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.