Isn’t life strange ? One day you’re trying to erase Berlin, another you’re trying to save its people.
North by Northwest on this Dan Bell report. I can see what Mr Bell is trying to do – the human side and all that. But a little context would be in order – maybe a little about why Stalin was trying to “expel the Western powers from the city” – aka “starving its inhabitants”. Maybe the words “Communist” or “Union of Soviet Socialist Republics” might put in an appearance here and there.
(Surprisingly for the PC BBC, Mr Bell’s cheery account of Hamburg brothels, black markets and the ‘hedonistic post-war atmosphere‘ misses out the important contributing fact that, while historians differ over the degree of starvation and the number of deaths incurred, it is accepted that post-war Germany was extremely short of food and fuel – a condition exacerbated by the harsh winter of 1946-47.)
NNW asks – and rightly so – what effect this lack of context, repeated again and again, does to a British people with a dumbed-down history curriculum, and overseas readers for whom the BBC is their window on British culture :
“… think how this is being read in Islamabad and Cairo, in Ankara and Nigeria, in the Caribbean and in mill-workers’ cottages in Leeds and Burnley where 1066 is never mentioned, and in Halifax, West Yorkshire and in curry houses in downtown Halifax Nova Scotia. What impression will this give to people who don’t grow up with the perspective and (limited) historical knowledge that The Great Escape and Tora Tora Tora and Kelly’s Heroes and Schindler’s List provide ?”