The wrong messages.

Margaret Atwood’s dystopian cloak-and-bonnet tale and the BBC’s Rise of the Nazis. A pair of allegories-with-a-message. 

Reviewers were quick to recognise that these programmes bore comparisons between present-day reality and dramatised fiction. Craig has already cited James Delingpole who points out that within the programme (Nazis) former Cambridge historian Professor Sir Richard Evans laid it on with a trowel; Trump =  Hitler. 

There are indeed parallels and messages, Jim, but not as we know it. Not as you know it. Y’all took away ’the wrong message’.

I started to pen a review of  “the Nazis” but it got filed under ‘pending’. (‘Pendings' are beginning to stack up). Objections to Ash Sarkar’s inclusion in this programme have already been well documented, so I won’t waste time on that. 

The parallels I saw were the opposite of the good Professor’s. The real parallel is between the rise of antisemitism and the Corbyn-led Labour Party. 

But no, the intelligentsia has pronounced that the parallels were between Boris Johnson, President Trump and populism and, somehow, fascism.

Allison Pearson has written about a similarly topsy turvy ‘take-away’ from The Handmaid’s Tail.  Sorry, tale.

The Republic of Gilead is not Trump’s America. The parallel is with a certain religion. Praise be!

Spectacles

Talking of Andrew Neil, The Spectator has a couple of fine pieces about BBC bias, albeit by the usual suspects - Mr Liddle and Mr Delingpole. 

Rod's piece concentrates on the BBC's deep-seated bias towards social liberalism as reflected in its many outlets (from Today to the Victoria Derbyshire show) firing on all cylinders after Mrs May's resignation honours list included Geoffrey Boycott, who was once convicted of assaulting his girlfriend. Why did the BBC go heavily on that when they could have majored on the stinking "cronyism" of many of Mrs May's other choices - most of her former senior aides and advisers, plus Conservative donors - and the reek of hypocrisy and corruption they might be said to reveal so clearly? Now, I must say that I think the BBC could have concentrated on both stories, but Rod - from my researches - is right that it was the abusive cricketer who dominated the corporation's field of vision. 

James's piece looks at a couple of BBC documentaries and finds them guilty of bias - The Rise of the Nazis and Conspiracy Files: The Billionaire Global Mastermind? 

Except for watching the Ask Sarkar bits (which I ferreted out like truffles and which I agree with James turned out to be "harmless to the point of irrelevance"), The Rise of the Nazis isn't a series I've watched (yet). Of it he writes: 

Back in the day, the BBC might have been content to strive for an objective take on the subject, perhaps with a voiceover by Samuel West and lots of period footage. But the danger of that approach, the BBC has since realised, is that it runs the risk of viewers making up their own minds what to think. Some of them might not be aware, for example, of the obvious parallels between Hitler, Nigel Farage, Donald Trump, Brexit and, to a lesser extent, Michael Gove. 

But I did watch the George Soros programme (you'll doubtless be pleased to hear). It was a straightforward debunking exercise aimed at right-wing conspiracy theorists which focused mainly on the loudest, nastiest figures of the fringe and the wilder, nastier conspiracy theories. But the relentlessness of its defence of Mr Soros struck many online commenters as constituting a whitewash. It also left me deeply uneasy on that count. Is every accusation false? Has he done nothing wrong? Is he such a good guy? Is everyone accusing him bad?

Here, for example, is the programme's (very) brief take on his campaign to prevent Brexit:

George Soros has made no secret of his views on Brexit, publicly contributing £1.7 million to the Remain campaign. Now, talk of a secret Soros plot is spreading to the UK.

This was followed by a clip of Nigel Farage sounding like a conspiracy theorist. 

And that was that. 

A lot more detail on what he has done - e.g. his £400,000 to find Gina Miller & Co. since the referendum - wouldn't have gone amiss. And what is the role (if any) of his Open Society foundation in, say, funding OpenDemocracy in the UK, with the latter's admitted links to the likes of Carole Cadwalladr? 

Anyhow, here's James's less charitable take on the programme:

But the documentary it did on George Soros — Conspiracy Files: The Billionaire Global Mastermind? (BBC2, Sunday) — was worse, much worse. Soros is an intriguing and influential character, well worth a detailed investigation. Apart from the time he famously broke the Bank of England in 1992 when he caused sterling to crash out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism, there’s the vexed issue of what the BBC calls his ‘philanthropy’, but which some of us might consider more akin to bankrolling the destruction of Western civilisation. 

Soros has given away $32 billion to ‘liberal’ causes, ranging from his promotion of the global-warming scare to his campaigning for open borders which involves hefty donations to a number of unsavoury and sometimes violent hard-left activist groups. The documentary’s considered take on all this: Soros gives generously to ‘education, health, human rights and democracy projects’. People who think it’s any more sinister than that are mainly tattooed, racist, far-right conspiracy theorists — and Trump fans, if there’s any difference — whose hatred stems mainly from the fact that Soros is Jewish. I think it’s time the BBC gave up trying to pretend it’s a voice of impartial authority, don’t you?

Don't you? 

Ash Sarkar again

Bruce Lawson (modern day follower of Montaigne): Someone very senior at the BBC recently said the whole corporation has become obsessed with diversity quotas. That’s the only charitable reason I can think of as to why BBC Two decided to have anti-Semite Ash Sarkar, a non-expert and non-historian on a Holocaust programme.

Tracy Ann Oberman (actress): Dear Patrick Holland, BBC2, as someone who lost family during The Rise of The Nazis I am deeply disturbed that of all knowledgable experts/historians, you use Ash Sarkar, a woman who endorsed the spray painting of the remaining Watsaw Ghetto wall - an open grave for our families. Why? Her friend Ewa spray painted FreeGaza on my family's grave. They died for being Jewish long before Israel even was a thought of existence. Ash Sarkar is not a Holocaust historian or expert. She is a Momentum Propagandist. Why have her on as an expert voice? So upsetting. BBC Two, Patrick Holland, rethink your ‘experts’ please. Too much insensitivity and lack of diligence on this.

Euan Phillips (Labour Against AS): What the hell are BBC Two doing making a programme called ‘Rise of the Nazis’ and featuring Ash Sarkar, who supported the desecration of the Warsaw Ghetto and opposes the IHRA definition of antisemitism? How tone deaf/insulting/outright racist are you?? 

Yes. This isn't another (albeit sick) joke about the ubiquity of Ash Sarkar ("literally a communist") on the BBC.

She really is an expert 'talking head' in the major new three-part BBC Two series The Rise of the Nazis.

Even by the standards of the present-day BBC, that's truly extraordinary, isn't it?