This story from the Beeb, as the Brits call it, is an excellent example of how globalism is eroding the nation state.
The Islamists who committed the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris should be not be described as “terrorists” by the BBC, a senior executive at the corporation has said.
Tarik Kafala, the head of BBC Arabic, the largest of the BBC’s non-English language news services, said the term “terrorist” was too “loaded” to describe the actions of the men who killed 12 people in the attack on the French satirical magazine.
Mr Kafala, whose BBC Arabic television, radio and online news services reach a weekly audience of 36 million people, told The Independent: “We try to avoid describing anyone as a terrorist or an act as being terrorist. What we try to do is to say that ‘two men killed 12 people in an attack on the office of a satirical magazine’. That’s enough, we know what that means and what it is.”
Mr Kafala said: “Terrorism is such a loaded word. The UN has been struggling for more than a decade to define the word and they can’t. It is very difficult to. We know what political violence is, we know what murder, bombings and shootings are and we describe them. That’s much more revealing, we believe, than using a word like terrorist which people will see as value-laden.”
This is an inevitable result of globalism. The BBC used to be a British company funded by British taxes. Now it is a global concern (still collecting British taxes) with more customers outside of Britain than within it. The elites running it naturally have little reason to be loyal to Britain or any other country in which they operate. Like their company, they are citizens of the world, which is a polite way of saying citizens of nowhere.
The global elites are the cloud people. They float above us, detached from language, culture and history. They have no loyalty to a country or the people and traditions of a country. It’s like the British Raj. The people in charge are fine with the rest of us engaging in our quaint customs, as long as it does not interfere with their looting of the resources. When the ground people cause trouble, then the cloud people step in to remedy it.
I suspect it is why our elites are berserk for mass immigration. At some level, the fact that clusters of people with a common ethnicity and common heritage exist is a challenge to the new post-national ideology. If Europe can be turned from a patchwork of peoples and cultures to a gray, featureless slurry devoid of cultural diversity, the elites will feel justified in their indifference to toward the people.
At other times I have used the word neo-feudalism to describe this new arrangement. The financial support of our elites comes primarily through government sanctioned skimming operations. The BBC would not exist without the British government and the British taxpayer. Much of the modern economy is simply socializing costs and privatizing profits with the former falling on the middle-class and the latter bubbling up to the elites.
Mere greed does not explain the berserk behavior with regards to immigration. It does not entirely explain why the BBC is willing to indulge in linguistic acrobatics in order to avoid describing reality. It turns out that Georg Lukács was right, but he was looking in the wrong direction. It is not the proletariat that achieved class consciousness through reification. It is the modern global elites.
The alienation that Marx and Lukács imagined as the natural result of a mechanized, material society never materialized as the lower classes always had other primary identities that trumped all else. The neighborhood, the gang, rooting for a particular football team are all ways working men give their lives meaning. No amount stuff can change that, particularly in a welfare state.
The modern global elites are formless and their dealings are entirely transactional. The rich and powerful of the Industrial Age used their wealth and power to build the cultural and political institutions of their country. They could look around them and see the envy and admiration of their tribe, they people, their country. Today’s elites hang out at Davos comparing Rolex watches and eating $50 hot dogs.
The class identity that our elites have realized is really an anti-identity. They hold the rest of us in contempt. That’s why the BBC looks for ways to poke the common Brit in the eye. It is why the NYTimes roots for whoever is fighting against the American service man, wherever he is sent to fight. It’s why elite academies keep retrograde companies like Chick-fil-A off their campus. They are who they are because they are not us.
“The elites running it naturally have little reason to be loyal to Britain or any other country in which they operate. Like their company, they are citizens of the world, which is a polite way of saying citizens of nowhere.”
Actually, they are capitalists who are trying to make some coin.
Much of the modern economy is simply socializing costs and privatizing profits with the former falling on the middle-class and the latter bubbling up to the elites.
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lol that is a cynical way of seeing things. Like tesla and wall st.?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moralistic_therapeutic_deism
Nietzsche-
They are rid of the Christian God and now believe all the more firmly that they must cling to Christian morality. That is an English consistency; we do not wish to hold it against little moralistic females a la Eliot. In England one must rehabilitate oneself after every little emancipation from theology by showing in a veritably awe-inspiring manner what a moral fanatic one is. That is the penance they pay there…
We others hold otherwise. When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one’s feet. This morality is by no means self-evident: this point has to be exhibited again and again, despite the English flatheads. Christianity is a system, a whole view of things thought out together. By breaking one main concept out of it, the faith in God, one breaks the whole: nothing necessary remains in one’s hands.
lol @ all you dorks, Hitler hit this nail on the head a long time ago. Welcome to the party.
The struggle between the people and the hatred amongst them is being nurtured by very specific interested parties. It is a small, rootless, international clique that is turning the people against each other and does not want them to have peace.
It is the people who are at home both nowhere and everywhere. Those who do not have anywhere a soil on which they have grown up. Rather they live in Berlin today, Brussels tomorrow, Paris the day after that, and then again in Prague or Vienna or London. They feel at home everywhere. They are the only ones who can be addressed as international elements because they conduct their business everywhere.
But the people cannot follow them. The people are bounded to their soil, bounded to their fatherland, bounded to the possibilities of life that the state, the nation, offers.
“The global elites are cloud people”
Best line yet.
Now what?
The elites are not us because they aren’t racist, sexist, homophobic, gun loving, xenophobic, sexually uptight, religious nuts. Or to put it another way, they aren’t us because they don’t sin and we do. We may not want to admit it any more than they do, but it really is all about our fallibility. Some of us recognize it and submit to God, some of us don’t and think we are a god.
Wow, you hit the invisible nail on the head with this one. I knew something was afoot but couldn’t get it quite in focus but you did. Like any 12 step program, the first move is to recognize you have a problem and you just diagnosed it. Nice work.
Well said.
However while Al-beeb is the development of both socialism and the desire to nurture a collective guilt, imposing liberally as I have said before a tax that everyone must pay: if the muscle-men of the Corporation think you are in possession of an unlicensed ‘television receiver’ you can go to jail. (An aside here; my daughter got a TV licence when she first went to university but it was delivered to the wrong address. The Beeb’s response to her enquiry was to send her a warning letter that on no account must she attempt to watch her TV until she had retrieved the licence from where it had been sent. Yes, she/we had paid but they thought it better to threaten her for their error.)
You also have to look at two things here as well. First is the fact that the man promoting non-terrorist love and understanding is, er, of Middle east stock. His loyalties may well lie more with the lunatic regimes and weird religious practices over there rather than in the UK.
Be that as it may, the second thing is the story was run by a friend of Al-Beeb in the shape of a jaded rag called The Independent (or as Private Eye, the long-standing satirical if rather neutered magazine here used to name it: The Indescribablyboring). The Independent likes stories like this.
The Independent, if you are not aware, is heavy on left opinion and light on news. They have given over their front pages to frothing opinion pieces about things they don’t know much about. While The Guardian avoids being nakedly opinionated on its front page most of the time, it holds the peak position in the lefty ‘newspaper’ market and The Indy lags behind, so it tries hard to be as outrageously stupid as it can be.
It was the Indy that published the now-famously laughable news story in 2000 that wailed that global warming meant children in the UK would never see snow again. I try not to think of this when I am digging my car out of the white stuff.
The Beeb is awful in all sorts of ways — though we may say it is mostly the least worst television in the world, mostly due to its wildlife documentary tradition — and the truth is that if it were not for the heavy hand of the state forcing us all to pay then it wouldn’t survive other than as a fringe station showing seagulls raising their young.
Rags like the Indy and broadcaster like the Beeb love the elite who have trampled on so much of the UK (though not on the seagulls, of course, basking in the endless summers we now endure) and yes, they would prefer us to be the shapeless mass ready to follow the EU’s diktats. Sadly, while there are still some who resist this, Orwell could see it coming and he made it clear the answer is more big fist lovingly reported in the thoughtless rags.
A big fisting, some might say.
I check your site daily. This is the single most insightful thing you’ve written, and deserves widespread attention.