Saturday, December 22, 2007

Starkey compares Queen to a Nazi





Ellee Seymour said...

I find it hard to believe that the Queen hasn't visited Greece at all during her reign, I would have thought Philip would have planned a few excursions there, she doesn't know what she has missed.

Merry Christmas wishes to you and your family.

Anonymous said...

Its people like starkey who spend their lives with their heads stuck up their own arse that annoy me.In the grand scheme of things art is a pointless activity and is only important to people who think its important.I like good art but it never saves lives or feeds people and should be treated accordingly.

Anonymous said...

Pedantry alert!

Without challenging or condoning the underlying premise of the comparison, it would be quite a slip by Starkey if he does indeed compare the Queen to Goebbels. The quote: "When I hear the word culture, I reach for my revolver," is actually popularly misattributed to Herman Goering (misattributed because while Goering may have uttered the phrase it originally came from some late Weimar era play).

Quite a shoddy error for a historian to make, even if the historian is an expert of the English sixteenth century history rather than the history of Germany in the interwar period. Perhaps we should wait, however, until the program is shown on Wednesday to see if Starkey really does misattribute the phrase to Goebbels. I have a suspicion that interviewer, Aida Edemariam, has mixed up Goering and Goebbels. After all, his article has other huge inaccuracies: (i) George V did not ditch any continental alliances in 1917 (apart from the fact that he personally did not have the power to do so other than upon the advice of his government, the ‘alliance’ that Edemariam appears to be referring to was the fact that George V was the first cousin of Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany but in 1917, there was certainly no alliance between King and the Kaiser, let alone between their respective countries); and (ii) he did not marry an Englishwoman in 1923 (Edemariam is no doubt thinking of the marriage of his son, the future George VI, to Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, but although she was a technically a commoner (the point he is probably trying to make) she was Scottish!).

Croydonian said...

A fine man is Starkey, and solidly libertarian. Shame he attributed the quote to Goebbels rather than Göring.

Anonymous said...

Starkey. Now that reminds me of my first year as an undergraduate. A student mentioned his name in class and the lecturer said Starkey was just a media whore. Evidently he seems to be correct.

Anonymous said...

I think he may be right about Her Maj. Anyone with a sense of history about this country and an appreciation of our ancient freedoms would have been alarmed by the antics of a fascist like Tony Blair.

Given all the offences that he and his party piled up - curtailment of freedom of speech, trying to dilute the indigenous peoples (I always suspected to teach us a lesson for being so uppity) with massive floods of immigrants from a much less developed society and then insisting the indigenes give up their habits in the cause of "not causing offence" to the unwelcome incomers, destroying education (again, I suspect to teach the middle classes a lesson), nationalising childhood by teaching them about sex in classrooms at an absurdly young age and taking this vital subject out of the family; encouraging pregnancy in young women and underage girls and encouraging the chav council estate life. Giving derisive sentences to killers and those who commit assault, for which the signing of the HRA was the excuse. All blatantly destructive to a cohesive society.

The Queen, one hoped, was noticing all this. In Tony Blair's second or third term, she should have dismissed the government as acting against the interests of the country. Instead, she read out each year, in Parliament, each new increment of destruction dictated by Blair of our formerly cohesive country.

I used to be a royalist, but having observed the Queen over the past decade, I've inched a little more towards republicanism each year.

If she is not the guardian of our country, I cannot see that the monarchy serves any purpose at all.

She proved, in fact, that the monarchy is for nothing. Absolutely nothing.

Anonymous said...

Anon 16:01 Gosh. How interesting.