Winnie the Poo…

Tolstoy

If Tolstoy was alive today and pondering the poisonous socio-political ulcer that is the modern United Kingdom, I can imagine him observing that “While every good thing about a nation-state resembles every other, every bad thing about it is bad in its own way…”

And if this was his view, he would — in my view — be wrong.

For, as it happens, I have no difficulty at all in diagnosing significant points of similarity between, on the one hand, the jolly bad thing that was and remains the BBC, and, on the other, the distinctly awful thing that was Winston Churchill and persists as his real and imagined legacy. So much do these bad things have in common, in fact, that it should come as no susprise to find them now fitting together, fist in glove, in what I will show to be an attempt to manipulate and divert a population in real danger of actually getting something right for once.

1911, Liverpool: the Scots Greys advance along Edge Lane. Photo courtesy of Liverpool Records Office via @YOLiverpool. Click here for a larger image.

First, let’s recall a few of those similarities. Before WW2, both Churchill and the BBC were widely despised among Britain’s working class — and for good reasons: each was profoundly committed to untrammelled elite power; and each had been energetically active in the elite fight against labour rights. Under J.W.C. Reith (“… they know that they can trust us not to be really impartial…”), the BBC had helped Baldwin’s Tory government break the General Strike of May 1926; while as early as 1911 (less than a year after Tonypandy), Home Secretary Churchill’s love of ‘sending in the military’ had seen him put 3,500 troops on the streets of Liverpool — and an armoured cruiser in the Mersey! — in order to end the General Transport Strike that ultimately lasted 72 days. (Needless to say, when on 15 August the 18th Hussars shot 15 people in Vauxhall Road, the two men who died — each hit by two bullets — had their murders legally whitewashed as ‘justifiable homicide’…)

A nice try; but this collection does not even scratch the surface of Churchill’s racism…

By contrast, what we see after WW2 is the gradual re-definition of both establishment-serving monstrosities as much-loved national treasures. Having supposedly distinguished themselves by their behaviour during those years of peril, the Grand Old Man and the Dear Old ‘Auntie’ — seen as embodiments, respectively, of ‘bulldog spirit’ and ‘propaganda-free veracity’ — were increasingly taken up as socio-political icons to be venerated by all, and to hell with the historical reality. (For a quick summary of historical reality as it pertains to the monster that was Churchill, see here.)

And, sure enough, to speak realistically against either icon today elicits precisely the kind of outraged, knee-jerk reaction that shows one to be in the presence of religious conviction, however secular. Draw attention to horrific facts from Churchill’s biography — say, his exuberant racism (Aboriginals, Blacks, Indians, Jews [inconsistently], Muslims, Native Americans, Palestinians, ‘uncivilised tribes‘: you name ’em, he despised ’em); his military and policy catastrophes (Dardanelles, anyone?); his culpability for the 1943-4 Bengal Famine and its three-million-plus deaths (half a holocaust and more; but who’s even counting?) — and, straight away, you’ll find that some servile votary will pop up with what is probably the stupidest defence of the man anyone could ever imagine…

“You’d be speaking German now if it wasn’t for Winston Churchill…”

Ju 87 ‘Stuka’ above France, 1940. Stencilled fuselage text reads: “Dieser Blitzkrieg wird von Charles Berlitz und Linguaphone gesponsert”

“But still, gosh, eh? I mean, gosh! Just imagine that there’d been no Churchill, eh? The Nazis would have won, obviously — and then Britain would have become the kind of horrible place where all the unproductive and expensive old people, and all the sick and disabled, were gradually exterminated by the government… Oh, wait…”

Similarly, dare to sound off sensibly, rationally about the BBC’s unpardonable history of elite-serving manipulation of the news agenda — pro-imperialism, pro-establishment, pro-U.S., pro-capitalism, pro-military, pro-war, and pro-more evils besides — and our servile votary will pop up once again … this time revealing that he has not the slightest idea about the BBC’s actual, pursued values or the staff it recruits to do the actual pursuing…

“I suppose you’d prefer us to lose the BBC and its Public Service Broadcasting and just to have Rupert Murdoch’s people in charge of everything…”

And, if you want one final resemblance between our two dismal anti-models, let me point out that, just as there are literally no nice truths to be unearthed about the BBC and its internal affairs — everything with ‘PR potential’ having been exploited to exhaustion years ago, whether or not it was real — so do we find that the very personality of Churchill becomes more disgusting the more we look into it.

For it was the obsessed imperialist Churchill who, in 1911, was spooked by the thought of what might happen across the Empire if darker-skinned races learned of black fighters beating white fighters in the boxing ring: his response was to institute a ban on interracial boxing matches — a restriction which lasted into the 1940s and, of course, prevented black talent boxing at championship level.

It was the worker-despising and ridiculously out-of-touch patrician Churchill — born in 1874 at Blenheim Palace, you will remember — who went on the radio in the post-WW2 era and actually addressed the people of Britain as “you, who are listening to me in your cottages…“

And it was the staggeringly inhuman and aloof Churchill who appears in the following story — which I have from my late friend, the composer, writer and broadcaster Robert Simpson (1921-97). Simpson was, of course, a born composer; but his family history boasted medical eminence, and he himself had spent time as a medical student after leaving school. So it was that, as a pacifist with medical knowledge, he served as an orderly in an ambulance team working in the London blitz…

On one occasion, he told me, he was with a crowd of people struggling to shift rubble and locate survivors and bodies after an air-raid — when a big staff car drove up and disgorged Churchill and some unidentified ‘brass hat’. According to Simpson, there had been a lull in the Nazi bombing in the days or weeks preceding; and from the two arrivals issued a stream of jaunty comments about how it was ‘Now back to business as usual, then, eh?’. These contributions, I was told, were not at all appreciated by the exhausted and traumatised rescuers — some of whom moved towards the Prime Minister and his lackey in such a menacing fashion that the two quickly jumped back in the car and were driven away… A reminder there from oral history that Churchill could be as deservedly loathed during WW2 as he had been before it.

So where are we now, and what is it — within the current propaganda maelstrom — by means of which our bloated imperialist statesman and his hierarchical perspective on race (whites at the very top, blacks at the very bottom) is connected with our bloated neoimperialist national broadcaster and its hierarchical perspective on race (Israeli blood matters more than Palestinian; and the U.S. can kill who it likes)…?

Ever noticed how the very people who say they don’t want statues torn down because “It’s erasing our history!” are always the same people who don’t actually want our schoolchildren to be taught  the horrors of our history…?

The answer is found within one of the ‘debates’ around the currently active and prominent Black Lives Matter movement, God bless it in its righteousness.

In a society less broken and maladaptive than ours, of course, a statement of the full-length truism that ‘Black Lives Matter — and, Incidentally, Should Always Have Mattered‘ would be completely unnecessary. Such however, is our nation’s historical indulgence in and of racist violence — not just physical and obvious, but also structural and insidious — that, down the years, ‘Civic Pride (Caucasian)’ has erected and preserved impressive statues of men whose only claim to remembrance is that, after making more money than they could ever spend by way of the slave trade, they then gave some of it away. Last weekend, in Bristol — that über-racist civic armpit (google ‘1963 Bristol Bus Boycott’ sometime) in which, for 40 years, the council has brushed aside campaigners’ objections to a statue commemorating a man who profited from 84,000 inter-continental kidnappings — a joyful band of BLM protestors rolled the offending simulacrum across town and dumped it in the harbour.

Good for them!

You see the problem, however. If we’re down on slave-traders — and, while Brexit Britain’s gammonati may not be, their kids and grandkids sure as hell are — we’re also down on racists, imperialists, colonialists, white supremacists and — how blasphemous and heretical is this? — their ultimate Establishment manifestation in the unlovely form of Winston Spencer Churchill…

And, that very same weekend, another happy band of BLM protestors showed their scrupulous concern for ethical truth and biographical accuracy by subjecting Parliament Square’s appropriately hideous Churchill statue to what must surely be the most sternly factual vandalism in history…

Indeed, for a time, it even seemed possible that the statue might get the same kind of dunking as the one in Bristol: after all, it stands a mere 220 yards from Old Father Thames, as my helpful map shows…

In the event, though, the statue was left where it was, and daily life in the capital gradually returned to abnormal. And, in case you’re wondering, the bit I particularly value is the way the council then sent out a black man to scrub the reality off a racist’s statue…

Now, this simply won’t do, having young, right-on people taking matters — or, at least, statuary — into their own hands and having a terrific time as they do so. Something must be done to manipulate, to distract, to incite, to create conflict, to promote ‘divide and rule’…

Enter the BBC…

What did we see in ‘the news’ the following Thursday (11 June)? We saw that the BBC-owned streaming service UKTV had withdrawn the sixth episode of the 1970s comedy series ‘Fawlty Towers’ on account of its ‘racial references’.

No, I’m not ‘going too far’ in linking the two events: you’ll think I am, but that’s only because you haven’t been doing this for as long as I have. Trust me: as someone who can go through a newspaper with different coloured highlighters to show, line by line, the tricks that are being played on the reader, what I’m spotting here is child’s play.

Think about it. There was absolutely nothing by way of even minority public opinion that had demanded the removal of the classic show’s Season 1 finale, no hint of any sort from anybody that, since ‘Black Lives Matter’ and slave-traders are not to be celebrated, it was suddenly necessary to hide from public view a 45-year-old comedy episode in which some Germans get upset and in whose original, unedited version a foolish elderly character uses racist language. The utterly simple fact is that nothing had happened on the Wednesday that made the ‘N-word’ and ‘W-word’ more offensive on the Thursday than they had been on the Tuesday: the edited version of the episode has existed for years, and if it wasn’t the one held for streaming, it could have been quietly substituted. Pulling the entire episode from the service, by contrast, was absurd, unnecessary, and provocative.

Which is precisely why it was done.

(Pause, then read on…)

Consider what this apparent piece of lunatic ‘political correctness’ achieved…

First, the Tory-led, Tory-stuffed and Tory-serving BBC once again stood before the nation ‘unmasked’ as some kind of extreme ‘liberal leftie’ bastion — its actual, demonstrable right-wing and far-right sympathies invisible behind, well, an apparent piece of lunatic ‘political correctness’.

Secondly, what had been an important debate — about the literal life-or-death issue that is the physical and structural violence endured by Britain’s BAME population — was instantly supplanted by a ‘culture war’: vital messages such as ‘Black people are killed by police in the UK too, you know!’ and ‘This Tory government is full of unapologetic racists enacting openly racist policies!’ suddenly became inaudible beneath cries of ‘Now they’re trying to take away our TV comedy!’

And, of course, thirdly, this manufactured bun fight was a debate in which everyone could find something to be obediently, time-wastingly triggered by: ‘Surely you don’t think restricting access to comedy is right!’; ‘Does anyone know what John Cleese thinks about this?’; ‘This is exactly what Jordan Peterson means by ‘cultural Marxism’!’; ‘Next thing, they’ll want a bonfire of the ‘Carry On…’ films!’; ‘I mean, this is Hitlerism, isn’t it. Or Stalinism. Or both. But it’s everything Churchill fought against on our behalf!’; etc, etc, etc, etc…

Welcome to ‘Britian’… (Though, to be honest, my eye tells me that someone photoshopped that.)

And, fourthly, Churchill. For, having goaded the nation’s gammon-faced Little-Englanders with this pseudo-threat to their classic telly, the BBC was making it absolutely certain that untold numbers of people from white supremacist ‘patriotic’ fascist right-wing and neo-Nazi far-right groups would feel even more motivated to take their central obesity into Central London today in order to attend a ‘counter-demonstration’ insisting, as it were, that ‘Ugly Monuments Matter’. Or, in other words, the decision that was, on the face of it, a ludicrously exaggerated response to a problem that need not even have existed, was in deeper reality an inspired piece of instinctive ‘divide and rule’. In a country where tens of millions of the systematically impoverished and dispossessed obsessively blame their condition on folks who differ in terms of ‘ethnicity, heritage and history’ — instead of blaming a ruling class that differs in terms of its wealth, its privilege and its depravity — our unknown BBC employee was throwing the reddest red meat to everyone who imagines that ‘people of colour’ are getting a little too uppity for a land in which ‘We’re taking back control‘…

Forget the need to fight the Malthusian cull currently being carried out by the most vicious and dishonest (and racist!) government this country has seen in centuries, and concentrate instead on watching the exploited working class tearing itself apart in a fight to defend old TV shows and even older statues…

Yes, if by the end of today we have seen a crowd of beer-soaked white racists in Whitehall performing actual ‘Hitler salutes’ in front of the Cenotaph — or an anti-anti-racism demonstrator who upholds ‘the sanctity of monuments to history’ by emptying his bladder mere inches away from a monument to history, you must remember to thank the BBC for helping to confect the sense of gammoniacal outrage that made this happen instead of something more important…

Ooh, look:

MD

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