As Boris Johnson might say….‘it sounds like a trivial thing to get worked up about, but one trivial thing leads to another.’
The BBC presented us with another exotic adventure chasing wild animals in out of the way places…this time Tigers in Siberia in ‘Operation Snow Tiger.’
Awesome landscape with some majestic beasties, the programme itself promised to be somewhat formulaic but was rescued by an unexpected turn of events….watch it and see for yourself.
However one tiny little thing jarred….the naivety of the presenter or the compete lack of awareness of history and context.
The programme was trying to investigate the likely survival of Tigers in Siberia in the face of various threats…from land use, poaching, disease and the like.
At 26 mins in the presenter gave us a history lesson telling us:
‘Poaching here hasn’t always been a problem. Back in the days of the Soviet Union stricter management of the landscape and its wildlife saw tiger numbers rise…but when Communism collapsed so did the economy. People turned to the forests for food and as capitalism took hold and the borders opened an illegal trade in animal parts for Chinese medicine took off…tiger numbers declined dramatically.’
Let’s hear it for the Communists from a BBC presenter stood in the snows of Siberia…the same snows that helped kill off nearly 2 million of the 30 million or so prisoners in the Gulags or the forced labour camps who were worked to death and many of whose bones lie under the very roads they built and over which the self same presenter probably travelled to get to her picturesque film location.
As I said a small and almost trivial point…but not really…not if it gives people watching a romantic, nostlagic view of Communism that it very definitely doesn’t deserve….and maybe somewhere down the line makes them think well what if..maybe we could just try it and see….
Boris Johnson has a similarly dim view of some of the BBC’s PC world views which are small but damaging nonetheless…here changing the dating system from BC/AD to BCE/CE:
This decision by the BBC is not only puerile and absurd. It is also deeply anti-democratic, and I urge all those who are fed up with the advance of pointless political correctness to fight back.
The BBC is almost alone in Western democracies in being a state-funded broadcaster. Even though I get most of my news from papers or the internet, I pay through the nose for the privilege of having a TV. I think the last bill was about £148. We all pay through the nose. And therefore I think we deserve to be consulted before the corporation makes a decision of immense cultural importance, a decision that affects the way we will ask our children to think about the history of our civilisation.
If the BBC is going to continue to put MMXI at the end of its programmes – as I think it does – then it should have the intellectual honesty to admit that this figure was not plucked from nowhere. We don’t call it 2011 because it is 2011 years since the Chinese emperor Ai was succeeded by the Chinese emperor Ping (though it is); nor because it is 2011 years since Ovid wrote the Ars Amatoria. It is 2011 years since the (presumed) birth of Christ. I object to this change because it reflects a pathetic, hand-wringing, Lefty embarrassment about thousands of years of cultural dominance by the West.
There was Christ, and if the BBC doesn’t want to date events from the birth of Christ then it should abandon the Western dating system. Perhaps it should use the Buddhist calendar, which says that it is the 2,555th year since the nirvana of Lord Buddha. Perhaps it should have a version of the old Roman calendar, and declare that this is the fourth year of the fourth consulship of Silvio Berlusconi.
Full marks to Boris – as (almost ) always.
Apologies, my big fingers bashed the report button by mistake when I was going for the like one.
CE = Christian Era. BCE = Before Christian Era. What’s not to like?
What’s not to like?
1) Consistency: Two characters versus three.
2) Lack of phonetic differentiation, (important for a broadcaster?), B-ee, C-ee, E-ee, particulary if following thr-ee, thirt-ee, fort-ee, fift-ee, sixt-ee, sevent-ee, eight-ee or ninet-ee.
It’s ‘Common Era’ and ‘Before Common Era’ thus expunging any mention of Christ from the dating system, to which Johnson (rightly) objects.
I was being sarcastic. I know what CE and BCE means to the opposition. My recommendation is that the rest of us, when presented with the terms, simply redefine them as Christian Era and Before Christian Era. The phrase “what’s not to like” is directed at the BBC and fellow travellers.
Everyone knows that the BBC’s calendar starts in 1968.
1967 works, too.
France, Netherlands, Germany many countries have (unfortunately) state funded broadcasters.
Remarkably they all have the same biases in common with the BBC. Someone should study that
I expect they all have a “Common Purpose”!
And I’ve no doubt that like the BBC they are in receipt of many a Euro from the E.U. so the narrative continues unabated, unchallenged. (I’m making assumptions here, never a good thing to do, especially as I’m a pilot, but I’m sure someone will correct the error of my ways should my assumption be wrong)
Oldbloke- if you were a commercial pilot our paths may have crossed; I used to be an Air Traffic Controller.
I say used to be… meh one incey-wincey mid-air to mid-air. 🙁
So the lesson is that communism is good for tigers even if it’s been proved to be a godawful system for humans?
It’s not a trivial point at all and I think you’re quite right to flag it.
It is these sneaky, almost subliminal messages that are put into programmes which, on the face of it, have nothing to do with economic theory which tend to stick in the mind of the viewer without them even realising it.
The BBC aim this kind of apparently throw away comment at a younger generation conditioned to the slogan ‘capitalism bad, communism…. err… not been taught much about that but it sounds cool’
That is why I now use BC ( Before Christ), and AD ((Latin for Anno Domini, or Year of Our Lord), whenever I have to.
As for communism, this is the ideology that killed in cold blood, around 150 million in the space of less then a century, and enslaved a billion people or more. Communism/Marxism makes Nazism look like a compassionate ideology.
btw, you don’t have to pay the licence, you can get rid of your tv!
BBC presenter/narrators are very irritating and often very ill informed but most often they are just reading their lines which are concocted by the regular contributors. The BBC seems to be a job (or contract) for life, the same old, same old faces endlessly cycled through the same set of programmes and when the “celebrity” is waning they create special “grumpy old this” or “grumpy old that” programmes to keep them in the limelight.
I watched a programme about china where the narrator said “the fishermen have used these birds [cormorants] as SLAVES for thousands of years” – does this mean a sheep dog is a slave, or a horse is a slave – has the programme maker been groomed by PETA?
Childrens BBC and also adult comedy programmes are particularly full of propaganda – dump the TV and save £134!
Pedantry alert: Licences cost £145.50.
I rather like watching football on Sky. I’m also a big fan of Game of Thrones… on Sky.
My kids, bless em, like watching Nickelodeon and the Disney channel.
Occasionally, we will all sit down as a family and watch a movie… usually on Sky.
Yes, the choice is there but it is a kind of “throwing the baby out with the bathwater” type decision you’re making.
What I would like is the ability to choose whether or not I wish to fund the BBC. I don’t think it’s an unreasonable demand.
If it’s as good as they think it is then there will be no shortage of paying customers so it won’t go away.
point taken – I kept hold of the telly for a long time before I suddenly realised I could get everything I watch from other sources (e.g. the occassional film or news or factual programme) and was only using the tv to play back old recorded stuff. I do miss a really good documentary, you know, the ones that give information without trying to pull the heart strings and I do miss not having to look for entertainment i.e. just switching the tv on and finding something good to watch rather than planning ahead as I do now. But that was becoming less and less frequent. I like to watch factual programmes but was becoming fed up with the PC of most of that kind of programme – most animal programmes seemed to talk about “mummy and daddy lion” etc. instead of simply telling it like it is.
Try YouTube, every type of documentary imaginable seems to get uploaded to there as soon as its made. In fact its an eye opener to just how p#ss poor the BBCs ‘factual’ out put is
try these
http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/
http://www.youtubedocumentaries.com/
http://documentaryheaven.com/
stick www in front documentaryheaven for it to work
You know, you’ve almost converted me! 🙂
The economy was already collapsed. Does this woman think the Soviet Union collapsed because of a few Occupy-style protests? As ever, history is merely a plaything for BBC emotions.
All things are permissible
alan makes a good point here about the commie hypocrites,the nazis were made to face up to the crimes they commited in world war 2 and wrightly so.but something disturbs me here about the lefts rewriting of world war 2,stalin and his communist war criminals murdered in excess of 60 million of his own people including civilian men, women and children and purged up to 100,000 of his own soldiers whether generals or foot soldiers shot in the head and dumped in mass graves in his reign of terror ,why do the left try to hide the history of communist genocides commited this century by the likes of mass murderers like stalin,chairman mao,pol pop,just to mention a few.they make me sick with there double standards and gross hypocrisy.
because soviet communism is based on marxism and most socialist will have a copy of his works on their book shelf
The Nazis atleast tried to hide their crimes. In that sense they knew they were doing something quite appalling.
Not so the communists/socialists/marxists, or whatever name they now use as cover They did not hide their crimes, as they never regarded the greatest mass murder in history, as a crime.
Then the manner of death
1. Mass murder was designed by socialists/communists to sow terror in the populace ( that is why it was done openly).
2. The manner of death was slow starvation lasting weeks or months, while being worked to the death. Can anyone imagine the pain of parents watching their children die slowly , day by day.
The Nazis used a bullet or gas, which was quick. The communists forcibly took the food that peasants created, and then let them, and their children starve.
Its absolutely appalling that communists/ marxists have never been unmasked as the devils they are. Instead they sit comfortably in western universities pissing on the snow and ice that hides the bones of tens of millions in Russia alone.
Surely for this accusation of bias to have any merit you have to at least attempt to show that the point about the Siberian tiger population is either inacurate or superflous? Its a film about tigers, doesn’t seem any reason to discuss the humans killed there by Stalin. The presenter didnt show an ignorance of historical context, your point is simply irrelevant to a film about tigers.
Presumably you’d have to make some attempt to show the presenter had some sympathy with the Stalinist regime.
Yoy haven’t attempted any of this. I also think you have all your work still ahead of you when you try to make the connection between someone who might have voted for or supported the UK Labour party equating to sympathy with Stalin.
So your point about the film being pro-Stalin propaganda doesn’t bear the slightest scrutiny.
Boris’ article is from 2011, and if you’d done a little research you’d have discovered there was no truth to the BC/AD story, it was invited by a newspaper. They recycle the story every so often, it creates a little moral outrage
You could say such mistakes are small but damaging, as even though they turn out to be completley false , therell always be some fool willing to use it to support a point in some dank corner of the internet.
So that’s 0 marks on both points there Alan.
Trolls should notbe fed.
Troll = anyone who dissents from the accepted view here right?
I think it relevant to draw attention to one of the central planks of Alan’s argument here being completely false…..wrong… untrue…that’s relevant right?
Reality check: has the BBC dropped the terms BC/AD?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/reality-check-with-polly-curtis/2011/sep/26/1
PCC tells Mail to ‘take greater care’ when reporting ‘BBC drops BC/AD’ :
http://tabloid-watch.blogspot.co.uk/2011/12/pcc-tells-mail-to-take-greater-care.html
Now, what about the Siberian tiger population then? anything?
No, a troll is an ugly and slow-witted creature in Scandinavian folklore who feels the need to add “right” to the end of each sentence.
I’m certainly not ugly, right?
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