What alternative do we have? Do we have any control or influence over the American elections?’ the naturalist says before joking about an alternative solution.
Thanks to Jerry Owen in the comments for reminding us of Attenborough’s incitement to kill Trump…and of course Attenborough’s not alone as we’ve noted before.
The BBC’s Paul Wood, who concentrates on Trump and Russia, asks in the Spectator…thus putting a firewall between his speculation and the BBC…
Let’s not forget that BBC virulent anti-Trump rhetoric almost certainly played a part in the actual attempted shooting of Trump by a British man and that a Republican congressman was attacked and shot in an attempted politically motivated murder.
Why refresh our memories about this toxic, extremely polarised, menacing anti-Trump liberal narrative? Why? Because Andrew Marr is once again treating us to his version of history, the Marr Book of Alternate Facts, as he reveals that Trump is a ‘bad man’ and that the Right are to blame for the polarisation and breakdown of US politics and democracy.
Marr is a bit of a star when it comes to history….history is apparently a moveable feast and what’s on the menu can be changed to suit your own tastes. Here’s his view on the Boer war and the British Empire…and its consequences…
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”.’
No different of course to the standard BBC narrative about the British Empire.
Marr had a trial run airing his views in the Evening Standard not so long ago attacking Social Media [as directed by the BBC whose interests, commercail and political, lie in demonising and reining in social media] as the source of all that is wrong in society today, suggesting that it will lead to civil war and the rise of a new Hitler in Britain. He finished off with a pompous and arrogant bit of advice to Trump…‘Got that Donald?’….and a hint of where he gets his own thinking confirmed by the liberal echo chamber that resounds to anti-Trump conpipracies and rhetoric…
And it’s dangerous. In a new book about Trump’s America, two political scientists from Harvard, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, discuss “How Democracies Die”. In it they emphasise the importance of not just political rules but how we behave. These “soft guard rails” include mutual toleration or “the understanding that competing parties accept one another as legitimate rivals”. Got that, Donald?
So yes, we need basic civility and some mutual respect even when we disagree. This is going to be a difficult year. The last thing we need is a spitting arms race of abuse. History, as so often, tells us why.
Today in the Sunday Times Marr expands and expounds on the narrative he touched on above as he critiques [lol…not in the slightest does he ‘critique’] the book he mentions above….Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt’s “How Democracies Die”. This book is targeted squarely at Trump and accuses him of being a dictator who will kill American democracy. Marr’s analysis is in fact one long nod of agreement with everything they say….Trump is a bad man and the Republicans are white supremacists who want to make America white again. The whole premise of Marr’s diatribe is highly one-sided, blinkered, extremely partisan and wrong.
Marr admits that the two authors are ‘anti-Trump politics professors at Harvard’ and yet he fully accepts everything they say as the one version of truth that is true and ominously warns that ‘democracy is in danger’ and that ‘Britain could learn a lot from this study’.…’study’?…..he means of course very partisan, one-sided polemic.
He tells us that they ask if a modern American President could destroy American democracy and then lays out the criteria they used to judge Trump by…naturally this is window dressing for they used no criteria other than their own hatred of Trump and Republicans.
He tells us that every democracy needs ‘gatekeepers’ who can identify the anti-democrats and tyrants before they can establish themselves in the system and take it over. What are the criteria they use to identify these anti-democrats?
Do they reject, or have a weak commitment to, the democratic rules of the game?
Do they deny the legitimacy of their opponents?
Do they tolerate, or even encourage, the use of violence?
Are they ready to curtail the civil liberties of opponents, including the media?
Marr tells us ‘They find Trump guilty on every count’. Really? Evidence? He certainly denies Clinton’s legitimacy to be President but that is run of the mill politics and quite possiby fully jusitified….the other three accusations are based upon the author’s own prejudices aganst Trump.
The problem with Marr’s approach is that it is entirely from the liberal’s very prejudiced and blinkered viewpoint…as said he claims the Republicans are a racist white supremacist party and it is they who created the dangerous politics of ‘identity’. He has correctly identified ‘identity politics’ as at the heart of the problem but not who created that problem. It is pretty much orthodox thinking that the Left abandoned the working class and class war when they realised that capitalism had dragged the poor out of poverty and had given them lives far, far better than anything they had known before and that they were just as likely to vote for Right-wing parties as Left. What to do? The Left decided that the battle to derail the West would continue with new soldiers….recruited from the various ethnic, religious, gender minority groups that could be exploited by apealing to their own self-interests and buying them with promises that the Left would put them first. This is the old ‘divide and rule’ game that pits Black against White and Muslim against Christian and Straight against Gay. A very dangerous game and one the BBC itself plays to the full….ironically in contradiction of its charter requirement to maintain a civil and cohesive society.
The lefty New Statesman claims that Marr is ‘a transformative political editor for the BBC and possesses an original and free-thinking take on the issues of the day.’
Nothing could be further from the truth. Marr peddles liberal/left orthodox ‘cure-all’ commentary like a doctor mechanically pushing anti-biotics…without intelligent consideration and without thought for the consequences. Nothing original or free-thinking about Marr…nor is he a challenging interviewer for those of similar mindset to him…such as just about any Labour politician or anti-Trump polemicist.
Let’s go back and consider those four criteria Marr’s new friends put forward as a way of identifying anti-democratic tyrants who are a ‘danger to democracy’. Do not all the criteria in fact define the Left’s approach to political discourse and indeed, defines the BBC’s own approach?
First…Do they reject, or have a weak commitment to, the democratic rules of the game?
The Left/BBC have no respect for democracy….witness their attempts to ignore and overturn the Brexit referendum result by any means possible, the cover up of the surge of hate and intimidation against Leave voters and instead reporting solely that it was Leave voters who were guilty of spreading racist hate across the UK, or the cover up of the violence and intimidation by Corbyn’s Brown Shirts as they try to cleanse his party of opponents by undemocratic means. You can see a recent example of the Remain hate and violence in this report from Guido of a Tory Brexit supporting MP being attacked.
Second….Do they deny the legitimacy of their opponents?
Where to begin here…the Left/BBC have a long track record in demonising anyone who has views and opinions that are different from their own…Enoch Powell was just the start and acted as a template for all other actions to counter those who opposed mass immigration. The liberal use of the slur ‘racist’ was used to shut down such people and has continued to this day….Farage, Tommy Robinson and Trump are the most prominent victims but it is a widespread tactic that is used on anyone to spread fear and self-censorship on the subject of immigration or Islam. The BBC has also used similar tactics to try and silence the people who voice concern about the climate change narrative…they are lunatics, or deniers, or people who hate children or they shouldn’t be allowed to speak because they are not scientists…..never mind that BBC journalists are not scientists and indeed the politicians who make critical and expensive decisions based upon the science are not themselves scientists.
Leave voters also felt the firm smack of the BBC’s Stalinist counter-punch as it mobilised its pro-EU propaganda machine and derided them as ignorant and uneducated little Englanders, denouncing them as racists who had ‘made Britain a nastier and more racist place’. The message being….Leave voters were too thick and bigoted to be allowed to vote. Delegitimising them? Just a bit.
The BBC that relentlessly portrays Farage and Leave voters as ‘far-right’, fascists or even Nazis and warns that Brexit is taking us back to the ‘thirties’…in other words to an era when the Nazis were in power and 6 million Jews were murdered by them. No attempt to draw genuine comparisons between what Corbyn’s supporters are doing with the rise of Hitler and the rise across the world of socilaist utopias in which millions upon millions of people were slaughtered by those socialists or reduced to poverty and misery in police states.
Third….Do they tolerate, or even encourage, the use of violence?
Well we’ve seen the prevalent, casual incitement to kill Trump from the liberal/left, including those at the BBC, attacks on Tommy Robinson are celebrated and the use of violence by the street thugs of UAF are tolerated and indeed whitewashed from the news….the EDL was always to blame for violence despite it being almost 100% the UAF who started it….for the cameras of course.
The BBC covered up Corbyn’s support for terrorism during the election and went so far as to champion his claim that he was against it after the Manchester bomb went off. The BBC was itself guilty of giving support to the IRA cause as of course Corbyn was, not to mention its cheerleading for Islamist extremists…who apparently should be seen as the new Churchills, Ghandis and Mandelas. The BBC that gives publicity to anti-Semitic terror groups and suggests that Jews in Europe are legitimate targets because of what Israel does in Gaza [all bad of course].
So the BBC clearly tolerates and encourages violence.
Fourth….Are they ready to curtail the civil liberties of opponents, including the media?
The BBC that has tried remorselessly to shut down the Murdoch media and is even now generating an anti-Social Media narrative intended to rein that in? The BBC that has demonised those whose opinions it does not like and tries to silence them and force them off all platforms for voicing their opinions and views? The BBC that consistently attacks the Right-Wing press, the Mail in particular? The attempt by the Corbynistas to silence the Mail by intimidating its advertisers? The BBC that refuses to consider complaints against it in any meaningful way instead being immediately defensive, dismissive and obstructive…thus curtailing your legitimate attempts to get any redress or force the BBC to change its ways.
The BBC is guilty of all four charges…thus we must conclude, using Marr’s own criteria, that the BBC is a danger to democracy. A conclusion you may have reached a long time ago if you have been reading this site and others like it for any length of time.
