Boyle's Dream of England

Some while ago, when hearing that Shallow Grave director Danny Boyle had been commissioned to produce the opening ceremony to the London Olympics, I wrote an article in which I imagined what sort of spectacle Boyle might produce.  The result was widely mocked on the troll sites and also slightly less vindictively on Rational Wiki.

However, in an outcome that was beyond satire the result was worse than even I had imagined. Instead of effigies of Obama and Mandela we were presented with the real  life Doreen Lawrence, taking time off from attending court cases which her glowering presence might just influence, and Shami Chakrabarti. Meanwhile Danny Boyle set before us a vision of England which resembled a cross between a multiracial Gormenghast and rap night at the Spearmint Rhino.

All it lacked were the vuvuzlas, or did I miss those?

The only permissible reaction was to rave about how wonderful it was, while any criticism was treated in rather the same way as the Pyongyang authorities might respond to a streaker at the Dear Leader's funeral.

 The old media and the mob of great and good have viciously attacked Conservative MP Aidan Burley for describing the ceremony as “Leftie, multi cultural crap” however, I fail to see how he could be faulted on that description.  The ceremony portrayed a version of British history only recognisable from the prejudiced and distorted perspective of a left wing bigot.  It was aggressively multicultural to the degree of psychosis, and Mr. Burley’s critical assessment that it was crap is one I find hard to argue with.

The show was an example of ideological propaganda of which North Korea or the old Soviet Union would have been proud, and Mr. Burley was entirely correct in pointing it out for what it was.

However, we live in an age where telling the truth is a punishable offence, and I regret that Adrian Burley’s attempts at explaining himself or even apologising will not save him from a vengeful old media and a left desperate to protect its precious but deformed ideology.

One person who long ago gave up apologising or attempting to explain himself is the much maligned historian David Irving, and I invite you to enjoy his intelligent description of Friday night’s macabre cabaret

After having speculated that the queen might come to view the ceremony as one of the low point of her reign, Irving goes on to say:

IN her sixty years' rule she has seen the feckless politicians turn her kingdom from a mono-ethnic wellspring of world civilisation into a drug-crazed, gun-toting, knife-wielding "multi-cultural" cesspit. The British Empire imploded. The BBC television cameras hover lovingly on every Black immigrant face that has been shoe-horned, heedless of chronology, into the scenes that Boyle has devised -- including the top-hatted 19th Century capitalist factory-owners, and even the Suffragettes. Black children dance around 19th Century English Maypoles. Boxer, George Orwell's heroic carthorse in Animal Farm, would be scratching his forelock: didn't remember them, somehow. On the far side of the arena, meanwhile, the Empire Windrush berths to orchestrated cheers, bringing its first toxic cargo of Caribbean doom.

[What a come-down for the good ole Windrush. Launched in Hamburg in 1930 as the Monte Rosa, she became one of Hitler's Kraft durch Freude fleet of cruise-liners for German workers, served as a fleet auxiliary to the Tirpitz battle group in the 1940s, then heroically evacuated refugees from East Prussia before the Soviet onslaught in 1945.]

After the first hour, the constant and inappropriate interpolation of Black faces in this London Olympics ceremony becomes offensive, and probably as much so to them as to us, the Whites. There is brief relief when the outside-broadcast cameras go on to other celebrations in Northern Ireland, Wales, and Scotland, where there is not a single Black face for the BBC cameras to linger joyously upon.

No doubt they will be digitally inserted later, just as Black faces, looking remarkably like Robertson's Marmelade golliwogs, were digitally superimposed on some of Harry Potter's cheering fellow-pupils in the final scene of the first Potter movie.