This is the first of a number of sketches and pieces I’m planning to put up about some of the presenters of the children’s TV programmes I used to watch in the 70s. Cant was the lead presenter on Play Away, a sister programme of the long-running children’s TV favourite, Play School, on which Cant had also appeared, but aimed at slightly older children. Play Away was also more of an ensemble programme with a whole team accompanying Cant. There was somebody Cohen at the piano, and a number of other co-presenters, some of whom I’ve now forgotten. I think one of them was Toni Arthur, who I’ve since learned was a folk musician and the author of a book on seasonal customs for children, the All The Year Round Book. One of the presenters I do remember was Jeremy Irons, who has gone on to become a Hollywood star. I was really surprised in the ’90s when I read that he was playing the lead characters in David Cronenberg’s psychological horror film Dead Ringers. This was about a pair of twin gynaecologists, one of whom goes insane and believes that the women he’s treating are all mutants. The film includes a credit to H.R. Giger, the Swiss artist who designed the Alien in those movies, for designing ‘radical surgical instruments’. It’s as far from Play Away as you can get and is a reminder that the cast of such programmes are actors, who also take adult roles. Somebody must have seen Irons in Play Away and recognised his potential.
Cant was also the narrator for three interlinked children’s series, Chigley, Trumpton and Camberwick Green each set in one of these small fictional towns. These were animated series using small figurines and were similar in style, using the same type of figures and music. Trumpton started off with Cant announcing, ‘Here is the clock, the Trumpton clock. Telling the time, steadily, sensibly, never too quickly, never too slowly, telling the time for Trumpton.’ The various characters also had their own theme songs. One of the characters, whose figure I’ve drawn being looked at by Cant, was Windy Miller. Miller appropriately enough lived in a windmill. His song began, ‘Windy Miller, Windy Miller, sharper than a thorn’. The theme song for the local fire brigade began with a rollcall of their names, ‘Pugh, Pugh, Barney McGrew, Cuthbert, Dibble, Grubb.’ The railway also had its own song with the words, ‘Time flies by when you’re the driver of a train as you ride on the footplate there and back again.’ These shows have developed a cult following. In the 1980s the band Half Man Half Biscuit released a record Trumpton Riots, about what would happen if Trumpton had a riot. According to rumour, it parodied the train song with the words ‘Time flies by when you’re the driver of a train, as you ride on the footplate with a cargo of cocaine’. You can find videos of ‘Trumpton Riots’ on YouTube, including the lyrics. These words don’t seem to appear, but perhaps they’re on another song with a similar theme. Half Man Half Biscuit, as their name suggests, had a peculiar sense of humour. One of their other songs was ‘All I Want For Christmas Is A Dukla Prague Away Kit’. This was just before Communism fell, when there were far fewer people from eastern Europe in Britain, who might genuinely want such a football kit for their collection.
The series’ visual style has also influenced pop video producers. One of the series began, if I recall correctly, with one of the characters spiralling up out of an opened music box. Something similar occurs in the Ting Tings’ video for ‘That’s Not My Name’, where the two leads seem to spiral up into view from something off camera below them. The producers of another pop video for a song with the delightful name ‘Burn The Witch’, deliberately based its style on the three children’s series. He also appeared in a pop video for Orbital’s The Altogether in a sequence which was similar to Play School, the children’s TV programme that preceded Play Away and in which Cant also appeared as a presenter. He also appeared in a number of other programmes and theatrical productions. Wikipedia notes that Cant won a poll as the best-loved voice from children’s TV in 2007, and three years later in 2010 he won a special award at the BAFTAs for his work in children’s television. Accepting it, Cant said: “When I was a child I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child. When I became a man I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child, and they paid me for it.”
I know there’s a danger of this blog just repeating stuff from the right, and that it’s not reciprocated on their part. But I do feel that I should promote some of their material when it’s correct. And in this case, I think Candace Owen’s take on Black Lives Matter, or at least it’s American incarnation, is entirely correct. Owen’s is a Black Conservative activist, who has said some monumentally stupid stuff in the past. A few years ago, came over here to launch Turning Point UK with another, White American conservative active, Ben Shapiro. Turning Point UK is the British subsidiary of the American right-wing activist group, Turning Point. It’s supposed to be converting British yoof to conservatism, but as far as anyone can make out, it’s impact over here is marginal. It looks like a scheme to get the right-wing public over the Pond to give donations to Turning Point in the mistaken belief that they’re spreading the right-wing gospel of private enterprise and saving us from Communism and the welfare state.
As the press conference for the launch of Turning Point UK, Owens and Shapiro were keen to defend nationalism. Someone therefore naturally raised the question of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. No, said Owens, Hitler wasn’t a nationalist because he wanted everyone to be German. But his policies would have been perfectly all right if they’d been confined to Germany.
This is monumentally stupid.
Hitler and his thugs were definitely nationalists. They said it openly, and it was in the name of their damnable party: the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. And he didn’t want everyone to be German. Rather, he wanted the Germans to be dominant, ruling people in Europe, and especially over the remaining Slav populations after eastern Europe had been conquered and peoples like the Czechs had received the same treatment as the Jews. And no, the suspension of democracy, imposition of a one-party state, persecution and annihilation of the Jews, Gypsies and other peoples deemed ‘subhuman’ and the eugenic murder of the disabled, the incarceration of neurotics, the long-term unemployed and homosexuals and all the other horrors of the Third Reich would not have been acceptable if he’d confined it just to Germany.
But I think she had done something positive this time in turning her jaundiced eye on Black Lives Matter. They were responsible for many of the protests-cum-riots that broke out in America and elsewhere around the world following the death of George Floyd. Although that was the immediate cause, behind it was the issue of the continuing poverty, unemployment, low academic performance, crime and despair of Black America. They demanded for immediate, radical action against the systemic racism they saw as the cause. They received millions in donations from ordinary people and corporations. But that money was swallowed up by the leadership, as they gave themselves millions to purchase luxury housing and pay their relatives hundreds of thousands for services provided. And the Black people on whose behalf they claimed to be campaigning didn’t see a penny. Owens and her film crew went out to find the truth of what was going on. The result is the documentary, The Greatest Lie Ever Sold, premiering on the Daily Wire, a conservative channel.
The trailer shows Owens talking about how she got interested in it and says that BLM got $80 million in donations. I thought the number was higher – $90 million or over. It shows the incriminating tax invoice, that shows what the money was spent. This doesn’t mention they multimillion dollar houses but does mention transgender events or people and various types of sex worker, which I hadn’t heard about before. It shows her talking to Black people in some of the areas devastated by the rioting, who state they never saw any of the money and things are worse than before. Here’s the video
Black Lives Matter have tried to spin the anger and investigations as attempts to discredit them by the right, big corporations and the White system. In fact, I understand it started when the movement’s employees started getting hit with demands that they weren’t to disclose information about the charity’s affairs to lawyers and the people in the impoverished communities, who expected to be receiving money from them, wondered why they weren’t. And many Blacks, not just Conservatives, despise them not just for their corruption, but how they exploited real Black death and poverty simply to enrich themselves.
The organisation is Marxist, with extreme doctrines demanding the abolition of the traditional western nuclear family and seems to be following Critical Race Theory in regarding all Blacks as oppressed, and all Whites as oppressors – a divisive, nonsensical and racially vindictive doctrine. I very much believe that thanks to them and other organisations pushing the woke nonsense, race relations have got worse. I know this comes from the conservative right, but I think they were absolutely correct in exposing the organisation and its corruption.
Angus Fraser, The Gypsies (Oxford: Blackwell 1992).
I’ve been meaning to blog about this book, off and on, for a little while now. This is largely in response to the right-wing, Tory and Blairite Labour racists, who screamed blue murder at any chance they could get to smear Jeremy Corbyn as an anti-Semite, but who had absolutely no qualms about whipping up hatred against Roma, Sinti and other Travellers for their own political benefit. Anti-Gypsy hatred has become topical once again thanks to Jimmy Carr’s wretched joke about their genocide in the Nazi Holocaust somehow being a ‘positive’. Mike’s written extensively about that tasteless joke, as have very many others. He’s pointed out that it came just when Boris Johnson was passing legislation very similar to that of the Nazis, which would allow the cops to close down Gypsy encampments, move them on and impound their vehicles simply for suspecting they might be about to do something illegal. And when you get to eastern Europe, the prejudice against them is even more extreme and really does approach the genocidal hatred of the Nazis. A decade or so ago doctors in Czechoslovakia were caught operating a programme of involuntary sterilisation of Gypsy women very much like the Nazis’ eugenics programme against those of mixed race and the biologically unfit. Czech politicians were also very keen to have the Gypsies emigrate to Canada after a documentary was shown on television about a Czech Gypsy family finding a welcome in the land of the maple leaf and beaver. This was, like anti-Semitic and Nazi plans to force the Jews to move to Palestine, simply a way of forcing the Gypsies out of Czechoslovakia. One female Czech MP made this very clear when she screamed ‘They will go to Canada or the gas chambers!’ Such naked, genocidal bigotry means that Carr’s joke really, really isn’t funny. Respect, then, to the Auschwitz museum for taking the moment to offer him some of its courses on the murder of 27,000 Gypsies so that he could learn about the horrific reality.
The book’s blurb runs
‘Since their unexplained appearance in Europe over nine centuries ago, the Gypsies have refused to fall in with conventional settled life. They remain a people whose culture and customs are beset with misunderstandings, and who cling to their distinct identity in the teeth of persistent rejection and pressure to conform. The book describes their history.
The book opens with an investigation of Gypsy origins in India. The author then traces the Gypsy migration from the early Middle Ages to the present, through the Middle East, Europe and the world. Through their known history they have been recognised for their music, metal working, fortune telling, healing and horse-dealing, but from the outset they outraged the prejudices of the populations they encountered; they were enslaved, harassed, outlawed and hunted. Yet against all the odds the Gypsies have survived, preserving a distinctive heritage and culture that transcends national boundaries. How they did so is the compelling them of this book.
This new paperback edition has been revised to take account of recent research and of the political changes in Eastern Europe, which have sadly been followed by a resurgence of Gypsy persecution in a number of countries.’
The book has chapters on their origins, then subsequently traces their migration through Persia and Armenia, Greece and the Byzantine Empire, Serbia, Bulgaria, Wallachia and Moldavia, the provinces that are now part of modern Romania; Germany, Austria and Switzerland, France, Spain and Portugal, the Low Countries, Italy, Hungary and Transylvania, now also part of Romania, Scotland and England and Scandinavia. It also discusses images and stereotypes, the pressures placed on them to assimilate, and persecution, including expulsion, transportation and extermination, both in Europe and the Ottoman Empire, as well as their survival. It also discusses changes in Gypsy society and culture, including their music, and their genocide under the Nazis – ‘The Forgotten Holocaust’. The final section discusses modern Gypsy society and culture.
It should be clear from this that the Gypsy Holocaust is, like that of the Jews, absolutely no joke. Carr has been defended by various members of the media set, including Victoria Coren. They’ve defended him as being good and kind. I don’t doubt he is. The problem is that there are some subjects that are too terrible to be the subject of jokes, as well as moral consistency. Carr clearly balked at telling jokes about the Jewish Holocaust, as he should. But if the Jewish Holocaust is unfit as a subject of humour, so should the Nazi murder of other racial groups, especially those still experiencing persecution.
The Lotus Eaters have run to Carrs defence, posting up a video of him as a ‘free speech berserker’. Now I don’t believe that Carr should be prosecuted for his joke. It was outrageous, but, in my opinion, not hateful. He wasn’t intending to stir up racial hatred, although I don’t doubt that some others, who would tell the joke would have definite malign intentions. In my view it’s really a case of a moral problem discussed by John Stuart Mill in his classic book On Liberty: just because something’s legal doesn’t mean that it’s moral. He put it in the following terms: just because there’s no law against chasing a Jew up an alley waving a piece of pork doesn’t mean that you should do it. I don’t believe that Carr has broken any law or should be prosecuted. He just shouldn’t have told the joke. The best thing now is for him to apologise and Netflix to cut the joke. Then perhaps we should move on to combatting some real Nazis.
Anton Petrov is a science vlogger on YouTube. Always greetings his viewers with ‘Hello, wonderful person’, he mostly talks about recent advances in space exploration and astronomy. But occasionally he branches out into the other sciences. In this fascinating video, he talks about a recent development in the creation of artificial cells. These are tiny objects that mimic some of the functions of real cells. This new advance is the creation of a process that mimics the energy transfer within real, biological cells. He talks about how artificial cells are formed. They’re microscopically small with a tiny hole. This may allow them to be used as a method for delivering medicines more efficiently into the body. It may also allow them to be used a artificial white blood cells, in which they capture bacteria and viruses through the holes and keep them there.
Of course, we’re a very long way away from that level of technology, but it all reminds me of the artificial humans and animals – replicants – in Ridley Scott’s SF classic Blade Runner, based on Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? It’s also similar to the original robots in Karel Capek’s seminal SF play, R.U.R., or Rossum’s Universal Robots. This was the play which introduced the word robot to the English language. It’s Czech for ‘hard work’ or ‘drudgery’. It was also one of the first to portray a robotic revolt. The robots in the play are more like Scott’s replicants than modern robots. They are formed from an artificial substance which mimics biology, so that part of the process in the manufacture of the robots are mills spinning miles of artificial nerves.
A recent item on robots on one of the Beeb’s programmes – it may have been The One Show said that it might be a thousand years before we can create something like a replicant. But watching this video, I do wonder.
First off, I’m sorry I haven’t posted anything for a few days. I’ve been busy with other things down here, but normal service will be resumed as soon as possible. Yesterday, our Tory government announced that they were going to put a new memorial up commemorating the Holocaust. And Sargon of Gasbag, the man who broke UKIP, and his mate Callum over at the Lotuseaters Youtube channel have asked the obvious question: why? The proposed memorial has received widespread approval, especially from the Board of Deputies of British Jews, who were highly delighted. They claimed it was needed because Holocaust denial was growing in the UK and we needed to be reminded of our part in the Shoah, the great crime against the Jews, and also against the disabled, gays and the Roma. But as the commenters on the Lotuseaters video have pointed out, they said nothing about the Slav peoples of eastern Europe, who were also massacred. This is true. Hitler hated the Slavs, and in his Tabletalk he makes it clear he was looking forward to the extermination of the Czech. After the Jews, the Poles formed the largest number of the victims of Nazi massacre and extermination, particular Polish Roman Catholic clergy. Slavs were considered subhuman under the Nuremberg race laws. Their lands were targeted for German colonisation, and those Poles, Russians and Ukrainians lucky enough to survive were to serve as an uneducated peasant class producing agricultural goods for their German masters.
The Lotuseaters are men of the right, and the extreme right at that. I find their videos difficult to watch because of the idiot sneering at the Labour party, idiot ‘woke’ lefties and similar comments that also come out of the mouth of the mad right-winger, Alex Belfield. Particularly annoying in this video was all their jokes about Jeremy Corbyn and anti-Semitism, and how he especially wouldn’t like the memorial and agrees with Holocaust denial. It’s just right-wing libel. Corbyn, like George Galloway, has never denied the Holocaust and has a proud record of standing up for the Jews in this country, as he has done for Blacks and other ethnic minorities. His crime wasn’t anti-Semitism, but standing up for the Palestinians. The Israeli state and the ultra-Zionists, like the Board of Deputies, can’t justify it, so they smear those criticising their ethnic cleansing of Israel’s indigenous population as anti-Semites. This include proud, self-respecting Jews, who are tarnished and demonised as ‘self-hating’.
But the Lotuseaters are right to ask why we need such a memorial. They say we entered the War to stop the persecution of the Jews, when the Nazis and USSR had signed a non-aggression pact to divide Poland between. Callum even claimed that when the Soviets took over their part of Poland, they handed over its Jewish inhabitants to the Nazis to massacre. Well, I haven’t heard that before and neither did Sargon, but it doesn’t surprise me. Stalin was a vicious anti-Semite, and during the Weimar period western Communists were ordered to collaborate with Nazis despite the Nazis hatred of Marxist socialism and their persecution of the KPD under the Third Reich. It’s wrong to say we entered the War to save the Jews. We didn’t. We declared war on Nazi Germany because of our defensive alliance with France and Poland. Although there was little outright anti-Semitic persecution in Britain, low-level anti-Jewish sentiment was widespread and acceptable. There was considerable sympathy for Nazism amongst the British aristocracy, with various high-ranking individuals joining pro-Nazi organisations like the Anglo-German Fellowship. The father of Geordie Grieg, editor of the Heil, was a member of one such group. On the other hand, the Fascist parties and groups remained generally small. Britain passed laws banning the stirring up of racial hatred, and once war was declared Oswald Mosley, the head of the BUF, was sent to the Tower of London and his stormtroopers interned on the Isle of Man along with other enemy aliens. And our troops did liberate some of the concentration and death camps, along with the Russians and our other allies, and we did save the survivors from starvation, or as many as we could. There were Nazi sympathisers who served as auxiliaries in the Waffen SS, the British division of which served as the basis for neo-Nazi organisation the League of St. George. But as far as I know, there was absolutely no British state involvement with the Holocaust and I haven’t heard of any British commercial involvement with it, either. I’m therefore puzzled when the Board says it was needed to remind us of our role in it.
As for anti-Semitism in Britain, only 7 per cent of Brits have negative view about Jews. The majority have positive views of them, and a smaller number consider them no better or worse than anyone else. The Lotuseaters state that the Holocaust is taught as part of the British history curriculum. There are Holocaust deniers knocking around, but there are very few of them, at least among the vast majority of severely normal Brits, who despise them. I wondered if behind the cloaked language which didn’t name anybody in particular, the real fear was about the possible growth in anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial amongst Muslims. It’s rife in the Middle East because of the Israeli colonisation and ethnic cleansing of Palestine, and the humiliation inflicted on the Arab nations during the Six Day War. I have the impression that the majority of British Muslims despise Israel for its maltreatment of the Palestinians. However, Tony Greenstein has pointed out that the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism offer no supporting statistics or information on their website for their statement that the majority of anti-Semites are Muslim.
David Cameron apparently approved the monument five years ago in 2016, but Boris has only just given it the go-ahead. My impression is that this has precious little about commemorating the Holocaust for itself, and everything to do with generating support for Israel. Peter Oborne in his documentary for Channel 4’s dispatches 11 years ago described how the Israel lobby had effectively captured Britain’s political parties, and especially the Tories, through parliamentary friendship groups, sponsored trips to Israel and donations from pro-Israel Jewish businessmen. Any British paper or broadcaster, including the Beeb, that dared to cover atrocities by the Israelis and their allies, like the Lebanese Christian Phalange, were attacked and smeared by the Board as anti-Semites. Hence the attacks on the Labour party and Jeremy Corbyn, and the capture of the party of Keir Starmer, who has declared himself to be ‘100 per cent Zionist’. Hence also the foundation of front organisations claiming to represent Jews and combat anti-Semitism, but which are really concerned with persecuting and smearing critics of Israel, like the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism and the Jewish Labour Movement, previously Paole Zion, Workers of Zion. These two organisations were founded to combat the rise in anti-Israel sentiment following Israel’s bombardment of Gaza. My guess is that Israel and it’s satellite organisations and mouthpieces in the UK have been rattled by British support for the Palestinians following the riots around the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian districts in east Jerusalem ready for Israeli settlement. This all looks to me very much like the Israel state exploiting the Holocaust to garner support on the one hand, and the Tories using it to signal their compliance with Israel and its genocidal attitude to the Arabs on the other.
The Holocaust was a monstrous crime against humanity and it is entirely right that British schoolchildren are taught about it. But this new memorial looks like it has nothing to do with remembering the victims of the Shoah, but is simply a PR exercise to shame Brits into supporting Israel and its ethnic cleansingof the Palestinians.
‘Mr H Reviews’ is a YouTube channel specialising in news and opinions on genre films – SF, Fantasy and Horror. In the video below he comments on a piece in the Hollywood Reporter about the production of a new SF movie, which will for the first time star a genuine AI. The movie is simply titled b. Financed by Bondit Capital, which also funded the film Loving Vincent, with the Belgium-based Happy Moon Productions and New York’s Top Ten Media, the film is based on a story by the special effects director Eric Pham with Tarek Zohdy and Sam Khoze. It is about a scientist, who becomes unhappy with a programme to perfect human DNA and helps the AI woman he has created to escape.Â
The robot star, Erica, was created by the Japanese scientists/ engineers Hiroshi Ishigura and Hohei Ogawa for another film. The two, according to the Reporter, taught her to act. That film, which was to be directed by Tony Kaye, who made American History X, fell through. Some scenes for the present movie were already shot in Japan in 2019, and the rest will be shot in Europe next year, 2021.
The decision to make a movie starring a robot looks like an attempt to get round the problems of filming caused by the Coronavirus. However, it also raises a number of other issues. One of these, which evidently puzzle the eponymous Mr H, is how a robot can possibly act. Are they going to use takes and give it direction, as they would a human, or will it instead simply be done perfectly first time, thanks to someone on a keyboard somewhere programming it? He is quite enthusiastic about the project with some reservations. He supports the idea of a real robot playing a robot, but like most of us rejects the idea that robots should replace human actors. He also agrees with the project being written by a special effects supervisor, because such a director would obviously be aware of how such a project should be shot.
But it also ties in with an earlier video he has made about the possible replacement of humans by their Virtual simulacra. According to another rumour going round, Mark Hamill has signed away his image to Lucas Film, so that Luke Skywalker can be digitally recreated using CGI on future Star Wars films. Mr H ponders if this is the future of film now, and that humans are now going to be replaced by their computer generated doubles.
In some ways, this is just the culmination of processes that have been going on in SF films for some time. Animatronics – robot puppets – have been used in Science Fiction films since the 1990s, though admittedly the technology has been incorporated into costumes worn by actors. But not all the time. Several of the creatures in the American/Australian SF series Farscape were such animatronic robots, such as the character Rygel. Some of the robots features in a number of SF movies were entirely mechanical. The ABC Warrior which appears in the 1990s Judge Dredd film with Sylvester Stallone was deliberately entirely mechanical. The producers wished to show that it definitely wasn’t a man in a suit. C-3PO very definitely was played by a man in a metal costume, Anthony Daniels, but I noticed in the first of the prequels, The Phantom Menace, that a real robot version of the character appears in several scenes. Again, this is probably to add realism to the character. I also think that in the original movie, Episode 4: A New Hope, there were two versions of R2D2 used. One was the metal suit operated by Kenny Baker, and I think the other was entirely mechanical, operated by radio. Dr. Who during Peter Davison’s era as the Doctor also briefly had a robot companion. This was Kameleon, a shape-changing android, who made his first appearance in The King’s Demons. He was another radio-operated robot, though voiced by a human actor. However the character was never used, and his next appearance was when he died in the story Planet of Fire.
And then going further back, there’s Alejandro Jodorowsky’s mad plan to create a robotic Salvador Dali for his aborted 1970s version of Dune. Dali was hired as one of the concept artists, along with H.R. Giger and the legendary Chris Foss. Jodorowsky also wanted him to play the Galactic Emperor. Dali agreed, in return for a payment of $1 million. But he stipulated that he was only going to act for half an hour. So in order to make sure they got enough footage of the great Surrealist and egomaniac, Jodorowsky was going to build a robot double. The film would also have starred Orson Welles as Baron Vladimir Harkonnen and Mick Jagger as Feyd Rautha, as well as Jodorowsky’s own son, Brontes, as Paul Atreides. The film was never made, as the producers pulled the plug at the last minute wondering what was happening to it. I think part of the problem may have been that it was going well over budget. Jodorowsky has said that all the effort that went into it wasn’t wasted, however, as he and the artist Jean ‘Moebius’ Giraud used the ideas developed for the film for their comic series, The Incal. I think that Jodorowsky’s version of Dune would have been awesome, but would have been far different to the book on which it was based.
I also like the idea of robots performing as robots in an SF movie. A few years ago an alternative theatre company specialising in exploring issues of technology and robotics staged a performance in Prague of the classic Karel Capek play, Rossum’s Universal Robots, using toy robots. I can see the Italian Futurists, rabid Italian avant-garde artists who praised youth, speed, violence and the new machine world around the time of the First World War, being wildly enthusiastic about this. Especially as, in the words of their leader and founder, Tommasso Marinetti, they looked ‘for the union of man and machine’. But I really don’t want to see robots nor CGI recreations replace human actors.
Many films have been put on hold because of the Coronavirus, and it looks like the movie industry is trying to explore all its options for getting back into production. However, the other roles for this movie haven’t been filled and so I do wonder if it will actually be made.
It could be one worth watching, as much for the issues it raises as its story and acting.
Here we go again. Things must be desperate for the Tories, as they’ve got Thatcher’s bully-boy, Norman Tebbitt, to write a piece declaring that the Nazis were far left and socialists. Because they had the word in their name, the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. It’s an old like that’s been going around for years. It surfaced about the beginning of this decade with the publication of Joshua Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism. Now Communism as genuine far left socialism is guilty of horrendous atrocities by Stalin and other monsters, but the Nazis were never socialists. They had their origins in radical right-wing patriotic movements around the time of the First World War, which believed that the Second Reich of the Wilhelmine emperors had failed to capture the support of German workers, and thus left them exposed to the allure of democracy and socialism.
As Social Darwinists, the Nazis believed that the aristocracy and the leaders of big business were biologically superior to the rest of humanity. Hitler made it clear to the genuinely anti-capitalist elements in the Nazi party, led by Otto and Gregor Strasser, that he didn’t intend to nationalise anything. Businesses and enterprises would only be taken into state ownership if they were failing. He courted the support of German industrialists by giving a speech in which he declared that private enterprise could only survive through the personal autocracy which the Nazis were going to introduce. Hitler had introduced the word ‘socialist’ into the party’s name against the wishes of its founder, Anton Drexler. He did so with the deliberate intent of luring voters away from the real socialist parties – the SPD, USPD and later Communists. Yes, thanks to Stalin’s order, the Communists did demonstrate alongside the Nazis after the signing of the Nazi-Soviet pact. But once the Nazis seized power, socialists and communists were among the first prisoners in the concentration camps, as well as trade unionists after they smashed them.
Nazi Germany was a centrally-planned economy, like the Soviet Union and Fascist Italy, in which the government controlled production and issued commands to business. But industry was largely not nationalized. It was controlled through a series of state-mandated trade and industrial associations. German law divided property into three categories: private, public, and private, but used for public purposes. The industries they controlled fell into the last. They also embarked on a massive privatisation campaign. Even when the industries remained largely in state ownership, like electricity, the heads of the associations managing them were drawn from private industry. The Nazis also took over private businessmen as heads of the government department managing the economy. It’s a method very similar to New Labour’s and the Tories’ appointment of senior business chiefs to run government departments in the new corporativism.
The Nazis weren’t socialists at all for all Hitler’s propagandistic claims. But Conservatives, including the American Republican Party, like to claim that they were as a smear on the left. They also contradict themselves by trying to deny that the Nazis were nationalists, despite the glaringly obvious fact that it is precisely what they said they were. Candace Owens, a young Black lady whose one of the leaders of the American Conservative youth organisation, Turning Point, infamously denied that the Nazis were nationalists when she and the equally loathsome Dave Rubin turned up over here trying to promote their British branch, Turning Point UK. Owens declared that Hitler wasn’t a nationalist, because he wanted everyone to be German. This is flat wrong – he wanted a Europe ruled by Germany, in which those races deemed biologically unfit or hostile would be exterminated. This started with the Jews, but as he makes very clear in Mein Kampf and his Table-Talk, would have gone on to the Slav peoples like the Czechs. She also thought that Hitler’s policies would have been all right, if he’d only put them into practise in Germany. Which means presumably that she believed the ending of democracy, the imprisonment of political prisoners and the Holocaust would all have been acceptable if he’d just stuck to Germany. She was naturally torn to shreds for this stupid, ridiculous and vile remark.
As for Norman Tebbit, he became notorious in the 1990s for his remark that British citizenship should be decided on who you supported at cricket. If a Black or Asian person didn’t support England, then they weren’t really Brits. Not surprisingly, people also tore into him for this piece of prize bigotry.
Mike’s put up a piece criticizing this latest piece of Tory lying, including some very amusing and interesting Tweets by the very many peeps not impressed with the Chingford Skinhead’s knowledge of such matters. My favourite is the comment wondering, based on Tebbitt’s logic for telling the world that the Nazis were socialists, whether he has had spotted dick. It’s a good question, as while I don’t doubt Tebbitt enjoys good, traditional British fare, he also has a reputation for homophobia.
Joking aside, this is a deliberate attempt by the Tories once again to misinform the public and distort history. Tebbitt always had a reputation for thuggish ignorance, but the Torygraph is supposed to be an upmarket, informative newspaper. Well, it lies badly and constantly, like the Tories themselves. This highly mendacious claim is yet another demonstration why shouldn’t believe anything it says.
The newspaper is making a loss hand over fist, and is heading down the tubes at a rate a knots. And this piece has just shown that when it finally goes under, British journalism will improve.
Last Thursday may well have been the last time Britain ‘claps for carers’. The woman who started it all, I believe, now wants it to end because she feels it’s been politicised. In her view, it’s no longer about applauding and showing appreciation for the tireless heroes of the NHS and care workers seeking to combat this terrible disease.
I can see her point. From the moment it started I wondered if it was also going to be a way Boris and his gang of murderers could bask in their reflected glory. Was it going to be a way Boris could subliminally manipulate the nation’s mood, so that as they clapped for the NHS, they were also clapping him and the measures his government put in place – grudgingly and belatedly? But still, our NHS and care workers deserved it, especially as so many have died, partly due to the government massively fumbling the supplies of PPE. It’s also been a good way to raise morale and bring people together by getting them out of their homes and onto the streets in collective act of celebration. All while maintaining a safe distance, of course.
But now a new collective ritual may be ready to take over from it. A ritual that has absolutely no government sponsorship and definitely does not reflect positively on Johnson and his pack. Last Tuesday, Brits across the country took part in the national ‘Boo for Boris’. Mike posted several of the videos of people booing our incompetent, malign and murderous prime minister across the country, from Canton in Cardiff to Saltaire. One woman even dressed in ancient Celtic costume as ‘Boodica’, to shout her defiance just as the ancient queen of the Iceni stuck it to the Romans. There’s a parallel with modern history there, as well. Boadicea’s rebellion was partly sparked off not just by Roman brutality against her, her sisters and her people, but from economic recession caused by rich Romans like Seneca withdrawing their money from Roman Britain. This is what happens when the rich don’t spread it around and the economy contracts: people get into their spiked chariots and start mowing down the government.
I didn’t take part because, like Mike, I was too shy. But Mike’s article and the piccies he posted of it can be found at:
Sargon of Gasbag, the man who broke UKIP, posted a video denouncing the whole affair. He seemed to think it was like the three-minute hate in Orwell’s 1984, in which the whole nation screamed its hatred of the totalitarian regime’s archetypal state enemy. Like so many of his libertarian fulminations, it’s absolutely wrong. The three-minute hate in 1984 is the total opposite. It’s a consciously staged even by the regime to direct popular hatred away from itself. As such, it’s far more like the regular denunciations we had over the past four years of Jeremy Corbyn as a Communist, Trotskyite, Russian or Czech spy and anti-Semite from the Tory establishment and a complicit, mendacious press. The ‘Boo for Boris’ campaign, on the other hand, was an act of popular discontent and resistance against a government that insists on a stifling control of the media. If there is a a film parallel, it’s probably with broadcast news when people follow the lead of the angry and confused news anchorman by shouting out of their windows that they’re ‘mad as hell’. Though I hope it doesn’t end badly, as it did in that movie.
But as Boris continues to make himself massively unpopular through his support of the unrepentant Cummings, our clown prime minister may well have to suffer more boos to come.
The onward march of the extreme right in eastern Europe takes another fateful goosestep. Viktor Orban, the already very authoritarian president of Hungary, has used the Coronavirus crisis as the pretext to pass legislation destroying the last vestiges of the democracy there, establishing him as the country’s virtual dictator.
On Monday, Zelo Street posted a piece based on an article in the Groaniad, reporting that Hungary’s parliament, dominated by his xenophobic Fidesz Party, was expected to grant him sweeping powers. These will give Orban the ability to rule by decree. Elections will be banned. The speaker of the Hungarian parliament and parliamentary groups will be informed of the government’s actions. However, spreading false information will become a criminal offence punishable by a long prison sentence. It will be prerogative of Orban’s Fidesz MPs to decide when the emergency is over. Orban has said that when it is, he will surrender all his powers without exception. However, there’s absolutely no guarantee of this, as the laws he passed in 2016 against asylum seekers, which were also supposed to be temporary, are still in place. It’s therefore possible that a compliant parliament will allow Orban to hang on to some or all of them.
Zelo Street stated unequivocally that the EU should expel Hungary because of this seizure of power. The Sage of Crewe pointed out that when the EU was the EEC, and only consisted of France, West Germany, Italy and the Benelux countries – Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg, the dictatorships to the east and west of the bloc stood absolutely no chance of getting. This meant the Fascist dictatorships of Portugal and Spain, Greece under the military rule of the colonels, Ceausescu’s Romania and the DDR (East Germany) under Erich Honecker. He remarks that Hungary’s continued membership of the EU has been a test for its remaining member states, one that they have so far failed to tackle. He concludes
‘Viktor Orbán may be more Chaplin than Hitler. But if the values of the EU are to mean anything, the Union cannot permit a dictatorship within its club. So expel the SOB.’
Zelo Street describes this legislation as an ‘enabling law’. The reference is to the Enabling Act which formally made Adolf Hitler dictator of Germany and suspended parliamentary democracy. And the Nazis, and the Italian Fascists before them, also seized power in response to a crisis. Fascist governments are crisis regimes. In the case of Italy and Germany, the crisis was first of all the breakdown in parliamentary democracy, as the pillars of the liberal regime in those nations stopped cooperating. In Germany this led to the president, Hindenburg, ruling by decree. This was succeeded by the recession caused by the Wall Street Crash and the massive uncontrolled inflation that saw the Mark as worth far less than the paper it was printed on. This discredited capitalism for millions of Germans, leading to a surge in votes for the Nazis and the Communists. And finally there was the Reichstag fire, which allowed the Nazis to declare a state of emergency and begin rounding up subversives. Which meant anybody who didn’t cede power to Hitler, and particularly Communists and the democratic socialists of the SPD.
Fidesz is extremely xenophobic and, like many political parties in the former eastern bloc, in particular anti-Semitic and islamophobic. I’ve no doubt Orban would be overjoyed if he could somehow blame the pandemic on Gypsies, Jews, homosexuals and Muslims. And I’m afraid that where Orban’s gone, other countries will follow, such as Poland under the Law and Justice Party. Or even Britain, where Boris has also passed legislation granting him extraordinary sweeping powers to deal with the pandemic emergency.
The EU’s failure to do so is an indictment of the hypocrisy of its leading politicos. Years ago Private Eye published an account of the EU’s dictatorial attitude towards the states then seeking membership in its ‘Brussels Sprouts’ column. The terms and conditions were very detailed and were not open to negotiation. Or at least, not very much. One of the countries joining was the Czech Republic. It’s president, Vaclav Klaus, was so outraged by his country’s dictatorial treatment, and told the EU negotiating team that his country had not suffered such treatment for nearly 30 years. This was in the late ’90s – early 2000s, so he was probably referring to the Russian invasion which ended the Prague Spring, the attempt by Czech premier Anton Dubcek to make Communism popular and democratic. This infuriated two of the EU’s team, the French former radical, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, and a German MEP. They immediately climbed on their high horses and started angrily shouting about how the EU was the opposite, and was the champion of democracy. And I can remember how, about ten years ago, the EU managed to leave many people highly unimpressed when it sanctimoniously awarded a peace prize to itself, claiming that it had successfully kept the peace in Europe. Well, possibly. But I also think NATO and a general fear across the continent of another war had played a major party. If the EU is unable, or unwilling, to do anything about Orban’s seizure of power, then all the verbiage about defending democracy is simply empty, vacuous nonsense. As readers of this blog will know, I am absolutely no supporter of Brexit. But it is true that EU is an immensely flawed institution.
It’s too much to claim that the EU is some kind of authoritarian superstate, an EUSSR, as the Kippers and Brexiteers liked to describe it, or some kind of successor to the Third Reich or Napoleon’s empire. But with Orban seizing dictatorial power, it is true to say now that the EU is no bulwark of democracy either.
Boris Johnson still hasn’t published the report into Russian influence in the UK, probably because it would be highly embarrassing for his party. He and many of the other leading Tories have very close relationships with Russian oligarchs from whom they have received very handsome donations. Mike and Zelo Street have blogged about the strange non-appearance of the report. However, according to the I, MPs were told that Putin had extended his influence into this country. The article by David Connett, ‘Kremlin has infiltrated Britain, MPs told’, in this Tuesday’s I for 10th March 2020, runs
MPs have been told that Russia hired British politicians and consultants to help advance its criminal interests and to “go after” Vladimir Putin’s enemies in London, it was reported last night.
MPs on the parliamentary intelligence and security committee were told by businessmen and anti-corruption campaigner Bill Browder that Moscow had “infiltrated” Britain by using well-rewarded “British intermediaries”.
The information was submitted to MPs who drew up the Russia report suppressed by Boris Johnson, The Guardian newspaper reported.
The Browder evidence was submitted in secret to the committee which carried out a two-year investigation into how the Kremlin is seeking to influence UK politics. Its 50-page report was ready for release last November, before the election. No 10 cleared the document after the election but it is not clear when it will be published.
Clearly it’s very embarrassing for Tories. But remember – they’re the party of patriotic Brits, and it’s Corbyn and the Labour Party who were selling out this country to the Russians. Or the Czechs. Or Hamas, and indeed anyone else they could use to smear him.
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