Thursday, 24 July 2008
That Was Then...
Caught some of a BBC4 series called The 30s In Colour last night. Potentially fascinating stuff, marred by a relentlessly leftist commentary - for every 20 seconds of footage, 2 minutes of political analysis, rich in the abundant wisdom of hindsight, telling us what to think about it. No prizes for guessing what the commentary made of some rather charming footage of prewar Palestine. Even holiday footage of the Canaries couldn't escape, as Franco was there, so we were told who was right and who was wrong (go on - guess) in the Spanish Civil War. This How could they be so blind? We know better now approach is deeply patronising (how very BBC) and betrays a fatal flaw in the progressive view of history: Then was then Now, and Now will soon be Then. How blind was the world on 9/10? So blind that many, especially on the Left, are still living and thinking as if the date had never changed.
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The Left as anyone who bows down to evil may very well be wrong & they generally are, but that of coursze doesn't mean the servile minions who bow down to the right are right. Evil is evil and servility is apparently a ubiquitous trait. Is there some doubt regarding the fascist Franco's being right? 9/10?
ReplyDeleteGood little bourgeois slaves will believe whatever rapacious sickos will them to believe. Their blindness is utterly impenetrable, just as leftist slaves will do likewise. Most just have to find the right master to bow down to.
Thomas Mann in Dr Faustus accurately wrote of 911 scenarios that conveniently justify exactly what the ruling elites wished to enact:
ReplyDeleteA book by George Sorel entitled Reflexions sur la violence (whose theory that)...in the era of the masses, parliamentary discussion would prove utterly inadequate as a means of shaping political will; that in the future what was needed in its place were mythic fictions, which would be fed to the masses as the primitive battle cries necessary for unleashing and activating political energies; that henceforth popular myths, or better, myths trimmed for the masses, would be the vehicle for political action- fables, chimeras, phantoms that needed to have nothing to do with truth, reason, or science in order to be productive, to determine life and history, and thereby to prove themselves dynamic realities... It made it possible to understand that truth's fate was closely related to that of the individual, indeed identical with it- and that fate was devaluation.
Though of course as Kafka wrote on blindness:
If a man has his eyes bound, you can encourage him as much as you like to stare through the bandage, but he'll never see anything.
Good point, Nige. The left are stuck on 9/10 and the right on 9/11. The rest of us are trying to muddle through today (7/24 as I write) weighed down by the preposterous fantasies of the former and spine-tingling nightmares of the latter.
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