Truth
I don’t suppose we will ever get to see “The dark charisma of Stalin” or “The dark charisma of Mao”.
But Communism is a all about being kind, caring, loving and pacifistic towards others! 100,000,000 million or so people have most definitely not been killed under it’s tyrannical grip.
Any 18 year old on an ‘anti-racist’ FaceBook page can tell you that!
That Britain invented not just the concept, but the name, of concentration camps is fairly conventional history. My staunchly conservative school taught this fact forty years ago. I’m not sure what there is to object to here.
But I remain failry confident that some people kept large groups of other people enclosed and unable to break free some time before the concentration camp idea was coined.
‘some time before’
For the BBC and its apologists, ‘it was a different time is a flexible concept, especially if context can serve or cause problems.
From such as the dictates of Mr. Marr’s narrative to the moment a group of schoolkids somewhere find themselves again in the vicinity of a recent Grad launch.
yes and at my grammar school 40 years ago
(chucked out at 15 and rightly so) made us sit through Peter Watkins ‘Culloden’ Its still the most awful piece of agitprop
Perhaps Melanie Phillips is right about how early deconstructionist ideology got control of the education system
For long enough convential history claimed that the bombing of Dresden killed anything between a hundred thousand and half a million people.
The truth is that it was one of Goebbels greatest propaganda coups but it served the purpose of many historians and political activists to accept it unquestioningly.
It now turns out that, after a thorough study by German historians, the numbers, although bad enough, were not in the hundreds of thousands but between 20 and 25 thousand.
Linking the Boer Concentration Camps, where people died more as a result of organisational incompetence than callous intent, with the Nazi Extermination Camps, is like comparing the swamping os a rowing boat on a park lake to the sinking of the Titanic, a massive streatch of the imagination by any measure.
And of course the purpose of a concentration camp is to keep lots of people captive and alive, not destroy every last one of them.
Hmmm, your opinions and style of writing remind me of someone else.
Are you Nicked’s twin brother by any chance?
This is the world the BBC wants
Beat you to it just
the sound on my old PC is bad are they singing
Obama,Obama,tis for thee?
2 minute hate at the Tory Party!
Surely a concentration camp is exactly that, a place where POWs are ‘concentrated’ to minimise the resources needed to securely hold them?
How the prisoners are treated is a completely different issue. It took the genius of the USA to invent the concentration camp that is beyond the law of either the belligerents, you know, the one that He was going to close.
Quite. But in Nazi Germany ‘concentration’ and ‘extermination’ camps were not the same thing, at least at first.
I don’t believe there is anything in Hitler’s writing crediting either the British in South Africa or Darwin for his racial ideas although I will accept correction on that point. His racial ideas (if they had an academic background) owed much more to Prussian nationalistic historian Heinrich von Treitschke who coined the term “the Jews are our misfortune” which would later be widely used by Nazis and Wilhelm Marr whose “The Victory of the Jewish Spirit over the Germanic Spirit. Observed from a non-religious perspective.” is credited for introducing the word antisemitism than any English source. His racial theories have a complex and thoroughly German origin. Any Darwin link was thoroughly diluted by the time it reached him.
Eugenics was extremely popular amongst the Left in the 30s (e.g. John Maynard Keynes, George Bernard Shaw) maybe that’s where the distorted ‘Darwinism’ come from. I’ve no idea if Eugenics was based upon a misinterpretation of Darwinism though. I always understood that Hitler admired the English as fellow Saxons and aspired to a German Empire though?
The benign paternal face of Swedish social democracy:
“A sharp debate has opened here over eugenics policies carried out for decades. Some 63,000 people were sterilized in Sweden between 1935 and 1975 to supposedly combat racial and social inferiority. Most were sterilized against their will, and the overwhelming majority of them were women. ”
(even the right on comrades of the Militant are disgusted!)
http://www.themilitant.com/1997/6133/6133_18.html
Hitler also got his ideas from Gobineau and Stewart Houston Chamberlain, so they weren’t all of German origin.
This Andrew Marr?
“Andrew Marr denies affair: It was just a ‘drunken clinch'”
http://www.theweek.co.uk/people-news/48911/andrew-marr-denies-affair-it-was-just-drunken-clinch
Historical revisionism?
Maybe a case of ‘it was just a different timing’ then?
I wonder at what duration a drunken clinch becomes an affair?
One is sure that if feeling an open air… clinch… is felt appropriate, what happens indoors (say, oh, I don’t know, and oval office?) will be much more chaste.
These distinctions do seem to consume BBC semanticists and their apologists, often to the distraction of the main point.
For some reason.
Considering the unfortunate visual result of Marr’s genetic heritage it’s not surprising that he dislikes eugenics.
Can’t be arsed to look up the date, but certainly before the Boer war, the British were faced with dealing with the Thug cult in India. The Thugs were a Caste who for centuries had murdered travellers as a way of living.
They posed as pilgrims or merchants , joined up with other travellers , then strangled them at camp during the night .
The British hunted down many and the whole male population of the clan was then shut up in a closely guarded village and held till they died off.
ps. its Saturday morning and the bbc have just issued the most grovelling apologie in their history re NN !!!
I wonder if the Beeb will be doing a piece on this group, and getting a Communist ‘anti-extremist’ campaigner to tell us all about it?
“The Jews need another Holocaust, but this time none of the pigs should be left alive!”
http://thebodyoftruth.wordpress.com/2012/10/31/british-muslims-celebrate-hurricane-sandy-911-and-the-holocaust/
I was unsure of my facts on this, so I’ve just done a bit of research. Alan doesn’t know what he’s talking about. The Spanish indeed used something they called ‘reconcentration’ camps in Cuba, but the modern concentration camp (and the English term) were invented in the Boer War. Moreover, Nazi concentration camps were directly inspired by the Boer examples – Hitler’s speeches of the 1920s refer admiringly to the camps and he outlined his plans to ensure a rapid Nazi takeover using similar techniques. There is nothing controversial in the Marr documentary at all. The Boer camps may not have been about extermination (nor were most of the German ones, for that matter) but they were widely regarded in this country as a huge embarrassment, not least because thousands of women and children were interned in them.
Alan I have to take you to task over the following statement;
He also fails to mention why most of those Boer civilians died in the camps…because the Boer Commandos attacked and cut off the trains bringing in supplies of food and medicine. Bit inconvenient for the narrative of the nasty Brit and the plucky Boer.
This statement is as wrong as Marr’s accusation that the British developed the concentration camp idea.
Firstly the Trek Boer were agrarian, very religiously conservative farmers and had no need of railways or any form of industrial development. In fact they opposed such development.
The real truth of the Anglo/Boer War was hinged on Rhodes’ desire to get his hands on the wealth of the Witwatersrand Gold fields and develop his idea of a Cape to Cairo chain of British Colonial control. Rail roads were fundamental to the concept of control and development. The War was instigated by the British to force the Boer Governments to grant voter franchise to mainly British miners working the Gold fields. Since British miners outnumbered the local Boer population it would have been possible for the backers like Rhodes to gain power over the territories via the ballot box. The Boers had already fled the British ruled Cape because they did not wish to live under their administration. Whilst the Boers were happy to grant mining rights and issue work visas to miners they drew the line at permanent residence.
I am sure that we can all relate to this sentiment given our current immigration problems distorting what we see as our heritage and way of life which we are are rightly proud and wish to perpetuate.
The Boer commandos operated in flying columns against invading British forces. Their ability to shoot accurately, camouflage, knowledge of the terrain and bushcraft (=SAS cavalry units) made them fierce opponents. The British forces suffered very heavy casualties and were on the brink of another “Isandlwana” bringing humiliation and defeat to the much vaunted military establishment.
Since the Boer forces were reliant on obtaining basic food essentials from their farms being run by wives and elderly relatives Lord Kitchener decided that the only way to defeat them was to take the Boer civilian population and their black servants into custody.
These civilians were rounded up and put into tented camps, livestock shot, equipment burnt and blown up, homesteads burned down and fields salted.
Contrary to what you state, most of the camps were located in British controlled territory and there was easy access to rail communication. This was deliberately done to prevent Boer columns attacking and freeing their families.
Because of very extreme temperature variations, particularly in the winter where temperatures on the high veld can drop to -15C, many of the more vulnerable people became ill and died. Poor sanitation meant cholera and dysentery spread rapidly killing more. There was inadequate medical support and it turned into a nightmare. There was inadequate food and the internees were issued with military ration packs and not on the basis the troops were. There was no record of ill treatment of internees just lack provision and care. These were highlighted by a Cornish aid worker, Emily Hobhouse. She was to bring this to attention of the British Parliament. She was later honoured by the naming of a town after her, Hobhouse, in the Eastern Cape.
Kitchener was unconcerned as his main objective was to win the War and reduce the embarrassment that he and his staff were suffering.
British military records show that 27% of the Trek Boer population died in this conflict and the concentration camps. 21% died in the camps. These are unforgivable stats which few are aware of.
There were long term consequences of this policy. The Boer nations had and still have intense hatred of the British. The Boer survivors had no where to go back to at the end of the war. The lands were destroyed through salting. They had no finance to put them back of their feet. This led to a huge population that became “poor whites”. Most were left uneducated and manual labourers competing with black manual labourers in industry and the mines. In the 1930’s they organised themselves politically and since they were the majority of the white voting public they gained political control. Apartheid was born out of their need to educate and place their portion of the population back into the economic system.
How do I know? My ancestors were Cornish miners. I have spoken to many descendants of the victims of the Boer side of the war. This is one part of our history that we should not be proud of.
Very good. This year I went to the funeral of an old Boer friend. When he enlisted in 1939 his family cut him off because memories of that time were so bitter. He never returned to SA except in old age as a visitor.
That aside Marr omits one essential fact. We chose to build those camps. The Germans chose to build concentration camps and extermination camps. Historical example means nothing. Choice is all and right from wrong is an eternal truth with which we all have to live.
If I may redefine your thoughts;
Kitchener saw the isolation of the civilian portion of the enemy as a necessary part of a strategic policy. In modern terms this unlawful and both now and then very OTT.
Hitler and his war machine used this example as a justification to isolate and then eradicate portions of his OWN people who he despised.
These are very different objectives.
Interesting thread developing here, but returning (slightly) to the discussion on the BBC put their own slant on history, I’m not surprised that on this remeberance weekend said BBC returns again -via the tragedy of Battle of the Somme- to the 1960s liberal left rewriting of modern history. The Great War is arguably the most misunderstood event in recent history. The war was tragic, but not futile. The British Army by 1918 was the most effective fighting force in the world, and in August 1918 won the battle of Amiens and decisively defeated the German Army. I doubt that will get a mention on Auntie; more the ” lions led by donkeys” lie that backs up the 1960s myths of poor untrained Tommies sent tfor slaughter by upper class Generals sipping champagne hundreds of miles away.
Hindsight is one of the driving forces behind liberal thinking. If only etc.
The army really thought the Somme was going to be decisive. The planners were wrong. That is all. They were not malicious or evil. Human like the rest of us.
Andrew Marr’s academic qualifications via Wikipedia. Cross checked on other sites.
Marr was born on 31 July 1959 in Glasgow, Scotland[3] to Donald and Valerie Marr, his father being an investment trust manager. Marr was educated in Scotland at Craigflower Prep School, the independent High School of Dundee and at Loretto, also an independent school in Musselburgh, East Lothian, where he was a member of Pinkie House. He went up to read English at Trinity Hall, Cambridge graduating with a first class honours degree.[3][4]
He was once a member of the Socialist Campaign for a Labour Victory. At Cambridge, Marr says he was a “raving leftie”, and he acquired the nickname ‘Red Andy’.[5][6
Mmm. Doesn’t seem to be a degree in history in there. Never mind.
Marr has never had the time to do any serious research into the history of England, let alone Britain and Ireland, so he doesn’t have the in depth knowledge to consider the totality of the many historical, political, social and economic facets which have been involved in the making of modern Britain.
One could posit that he is drawing on other’s research and ideas and his own subjective thoughts and feelings.
He is presenting revisionist history, something the BBC is very keen on – e.g. Horrible Histories. It might or might not be good television depending on who is viewing. However, it feeds our desire for there to be simple explanations for what are incredibly complex events and situations. We do so want to read past events from the perspective of the morals and attitudes of our own time.
The BBC could have looked to try and bring some balance by including the views of real historians with differing views from Marr, but of course that would change the emphasis of the golden narrative that the BBC likes to run through all its programmes.
Those of us who are students of history know what that is.
The only Historians the BBC admires are Marxist ones like Eric Hobsabwm.
Self-loathing affulent Hampstead, Islington Cultural Marxists. Who hate the white British because they don’t want anything to do with their Marxist fantasies.
Anytime Communism, Socialism, Marxism has been tried it has failed. These people don’t realise when the SHTF they will be the first to die.
Only the BBC/Guardian could subliminally implicate the British in the genocide of the Third Reich.
It would be laughable if it were not for the fact the BBC are helping to educate our children.
Why would anyone listen to a word Andrew Marr says anyway? He hasn’t even disguised how far to the left he is – he’s flat-out stated that anyone with an opinion right of centre should be repressed by the media “for the good of the public,” and that we need mass, nationwide homogenisation of all races. The man is a complete and utter fruitcake with no concept of how society works.
Only the BBC/Guardian could subliminally implicate the British in the genocide of the Third Reich
And so hypocritically, even when semantically ‘tuned’, when it suits.
The man is a complete and utter fruitcake with no concept of how society works.
There’s a lot of ’em about.
Odd how many of a like minds seem to have washed up, so uniquely, at a certain broadcaster.
Oh… be prepared for detailed disagreement along the lines of ‘No he isn’t’.
Worse if you beg to differ.
Then the irony on it being on this thread would be… well… familiar to many, if inevitably lost on some.