I think my relationship with the BBC is finally settling into something quite satisfactory. Having been through the stages of disillusion, mistrust, contempt and loathing I now find that I have reached the point where I now regard the BBC as reasonably reliable reverse indicator.
For example, whenever the BBC presents an event as a spontaneous outburst of public feeling, I immediately turn my mind to the possibility that it is anything but.
A case to consider is this series of nationwide anti-war protests by schoolchildren:
Hundreds of children are among crowds protesting at Westminster.
School children have been played a big part in many demonstrations across the UK while others have staged their own protests at their schools.
Sixth-former Sam Beste, from Fortismere School in north London, has organised many protests against the war.
He is staging a demonstration with dozens of others in Muswell Hilll before heading for Westminster.
In Carlisle, the police were called to a school after hundreds of pupils staged an anti-war demonstration.
There were two separate demonstrations in Belfast with more than 1,000 students and schoolchildren mounting a sit-down protest, blocking the road outside Queen’s University.
In Nottinghamshire, more than 100 pupils walked out of lessons at West Bridgford School to stage a demonstration on a nearby playing field.
In Manchester, about 200 school children joined a big demonstration.
The article makes no specific claims but first impressions would lead one to believe that these pre-pubescent protests are just breaking out everywhere like typhoid. Who knows, maybe they are. I certainly cannot prove anything but, for me, this wave of teenybopper discontent bears all the hallmarks of orchestration. And, if that is so, who are the conductors?
Far be it from me to point the dirty end of the stick at their teachers and lecturers, but it would not be an entirely unreasonable inquiry to make. Just don’t expect anyone at the BBC to make it.
Here’s an answer [www.studentstopwar.org.uk]
Here’s another answer [www.socialistparty.org.uk]
Here’s where you get the information pack [http://www.anticapitalism.org.uk/antiwar/].
Then of course there is this A.N.S.W.E.R.[http://www.internationalanswer.org/]
I’ve certainly seen reports that teachers are urging leniency on war-protesting students (as opposed to less high-minded truants). Not exactly a smoking gun, but a finger in the breeze, maybe.
In my own college days, I remember joining in a student protest in support of a teacher strike. About this time of year, too. Weather was unseasonably warm and sunny, no classes for a week…a kid can develop a serious social conscience fast under those conditions.
Exactly my thought, S. Weasel. What student wouldn’t grab an excuse to get out of school?
lars
I think I should just point out that what the left are doing is carrying on a policy of Revolutionary Defeatism. The idea is to instill defeatism in the minds of imperialists (that’s us) so that the vanguard of the proletariat has an easier time of it come the revolution. It really doesn’t matter who the imperialists (that’s us) are fighting at the time, and whether the left like the other side or not.
This was particularly noticable when we were fighting the Taliban and the left demonstrated against it. Common sense would suggest the left should hate the Taliban for all their woman shooting, homosexual crushing, communist killing ways, but the left had to go for consistancy.
I think that so far the left have been qute succesfull in instilling Revolutionary Defeatism since you see it everywhere once you look for it.
Read the article I linked to above, it is quite informative particularly in relation to the origin of the policy and it’s implementation in contemporary situations (Afganistan and September 11th).
I think this is absolutely vile
Hundreds of peace protesters have staged anti-war demonstrations across the city following the outbreak of war in the Gulf. Organised by the Plymouth Stop the War Coalition, a rally and a ‘die in’ event was held at the Sundial yesterday afternoon, and a protest was also staged at Charles Cross yesterday evening.
The protesters, who included parents and students, maintained that there was ‘absolutely no reason’ why America and Britain had to use force to remove Iraq leader Saddam Hussein from power, and said they felt ‘let down’ by their Government.
Many said as long as the war went on, they would continue to show their disagreement through protests in the city.
Yesterday’s first protest, held at the sundial from 12.30pm, saw about 150 people lie down on the pavement.
While they were on the ground chalk lines were drawn around them to symbolise the after-affects of a bomb attack.
given that
Royal Marines are among eight British troops feared dead in a helicopter crash. The tragedy came as Plymouth commandos and sailors spearheaded a daring charge into Iraq last night in their biggest mission since the Falklands.
As the invasion of Iraq began on a moonless night amid swirling dust storms, hundreds of commandos swept across the border and launched air and seaborne assaults to secure gas and oil fields and vital positions in southern Iraq.
As the operation took place Plymouth-based 3 Commando Brigade suffered the first British casualties of the war when eight British servicemen died alongside four US air crew in a helicopter crash in northern Kuwait.
The main assault saw heroic city troops standing on bows of high-speed landing craft to pluck mines out of the water with grappling hooks. Artillery fire from Plymouth gunners of Citadel-based 29 Commando Royal Artillery thundered through the air, paving the way for hundreds of marines to descend on their targets. Flames hundreds of feet high from burning oil wells shot into the night sky, thickening the air with smoke.
Artillery, mortars and howitzers shook the desert floor, punctuated with sudden bursts of activity from rocket launchers.
And some distance away, far beneath the waves, Plymouth submariners fired the Royal Navy’s first shots in the war, Tomahawk cruise missiles striking command centres in the heart of Baghdad.
At the very least the teachers have let the children go, I only wish they would do the same whenever a child wanted to leave school for any reason regardless of whether they approved of it or not.
I also remember a story about some soldiers who had come back from ‘Nam and went to college. The lecturer in one of their classes ‘casually’ mentioned a walkout in protest over the war. They went up to him at the end of the class and said they were going to be in class during the walkout and as they had paid their tuition he’d better be there too. Of course, most school children wouldn’t dare to do anything like this since they are a captive audience and the teacher can torture them later at his leisure.
Britain is ahead of the U.S. in this sort of mental child molestation, I see. Here we only have teachers assigning students homework: “Write an anti-war letter to the White House.” Never fear, fellow Anglosphereans. I’m sure we’ll catch up with you eventually.
I just wrote about a similar story I saw last night on the Beeb about Iraqi support for Hussein growing, and locals streaming back into Baghdad prior to the bombing starting.
The entire slant of the story was how the war was already beginning to breed a backlash against the UK and US, and how it was going to make the war on terror that much more difficult.
Funny how most of what I have seen in today’s news is about Iraqis happily surrendering and the populace cheering the arrival of coalition forces.
I’m a teacher at a large boys comprehensive school where such an action took place.
Get real. The kids saw this as nothing more than an excuse to bunk off lessons. They read reports in newspapers mainly (many teachers were surprised that that they could read) and through texting and a few pupil web sites. There was no political motive to the kids action. Most of them don’t even know where Iraq is!
A small number of teachers encouraged the ‘right to protest’ but this was probably more to do with the idea of getting a free period or two than any political stance. Some were even hoping that the school would be closed and they could go down the pub.
The highlight of the ‘action’ for many was a ‘march’ to a neighbouring girls school where they mooned outside and encouraged the girls to “get their tits out for our boys”.
Here’s a picture of one of the ‘spontanious’ demonstrations, you can see that they have scottish socialist party signs (on the right), which I guess must have appeared as spontaniously as the demonstration:
Picture from http://freedomandwhisky.blogspot.com
Recently, some public school teachers in the state of Maine berated in classes the children of Yank soldiers for their parents’ work in defeating the Iraqi regime.
Fox News picked up the story from an isolated local Maine TV news station story. And spread it nationwide.
That child abuse by certain Maine public schoolteachers ended abruptly.
Public K-12 education in the US may be mediocre, but it certainly is expensive.
Excellent post, Mr. Carr – and high time that the BBC’s coverage of the Iraq conflict came under critical scrutiny.
Of course, the ‘not in my name’ leitmotif has been maintained since, with all the usual suspects contributing their (sometimes) subtly slanted reports to help grease the protest organisers’ wheels.
This morning’s BBC news online, for example, opened with head-shaking and sighing at the ‘levels of destruction’. It could, just as easily, have opened on the remarkable accuracy with which the allies have attacked Baghdad. The following quote typifies the BBC’s angle:
‘Iraqi officials said 207 civilians had been hurt in the air strikes. A BBC correspondent in Baghdad was told by doctors at a hospital he visited that a young girl and a man were killed in the barrage.’
True, this may have happened, but does it really warrant the prominence it has been given in the Corporation’s report? Does it really deserve to have set the entire tone?
But back to the issue of student protests. By covering these so extensively, the BBC has sought (consciously or unconsciously) to give the impression that they have significance as a representation of what a sizeable number of people think. But if you cover protests, what do you do to cover non-protests? If 500 schoolchildren and students protest in a town of 250,000, how do you report on the 245,500 who stayed at their posts? The BBC doesn’t try. It pleads innocence and objectivity by ‘reporting events’ while knowing full well the effect it is creating. And no – there isn’t a hope in hell that they will start asking questions about the shadowy Leftist organisations which are gnawing away at the societal woodwork, this week using student activity to advance their ragged cause, next week turning to something else.
At some stage there will have to be a reckoning with the BBC, though it is hard to see how such a citadel of the liberal Left can be stormed without government action. Maybe it should be the next target after Iraq?
As a student at the school in carlisle where one of the supposedly “spontaneous” demos took place, I can verify that they were nothing more than an opportunity to bunk off lessons and have a riot, having seen that the weather was nice and that kids in other schools had done it already.
Many of pupils which took part were in fact pro-war or sheep shouting random comments about osama hussein (?!?! the ignorance). Most of the teachers just stood and watched, trying to convince thenselves that it was in fact a “peaceful” protest, since they had no control over the unwielding mob. Needless to say, the little old ladies out shopping were just as frightened as the people in iraq, when their cars were banged and walked over….. those kids are almost as thick as Bush and Blair in my opinion.
As a student at the school in carlisle where one of the supposedly “spontaneous” demos took place, I can verify that they were nothing more than an opportunity to bunk off lessons and have a riot, having seen that the weather was nice and that kids in other schools had done it already.
Many of pupils which took part were in fact pro-war or sheep shouting random comments about osama hussein (?!?! the ignorance). Most of the teachers just stood and watched, trying to convince thenselves that it was in fact a “peaceful” protest, since they had no control over the unwielding mob. Needless to say, the little old ladies out shopping were just as frightened as the people in iraq, when their cars were banged and walked over….. those kids are almost as thick as Bush and Blair in my opinion.