Simon Schama tweets

Talking of the BBC's Sweden coverage, the famous Simon Schama took to Twitter just before 8 o'clock this morning to fulminate about...:

....a completely misleading report on BBC Radio 4's Today on Swedish elections as though SDs had become second biggest party - barely corrected at the end. 

I'll stick up for the BBC here because Gavin Lee's report was obviously an 'as-it-happens'-style piece beginning yesterday evening at the Sweden Democrats HQ as an early exit poll placed them second (with the SDs erupting with delight) and then returned there at the end of the report and in the early hours of this morning to say that the SDs had actually come third...

...and John Humphrys had after all introduced the whole thing by saying: 

The political face of Sweden has changed pretty dramatically in the past few years from a solidly socialist country one to where the far-right has challenged the old order. Many expected the populist Swedish Democrats to take second place in yesterday's elections. It didn't quite happen. They did take a big share of the vote, but the Prime Minister said he will not form a coalition with them. So what next?

So Simon Schama's complaint was itself rather "misleading", wasn't it? Naturally though, it provoked comments, such as this:

On the Today programme they made out that the SD had stormed to 2nd place then had to admit it came 3rd. 

Well, no, they didn't really do either of those things.

Anyhow, talk of Simon Schama reminds me of Harry & Paul's Story of the Twos and their tribute to the BBC's love for dark Scandanavian dramas:

Civilisations

Mary and a fine early Greek lass

Well, I've watched the first two episodes of the BBC's new 'landmark series' Civilisations - the first by Simon Schama, the second by Mary Beard - and I thoroughly enjoyed them both, in a hazy sort of way.

They passed a couple of hours of my day very pleasantly. 

Yes, they weren't anywhere near as thought-provoking or profound or original or as startling as the wonderful Kenneth Clark in his still-magnificent, beguiling and intellectually challenging Civilisation but, Hyperion to a satyr as that old BBC programme surely is to this comparatively dumbed-down new BBC programme, Simon Schama and Mary Beard are both excellent story-tellers - and, as you'd expect, the programme is an absolute treat for the eyes...

...(except for when the BBC's camerapersonages are made to do that annoying out-of-focus gimmick they've obviously been asked to do on behalf of Professor Beard). 

*******

On the BBC bias front...

...Dividing the presentation between three reliably left-wing, 'progressive' historians - all of who could be relied upon to drop in the occasional hint about the value of immigration and multiculturalism, or to talk critically about "gendered" art, or to take the odd potshot at Kenneth Clark's 'Eurocentricity' - was a very 'BBC' decision.

In fact, you might even cite it as an absolute proof of BBC bias.

And, yes, although I didn't feel as if I was being continuously hit over the head by a huge BBC-shaped haddock in these first two episodes, I did notice the programme's 'progressive' hints.

And, yes, it was indeed a divisive decision to make the presentation of the programme a purely, left-wing 'progressive' affair...

...as demonstrated by the following pair of articles (the first from the Right, the second from the Left):

Ed West: Civilisations is right-on and rather underwhelming. 

Yasmin Alibhai Brown: The BBC’s Civilisations is wonderfully multicultural – and the usual suspects are fuming.

*******

Mary and the Chinese lads

Despite enjoying what I've seen so far, no blogger worth his or her salt could ever resist trying to best a BBC historian, so I'm going to indulge myself here by using my avid reading of ancient Chinese history in order to try and discredit Mary Beard.

See how I get on below....

One thing I know about China's famous 'First Emperor' - the Mao-like monster. who began reigning supreme over the Chinese heartland in 221 BC and who was responsible for the Terracotta Army and the founder of the Qin dynasty - is that his name wasn't 'Qin' and that he wasn't the 'Emperor Qin' despite Mary Beard repeatedly calling him that!

He was born either Ying Zheng or Zhao Zheng and became - like Bruce Forsyth before him - the King of Qin (a joke that only works if you know that 'Qin' is pronounced 'Chin' - hence 'China').

He's known to history, after brutally destroying every over Chinese warring state and becoming the first emperor of China as Qin Shi Huang - a title not a name. It simply means 'First Emperor, from the Qin dynasty'.

No one, except for Mary Beard, so far as I can see, has ever called the First Emperor 'Emperor Qin' before, for the very good reason that there never was a Chinese emperor called 'Emperor Qin'.

Still, to be fair to her, at least she didn't call him 'Emperor Ming', or 'Ming the Merciless'.

Would Kenneth Clark have made such an error? And wouldn't the BBC of the 1960s, unlike the BBC of now (which seems to know a lot less), have prevented such lapses from going out even if he had?

The First Emperor of Mongo

*******

Reviews for the programme have been mixed - some enthusiastic, some tepid, some brutal.

Very oddly, one of the most brutal reviews (a mere two stars our of five) came from the BBC's own arts editor Will Gompertz on the BBC News website...

...and the BBC News website has given it a good deal of prominence. 

It's astonishingly rude. 

So rude that it positively invited rudeness in return....

As noted by MB on the Open Thread, Will's criticism is curious and very 'BBC'. Why? Because despite attacking a BBC programme, it weirdly employs PC to pile in upon another form of PC. 

Personal pique (Civilisations without Will Gompertz) might be the explanation.

UPDATE: A little Twitter exchange involving the BBC's Nick Higham:

Willard Foxton Todd: Is there anything more BBC than spending millions on an incredibly high profile series and then having your own arts editor give it a 2 star review on the front page of your website?
Nick Higham, BBC: As the BBC’s erstwhile bad-news-about-the-BBC correspondent, I defend to the hilt the right/duty of BBC reporters to make independent judgements about BBC policies/actions. Whether we should be *reviewing* stuff (programmes, plays, films etc) I’m less sure...

More on James O'Brien

Last night's Newsnight, presented by left-wing 'shock jock' James O'Brien, was a Trump special. 

JO'B was as 'impartial' as ever, making an ostentatious show of presenting his anti-Trump/anti-Brexit guests as "experts" (a word he kept on using in that respect) before giving them all ample chance to showboat their anxieties/rage about Trump/Brexit with as little challenge as possible. 

In contrast, pro-Brexit and/or pro-Trump guests got the fully sneery JO'B treatment. 

It's BBC impartiality James, but not as we know it (though, alas, actually, very much as we know it).

First up came, Dr Leslie Vinjamuri (no fan of President Trump), introduced as "an expert in the transatlantic partnership" and asked "this must, professionally, be a fraught time for you?". JOB's questions questioned the importance of the 'special relationship', in the usual BBC way. ("Well, it was a global agenda in one sense. In another sense, the American media seemed a lot keener to ask questions about Mexico and Russia than they did about the other half of the so-called special relationship"; "In the great scheme of things, for all of his Scottish ancestry and what have you, how high up on his to-do list will be giving Britain something?")

Then came Dan Hannan, repeatedly (and sneeringly) called "an arch-Brexiteer" by JO'B. JO'B interrupted him quite vigorously and chose to take advantage of Dan's mention of the "English-speaking" nations to sneeringly imply racism on Dan's part. ("The English-speaking democracies?"' "English-speaking? English-speaking, or would we allow non-English speakers in as well?"). It was classic JO'B.

"In a moment we'll be talking to the foreign affairs expert, Anne Applebaum. But first joining me now from Florida is the veteran Republican political strategist Roger Stone, himself a long term confidante of Donald Trump", said JO'B introducing his next guest. 

Mr Stone received the usual JO'B treatment, getting a hostile grilling (for being right-wing) and having it made personal. Here's a flavour:

• And, sort of, the law of truth as well. You are a veteran of the dark arts of politicking. You seem to revel in the rascal-ish nature of the profession. So when, for example, you put it out that Ted Cruz' father was involved in the assassination of John F. Kennedy, one imagines you doing it with a wry smile and a sort of thumbs up to the gallery. Donald Trump has a slightly different relationship with the truth. When he spoke today at the press conference about being in Scotland the day before Brexit, the calendar in his own Twitter account reveals he did not go there until the day after. Does he in his own mind believe it when he says these things, even though all of the evidence contradicts him? 

• Which is why I haven't asked you about it! I've asked you about the stuff that has happened. On the record. Today. So when he says that he was in Scotland on the day that the result came in...I begin your pardon...the day before the result came in and he predicted it all and then his own Twitter account reveals he landed in Scotland the day after, does he believe it when he says it. 

• No, I'm interested in whether....you well well be right about that...when he says it wasn't raining during the inauguration but people can actually feel the raindrops landing on their head, I'm just intrigued to know whether or not, psychologically, as a long-term confidante, he's sort of gaming everybody or that, somehow, he puts himself in a position where he has persuaded himself that what he wants to be true is true? 

And the interview ended in a way that, regardless of who's being interviewed, always strikes me as unprofessional - i.e. where the interviewer gives himself the final come-back at his interviewee's expense. and then adds a final sneer before giving thanks:

But not on the dates for arriving in Scotland. Roger Stone. Congratulations on the morning suit and many thanks indeed to you. 

And then it was straight onto anti-Brexit/anti-Trump Anne Applebaum and JO'B introducing her by repeating her 'expert' credentials:

I'm joined now by Anne Applebaum, the foreign affairs expert and columnist for the Washington Post. 

The interview was gentle and ended with JO'B saying (of Mrs May and Mr Trump):

Well, hey, they held hands! Anne Applebaum, thank you very much indeed. 

And finally came a tag-wrestling match with James O'Brien and Simon 'Drama' Schama on one side and pro-Trump prof Ted Malloch on the other.

Impartial BBC interviewing it wasn't. Typical James O'Brien on Newsnight it was. 

For fans of transcriptions, here's one of the final segment:

JAMES O'BRIEN: The historian Simon Schama is here, alongside Ted Malloch, who is widely tipped for a role in the Trump administration - possibly as Ambassador to the European Union. You don't have any news for us, do you Ted, tonight? 

TED MALLOCH: Maybe next week. 

JAMES O'BRIEN: OK. We'll start with you Simon. You've taken to social media and coined the rhyme 'Theresa the Appeaser'. Anything in today's events to appease your fears? 

SIMON SCHAMA: No, not particularly. I did...no...The spectacle of them holding hands, actually, which doesn't in any rational way speak to your question, James, did turn my stomach somewhat actually. 

JAMES O'BRIEN: We don't know that it didn't turn hers! But the fear that she is cosying up to a regime that may prove to be, as an historian, may stand comparison with other 20th-century horrors..are you stepping back? 

SIMON SCHAMA: No, I think scary authoritarian regimes, not to inaccurately paraphrase Count Leo Tolstoy, are scary and authoritarian each in their own way. I think this is starting to look incredibly scary and authoritarian. Particularly, actually, banning the possibility of the Environmental Protection Agency delivering data to the public. All sorts of things, I think, are serious. But the most worrying part of all, which doesn't speak to the authoritarian issue, but something loopier, is President Trump's contact or lack of contact with reality. Today, he doubled down on this extraordinary assertion that between three million and 5 million illegal immigrant votes were cast. It is absolutely... and this was actually delivered to a reception in which...the first reception he had from Congressional leaders...were treated to an harangue on this entirely fantastic story, which has absolutely no evidence whatsoever. 

JAMES O'BRIEN (interrupting): OK, hold on!

SIMON SCHAMA: He is starting an investigation into an election he won! 

JAMES O'BRIEN: Yes.

SIMON SCHAMA: This is beyond absurd. 

JAMES O'BRIEN: There are three adjectives there that I will pick up on: 'absurd' is the first, but 'scary' and 'authoritarian' are the other two. Do you recognise what Simon Schama describes? 

TED MALLOCH: None of the above. Where would you like me to start? 

JAMES O'BRIEN: Well, let's start with the voter fraud allegations. He's sort of alleging that the Democrats managed to swing 3 million illegal votes, but not put any of them in the places that would have swung the election.

TED MALLOCH: So, let's have an investigation, and if there's hard evidence - and there's supposedly some people who have some evidence - then if there's more investigation...

JAMES O'BRIEN (interrupting): There's one (indecipherable)...

SIMON SCHAMA (interrupting) The evidence comes from Greg Phillips, the conspiracy theorist! 

TED MALLOCH: We'll see what evidence there is.

JAMES O'BRIEN (interrupting): We have the investigation and come to the conclusions afterwards?

TED MALLOCH: No, then you obviously state the conclusions. That's what investigations are. We have an investigation into Russian hacking and then we find out the truth. Hopefully we have imperial evidence into these things that we can look at, rather than dismissing them out of hand at the beginning. Why not look at them? Even on the liberal left, you are willing to look at actual facts?JAMES O'BRIEN: Empirical evidence. I mean, obviously it's a bit of a... 

TED MALLOCH: I'm a social scientist, so I prefer data. 

JAMES O'BRIEN: Clearly. Except when climate change is on the table.

TED MALLOCH: Yeah, well, there are people who have different points of view on climate change. 

JAMES O'BRIEN (interrupting): Thought we were talking about empirical data a minute ago! 

TED MALLOCH: We are! But there are about 10%, I'm told, of hard scientists who have some questions about some of that data. 

JAMES O'BRIEN: Of course. Let me just draw the conversation out, if I may, and look at whether or not you feel, as somebody who clearly Donald Trump holds in high regard, that we are in some sense - whether you're worried about it, like Simon Schama, or whether you're not, like you - at a pivotal point in Western history? 

TED MALLOCH: I think we are at a turn in Western history. Obviously we have had a change from one regime to another regime, so you have that. But you also have a more national-orientated and more populist-orientated political caste coming into play, and that's not just in the United States. It's in many countries around the world. So if that's the case then maybe a new order is beginning to appear. 

JAMES O'BRIEN: Nationalist, populist, they are not new ideas, are they? 

TED MALLOCH: Well, in this form, this time, yes. Frankly, are there any new ideas since Plato? We could have that debate. 

JAMES O'BRIEN (interrupting): But we're not. Nationalism and populism rarely lead to harmony. 

TED MALLOCH: Lead to harmony? Well, there are different kinds of nationalism, different kinds of populism. 

SIMON SCHAMA  (interrupting): Well, 'America first', you know, let's take that slogan. It takes a jaw-dropping ignorance of history...

TED MALLOCH (interrupting):  So do you know who used the term first? 

SIMON SCHAMA: ...if you know your history...Pardon?

TED MALLOCH (interrupting):  Do you know who used the term first? 

SIMON SCHAMA: Well, it was....Wilson? 

TED MALLOCH: Woodrow Wilson!

SIMON SCHAMA: Fine. I know. But it was reprehensible when Wilson used it...

TED MALLOCH (interrupting): Ah, I see. 

SIMON SCHAMA (crosstalk): It was unbelievably reprehensible...

TED MALLOCH (crosstalk): Maybe when Lindbergh used it it was more reprehensible.

SIMON SCHAMA (crosstalk): And how! Lindbergh was an appeaser. Lindbergh was soft on the Nazis. It is an irony that Trump has moved Churchill back into his office, who would have detested and did detest everything about the slogan and what 'America first' stood for. 

TED MALLOCH: But he nonetheless needed America to help save Britain at a certain point in time. But Trump is probably not intellectually connected with that wonderful litany we've just talked about in terms of intellectual history...

JAMES O'BRIEN (interrupting): What is he intellectually interested in?

TED MALLOCH: He is interested in, clearly literally, putting America first, re-establishing America's place in the world, America's economy. That is the thing to underscore. He really got elected on a platform that said the middle class has suffered for at least 15 years. So it's not just the last eight years. But it has suffered and it needs to come back...

SIMON SCHAMA  (interrupting): So why's he proposing a tax cut that will benefit, hugely and disproportionately, the top 1%? 

TED MALLOCH: You know about supply-side economics, it's worked before. 

SIMON SCHAMA  (interrupting): No, it hasn't worked before. We could have an argument about that.

TED MALLOCH: I'm an economist. It's worked before. It worked for John Kennedy, it worked for Ronald Reagan and it could work this time. In four years we could have a balanced budget under the best circumstances. 

SIMON SCHAMA: We had a balanced budget under Bill Clinton actually...

TED MALLOCH (interrupting): Newt Gingrich was the head of the Congress and they did it together, if you recall. 

JAMES O'BRIEN: I'm interested in the distinction between 'literally' and 'seriously'. It has been a recurring theme in the programme. You taken seriously, but you don't take him literally. You have always taken him literally? 

TED MALLOCH: No. I think you could take him either way and people obviously have in this very campaign. 

JAMES O'BRIEN (interrupting): But he's President now, he is not campaigning. 

TED MALLOCH: That's true. There should be some difference, you know. When you're president you step up your game...

JAMES O'BRIEN (interrupting): Have you seen any yet? Have you seen any yet? 

TED MALLOCH: Well, In five days, I think we are beginning to... I actually think we saw some of it today, in the meeting and the summit with Theresa May. 

JAMES O'BRIEN: Ted Malloch, thank you. Simon Schama, are you seeing any cause for cautious optimism?
SIMON SCHAMA: No.

JAMES O'BRIEN: Or a dilution of your pessimism? 

SIMON SCHAMA: No.

JAMES O'BRIEN: Ted Malloch, Simon Schama, thank you very much indeed. 

Simon Schama, actually

I watched the Munk debate, which is featured in Douglas Murray’s piece in the Spectator  entitled 

“No, Simon Schama, people worried about gang rape and FGM aren’t ‘obsessed with sex’”

It was an interesting debate with some fine highlights, what with Nigel Farage and Mark Steyn on the one side and Simon Schama and Louise Arbour (whom I was not familiar with) on the other.

It’s the immigration thing, and they stuck to the topic. Oddly enough, Rod Liddle crops up again in this piece from last year by Douglas Murray in which he clearly expresses his views on Simon Schama.

Rod Liddle must be like a bus. Nothing for ages, then several come along all at once.  Maybe I should do a poetic riff about that and submit it to the BBC. 

On QT, Simon Schama had called Rod 'a hack' in a most dismissive fashion (though he steered clear of the food particles) and now Douglas was hoping he’d have ‘his arse handed to him on a plate’ by Mark Steyn in this debate. 

In fact I didn’t think the two sides were all that far apart. They seemed to be talking about two separate things. A) Naturally occurring immigration in general, which is beneficial to the ‘host culture’, and B) Mass, unmonitored immigration which is detrimental to it. 

If they’d clarified that there is a distinction between gradual, culturally enriching immigration and a sudden, overwhelming invasion of culturally alien refugees and economic migrants  in the first place, it might have been a shorter debate.

The most remarkable moment (for me) came when Simon Schama asked, rhetorically, if there was anything within Islam that causes the problems we’re seeing in Cologne and Sweden etc.

  

His mannerisms were bad enough, and his habit of saying the word “actually” every few seconds was weirdly reminiscent of our friend Abdel Bari Atwan.

“It’s an appalling slander to the Muslim religion to imply, actually, that if you’ve got a Muslim immigrant that he’s bound to commit a  sexual crime sooner or later. That seems to me to be a monstrous and grotesque falsehood about Muslim communities that have been settled for a long time...”

That’s the kind of twisting of reality that we’re accustomed to. But when he went on to say:

“What is it about Islam that you’re saying that actually is about actually Islam that is designed to make men brutal animals?”

That could have opened up a very interesting strand of the discussion, but not on this occasion. 

That brings me to the first of two programmes on radio 4 about Deobandi Muslims in the UK. They’re being ‘investigated’ by Owen Bennett-Jones. 

This episode concentrated on the isolationist principle of this movement, and it looks as though Owen B-J is heading towards re-evaluating the current concept that the Deobandis are ‘moderate’.

The Deobandis certainly seem to have some extreme ideas and a genuine fear of letting their young people be corrupted by our debauchery and beastliness. 

Owen Bennett-Jones

Many years ago, before the carcinogenic properties of cigarette smoking were officially recognised, other negative implications of the habit included an implied permissiveness and possible sexual promiscuity on the part of the smoker.  Long cigarette holders; naughty, sophisticated and seductive. 

Never mind the cough. Parents would impose an outright ban on their children taking up fags on pain of disinheritance or the threat of a good whipping. More progressive parents might invite their offspring to have a puff, in the hope that it would make them cough, hopefully vomit, and thus put them off the habit for life.

Risky. It took a long time for the smoking fashion to subside, and cost many lives in the meantime. But it seems to have more or less come right in the end..

There was a similarly risky theory I once read in a 60s or 70s Dr. Spock manual on child rearing. A child knows what’s good for it, said the good doc, therefore fussy and faddy eaters would be perfectly fine if left entirely to their own devices. The infant’s body would tell it what it needs. All well and good if you're a native of some godforsaken jungle or if you live amongst the Kalahari Bushmen miles away from civilisation, but if you’re surrounded by junk food and sweet stuff, what hope is there of a good outcome? Next to nil, I think; so not worth the risk.

where did we go wrong

Something similar seems to be behind the isolationist practices of the Deobandis. Keep them on the straight and narrow, away from the Kafir’s debauchery and everything will be ok. If they let their children taste a speck of our over-indulgent, ungodly lifestyle, they’ll be hooked. Hooked and lost. You can almost understand it. But why, one must wonder, do they even want to live amongst such temptation?

Which brings me back to Simon Schama’s question. Yes, there really is something within Islam that makes some men into brutal animals. It’s a tinder-box combination of sexual repression and the concept of the superior/inferior relationship between the Muslim and the nonMuslim.

Isn’t it odd how gay men can have such a blinkered view of a cult that openly despises them?

Shame for Schama

A couple of says ago I read this in the Times. It’s behind a pay-wall, so I thought I’d bring it to you for fun.

Simon Schama struggles to put good spin on Jews’ story.  (£)

“Simon Schama has revealed that despite attempting to accentuate the positive in telling the story of the Jewish people, the continual rearing of anti-semitism keeps forcing him back to the “death star of the Holocaust”.Schama said that the “gathering drum roll of antisemitism” after the recent Gaza conflict had forced him to reassess his conclusions about the journey of the Jewish people.
The historian, who is late finishing the second volume of ‘The story of the Jews’ said that he previously “ran away from writing about Jewish history because it was so unsettling.”
He said that he had begun the second volume starting with the Spanish Inquisition, with the “ blithe assumption” that he could “put the balance back” because there was “plenty to rejoice and celebrate.”“I wanted to say that there was so much about Jewish history worthy of celebration. That was my hope, to look at the Jewish subject in a qualitatively different way,” he told the Cheltenham Literature Festival.“But then what happened was the gathering hideous drum roll of antisemitism, particularly in Europe.”He cited protests against Israel’s actions in Gaza with chants of “gas to the Jews and caricatures of Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister resurrecting the “blood libel”.
“There has been a toxic antisemitism where criticism of Israel, which is legitimate - I do it myself - has leaked out and morphed into a much more dangerous, vitriolic and loathsome attack on Jews across the world for just being Jews.“We have seen it here. The Sainsbury’s fiasco in removing all kosher food, the collective ban on anything that receives subsidies from the Israeli government.”
He said it had made him think again about the “parameters of the book.”

I’m not certain what Simon Schama is saying here. Is he saying that he’s afraid to criticise Israel, or report any Jewish-related issues negatively because it will ‘give succour’ to Israel’s enemies, and he’s wondering where that will end?  Or what? 

If he is, then that hypothesis contains its own suitcase-full of negative baggage, which could be used as evidence and held against the Jews, if used later in a future Kafkaesque court of ‘the Jews versus the world’.

If he’s merely saying he’s afraid of making himself unpopular by writing nice things about Jews, then that’s  quite bad too. I really don’t know what to make of it, but then it’s only a newspaper report and we know how accurate they are.

It’s not so much “Israel’s actions in Gaza”. More to the point, it’s how the BBC and the media reports Israel’s actions in Gaza.

Would the public’s black and white attitude towards Israel/Palestine and its white and black attitude to Islamic State (so-called) and its ilk still be the same if, say, hordes of reporters flooded in to other Islamist conflicts to film the dead and injured as they always invariably do on behalf of the Palestinians? That is if they didn’t have to risk losing their lives in the process.

Start the Week thread

This just in from Is the BBC biased?'s sour, right-wing radio reviewer....

This morning's Start the Week started a new season, and got off to a fine, arty start.

It featured posh, profound, populist, progressive British Museum director Neil MacGregor plugging his new Radio 4 series [accompanied by British Museum exhibition] on German history (as seen through its artifacts); Jamaican poet Kei Miller plugging his new book The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion; oh-so-contemporary artist Jeremy Deller plugging his new exhibition in Margate; and happy-to-be-provocative novelist Hilary Mantel plugging her new collection of short stories The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher.

As you may be aware, Hilary Mantel's title story has provoked a good deal of controversy. Lord Bell has called for her to be investigated by the police for imagining the assassination of his friend, Lady Thatcher, and various Conservative MPs have denounced her for her 'bad taste'. The Daily Telegraph refused to publish it. (The Guardian duly stepped in).

Presenter Tom Sutcliffe (of the Guardian) asked her about those charges - just one question, worded in a way that showed he didn't reckon much to them - and she then dismissed them, to general laughter. 

Tom's own take was perhaps also reflected in the preceding question. This asked if, in imagining the assassination of Margaret Thatcher, Hilary was actually giving expression to a "collective fantasy"...to which I felt the need to add the hashtag #notinmynameTom. 

Incidentally, for fans of The Twitter, Tom also retwittered this today:

Can someone explain to the Mantel-haters the difference between truth and fiction, maybe using plastic cows like Father Ted did with Dougal.
— Jonathan Coe (@jcoescrittore) September 22, 2014

Indeed, and I couldn't agree more.

I'm glad Tom believes that too as I've heard a very strong rumour that Rod Liddle's next book is a collection of short stories called The Gruesome Murder of Tom Sutcliffe, whose title story imagines the Round the Britain Quiz/Saturday Review/Start the Week host being graphically 'sliced and diced', to general amusement and acclaim, by Radio 4 listeners who can't stand him and what they see as his elitist metropolitan liberal views. (I've already pre-ordered my copy on Amazon).

Tom also admired something by the artist Jeremy Deller's on YouTube. I forget what. 

Jeremy, you will be glad to hear, has now imagined St. Helier, Jersey being accidentally burned down in 2017 during a protest there by non-Jersey people against the island's tax/tax haven policies. This is not to be taken seriously of course (of course). It's contemporary art, plastic cows. 

The Jamaican poet Kei Miller had some very sharp things to say about contemporary Jamaican society....er....about wicked dead whiteys and what they'd gotten up to in Jamaica. (Actually, when I say "very sharp" I mean 'very predictable, but expressed poetically and with much talk of 'multiplicity''). He had Tom, Hilary & Co. duly bending their white knees and tugging their apologetic forelocks. Elsewhere he was agreeably poetic, sounding profound even when you suspect he wasn't actually saying anything profound at all. 

Poor Neil MacGregor, though he got to go first, got far too little time. 

His programme and exhibition sounds interesting. The discussion about it on this edition of Start the Week, however, has been outclassed by a truly superb interview with Mr MacGregor by Simon Schama in the Financial Times, which you should (I think) be able to read for free. 

Here's a brief flavour of it:

There is a point in the exhibition, he says, from which, in one direction, the visitor will be looking at the beautiful portrait of Goethe by Tischbein – with the great man, a slouch hat on his head, recumbent in the warm light of an Italian landscape, the epitome of humanely learned Germany – while the other direction takes the eye to that Buchenwald inscription. In the Buchenwald essay MacGregor himself raises the awful, essential question of how one kind of Germany turned into the other. But he doesn’t offer an answer: “I don’t understand it myself,” is all he says.

His humility is moving but, all the same, there are ways to try. The Holocaust was made possible precisely because earlier figures who had shaped German culture had dehumanised the Jews and made them objects of murderous hatred. MacGregor wants to present Luther as the father of the German language, and so he was. But what he also fathered, all the more potently for that status, was an obsessive anti-semitism which described the Jews as “full of devil’s feces which they wallow in like swine”. “If they could they would kill us all,” he raved, proposing in On the Jews and their Lies a programme to burn their synagogues and raze their houses, so as to dispose of the “poisonous envenomed worms” that they were.

Luther’s anti-semitism is not in this show. But its illuminations are no less deep for being less relentlessly grim. The Iron Cross, often taken to be the emblem of Prussian militarism, was, he reminds us, invented in a moment of reformist egalitarianism, following the traumatic defeat and humiliation by Napoleon in 1806. Its consequence was to trigger a period of reform. The Cross was iron, not of a precious metal, because it was the first decoration that could be awarded to all ranks. Sanctioned by King Friedrich Wilhelm III, it became the symbol of a new, comradely patriotism.

Schama and the BBC

Further to my observations about Simon Schama’s final episode of The Story of the Jews, I would just like to add a couple of excerpts from Haaretz, the left-leaning Israeli newspaper the BBC prefers to go to for their negative Israel-related news and stories.

“Schama relishes the thought that his high-profile series, which has received a huge deal of attention and healthy viewing ratings, has done something to improve the BBC’s image among his fellow-Jews. “They have been very good to me,” he says of the network that made him a household name in Britain, beginning in 1995, when it broadcast its first series based on a Schama book, “Landscape and Memory,” “and besides, this was their idea. They came to me with it and I realized it was really the time to do it. I hadn’t worked on Jewish history for decades, since my book on the Rothschilds [published in 1978]. I had that sense that I’m an old geezer and I had to give it a go. Jewish history is just so out there in front of the world and full of anxieties of anti-Semitism and the history of the Israeli-Arab conflict.”

This says to me that Schama sees himself as a BBC insider, and as such he wishes his fellow Jews to be more sympathetic to the BBC. “Look,” he’s saying, “It was their idea!”  

“You speak with American Jews and they all think it’s 1930s Berlin here, but it’s not true at all,” says Schama who lives and lectures most of the year in New York, but shares the view that British Jews have rarely, if ever, had it better. “Sure, there are sometimes raw sparks when it comes to Palestinian issues. You still have the old Arabists in the Foreign Office, and the ultra-left, but the default mode in the big center of Britain is not Judeophobic at all. In fact it’s quite Jew-friendly.”

That says to me that he may be a BBC insider, but he’s not really a UK insider. He’s forgotten what the BBC is really like vis-à-vis Israel and the Jews, he doesn’t really know what impression the BBC has been giving the UK audience over recent years; he’s missed all those slanted news stories and is unaware of the way the BBC has been desperately appeasing the ever growing demands of the Israel-bashers, anti-Zionists and Jew-haters.

I have met a number of individuals who have visited Israel on work related missions. A potter who had been on a course there said he disliked Israel as it was “too militarised.” He was not familiar with the politics and had been ‘educated and informed’ by the BBC. I thought that was a bit like saying they didn’t like seeing the lions at the zoo because they were too caged. He didn’t realise that if it wasn’t for said ‘militarisation’ he wouldn’t have been able to go about his course in relative safely.

Simon Schama did acknowledge the ‘needs must’ aspect of Israel’s security measures, but he seemed to play down the reasons behind them. It’s as if his idealism had blinkered him, willfully.  

The Story of the Jews (Part 5)

The BBC Two continuity announcer introducing last night's final episode of Simon Schama's The Story of the Jews described it as "a very personal journey".

The four earlier episodes were always prefaced by the word "personal", but this was the first time the phrase "very personal" had been used. Why?

Well, perhaps because this was the episode the BBC most wanted to keep itself at arm's length from and the use of the words "very personal" made it very clear that 'THIS IS SIMON SCHAMA'S VIEW, NOT THE BBC'S!!'

Sadly, a personal take on the history of the modern state of Israel was always likely to be contentious. Pro-Palestinian activists had complained about the series even before it began, following Simon Schama's description of himself as a Zionist. Others would be watching intently to see if Simon was critical of current Israeli government policies. I suspect we all brought our own 'very personal' views to bear on this programme.

What we got was most definitely a very personal view: The view of a left-wing Zionist, passionately pro-Israel (calling the country "a miracle") but anxious and regretful about recent trends in the country - especially (inevitably) settlements and the security barrier - and deeply nostalgic for the idealistic socialism of Israel's kibbutzim.

"I've always thought that Israel is the consummation of some of the highest ethical values of Jewish traditional history, but creating a place of safety and defending it has sometimes challenged those same ethics and values". 

It was also 'very personal' though in its interweaving of Simon Schama's own life experiences with the history he was telling, from his birth in 1945 to his work experience on a kibbutz, etc.

The programme opened though by allowing us all to experience the sirens and silence of that day in Spring, each year, when Israel halts to mark the Holocaust - over one-and-a-half remarkable minutes of lump-in-the-throat TV.

As for the country itself,

"Today around half the Jews in the world live here in Israel. 6 million people. 6 million defeats for the Nazi programme of total extermination."

Simon Schama then told us about Szmul Zygielbojm, a Polish Jew who had escaped from the Warsaw ghetto who tried in vain to rouse the Allied Powers to come to the rescue of the Jews of Nazi-occupied Europe. Broadcasting on the BBC, he said, "It would be a crime and a disgrace to go on living, to belong to the human race, unless immediate action is taken to stop the greatest crime ever known to human history." Soon after, his wife and son were killed during the crushing of the Warsaw uprising. At the same time the Allied Powers were convening to discuss the plight of refugees. The words 'Jew' and 'Jewish' were banned from the proceedings, and the Allies decided to do nothing. Zygielbojm committed suicide in protest at their indifference soon after.

"The Holocaust put paid to the idea that when, facing annihilation, the Jews had any reason to expect much in the way of protection, succour or asylum from anyone. So it was not just what the Nazis did to the Jews. It was what everyone else failed to do that made the moral case for Israel."

After the war, "a desperate exodus from the blood-lands of central Europe, where two-thirds of Jews had been wiped out" made the perilous journey to the coast of British-mandate Palestine. 

"There was no returning to that continent of phantoms. Some who tried to go back to what had been their homes in Poland and Romania were harassed, assaulted, sometimes even killed."

A judicious telling of the history of the run-up to the re-birth of the State of Israel followed, moving from the arrival of the Holocaust survivors and back to the Chaim Weizmann and the Balfour declaration, through the bitter inter-communal conflicts in the interwar years and onto David Ben-Gurion, pausing to reflect on a 1919 letter from Prince Faisal (later King Faisal) of Iraq, leader of the Arab Revolt, to a leading American Zionist:

"Dear Mr Frankfurter, I want to take this opportunity of my first contact with American Zionists to tell you what I've often been able to say to Dr Weizmann in Arabia and Europe. We feel the Arabs and Jews are cousins in race and suffered similar oppressions at the hands of powers stronger than themselves. We Arabs, especially the educated among us, look with the deepest sympathy on the Zionist movement. We will wish the Jews a most hearty welcome home."

"This is the document of what might have been," said Simon Schama, "and, you know, what might still be."

A 'very personal' narrative on two of the main strands in Israeli politics took shape as the programme proceeded.

On one side (the side Simon doesn't like) stand the "intransigent," security-minded nationalists, personified by the figure of Ze'ev Jabotinsky [whose ideas eventually, long after his death, flowed into Likud] - the side of the settler who Simon met [and clearly felt uncomfortable with] later in the programme, the side of those who support the security barrier.

On the other side (the side Simon likes) stand the the left-leaning, secular Zionists like David Ben-Gurion, the kibbutzim, and the liberal novelist he met [and clearly felt comfortable with] later in the programme.

To the accompaniment of poignant music, Simon Schama made his feelings clear:

"There has been a dramatic shift in Israel over the past decades. The secular, outward-looking Israel I remember from my days in [a kibbutz] has been eclipsed by one that insists - in the name of religion, nationalism or security - on separation and difference."

Jabotinsky's essay Iron Wall and Simon Schama's expressions of distaste for his ideas were accompanied by images of the present security barrier, and when Simon arrived at the security barrier itself, he merged his distaste for Jabotinsky with his distaste for the barrier. He did observe, however: 

"I want to say that nobody, including me, ultimately has the moral right to say 'That shouldn't have happened. The wall shouldn't have happened.' Before the wall happened hundreds of people were dying every year from terrorist attacks, after the wall happened, very, very few."

There's much more to say about about this episode, but I'll just mention a few more things and ask you to watch it for yourselves and discover all the rest.

Yes, we heard from an Arab refugee (Yacoub Odeh) from the time of independence,  but - unlike in nearly all other BBC programmes - he was powerfully balanced by the testimony of a Jewish refugee (Levana Zamir) from the Arab world.

"But there are other memories, and other catastrophes, dating to these same fateful years. Hundreds of thousands of Jews living in Muslim countries for centuries discovered suddenly their home was no longer their home."

The deeply-rooted Alexandrian Jewish community, with its Shamas, was the example Simon Schama used. After 1947 came "assaults, riots, murders, arrests, show trials, public hangings, expropriations, expulsions."

"The same story was repeated across the Muslim world, not just in Egypt, but in Iraq, Yemen, Syria and Lebanon, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya. At least 700,000 Jews left or were expelled, many reduced to destitution, taking with them only what they could carry. Some went to America, others - in the North African world - to France, Iraqis to Britain, but many came to Israel, most of them Zionists by necessity rather than chose. The exodus of Jews from Muslim lands almost doubled the population of Israel in just a few years - the first but not the last demographic tidal wave to engulf this tiny country.

"In the decades that followed millions more would come when they could, from places as far apart as India, East Africa, the Caucasus and Russia. This was a country for Jews, but it also became one of the most diverse in the whole world." 

This final episode was as strong as any of the other episodes in this wonderful series, but it was also the most thought-provoking, and the most challenging. Many will, perhaps, strongly disagree with parts of it. 

Part of the challenge stems from that 'very personal' standpoint of Simon Schama. It's a 'very personal' standpoint which, I suspect, tallies quite closely with that of many at the BBC - when it comes to the issues of Jewish settlements and the security barrier. To have had a 'personal view history' from someone who would come out in support of Jewish settlements and the security barrier is still hard to imagine from the BBC; indeed, it's close to being unthinkable (which surely isn't as it should be, is it?)

Still, the whole series was a powerful and sustained argument for the necessity of the State of Israel, a moral vindication of the country's existence, a robust justification of Zionism. And that's something you don't usually get from the BBC. 

So thank you Simon Schama.

The Story of the Jews (Part 4)

Chagall, Russian Wedding

Simon Schama's The Story of Jews is, beyond a shadow of a doubt, one of the best things the BBC has done in years.

A good deal of the credit for that goes to Simon Schama himself. As a story-telling historian, few can match him. 

This week's episode, Over the Rainbow, took us from Eastern Europe to the United States and back again - from the Pale of Settlement to The Wizard of Oz, and then (leaving a lump in this viewer's throat) to a village in Nazi-occupied Lithuania - homeland of Simon Schama's own family, on his mother's side. Just one Jewish survivor lives there now, surrounded by his own carvings evoking the lost world of Lithuania's Jews. 

The early stages of the programme vividly conveyed the extraordinary variety and vitality of Jewish life in the Russian Empire (at that time including Lithuania, of course) - despite the oppressive restrictions imposed upon the Jews who lived here and the extraordinarily vicious pogroms periodically flung against them. Simon Schama's enthusiasm for this vibrant and diverse culture was infectious, and he fairly threw himself into his descriptions of it.

It was out of this rich culture that much of the best of American 20th Century popular culture sprang, as large numbers of Jews fled the increasingly savage anti-Semitism of Europe's east for the chance of a better, freer life in the United States of America, and brought the many strains of their culture with them, transplanting and transforming them, giving us many of the crowning glories of Tin Pan Alley (Irving Berlin, the Gershwins, etc) and leading and shaping the creation of Hollywood.

The programme opened in the ruins of Zvonárska Synagogue in Košice, Slovakia [above], where the sense of desolation and absence was tempered somewhat by "the rainbows coming through the [stained] glass." "Out of the dust burst the colours", said Simon. And so did the memories, as he imagined the former congregation gathered there. In the spring of 1944, all 15,700 Jews in Košice were sent to their deaths in Auschwitz, but "this wasn't a place that sat passively waiting for its death sentence."

And it was that final thought which spurred the first part of the programme, as Simon Schama conjured up the "thriving, confident, noisy" Jewish life which existed right across Eastern Europe before the Holocaust - "a world that lives and breaths, and dances and sings". And the switch of focus to America was then viewed in this light:

"That this world somehow flourished despite all the pounding storms that would come its way is an escape act so epic that it counts as one of histories all-time redeeming miracles. Even when systematic annihilation overwhelmed the people the world that had nourished them survived. This is the story about how this unique culture of faith and ferment, of poetry and music, of the search for deliverance from brutality and oppression did not get pulverised by the hammer of history. It just changed its address." 

The story of the Jews living in the lands ruled by Tsarist Russia is, perhaps, less familiar to us in the West - or at least it is to me - so I was particularly struck by this part of the programme.

Eastern Europe used to be the home to over 5 million Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazi Jews, the largest population of Jews in the world. They came from France and Germany, fleeing persecution, around the 13th century, and settled in the huge, tolerant Polish-Lithuanian Kingdom. The Polish kings allowed the Jews to prosper, using them to collect their taxes. The carve-up of Poland at the end of the 18th Century saw most of the Jews falling under Russian rule. Russian merchants took against this new competition, and the Russian government expelled the Jews from all their main cities and restricted them to the Pale of Settlement.

We heard what life was life in the shtetls (little towns) of the Pale, and it was often harsh. Jews were forbidden from the cities, the professions and the universities and not allowed to own land, and Jewish boys as young as twelve were forcibly conscripted into the Russian army for up to 25 years.

Yet they formed real, solid communities, looking inward, out of necessity, towards the treasures of their own culture, they did a remarkable range of jobs and they certainly knew how to celebrate a wedding!

We heard of the emergence of Hasidic Judaism, with its ecstatic, joyous mysticism [an especially fascinating section of the programme], and of Odessa, the city where Jews, modern Jews, who found the shtetls too claustrophobic, could find a place. Among them Leon Pinsker, whose proto-Zionist pamphlet Auto-Emancipation urged the Jews towards independence and national consciousness, and mooted a Jewish homeland - possibly in the Holy Land.

That pamphlet was published in the year following the assassination of Tsar Alexander II by the left-wing terrorist group The People's Will. One of the plotters was a Jewish girl, and within a month a tidal wave of pogroms (from the Russian word meaning 'destroy') began across the Pale of Settlement. These waves kept on coming, culminating in the massacres of 1903-1905 - massacres so extreme in their violence that many Jewish intellectuals despaired of ever obtaining equal rights in Tsarist Russia. They also noted that non-Jewish leftists didn't rush to their side. Some, including Pinsker, founded Hovevei Zion (The Lovers of Zion) in response - the first Jewish nationalist organisation.

It was at this point that things got a little confusing (for me) as Simon Schama's narrative would, I suspect, lead many viewers to assume to the organisations that comprised Hovevei Zion sprang up after 1905. Similarly, those viewers might also have assumed, from the way Simon described it, that Auto-Emancipation was published after the latest pogroms in Odessa (also around 1905). As far as I'm aware though (as I wrote earlier), Auto-Emancipation was published in 1882, just after the 1881 pogrom in Odessa, and Hovevei Zion societies first arose at that time too.

This was the period when many of the Jews of the Pale decided enough was enough, and began leaving for 'the Golden sanctuary', America.

They joined an earlier wave of Jewish emigration to the United States, dating from the 1850s, when Jews from Germany arrived in the country and began working their way up, building railroads and great businesses, becoming mayors of cities, achieving the dream. Their extraordinary success was illustrated by the magnificent Temple Emanu-El of uptown New York.

Most of the new wave of Jewish immigrants, though, ended up in the "mega-shtetl" of New York's Lower East Side. "Of the 2.5 million Jews landing in America between the 1880s and the 1920s, more than 60% of them began their new lives here, stuffed into a patch of land just one-and-a-half miles square. This lot were deeply different from the uptown Jews of Temple Emanu-El - proletarian, drenched in old world superstitions or radical politics and - worst of all - Yiddish! And, in the many ways, the New World was just a high-rise version of the old world they'd left behind."

It was this world to which Simon Schama devoted the next portion of the programme - especially the fusion of shtetl idealism and popular art - focusing on Yip Harburg, the left-wing lyricist behind that "anthem of the Great Depression", Buddy, can you spare a dime? (which may have helped Franklin D. Roosevelt defeat Herbert Hoover in 1933) - its tune based on a Jewish lullaby.

"What America had taught the Jews is the dream that they could be both Jewish and part of the wider culture in which they lived - a dream that was impossible in the old world of Russia - did actually have a chance of working out."

And it was to the dream-world of Hollywood - most of whose great studios were owned by the boys of self-made Jews - that Simon Schama took us next - and Yip Harburg too.

Harburg wrote the words for "the song that would come to define the Golden Age of Hollywood" - Somewhere Over the Rainbow from The Wizard of Oz ("this universal song of hope"). The song ended up in the film almost by accident, having failed to appear in the 'book' and striking the studio as unsuitable to be sung by the character of a young girl, but getting in because of Harburg and composer Harold Arlen's enthusiasm for it.

Then came the lump in the throat moment.

"I wish the story could end there," said Simon Schama, "with the collective success of America's Jews and the dream-world of Oz, but it didn't. Remember the date of that triumphant night at the Oscars [for Harburg and Arlen]. 1940."

It was to Plungė in Northern Lithuania we were taken, and to the fate of the three million Jews who had stayed behind. There was Jakovas Bunka, the last Jew in Plungė and his carvings of Jewish figures from before the Holocaust, and his memories. In 1941 the shtetl of Plungė was emptied of Jews in the most unspeakably brutal manner imaginable. Unspeakable? Well, Simon said, "As the grandchild of a Lithuanian Jewish family, I need to tell you what happened."

Which he did. Heartbreaking. You must watch it for yourselves - and for Simon Schama's closing words.

*******

Next week will be the final episode, contending with the Holocaust itself and the State of Israel.

I will be watching.