Another Country

I saw this film on an old DVD that had been given away free with some Sunday 'paper. I just managed to save it from the recycling bag.

I must say, I hadn't expected much, but it was still bitterly disappointing. It's beautifully set and, up to a point, quite attractively cast. Colin Firth, it turns out, was marvellous even when he was cute. Rupert Everett, similarly, turns out always to have been awful. But there's Guy of Gisburne from Robin of Sherwood as well, smouldering away in the background looking blond and posh and, well, just smouldering. And there's even a young Cary Elwes - not even bothering to act, but just being posh and cute and lovely and sweet and smiling oh-so-nicely and... Aaah!

And I suppose the rest of the film could so easily have been like that - a sort of Sound of Music with cricket. And one can feel that it's what the filmmakers really wanted to do. But the convention by the 1980s was that beautiful blond young men were always evil, beautiful old schools were evil, the military and the British Empire were always evil - and buggery was a beautiful, liberating thing.

Oh, fuck it! It's moral drivel from beginning to end. It's a film about communists in England at a time when England already knew about the horrors of Lenin and Trotsky. What makes it worse is that it was made at a time just when the whole gruesome Soviet experiment was already starting to fall apart. (Having said that, the BBC made The Curse of Fenric virtually as the Berlin Wall was tumbling. For failing to gauge the mood of the times, no one has ever beaten the British media-Establishment - and that, in some ways, is a comforting thought.)

The film's moral inadequacy has an inevitable knock-on effect on its characters. The "good", left-wing characters are almost all drawn hideously badly. Everett is supposed to be a sympathetic gay character but he's not: he's the most annoying, snivelling excuse for a gay stereotype ever seen. And Firth is a splendidly enjoyable prick, but he never grows or develops. Just to expand on that unfortunate metaphor, his character remains limp throughout: he starts out as a prick and carries on as a prick all the way until the end - when he's still a prick; and there's never any clue as to why he's a prick. He's just a prick. And a Marxist prick at that!

The goodies are of course gays in denial and sadists and militarists and (worst of all!) praying Christians. Again, the inadequacy of the writing is such that we don't even find out whether they're supposed to be hypocrites or fanatics. All we're supposed to take away (or rather, because this is a film that was really only ever playing to the gallery, it's a prejudice that we're supposed to take to it) is that Christianity and the military are yucky and nasty. And that's all there is to it.

The most interesting characters in the film are Fowler - who is played by far and away the most handsome young hunk on display - and his favourite fag. The fag himself is a standard-issue, handsome little prepubescent love-muffin. But he is the only character towards whom anyone in the film shows any genuine affection or tenderness, and Fowler is the one character who shows it. (It's just one line: 'All right, Tomkins! You've done a decent job on my boots.' or some such.) But then a film that really explored the human condition, and tackled the emotional relationships - hero worship vs. emerging paternal fondness - between young men and younger boys, in school or out, would have been unthinkable in pro-Marxist 1980s Britain.

It would be even more unthinkable now.

Jimmy Sime, 'Toffs and Toughs' (1937)

There's nothing new about fake news, or indeed political disinformation in the mainstream media.

Leaving aside that nowadays the boys on the right would be just as likely to be beaten up for being "posh" (not to mention English and white) as the boys on the left would have been back then, the photograph is hopelessly posed and the title itself is both misleading and probably no older than 2004.

In fact the boys on the right are not "toughs" but pupils at a local Church of England school. They'd taken the day off school for a trip to the dentist and then decided to earn some easy money by helping out at the Eton-Harrow cricket match that was taking place at Lord's that afternoon. Sime has clearly, er, solicited their aid for his photograph (presumably for a small fee). And given that nice young Anglican boys would generally have been discouraged from walking around with their hands in their pockets, he's presumably also instructed them to adopt the poses their holding - apparently to make them look as if they're quietly masturbating. The two Harrovian boys though just happened to be standing at the gate at the time waiting to be collected by one of their parents, and by all accounts they were persuaded to pose for the camera with neither their parents' consent nor any financial emolument.

The picture is of course well known in England, and a good example of indigenous English leftist propaganda - that is to say the lies we like to tell ourselves. It was first published in the 10th July 1937 edition of the News Chronicle, a leftist newspaper that later merged with The Daily Mail (which of course by modern standards isn't even considered leftist). The screechy agitprop caption read 'Every picture tells a story'.

The real "story" of the photograph - of the tragic fates of the two "toff" boys and of the long, happy, normal lives of the "toughs" - is now freely available on line thanks to dear old Wikipedia.

Conspiracy Theories: From Jack the Ripper to COVID-19

Watching dear old Christopher Frayling’s 1988 Timewatch documentary about Jack the Ripper (made to commemorate the centenary of the murders and available on Auntie’s iPlayer), my mind inevitably wondered back to the Coronavirus. Because the Ripper’s identity was just as much of a mystery to the Establishment 130 years ago as the nature of the Covid-19 disease is today. And just as both the MSM and “mainstream” politicians nowadays are finding themselves swept up in theories that even if they aren’t “conspiracy theories” are at least outlandish, so the Metropolitan Police of 1888 often had little more to go on than the evidence-free speculations of the general public.

The breakdown in relations between the police and the press of course has its own echoes in the rising number of horror stories in today’s ’papers and social media about unfortunate plods trying and failing to implement the Government’s social distancing and self-isolation regulations. The search for answers about the virus’s origins and spread has (albeit quite rightly!) turned attention to the secret activities of foreigners (i.e. Red China). And sooner or later, there is no doubt, there will be serious questions asked (even if they’re not in practice asked by particularly “serious” people) about why some social and ethnic groups have been affected by the virus worse that others.

And of course over both phenomena has hung the perennial and ultimate horror of death.

The only real contrast between the London of the 1880s and the London of the 2020s is that nowadays there is almost universal and unconditional respect for doctors and for men of “science” generally. But as the economic consequences of the Government’s response start to become apparent, and as some inevitably start to raise questions about the wisdom of implicitly trusting the judgement of latter-day quacks and wizards (because there is, it turns out, more to good government - and indeed preserving lives - than just “protecting the NHS), that too may very well change.

The Nazi Legacy

Not so long ago I remember there was an anti-baldness shampoo advertised on the telly which, like several other products at the time, made a positive virtue of being German. In other words it followed very much in the footsteps of car manufacturers such as Audi and of course Volkswagen (of which of course Audi has been a subsidiary since 1966) in proclaiming loud and clear that its German-ness was a mark of quality. In a country like England, which still has a passion for Holocaust movies and documentaries about the Battle of Britain, this was of course quite remarkable. But just imagine what other products could try the same trick.

Let's start with cars then. Not only was Volkswagen famously Hitler's favourite car manufacturer, but he actually named its most famous model - 'the Beetle'. And whether or not you drive a German car, you're quite likely to be insured by a German car insurance company - namely Allianz, whose director general in the early 1930s Kurt Schmitt went on to become Hitler’s Reich Economics Minister from June 1933 until January 1935*. Schmitt also became a member of both the National Socialist Party and the SS, rising to the rank of Brigadeführer, the equivalent of a one-star general. Eduard Hilgard, a member of the board of Allianz, became head of the Reich Group for Insurance in 1934. He represented the insurance industry in a conference summoned by Hermann Göring after the November Pogrom of 1938. Hilgard reported on the material damages caused during the Kristallnacht Pogrom and the estimated sums insurance companies had to cover.

Of course it was not merely German car manufacturers who invested in the Nazi war machine! Albert Speer himself acknowledged that the Blitzkrieg of 1939 would not have succeeded without the support of General Motors - or, more specifically, its German subsidiary Opel. And of course Ford too supported the Nazis - although his support was ideological and only in their early years. Time magazine though went so far as to make Hitler its Man of the Year for 1938. (The cover was an anti-Hitler cartoon by a German Catholic exile, but the magazine's founder, rather more ambiguously, referred to Hitler as the year's most influential man 'for better or worse'.)

But where better to drive your Nazi car than on a Nazi autobahn - on which, thankfully for the European economy, there is still no speed limit. At least one of Hitler's dreams lives on - even if it is the same as Jeremy Clarkson's! And if you need to refuel, there'll probably be an ExxonMobil, Chevron or BP somewhere along the way - the successor companies of Standard Oil, which was the Nazi war-machine's most important fuel manufacturer.

Not that it's just cars, of course! Various industries found much to be gained by cooperating with the Nazis. During the war years Siemens, who now make the trains I go to work on in the morning, were making switches for military use and even had their own slave labour camp actually inside Auschwitz. The most notorious beneficiary of the Nazi regime though was of course the chemical industry. Kodak and Agfa, who nowadays make cameras, and BASF, who make pesticides, as well as the pharmaceutical companies Sanofi-Aventis and Bayer - whom we have to thank for first producing aspirin - were all members of the German chemical conglomerate I G Farben, whose directors after the War eventually ended up being put on trial for war crimes at Nuremberg.

Nazi culture has in fact survived in various other ways as well. Nobody had heard of Hugo Boss before he was chosen to design those beautiful SS uniforms. Nowadays he's one of the modern fashion world's biggest brands. Ditto IBM, until they helped to compute the numbers of Jews being rounded up during the so-called "Holocaust". The Swedish founder of Ikea too was also a Nazi sympathiser. And Fanta, which is nowadays simply an orange-flavoured version of Coca-Cola, was actually invented by Coca-Cola's German distributor as a wartime alternative to the (famously/notoriously American) soft drink because at the time they couldn't get the ingredients for the Real Thing. The German film company UFA, which distributed such Nazi hits as Triumph of the Will, is still going strong today - though it is now owned (ultimately) by the Nazi publishing giant Bertelsmann, who also own Random House. The Nazi holiday camp Prora has recently been reopened.

So, you can still wear Nazi designer clothes and use a Nazi computer whilst working for a Nazi investment bank. At the end of the day you can return from the office on a Nazi train to a home furnished with Nazi furniture. When you go on holiday you can drive a Nazi car, insured by a Nazi insurance company and fuelled at a Nazi petrol-station by the side of a Nazi road, and you can then stay the night in a Nazi youth hostel. You can even take your holiday snaps using a Nazi camera. If it all gets too much for you then why not take a Nazi painkiller and relax by reading a Nazi book published by a Nazi publishing house or by watching a Nazi film distributed by a Nazi production company - whilst sipping a Nazi soft drink.

So, where's all this headed? Well, in all probability the Euro-sceptics really have been right all along. The "new" Europe will, in fact, end up looking very much like it was always going to - at least from the 1930s onwards. Even such modern and politically correct causes as "ethnic diversity" nowadays have their own Nazi heritage. Many European ethnic minorities are today represented by FUEN, which was originally founded in 1949 to support displaced Germans who had supported Hitler but found themselves on the wrong side of the new borders that had been drawn up by the Allies. A similar organisation is the YEN or Youth of European Nationalities organisation. And if you're a budding young politician who has successfully contributed to the "harmony" of Europe's different peoples and nations then you may even end up being a candidate for the Robert Schuman Prize, which is presented by the Alfred Toepfer foundation, which was itself founded by (you've guessed it!) a German entrepreneur with close ties to the Nazi regime.

UPDATE: And if you fancy some Nazi running kit and training shoes (or at least some trainers made by a company founded by and named after a man who used to make jackboots for the Wehrmacht) then there's always Adidas. That's 'Adi' as in 'Adolf', the Adolf in question being Nazi Party member Adi Dassler (after whom the company was named). His brother Rudolf or 'Rudi' Dassler, who was also a Nazi, went on to found his own footwear manufacturing company, called Ruda - later renamed Puma.

*Schmitt's successor as Economics Minister was Hjalmar Schacht, who had been deputy director of Dresdner Bank. Dresdner Bank was also complicit in the Nazi regime, although since the war it has thrived and prospered, now owning investment bank Kleinwort Benson. Another bank that was useful to the Third Reich was Chase Bank.