Waking up this morning and putting on the TV to see the news, instead I saw on BBC Breakfast a 30 minute piece on the role of a teenage girl in 1932 in helping her father do the maths to establish that the Spitfire needed eight .303 guns to deliver a sufficient weight of shot.
That sentence contains the total import of the 30 minute film. In spreading it out over half an hour, the BBC managed to repeat slight variations on that sentence over forty times, padded out with numerous shots of spitfires, Battle of Britain reminiscences and the exhibition of the kitchen table where the maths was done.
I am very glad the Battle of Britain was won. I admire the heroism of those who fought. My mother never forgot her only brother, an RAF navigator who was shot down and died aged nineteen. I am not mindless of the stakes or the sacrifice. But I am old, and the war was over more than a decade before I was born. It is as chronologically distant from a child born today as Victoria becoming Empress of India was from me. I have repeatedly been tempted to write about the WW2 obsession in the media and the English political psyche, but have refrained from not wishing to offend those with whose emotional ties I sympathise. But this is becoming an unhealthy obsession with a “glorious past”.
The BBC’s piece today actually finished with a Churchill speech, with spitfires flying and with Elgar. It was like a parody. The recent focus on Churchill’s vicious racism might as well not have happened. It really is going too far, and it links in to a current day militarism which was initially cultivated by New Labour and Blair’s obsession with neo-imperialist wars abroad.
You have a war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. We have had “anniversary” events that mark the 70th, 75th and now 80th anniversary with the result we have a full 16 years during which not a day passes that is not a “major anniversary” of an event in WW2, on which peg the BBC can hang more “Britain’s Greatness” nostalgia. Very plainly this all meshes with Brexit, with the nostalgia for Britain’s world-bestriding role exuded continually by Johnson and Gove, and with the new aggression of Unionism. It gets less and less subtle – Stalin’s propagandists might have blenched at today’s BBC state propaganda piece. The girl who did the maths deserved her recognition. But not like this.
In the real world, the UK has just resumed arms sales to Saudi Arabia to massacre the children of Yemen and support the jihadist terrorist fanatics of Idlib.
I am going to keep this page permanently open for comments, and hopefully bookmarked on the right hand side, so you can record future examples of BBC WW2 Porn as they occur, or indeed other examples of gratuitous official militarism.
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You can do no better than to read Clive Ponting’s excellent book, “1940 – Myth and reality”.
At the end of WW2, the then British government was loath to demobilize the 1 million men in the British armed forces, no doubt thinking this was very handy, for future imperial adventures.
My dad’s regiment was actually being lined up to be sent to Indo-China (Vietnam), when there was a change of policy, and they were all sent back to Blighty. I seem to recall reading, years ago, that a lot of pressure had to be applied to the government of the day.
In order to demobilize troops.
The English founder of the erstwhile known as the Friends of the Western Order, currently Triratna Community, Dennis Linwood (Sangharakshita) wrote in his memoirs than the end of the war with Japan caught him in India, in a RAF comms company. They didn’t waste any time in putting his unit at work in intercepting Burmese nationalist guerrilla communications. He says the rank and file refused on the grounds that that wasn’t the war they’d gone there to fight.
My father’s unit was about to be transported to Indo-China (Vietnam) when policy changed and they were all recalled back to the United Kingdom. Years ago, I recall reading that a great deal of pressure had to be given to the government at the time.
To allow troops to be demobilized.
feels like watching my favorite movies on https://dopescholar.com/ in a good way.
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“New leaked documents show Reuters’ and the BBC’s involvement in covert UK FCO programs to effect ‘attitudinal change’…”
Any page linking to or referring to this story on Twitter, even with a broken link, is now deleted by Twitter or the account itself is permanently disabled and inaccessible. Both Max Blumenthal’s Twitter page and the Grayzone page are at this moment broken or inaccessible. Disturbing that Twitter is now completely in service to the US/UK war machine. The story is, as Max Blumenthal says, ‘incendiary’.
From the link:
“The UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) have sponsored Reuters and the BBC to conduct a series of covert programs aimed at promoting regime change inside Russia and undermining its government across Eastern Europe and Central Asia, according to a series of leaked documents.
The leaked materials show the Thomson Reuters Foundation and BBC Media Action participating in a covert information warfare campaign aimed at countering Russia. Working through a shadowy department within the UK FCO known as the Counter Disinformation & Media Development (CDMD), the media organizations operated alongside a collection of intelligence contractors in a secret entity known simply as “the Consortium.”
Through training programs of Russian journalists overseen by Reuters, the British Foreign Office sought to produce an “attitudinal change in the participants,” promoting a “positive impact” on their “perception of the UK.”
“These revelations show that when MPs were railing about Russia, British agents were using the BBC and Reuters to deploy precisely the same tactics that politicians and media commentators were accusing Russia of using,” Chris Williamson, a former UK Labour MP who attempted to apply public scrutiny to the CDMD’s covert activities and was stonewalled on national security grounds, told The Grayzone.”
https://thegrayzone.com/2021/02/20/reuters-bbc-uk-foreign-office-russian-media/
DW NEWS 10/03
Japan angered by Russia’s plans for disputed Kurils
While the world focuses on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, tensions between Moscow and Tokyo are rising. Disagreement over who owns the Kuril Islands just off the coast of Hokkaido is one of the world’s longest-running territorial disputes and has parallels with the Ukraine crisis.
https://www.dw.com/en/japan-angered-by-russias-plans-for-disputed-kurils/av-61084698
This is getting to look like a drunken pub brawl just waiting for somebody to shout ‘leave it, he’s not worth it’
FYI there’s an excellent History Cafe feature on ‘Who really won the Battle of Britain?’ at https://www.historycafe.org/episodes/who-really-won-the-battle-of-britain
It suggests that when he delivered it, Churchill knew that we would never have to “Fight them on the beaches”
It’s not even controversial that Hitler’s wish was for a lasting peace with Britain. He saw Germany as a land power, Britain as a sea power; there was no reason why the interests of the two countries would conflict.
When Churchill refused to negotiate a peace settlement after the fall of France (despite the very generous terms on offer – Hitler would withdraw completely from western Europe – he didn’t even want Alsace, which was largely German-speaking at the time), Hitler formulated an invasion plan as the only way to end the war. This was completely impractical, however, because Germany’s military had been built up on the assumption that it would fight only land battles.
Of course Hitler’s regime was a very nasty one, but there were and are a lot of nasty regimes in the world (Stalin was a mass murderer too). Starting a war with every regime that is nasty is a stupid policy. Britain had no need to give “guarantees” to Poland that dragged it into an unnecessary war, and which it was unable to make good on anyway.
The unnecessary war bankrupted Britain (one of the richest countries in the world in 1939), resulted in the deaths of nearly half a million citizens (including colonies) and almost as many seriously wounded, caused France, Belgium, Holland etc to be occupied by German forces for an additional 4 years …
Exactly. I have never understood the obsession with war these days.