Peter Hitchens ; On Being Pompous.

Played it to perfection in Robin Hood as the Sherriff of Nottingham.

Just another article by Perter Hitchens, having the ability to write that it is easy to read and stays on the story line beautifully. A major talent and a man with a greatly admired ability.

On Being Pompous

George Bernard Shaw said rightly that no Englishman could open his mouth without making another Englishman hate him. As an Irishman, he could see from outside that the curious code of accents, mingled with class and education, as well as with region, was a potent form of wicked magic.

The British military and naval classes, into which I was born, were less sensitive about it than most because they lived their lives in strictly ordered hierarchies where there wasn’t much resentment. I think this was because of the shared danger and adversity, in which everyone had seen everyone else, scared, dirty and swearing, with the wraps off - and because so many people actually avoid responsibility. Who’d want to be an officer, the first to be blamed? It was cosier further down the list. This is a more common feeling than most people want to admit.

But by the late 1950s, even naval officers were beginning to disguise their cut-glass accents. They were all too redolent of a pre-1939 age which obviously wasn’t coming back, of ‘young masters’ and ‘my man’. It accelerated after that, thanks to TV, which gave other accents airtime and dethroned the old ones. In a way, I’m rather sorry about the accents, though not about the old class distinction – I share Nevil Shute’s loathing for the silly waste and snobbery it caused (very well described in a neat novel about the early years of World War Two, called ‘Landfall’, which I greatly recommend. Shute’s dislike of snobbery was one of the reasons he went off to live in Australia).

I get a thrill of recognition whenever I hear Celia Johnson, as the Captain’s wife in ‘In Which We Serve’. It’s almost as good a gateway into the imagination of the past as the sight and sound of a working express steam engine (not that I’d compare Miss Johnson to a locomotive).

But I digress. I never really understood how much my accent annoyed another people until I was in my late twenties, living and working for the first time in London, and heard my voice being mimicked, in an exaggerated lahdidah, as I went into a cinema in Swiss Cottage. I’m sure this wasn’t the first time this had happened. It was just the first time I had noticed it. I’d already unconsciously toned down my prep-school voice. But from that day on I toned it down still more. I noticed, a few years ago, that my brother, finding English public-school accents went down very well in the colonies, had actually become grander-sounding during his years in Washington, and though he would pronounce such words as ‘dynasty’ in the American manner (‘die-nesty’), he made no other concessions.

But in any case, there’s really no hope for me in the world of Estuary English and fake American. My voice (and my failure to disguise it further) immediately identifies me as privately educated. That is in itself a sin to many people. My use of formal grammar identifies me –accurately - as a believer in order, precedence and probably some sort of hierarchy. I think that’s what people mean when they describe me as ‘pompous’ a word they often can’t even spell. I think it’s what the crude caricature of me on ‘What the papers say’ was intended to suggest, plus a bit extra. These things are important. Czech exiles, returning from Britain after to the war to the new Communist Prague, were shocked to find that their precise grammar-school Czech was now considered too middle class, and that officials and political leaders were all speaking the Bohemian equivalent of Estuary, no doubt for fear they would sound ‘pompous’.

The rest of the article click the link in the title.

BBC's Monolithic Mentality and Hitchen's Perseverence.

Islamist Jihadists lining up to destroy your country with the help of leftists.

Peter Hitchens was maligned by some plod on the BBC, a media monstrosity that would very comfortably fit in George Orwell's book 1984, as a shining example on how manipulation, threats and misinformation can be handled by a tax payer's supported monolith that is answerable to no one. Only it self. That is ofcourse until Hitchens took umbrage against some manufactured comments that he was claimed to have made in a private conversation with another member of the Islamist "kill all infidels"  enthusiast, that now lay claim to owning England and thereby can now abuse the local population and threaten and coerce them to obedience as they have with every other backward country they possess.

This is the same religion that promotes the fact that women are mere objects, marrying an eleven year old minor is legal and shooting a female or murdering one because they have upset their grossly assumed mindset, must make one wonder why leftists are so proud to be supporting this monstrosity. They have regularly legislated positively for these jihad warriors at the expense of all other religions for the single intention of ensuring that they invade every country in the world. Bearing in mind ofcourse that once those lunatics are let loose, a future revolution can be justified. This is ofcourse their aim. The fact also that countries like Denmark now have the highest rape incidences is solely due to the fact that their immigration policy was concentrated on the middle east, an error they are now fighting to close as the Netherlands has already.

Mr Mehdi Hasan, biographer of Labour leader Ed Miliband, can be found on YouTube saying as follows: ‘The kuffar, the disbelievers, the atheists who remain deaf and stubborn to the teachings of Islam, the rational message of the Koran; they are described in the Koran as “a people of no intelligence”, Allah describes them as not of no morality, not as people of no belief – people of “no intelligence” – because they’re incapable of the intellectual effort it requires to shake off those blind prejudices, to shake off those easy assumptions about this world, about the existence of God. In this respect, the Koran describes the atheists as “cattle”, as cattle of those who grow the crops and do not stop and wonder about this world.’

Anyway, Hitchens comes under the malicious attack of one of these jihadists, who has problems discerning the truth from memory, preferring to add and delete words in order to achieve their own malicious ends.

‘What the Papers Say’ says ‘Sorry’ (up to a point), Cows, Quotes, the BBC and Me

Am I an 'animal', a 'cow' - or just another victim of BBC bias?

From article -

Anyway, last night at eleven o’clock, the BBC read out an apology to me (!) on air, an apology offered because of my complaints about the way I was treated a week before on the programme ‘What the Papers Say’.

The Olympics beginning to Suck ever more...

I use to enjoy the Olympics back a few years ago, when it was a combination of amateur athletes and politics was nowhere to be seen except ofcourse when those lunatics from communist countries got involved. They saw no issue with dragging children from the arms of their parents and drugging their population, forcing them into training regimes that you would not put an animal through, let alone a human being. But as with all those communist countries, the metal count was somehow a deciding factor on how superior their countries are or were, most have disappeared thank goodness. The East Germans were one of the worst, where we witnessed a former athlete stating that her life was completely destroyed by the drugs they forced down her throat in order to insure a dishonest win. This was before the drug tests arrived as that was becoming a major problem as well,

Peter Hitchens has a few things to say and I agree with some. Apart from the fact that the Olympics is now about greed, self promotion, selfishness, logos and advertising rights. One wonder if there is any room left for the athletes or their supporters or even their family members who have made it possible for the existence of the competitor in the first place. Where is the consideration for them, one may have to ask that now as members were told to bugger off from one venue even though there were plenty of empty seats available. A major cockup I know but one that is becoming more and more common as the Olympic gestapo go about ensuring that the local butcher takes down his five ringed sausage display as it infringes on the billions they hope to cream off the local sheeple.

28 July 2012 10:50 PM

Join the smiley Cult of the Five Circles? Sorry, but I have a democratic right to be bored (and I'm exercising it while I still can)

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column
Enthusiasm is compulsory only in totalitarian dictatorships. Anywhere else, we are free to be keen if we want to, and bored if we want to.
So I wish people would stop telling me that I should enjoy the Olympics, or be proud of them, or think that they will in some way benefit this country.
But they won’t stop telling me. Hardly a day goes by without another previously independent mind surrendering to this pseudo-religion of obligatory smiles.
And that makes me suspicious. What is this strange cult? In the end, the Olympics is nothing more than a large athletics meeting.
Before Hitler and Dr Goebbels made it into a torch-lit and grandiose spectacle, you could be in the same city as the Games and barely notice.
Are we really that interested? And if we are, are we interested for good reasons?

We have the other article as well 

What the Papers didn’t Say -and What They Did

Meanwhile, on the subject of the legitimacy and reasonableness of my view of the Olympic ceremony, let me quote to you from an article by Chris Blackhurst, a former colleague of mine, and no fool,  now Editor of the Independent newspaper. You can read the whole thing here.

Chris (who I do not think would describe himself as a man of the right)  said : ‘Did I think I was being preached to? Was I aware that the director was ramming his vision of a leftie Nirvana down all our throats? Yes to both. Did I mind? Not in the least’

He also conceded :’There could have been more use words, more acknowledgement of our contributions to the arts and our faith in individual liberty’(these are my principal complaints about what was lacking. But he added ’This was an occasion for television, more than those lucky enough to be present’.

He makes a curious comment about multiculturalism, mistaking it – as so many seem to do – for multiracialism, a wholly different thing. He said ‘swathes of the population, not those perhaps in the stockbroker belt or secure in their gated communities, those of different ethnic origin living side by side is how it is’. Let me say it again. Multiculturalism is nothing to do with race. It is to do with abandoning the idea of one unifying national culture to which all are expected to belong, and choosing instead to promote a series of solitudes with their backs turned upon each other (some readers say, trying to be clever, that we no longer have much of a British culture to offer, but that is precisely because we abandoned it so long ago). Those who have sought to defend a unified national culture have been, and are still being, smeared as racial bigots, when this is the opposite of the truth. I am sad, but not amazed, that this still needs to be explained.