The BBC

For Tom D

https://i.imgur.com/7bZfhry.jpg

Aye, it's a sair fecht.

i've been checking p frequently to see how long it takes for the school meals story to reach the bbc news front page. turns out 24 hours later, an apology and rebuttal from chartwells gets there first.

ffs if they can't afford license fees they shouldn't get 54 " televisions from brighthouse at 99.99% APR

It was third story (after vaccines and deaths passing WWII) from after lunchtime - led in on Rashford

(I was checking too, because fuck these fucks)

disingenuous faux insider *reportage* on politics.

― calzino, Wednesday, 6 January 2021 21:48 (one week ago)

Very well described.

kelechi didn't appear on air because she heard barnett bringing up her past anti- semitic comments and making it clear she would challenge her on them.

isn't the official story that Barnett heard about these comments moments before the show start?

Forgive the thread spam, but I wanted to note that plenty of BBC shows' 2020 seasons are nominated in the 2020 ILX TV poll:

ILX's Best Television of 2020 Poll / VOTING AND CAMPAIGNING THREAD / Voting Ends After January 29, 2021

If you like this show and you'd like to see it have a good showing in the poll (running in February) all you need to do is submit a ballot including it and your other favorites (3 minimum, 25 maximum, ranked by your favorite to least favorite) to forksclovetofu at gmail. It'll take five minutes; get to it!

please add "The BBC" to the top of my ballot

you haven't submitted one!

itt: forks forgets my irl name

oh right. well if you showed up in person in nyc more than once a decade...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000sbdx

decent first episode on series about British Fascism. It's quite noteworthy that the BBC "de-platformed" Mosley in the 30's, none of this dubious political balance bollox, yah banned m8!

Kind of like what happened to Gerry Adams under libertarian and free speech heroine Mrs. Thatcher?

Iirc Gerry was allowed to speak as long as he inhaled helium first

lol beat me to it, it sure subtracted credibility from his Republican/Irish independence politics when he sounded like a speeded up Kieth!

the BBC "de-platformed" Mosley in the 30's, none of this dubious political balance bollox

mosley and his supporters (and some ostensible opponents) were already using these very familiar lines about free speech and censorship back then- so what has changed, so that their contemporary conterparts saying the same things now are taken much more seriously (by the BBC and in general)?

I suppose there was actually a left wing back then, which accounts for some of it

but you'd think people would be better and not worse at recognising what these things mean in this context- that's if their apparent ignorance is genuine and not just part of the game for them

Makes me want to do something violent and criminal to the BBC

An episode of The Hour was about platforming a fash or not in the late ‘50s - interesting that it became a free speech issue to allow them on when black people were the minority they were griping about...

perhaps domestic fascism sat a bit awkward with the propaganda global-empire Britain would need to deploy against the growing power of Nazi Germany. But on the program it is noted that lots of proto-fash writing on Eugenics and Racial Theory started off in Britain.

Churchill's main reason for not making peace with Hitler was to preserve the empire tbf

i have always felt if it weren’t for geopolitics/balance of power stuff that no one would have given one fuck about the death camps. ofc as tooze and edgerton have shown the economics of lebensraum and the death camps are inextricable but even so feel it’s useful to separate the drivers of war from the post war moral horror. moral is not perjorative there i hope it should be needless to say, it was horrifying and people were rightly horrified. but that moral quality was absent in the drivers to war and did not make it in anyone’s minds a “morally good” war afaict.

one fuck about death camps and perhaps more pertinently to avoid that post hoc lens, the rounding up of the jews and segregation and window shattering of jewish communities.

Yep, easy to envision an alternative where the UK made peace and the outcome was a world where fascism became normaliz oh never mind

Fizzles: would you make the same case about the US civil war?

i don’t know enough about it to answer i’m afraid pinefox. real blind spot for me that i intend to rectify this year. what’s your view? (and do you agree about the WW2view?)

Churchill was ringing the numbers in red pencil of Jews getting "special treatment" from intercepted wires de-scrambled by Enigma from the camps and these were stadium sized big numbers, but it had no discernible influence on war strategy. If anything Churchill would have been more concerned in not saying a damn thing about it to prevent Hitler from having the domestic propaganda victory of portraying the British as fighting a war against them on behalf of the Jews.

right ok. it sounds like it was something they were interested in understanding it though? do you know why? i was reasonably sweeping in my view that nazi jewish policy didn’t factor into pre and early war decision making but it’s a while since i’ve read anything detailed about it, certainly not recent history.

SO MUCH STUFF TO READ

i guess to bring it back to thread, it would be interesting to know how much anti jewish policy and violence in germany and beyond featured in pre and early war news reports in the UK and US (and indeed elsewhere).

I think it's also notable that britain's first major immigration control legislation was specifically motivated by antisemitism (there was a disgusting piece in the jewish chronicle recently denying this, presumably to justify its legacy of subsequent border controls). and that britain deported so many people to their deaths (like we still do today) during the holocaust

these facts seem to me to reveal a lot about the british contribution to fascism and antisemitism, to be extremely relevant our current situation and debates we have about borders and immigration, as well having been quite thoroughly expunged from UK pop history, to the extent that using then to contextualise now (or vice versa) is seen as irrelevant at best or offensive at worst

I was alerted to how good When The Boat Comes In is by a twitter poster and all 3 seasons are on Youtube. It's very binge-worthy as they say these days.

Love it, like if Peaky Blinders was good

the politics in it are quite complex and interesting, some great writing, great performances albeit with some wayward regional accents - it would be 100% more of the latter these days from the bbc! But it is so good.

"We'll get wet rot through this house while you're philosophising about socialism"

i have always felt if it weren’t for geopolitics/balance of power stuff that no one would have given one fuck about the death camps. ofc as tooze and edgerton have shown the economics of lebensraum and the death camps are inextricable but even so feel it’s useful to separate the drivers of war from the post war moral horror. moral is not perjorative there i hope it should be needless to say, it was horrifying and people were rightly horrified. but that moral quality was absent in the drivers to war and did not make it in anyone’s minds a “morally good” war afaict.

Yeah, no doubt. This is apparent not just from govt actions but even the writings of non-jewish anti-nazi writers of the time, the moral horror only came in later. And of course it took a few decades for the holocaust to become fully something the general public had knowledge of (or wanted to face). I've mentioned this many times but the current Life In The UK test has a whole section about WWII and there's no mention of the holocaust or even anti-semitism; I assume this is because it must have been pulled from older history books.

I had definitely watched When The Boat Comes In at some point before in the last decade but had completely forgotten it for aging brain reasons, would deffo recommend chasing it up on YT - it's so good and as NV said it pisses all over Pally Blanders

When the Boat comes from an age where script and human drama did the heavy lifting, not "lol let's do Scarface in Brummagem"

nb I will never watch PB

Fizzles: I think there is a widespread convenient popular history that 'WWII was fighting evil Nazis and their Holocaust', and also 'Civil War was fighting evil slavery'.

I think we can agree that reality was more complex than that.

That might mean that these moral factors (all too easy to agree on now) were in reality less important than Realpolitik (this would be unsurprising by definition), self-interest, or than economic factors.

(It seems accurate enough to say that Britain defending *itself* from Nazi invasion and rule was a good cause, let alone any other moral cause. So that seems an instance of self-interest and morality coinciding.)

If you follow the argument that 'actually it was about self-interest, economics, etc' ('it's the economy, stupid!'), then I am broadly prepared to assume that this is quite likely to be correct.

But:

1: A complex and accurate view can probably afford to be overdetermined, ie: including multiple factors and not having to choose entirely between one and another. (Many *were* appalled by Nazism during the 1930s.)

2: What's odder is that the same people don't seem to apply the same principles to the two wars. I have recently seen socialists argue *against* the idea that the Civil War was a matter of economics and Realpolitik. It seems as though, in *that* particular case, the conservative arguments are economistic and the progressives are the ones who say 'No, it was a moral war against slavery!'.

I find this discrepancy slightly confusing.

You (Fizzles, or perhaps anyone) can see why I raised the comparison.

Without commenting on the political realities, you have to account for the fact that post-Civil War a huge economic and cultural force sprung up whose only mission was to cast the South as having been totally in the right. Suggesting the war wasn't about slavery but TAXES (the greatest evil yer average joe can think of) obviously a great strategy for that.

Fans of the Third Reich less succesful with this line of argument because of course they would add the prefix Jewish to "it was about money".

Britain defending *itself* from Nazi aggression would be some value of a good or at least understandable cause. Britain refusing to make peace with Nazi Germany because Churchill did not want to lose any part of the Empire (and not out of abstract concerns for human rights, protecting the Jewish victims of Nazism or belief in the inviolable sovereignty of none British states) seems like a different measure of "good" to me even tho sure the actual causes of war were probably more tangled.

Don't try telling Ian Austin that Channel Islands Jews got handed over to the Nazis by British police to be deported straight to Auschwitz. Even the great Michael Rosen was struggling to explain that fact to the deluded moron.

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2021/mar/17/bbc-to-move-many-top-news-jobs-to-leeds-sources-say

as usual, spoilers for tomorrow's internal meeting in the guardian the day before.

as it says in the article, ch4 did this recently too, and half of them took redundancy rather than move.

You know what it's like these days, you're not allowed to joke about anything.

https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/bbc-breakfast-union-jack-flag-b925080.html

He stares at one while he's wanking into the other. https://t.co/PM2ojbp5se

— Sirius Münleit (@LittlShyningMan) March 19, 2021

Just little baby footsteps toward fascism, or liberty and freedom as it's soon to be known

Why stop at baby steps?

Of course if people are not proud to be British, or of our flag or Queen, they don’t have to live in the U.K. Perhaps they should move to another country they prefer?

— Lia Nici (@lia_nici) March 18, 2021

MP for Grimsby.

The Union Flag is a symbol of liberty and freedom? Not even Robert Jenrick believes that.

I saw someone complaining yesterday about the continuing Barnettification of Woman's Hour and was saying she doesn't want to hear mostly interviews with men on the topic of male violence.