9 February2021 — Media Lens
A Cogitation by David Edwards
The name Arnold Ridley will be familiar to many viewers of ‘Dad’s Army’, one of Britain’s best-loved TV comedies, which ran a long time ago (1968-1977) but is still shown on prime time BBC TV.
Ridley played Private Godfrey, the loveable, most doddery member of a Second World War platoon of elderly Home Guard troops tasked with defending a stretch of the British coast ‘from the Novelty Rock Emporium to Stone’s Amusement Arcade’.
11 December 2013 — Our Kingdom
The Guardian editor being asked if he loves his country highlights how much of a problem the British left has with patriotism. With Scottish and EU questions being posed, this problem is coming to a head.
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12 January 2013 — WSWS
British Labour Party leader Ed Miliband has intensified his party’s promotion of anti-immigrant chauvinism. In two speeches now, Miliband has decried what he terms are uncontrolled levels of <strong class=’StrictlyAutoTagBold’>immigration, while advocating a strengthening of national identity.
20 June 2011 — Jews for Justice for Palestinians
The state of Jews
June 18th, 2011 From its origin as ‘Jew-state’ through various twists of meaning, the current ‘Jewish state’ which Palestinians must recognise has more in common with Pakistan than the USA or any European state of all its citizens. Uri Avnery traces the path
5 July, 2010 — William Blum: Anti-Empire Report, Number 83
Most important thought: I’m sick and tired of this thing called ‘patriotism’
The Japanese pilots who bombed Pearl Harbor were being patriotic. The German people who supported Hitler and his conquests were being patriotic, fighting for the Fatherland. All the Latin American military dictators who overthrew democratically-elected governments and routinely tortured people were being patriotic — saving their beloved country from ‘communism’.
General Augusto Pinochet of Chile, mass murderer and torturer: ‘I would like to be remembered as a man who served his country.'[1]
P.W. Botha, former president of apartheid South Africa: ‘I am not going to repent. I am not going to ask for favours. What I did, I did for my country.'[2]
Pol Pot, mass murderer of Cambodia: ‘I want you to know that everything I did, I did for my country.'[3]
Tony Blair, former British prime minister, defending his role in the murder of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis: ‘I did what I thought was right for our country.’4]
At the end of World War II, the United States gave moral lectures to their German prisoners and to the German people on the inadmissibility of pleading that their participation in the holocaust was in obedience to their legitimate government. To prove to them how legally and morally inadmissable this defense was, the World War II allies hanged the leading examples of such patriotic loyalty.
15 October, 2009 — MEDIA LENS: Correcting for the distorted vision of the corporate media
In our previous alert (‘The Westminster Conspiracy,’ October 8; www.medialens.org/alerts/archive.php) we described how the media’s insistence that journalists be ’balanced’, that they keep their personal opinions to themselves, is used as a tool of thought control.
Journalists who criticise powerful interests can be attacked for their ‘bias’, for revealing their prejudices. On the other hand, as we will see in the examples below, almost no-one protests, or even notices, the lack of balance in patriotic articles reporting on the experience of British troops fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, on the credibility of British and American elections, or on claims that the West is spreading democracy across the Third World. Then, notions of patriotism, loyalty, the need to support ‘our boys’, make ‘balance’ seem disloyal, disrespectful; an indication, in fact, that a journalist is ‘biased.’
The media provide copious coverage of state-sponsored memorials commemorating the 50th, 60th, 65th anniversaries of D-Day, the Battle of Britain, the Battle of Arnhem, the retreat from Dunkirk, the Battle of the Atlantic, the 25th anniversary of the Falklands War, and so on. Even the 200th anniversary of The Battle of Trafalgar was a major news item. Remembrance Sunday, Trooping The Colour, Beating The Retreat, the Fleet Review are all media fixtures. The military is of course happy to supply large numbers of troops and machines for these dramatic flypasts, parades and reviews.
On June 11, 2005, senior BBC news presenter, Huw Edwards, provided the commentary for Britain’s Trooping The Colour military parade, describing it as “a great credit to the Irish Guards”. Imagine if Edwards had added:
“While one can only be impressed by the discipline and skill on show in these parades, critics have of course warned against the promotion of patriotic militarism. The Russian novelist Tolstoy, for one, observed:
“’The ruling classes have in their hands the army, money, the schools, the churches and the press. In the schools they kindle patriotism in the children by means of histories describing their own people as the best of all peoples and always in the right. Among adults they kindle it by spectacles, jubilees, monuments, and by a lying patriotic press.’” (Tolstoy, Government is Violence – Essays on Anarchism and Pacifism, Phoenix Press, 1990, p.82)
Edwards would not have been applauded for providing this ‘balance’. He would have been condemned far and wide as a crusading crackpot, and hauled before senior BBC management.
4 July 2008 — Anti-Empire Report
Read this or George W. Bush will be president the rest of your life
Some thoughts on ‘patriotism’ written on July 4
Most important thought: I’m sick and tired of this thing called ‘patriotism‘.
5 July 2003
The vast and overwhelming propaganda onslaught that we’ve been subjected to since 911, is indicative of the lengths to which the ruling elites are prepared to go to in order to gain our consent for their actions. Indeed, the nature and scope of the propaganda war indicates just how insecure they feel. Appeals to patriotism and scaremongering tactics (eg the Anthrax attacks) have only short-term effects on the population. Sooner or later, the population is going to demand results, if indeed ‘results’ are possible to produce. And then one has to consider the idea that ‘results’ might have to be manufactured.
The New Dark Age 