Dimbleby Resigns as BBC Propagandist on Question Time

Yesterday, Mike put up a piece commenting on the resignation of former Bullingdon boy David Dimbleby as the host of Question Time. The man Private Eye dubbed ‘Dimblebore’ has been presenting the show for 25 years, and now considers it the right moment to leave. Dimbleby is another BBC presenter, who is very biased towards the Conservatives. Mike’s photograph of him accompanying his piece shows him raising two fingers, with the comment that it’s probably to a Socialist. Mike also cautions against feeling too good about Dimblebore’s resignation, as we don’t know what monster’s going to replace. He wonders whether the secret of human cloning has been found, and whether the next biased presenter of the programme will be Josef Goebbels.

https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2018/06/17/if-david-dimbleby-is-leaving-the-bbcs-question-time-what-horror-will-replace-him/

Last week Dimblebore was off in Russia, presenting a documentary about the country under Putin ahead of the footie there. He wasn’t the only, or even the first person to go. The comedian Frankie Boyle got there over a week earlier, presenting a two-part show about the country, it’s people and football on Sunday evening. Dimblebore was rather more serious in tone, presenting Russia as a country in the grip of a repressive autocrat, and mired in corruption which was strangling the economy.

Dimbleby first explained that Putin was most popular with young people, the generation that everywhere else is rebelling against autocrats, dictators and tyrants. He puts this down to Russians’ experience of economic collapse under Yeltsin. Yeltsin ended communism and dismembered the economy of the Soviet Union, privatising whatever he could. The result was chaos, and massive employment. At one point it got so bad that some factories were paying their workers in the goods they produced. Putin has restored order and economic stability to the country, and so has the support of the younger generation.

He spoke to a great of young professionals, an advertising branding team who were supporters of Putin, working to promote him through images and slogans. He stated that most of the media was controlled by the Russian president, with a few exceptions. He then went to speak to someone from RT’s Moscow branch. Dimbleby explained that some of the staff were British, and asked one of the Brits there whether he was presenting propaganda. The man denied it, said that there was no one watching over him, telling him what to do, and that his conscience was clear. Dimblebore then gave a knowing smirk into the camera.

He then talked to a female presenter on one of the few dissident broadcasters Putin had allowed to remain open. She said that she had not received any threats, but she knew that she could be killed for what she did. But she was still determined to carry on.

He then talked about how those, who criticised the government were arrested and jailed, interviewing a human rights lawyer, who defended them. When asked what people could be arrested and jailed for, the lawyer explained that it could be criticism of the government, or a non-traditional understanding of the Second World War. The other year Putin passed a law criminalising the view that Stalin was partly responsible for the Nazi invasion of eastern Europe and Russia through the Nazi-Soviet pact. From what I remember, I think you can also be arrested for promoting gay rights.

He then spoke to a woman, who was protesting her treatment by the state. She had already been jailed for criticising Putin, but was determined to do so again. She had not been able to get a permit to organise a protest, and so held her own, one-woman demonstration outside the court. This is permitted under Russian law. If you can’t get a permit for a demonstration, you can still protest, so long as there is only one person involved. As she stood with her placard, she was joined by an increasing number of counter-protesters determined to disrupt her protest, and possibly send her to jail. They moved closer to her, and she moved away, telling them to keep their distance. They kept coming, and their numbers kept increasing. Then the cops turned up, and started filming things as they’d been told foreigners were involved. And someone else from one of the TV companies materialised to film the protest as well. Eventually it all ended, and the police and counter-protesters disappeared.

Dimbleby then did a piece about the police’s brutal suppression of dissent, complete with footage of the cops beating what looked like a feminist protester from Pussy Riot.

He also touched on gender roles. He talked to a hairdresser, while having his haircut, who told him that Russia still had very traditional gender roles, in which women wanted a strong man to provide for them.

Putin has also succeeded in reversing the declining Russian birthrate. Instead of falling, it is now rising, with medals and benefits given to couples who have large families. He showed one woman and her husband, who were being presented a medal by Putin for having ten children.

He also went off to talk to a youth organisation, that was set up to get children, including boys of junior school age, interested in the army. The group’s name translates as ‘Net’, and is run by army officers. The children there wear combat uniforms and learn to shoot using air rifles, which they are also taught how to strip down. They were shown blazing away at targets, and competing with each other over who could reassemble a gun while blindfolded the quickest, with Dimblebore cheering the winner. And it wasn’t all boys. One of the youngster there looked like a girl. Dimblebore asked them if they wanted to join the army, to which they gave a very enthusiastic ‘Yes’.

He then went off to speak to a prelate from the Russian Orthodox Church about its support for Putin, where he described Putin as an autocrat attacking human rights and threatening peace in Europe. The prelate responded by saying that there were those, who did not agree with his view. And that was that.

He then went off to discuss the massive corruption in Russia, and how this was undermining the economy as more and more investors and companies left the country because of it. Russia has 144 million people, but it’s economy is 2/3s that of Britain, or about the size of Italy’s, and is declining.

Now all of this is factually true. John Kampfner, in his book Freedom For Sale discusses Russia as another state, where the population has made a deal with its leader. They have absolute power, in return for which they give their people prosperity. Except that, according to Dimbleby, living standards and wages are declining. Putin has passed laws against the promotion of homosexuality, there are massive human rights violations, including the jailing of the type of people, who would have been called dissidents under Communism. Journalists, who haven’t toed the Archiplut’s line have been beaten and killed.

Other aspects of the Russian state, as revealed by this programme, would have been immediately recognisable to the generation raised by Communism. Like the corruption. It was rife under Communism. The Bulgarian journalist, Arkady Vaksberg, wrote a book about it, The Soviet Mafia. And Gogol took a shot at official corruption under the Tsars back in the 19th century in his play, The Government Inspector. So no change there.

As for the Russian Orthodox Church supporting Putin, it was always the state church under the tsars, to which it gave absolute support. The watchword of the tsarist regime was ‘Autocracy, Orthodoxy and the People’. And its support of autocratic leadership didn’t begin under Putin. After the restrictions on religion were lifted in the 1990s, the BBC journalists interviewed some of its clergy on their shows. And the clergy had the same preference for absolute state power and total obedience from the people. Putin made the relationship between the Church and his government closer by granting them a sizable share of Russia’s oil.

The youth groups designed to get children interested in joining the army are also little different from what already went on under the Soviet system. Secondary schoolchildren did ‘military-patriotic training’ to prepare them for national service as part of the school curriculum. It was led by retired army officers, who were often the butt of schoolboy jokes. They were taught to handle weapons, complete with competitions for throwing grenades the furthest.

And let’s face it, it also isn’t much different from what used to go on over here. I’ve known young people, who were in the army and naval cadets. And the public schools used to have the CCF – the Combined Cadet Force – which the Tories would dearly love to bring back. And boys, and some girls, do like playing at ‘War’, so I’ve no doubt that if something like the Russian group was set up in this country, there would be many lads and girls wanting to join it.

Russia has also too been a very masculine society with very traditional ideas about gender and masculinity, despite the fact that most engineers were women, who also worked as construction workers and many other, traditionally masculine areas. One of the complaints of Russian women was that the men didn’t do their fair share of standing in queues waiting to get whatever groceries were in store.

And the medals and rewards to the women, who gave birth to the largest number of children is just another form of the Heroic Mother Awards under the Soviet Union. Putin’s Russia continues many of the same aspects of the country’s society from the age of the tsars and Communism, although Dimblebore said the country was going backward.

I’ve no doubt it is, but the programme annoyed me.

What irritated me was Dimblebore’s knowing smirk to camera when the guy from RT denied that he broadcast propaganda. Now I’m sure that RT does. There’s videos I’ve seen on YouTube from RTUK, which could fairly be described as pro-Russian propaganda.

But what annoyed me was Dimblebore’s hypocrisy about it.

The Beeb and Dimbleby himself has also broadcast it share of propaganda supporting western foreign policy interests, including imperialism. Newsnight has finally got round, after several years, to covering the Fascists running around the Ukraine under the present government. But the Beeb has emphatically not informed the British public how the pro-western regime which was put in power with the Orange Revolution, was created by the US State Department under Obama, and run by Hillary Clinton and Victoria Nuland. Far from being a grassroots movement, the revolution was orchestrated by the National Endowment for Democracy, which has been handling the US state’s foreign coups since they were taken away from the CIA, and one of George Soros’ pro-democracy outfits.

Putin is also presented as the villainous aggressor in the current war in the Ukraine, and some have compared his annexation of Crimea and invasion of eastern Ukraine to the Nazi annexation of the Sudetenland. But Crimea had been a part of Russia before 1951, when Khrushchev, a Ukrainian, gave it to that state. And Putin is not looking to take over the country either. The population of Russia is 144 million. Ukraine’s is a little over a third of that, at 52 million. If Putin really had wanted to annex it, he would have done so by now. And under international law, as I understand it, nations are allowed to intervene in foreign countries militarily to defend members of their ethnic group that are being persecuted. That was the pretext for the Nazi annexation of the Sudetenland, and it’s also the reason why Putin’s invaded eastern Ukraine. But it’s legal under international law. And I don’t doubt for a single minute that Russians, and Russian-speaking Ukrainians, were being persecuted by the new, pro-Western government.

In his documentary, Dimbleby met a very angry, patriotic Russian, who told him that the British had tried to invade Russia three times in the past three centuries. Once in the 19th century during the Crimean War; then in 1922 during the Russian Civil War. And now we were preparing to do the same. He angrily told us to ‘get out!’. Dimbleby looked shocked, and said to him that he couldn’t really believe we were ready to invade.

This was another continuation of the Soviet paranoia and hostility towards the West dating from the Communist period and before. Russia has always felt itself encircled by its enemies since the tsars. But the man has a point. We did invade Russia in 1922 in an effort to overthrow the Communist regime. Pat Mills has talked about this in his presentation on comics he gave to the SWP a few years ago. He tried to get a story about it in Charlie’s War, the anti-war strip he wrote for Battle. This is another piece of history that we aren’t told about.

And when Gorbachev made the treaty with Clinton pledging the withdrawal of Soviet troops from eastern Europe after the collapse of Communism, Clinton in turn agreed that these state would not become members of NATO. He broke his promise. They now all are, and NATO’s borders now extend to Russia. At the same time, western generals and NATO leaders have been predicting a war between Russia and NATO. One even wrote a book about it, 2017: War with Russia. Thankfully, 2017 has been and gone and there has, so far, been no war. But with this in view, I can’t say I blame any Russian, who is afraid that the West might invade at any moment, because it does look to me like a possibility.

And there are other matters that the Beeb and the rest of the lamestream news aren’t telling us about. They’re still repeating the lie that the invasion of Iraq was done for humanitarian reasons, whereas the reality was that western corporations and the neocons wanted to get their hands on Iraqi state industries and privatise the economy. And the American and Saudi oil industry wanted to get their mitts on the country’s oil reserves.

The civil war in Syria is also presented in simplistic terms: Assad as evil tyrant, who must be overthrown, and Putin as his bloodthirsty foreign ally. Assad is a tyrant, and one of the causes of the civil war was his oppression of the Sunni majority. But we are constantly being told that the rebels are ‘moderates’, while the fact is that they still have links to Islamists like the al-Nusra Front, the former Syrian branch of al-Qaeda, and ISIS. Nor have I seen the Beeb tell anyone how the Syrian rebels have also staged false flag chemical weapons attacks against civilians in order to draw the west into the war.

And objective reporting on Israel is hindered by the pro-Israel lobby. Any news item or documentary, which shows Israel’s horrific crimes against Palestinian civilians is immediately greeted with accusations of anti-Semitism from the Israeli state and the Board of Deputies of British Jews. I’ll be fair to the Beeb. Some of their presenters have tried to give an objective reporting of events, like Jeremy Bowen and Orla Guerin. But they’ve been accused of anti-Semitism, as was Dimblebore himself when he tried to defend them. In this instance, the bias isn’t just the fault of the Beeb. But it is there, and newsroom staff have said that they were under pressure from senior management to present a pro-Israel slant.

Domestically, the Beeb is very biased. I’ve discussed before how Nick Robinson in his report on a speech by Alex Salmond about Scots devolution carefully edited the SNP’s answer, so it falsely appeared that he had been evasive. In fact, Salmond had given a full, straight answer. Salmond’s reply was whittled down further as the day went on, until finally Robinson claimed on the evening news that he hadn’t answered the question.

And numerous left-wing bloggers and commenters, including myself, have complained about the horrendous bias against the Labour Party and Jeremy Corbyn in the Beeb’s reporting. Dimblebore himself has shown he has a very right-wing bias on Question Time, allowing right-wing guests and audience members to speak, while silencing those on the left. Not that he’s alone here. Andrew Marr has done exactly the same on his programme on Sundays.

Dimblebore is, quite simply, another right-wing propagandist, with the Beeb backing current western imperialism. His smirk at the RT journalist’s denials of doing the same is just gross hypocrisy.

The Feral Children of the Upper Classes

I was reading A Gay Mentalist’s blog a little while ago, and a term he used to describe the middle classes struck me. He called them ‘feral’. It’s not a word that usually applied to the upper ranks of society. Usually it’s given to the underclass and their children, the type of people, leading bleak lives of deprivation and pointless moral squalor. The type of people with no jobs, and no self-respect, whose chief and often only activities seem to be drunkenness, drug dealing, violence and sexual promiscuity. The type of people who provide the raw fodder for Jeremy Kyle, as they slouch onto his show to present their sordid tales of domestic abuse and accuse each other of stealing each other’s partners.

It does, however, also perfectly describe the attitude of the middle classes, and particularly the hysterical ranting of the middle market tabloids and the vicious, punitive attitude of the Tory front bench. ‘Feral’ implies savage, wild, extremely aggressive, vicious and untameable. You apply it to animals, like feral dogs infected with rabies, and vicious creatures like wolverines and pole-cats. It’s applied to creatures that most definitely stand outside the safe, decent and civilised, like the notorious ‘rat boy’, who got into the news a few years ago. This was a small boy, who already had racked up a long list of offences despite his extreme youth. He got his name because he used to disappear down the various service pipes lying about his estate to escape from the police.

The Murderous, Middle Class Persecution of the Poor, Disabled and Unemployed

Yet ‘savage’, ‘vicious’ also describes the Tory attitude to bullying the weakest members of society – the unemployed, the disabled, asylum seekers, everyone, who got on to the Tories’ wretched little list of people they want to persecute. The violence isn’t necessarily physical. They haven’t quite descended to the level of the Nazi party just yet in sending stormtroopers in to beat and murder benefit claimants, but it’s there nevertheless. Think of all the people Mike, Johnny Void, Kittysjones, Stilloaks, Glynismillward, Tom Pride, the Angry Yorkshireman, Untyneweare and so many others have blogged about, dying in hunger and squalor due to benefit sanctions. It’s the result of a vicious, murderous attitude to those they deem below them every bit as vicious and unrestrained as the type of gang hatreds you can see acted out on street corners in the sink estates. Fuelling it is a palpable sense of threat and status anxiety – that the working class and the unemployed are somehow a threat to middle class society and its precarious norms – every bit as vehement as that of the local thug or bully, who declares that he just wants a bit of ‘respect’.

Eton and Public School Bullying

It also accurately describes the culture of bullying and violence that pervades private, and particularly elite, education. The bullying in public schools is notorious. A friend of mine, who came from such a background, told me that in the public schools you were bullied horrifically in your first year, only for this to stop and you to become a bully in your term in the second. And some of the bullying truly is horrific. Way back in the 1980s Private Eye reviewed yet another book on Eton, and said that the accounts of the bullying there were so extreme and revolting, that if they occurred in state education it would result in a public outrage and demands for the school closed down or placed in special measures. One example of the type of bullying that went on came from one old Etonian, who said there was one boy, who forced others to eat ice cream mixed with human excrement. The bully is not named. It was, however, stated that he was now a prominent lawyer. And some of the bullying was sexual. Given the sexual nature of some of the cruelty, it’s probably not surprising that the elite covered up the paedophile activities of their members for so long. Exposure to that kind of bullying at public school may well have inculcated a kind of indifference to it, in the same way it is argued that too much exposure to porn or extreme violence in the movies will habituate viewers to even more extreme and depraved acts in normal society.

Physical Attacks on the Poor by Public School Children

And the children of the rich are violent too. A friend of mine once told me that ‘Eton Rifles’ was about a gang fight in which a group of public school boys beat up a group of lower class lads. It also affects the security measures some local businesses adopt to protect their property and customers from assault from the rich and privately educated. A little while ago I went on a tour of East Anglia and the Fen Country with a group of friends. One of the hotels we stayed in, a magnificent inn dating back to the Middle Ages, had various measures up to stop people causing trouble. They weren’t particularly intrusive, and I can’t remember now what they were, only that they were there. They weren’t imposed to stop the usual drunks and thugs starting fights in the bar. They were actually aimed at protecting the premises, customers and staff from the pupils at the private school nearby. At the end of the school year, or the term, these children would leave school to start fights and smash up the shops in the time. Presumably they felt entitled to this as their parents were rich enough to pay the £40,000 a year school fees.

The Public School Gun-Nuts of Snapchat and Pistolero Violence in the Developing World

You can see some of that same attitude on the story I reblogged this week about Snapchat, the Facebook site for public schoolchildren. This featured them showing off their wealth and contempt for the rest of the society in the most offensive ways possible. Among them were using £20 and £50 notes as toilet paper, and waving around guns. These, they claimed, were to protect their estates from ‘the peasants’.

Let’s examine the double standards going on here. If a Black lad or someone from the White underclass put up a photograph of themselves waving a gun around, trying to be ‘gangsta’ or mouthing off about protecting his ‘manor’, there would be angry and excited columns in the Mail and other papers screaming about ‘gun crime’ Britain. And not without reason, either. Gun crime and gang shootings are a problem in many British cities. You could also compare it, and the attitude underpinning it, to the right-wing gun-nuts in America. They’re affluent, but not necessarily rich, and the image tends to be of rural red-necks announcing that the government will only be able to take their guns away from ‘their cold, dead hands’. They’re as much objects of ridicule and contempt as seen as a threat.

No such opprobrium seems to be applied to these children, probably because the upper classes have always had a fascination with guns and shooting. Orwell remarked that the aristocracy and middle classes were brought up for war and battle. Which makes them sound like Dr Who’s Sontarans: bred for war. The stereotype is of aristocratic families, who have supplied a long line of soldiers and generals since the founder first came over with William the Conqueror, and who list various antecedents who fought at Agincourt, conquered India under Clive, and then did their patriotic duty at various battles in the Napoleonic, First and Second World Wars. The Combined Cadet Force frequently formed part of their education, training them for further service and leadership in the armed forces.

Now there are certainly parts of the world where, if you’re rich, you most certainly do need armed protection. There’s some extremely grisly photos around the web of the White farmers, who were killed by armed robbers in South Africa. In other parts of the Developing World, it’s historically been the other way, and the poor have most definitely needed protection from people like the gun-crazed youngster on Snapchat. In many parts of the Developing World the rural poor were kept in serfdom by the masters of the estate, who hired guns to intimidate and kill anyone who stepped out of line. Way back when I was at school about thirty years ago, the BBC screened a series, Brazil, Brazil covering that country and its history. This covered that aspect of Brazilian society, the owners of massive estates in their haciendas, and the pistoleros, the gunmen they employed. They talked to the peasants, who’d been threatened and attacked by these men for asking for wage rises or otherwise daring to challenge the absolute domination of their lives by their masters. Now you can conclude from this that the rich kids now showing off their guns on Snapchat and ranting about protecting their property from peasants are just reacting to the real violence against the wealthy in many parts of the world. Or they’re simply rich brats, with a feudal sense of entitlement, who really do believe that the lower orders are peasants, who should be kept down with armed force, exactly like their public school friends in Latin America do with the peons on their plantations. Considering the way Priti Patel and the other authors of Britannia Unchained believed that Britain should follow the exploitative employment practices of developing nations like India, this is a real possibility.

In short, A Gay Mentalist is exactly right: there is a culture of vicious, feral violence amongst the middle classes. It’s shown in the horrendous bullying for which the public schools have been notorious since the publication of Tom Brown’s Schooldays. It’s shown in the violent contempt so many have for the lower orders. And its there in the need to humiliate, persecute and kill the working and lower middle classes, the unemployed and the disabled, as expressed in the system of benefit sanctions, and physical testing now being used to decimate the welfare state. It’s there to satisfy the sadistic cruelty of RTU, Fester McLie and latest upper middle class thugs now taking up residence and valuable office space in the DWP. And its present in the terrible sense of threat clearly felt by the Daily Mail, the Express and every right-wing newspaper, not excluding the Torygraph and the Times in their editorials and their need to drum up further hatred against the poor, marginalised and underprivileged.