The Sunday Post: What’s Another Year Zero?
As ghastly as the catalogue of crimes committed by devotees of Radical Islam already is, the sorrowful sight of ancient monuments being bulldozed into dust, ones that have witnessed the rise and fall of endless empires with a dignity above and beyond the petty squabbles of their founders’ successors, is an act of cultural vandalism that stains all civilisation, not just that of the Middle East. But we’ve been here before, lest we forget; it’s less than fifteen years since the equally enlightened ISIS forerunners, the Taliban, blew-up the beautiful Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan. Whatever turmoil the world has endured in the centuries since these edifices were erected, they have survived them all, imbued with a serene sense of timelessness that has rendered the concerns of the here and now an irrelevance; they seem to gaze upon the landscape with a wisdom that knows Islam, Christianity and Judaism, and all the conflicts that have arisen from them, are passing phases they will outlive and outlast. Until now.
Imagine the same brutal treatment being dished-out to the Sphinx – or even Stonehenge; it seems inconceivable, yet the wilful and deliberate demolition of Nimrud, one of the pearls of Assyria from an Islamic era that included beauty as a crucial element of its framework, is the latest cultural atrocity committed in the name of ‘Islam’, following on from the smashing of priceless artefacts at the Mosul Museum as well as the ruination of two ancient Iraq shrines, the Mosque of the Prophet Younis and the Mosque of the Prophet Jirjis.
Similar acts have been carried out in Mali in recent years, especially in the famed city of Timbuktu; sites from the Islamic Golden Age, the faith’s most fruitful flowering, are viewed as veering too far from the supposedly pure bare-bones Islam favoured by fanatical militants. The twisted logic behind their determined destruction is based upon an arrogant attempt to eradicate any evidence that there was life before Mohammed; but aiming to trash the past so that what remains is a version that fits the rherotic of its revisionists is not necessarily a new phenomenon. In the aftermath of the French Revolution, the graves of French monarchs were plundered along with other sacred shrines in an act of opportunistic anarchy. And we don’t have to travel much farther than the Home Counties or East Anglia to witness the remnants of such philistinism closer to home.
Stroll into any surviving pre-Reformation English parish church and one will most likely be impressed with the architecture, but perhaps a little disappointed by the rather minimalist decor, something that doesn’t seem to compliment the Gothic majesty of the exterior. It radiates a chilly austerity that speaks of perennial poverty, of missing lead from the roof that is never entirely replaced, and a donation box with a collection of copper gathering dust. Of course, we are not seeing what once greeted the flock upon entering the building; we are seeing a pale shadow of past opulence, an interior stripped bare five-hundred years ago, whitewashed into sobriety lest parishioners be spellbound by the splendour of unnecessary distractions.
Distractions such as elaborate and elegant portraits of Saints and Apostles on the walls, or Christ’s life told in Technicolor stained-glass instalments; and at the centre of it all, the Virgin Mary. It was a dazzling cornucopia of exotic idolatry designed to remind worshippers of their lowly place in the world, and of the supremacy of Rome. Take Walsingham Priory in Norfolk, founded by a Saxon noblewoman after encountering a vision of Our Lady, and going on to become a pivotal pilgrimage site of the Middle Ages, boasting a phial of the Virgin’s milk amongst its relics and a famous wooden statue of the Madonna and Child. English sovereigns made a habit of visiting and lighting a candle, a tradition even Henry VIII upheld before he eventually oversaw the priory’s overnight decline and fall.
Everything changed in 1535-36. Upwards of 10,000 nuns and monks were evicted from abbeys and monasteries throughout the realm, their considerable assets redirected towards the royal coffers whilst the awe-inspiring establishments from which their wealth had generated were laid to waste by an army of state-sponsored gangsters answerable to Cromwell. But it was Edward VI, the boy king whose reign spanned six short years, who finished what his father had started by removing the last remaining Catholic trimmings from Protestant worship, such as the censure of Latin and the imposition of a common prayer-book in English, not to mention erasing all traces of the breath-taking interiors that had illuminated the grimness of life in a country short on manmade beauty. The loss of the latter was the most visible statement of intent, declaring – in tones all-too familiar to modern ears – that idolatrous portrayals of religious figures was a deviation from ‘pure’ Christian worship. The mystical, ceremonial aspects of the church were also dispensed with, the traditional barriers between all-powerful priest and subservient flock shown the door, as though the Catholic service had been a prog-rock stadium gig and the Protestant one was a punk band looking the audience in the eye.
The revered statue of the Virgin Mary that had been a focal point of the pilgrimage to Our Lady of Walsingham was burned and the priory itself left a skeletal ruin; the places of worship that suffered the loss of their art rather than their bricks were the lucky ones. Obstinate worshippers that remained secretly loyal to Catholicism were forced to attend mini-mass conducted in country house priest-holes, despite the knowledge that discovery of their attendance could result in imprisonment and execution. The wholesale facelift of the nation’s faith was complete, and for any of us left with little choice but to wander around the stone pillars of cold, grey Anglican churches on rainy Bank Holiday outings or suffer the boredom of weddings and christenings as children, how welcome a bit of Medieval Catholic Glam would have been.
Some would argue the greatest legacy of the human race is what we leave behind us, and the physical manifestations of civilisation should be immovable objects preserved for the pleasure and education of generations to come. The pre-meditated decimation of any leaves a hole in the story of mankind that can never be filled again. The poignant prediction of O’Brien, Winston Smith’s torturer, when he declares ‘there will be no art, no literature, no science’ could have ‘no history’ added to it, but Smith already knows that from his day-job of altering historical fact at the Ministry of Truth. He has spent his adult life being exposed to propagandist reports of Oceania’s military victories, though the enemy regularly changes and the history books are then rewritten to claim the current enemy has always been the enemy.
The actions of ISIS in Iraq or their blinkered brethren in Mali are merely the most extreme and headline-grabbing examples of a worrying trend to rewrite history that even extends to the relatively trivial. Popular culture has been marked this century by a conscious case of erase/rewind, comprising the removal of records by Gary Glitter, Phil Spector and Jonathan King from vintage playlists and the removal of anything featuring Jimmy Savile, Stuart Hall or Rolf Harris from repeat schedules. Their names can only be spoken of in relation to their crimes (or alleged crimes, though that prefix is rarely used beyond online forums), and their careers banished to an archive it’s not too fanciful to imagine a torch-carrying mob laying siege to, the kind that would never make the connection between their aims and those of ISIS.
The dramatic obliteration of antiquities in Iraq or the editing-out of a relevant performer from a 1970s edition of ‘Top of the Pops’ are acts that are in many respects worlds apart, but both share the symptoms of reshaping the past to suit the palette of the present. The older one gets, the more memory plays tricks. By the end of this era of widespread revisionism, the dearth of evidence to support memory should leave a generation incapable of trusting anything their memory tells them anymore.
Petunia Winegum
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March 8, 2015 at 10:14 am -
“East Anglia to witness the remnants of such philistinism closer to home”
Youngest Useless Object got married last year in the Parish Church of Upper Colostomy Bag-Parda-Lower Noosebleed-Mead. I was surprised to see the church not only still had a Rood screen but that they were married *in front of it* and only kneeling before the high altar to be blessed. Mind you, that was in a village that the 16th Century forgot…along with the rest of North Norfolk and where they still talk about Kett’s Rebellion in the present tense.
Here in Northest, darkest most Norfolk, we still have several churches with Lychgates, where the ‘common’ folk what couldn’t afford to marry their sisters in a Church would get themselves hitched. Nowadays young couples use them, the Lychgates, as smoking shelters…which seems doubly appropriate as in Olden Times the Lepers would also not sally nor sully beyond the gate.
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March 8, 2015 at 11:09 am -
I remember that movie ‘The Land That Time Forgot’, but I had no idea it was a documentary about Norfolk!
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March 8, 2015 at 12:01 pm -
“documentary about Norfolk!”
The Old Ways and Old Time Religion die slow round these parts:
“do you’re gorn ‘o sleep wi’h yooor sis’er ‘hen yow gi’ maarried in chaach and do tha’ all legal and proper boo-i, i’ll no’ havin’ yow livin’ in sin”
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March 8, 2015 at 10:17 am -
We struggle to change the rewriting of history but no doubt some of the artefact damage in far away places will be repaired or rebuilt.
As a Reading boy originally I can’t get out of my head the sad remnants of Reading Abbey, once a huge site.
Summer is icumen in… or something like that.
Long time since I saw it. -
March 8, 2015 at 10:44 am -
“Gary Glitter, Phil Spector and Jonathan King from vintage playlists and the removal of anything featuring Jimmy Savile, Stuart Hall or Rolf Harris ”
Or the iconoclasm of removing Churchill’s cigar or James Dean’s cigarette. The New Puritans are as pitilessly pious in their endeavours as ever were Cromwell’s New Model Army.
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March 8, 2015 at 11:10 am -
Wasn’t there once talk of removing the cigarette from McCartney’s hand on the sleeve of ‘Abbey Road’ as well? Don’t know if it actually happened.
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March 8, 2015 at 11:27 am -
“Wasn’t there once talk of removing the cigarette from McCartney’s hand on the sleeve of ‘Abbey Road’ as well?”
Thus sinking a thousand conspiracy theories…
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March 9, 2015 at 7:54 am -
And replacing the name of Guy Gibson’s dog – “Nigger” with “Nipper”.
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March 9, 2015 at 8:30 am -
And haven’t I seen a doctored version of that oft-used print of Brunel, complete with baggy trousers, stovepipe hat but NO cigar!
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March 8, 2015 at 11:29 am -
It isn’t all done in the name of religion and one need look no further back in history than Nazi book burning. Also, ask yourself about the effects of the Blitz and what was done (justifiably) in response. Then, of course, the best efforts of 60s architects were probably worse than the Luftwaffe, and communism had a lot to answer for.
Mussulmen truly buggered up Constantinople, and there are still churches built at the time Romans left Britain that are pretend mosques. I don’t imagine that in India there are too many small Victorian churches still in good repair and with congregations, are there?
It’s also a fact that some downright ugly items of cultural heritage vanish quickly. WW2 pillbox? Rural railway line? Canals, factories, airfields. I bet few of your readers ever saw a Chain Home radar station. It’s also years since I saw a Mk 1 or 2 Cortina on the road … and thankfully longer since I saw a Morris Marina or Austin Allegro, so it ain’t all bad!
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March 8, 2015 at 11:50 am -
“It isn’t all done in the name of religion and one need look no further back in history than Nazi book burning.”
In terms of a hankering for iconoclasm, there ain’t nothing much to choose between religion and ideology. Always wondered why Goering didn’t go after our “Icons” much more …Stonehenge, St Pauls, Westminster Abbey, The Dreamy Spires. “There’ll be Bluebirds over what remains of the White Cliffs of Dover”, “I met a Man going to the Crater formerly known as St.Ives”, “Ride a Cock Horse to the Banbury Interchange”. Architectural book burning.
Mind you, I’m just in a thinking-about-aerial-bombardment mood this morning , having been looking at images of the street in Camberwell that Papa Dwarf grew up in, which was so badly bombed they turned it into a park after the war.
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March 9, 2015 at 8:34 am -
“…… ugly items of cultural heritage …. ” Canals!!! Wash your mouth out Sir!
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March 8, 2015 at 1:07 pm -
They’ll have to prise my copy of Gary Glitter’s Greatest Hits and Shag’s “Loop Di Love” (a Jonathan King pseudonym) from my cold dead hands. v Or maybe I’ll put them in a sealed “time capsule” when I’m dead to be opened in 100 years (not that there’ll be any existing technology to play them on).
It’s funny how playing Gary Glitter songs divides people. Some would think he was in the room with his hand up a 12-year-old’s skirt. The separation of artefact from creator is hard for some people. As Bryan Ferry found out:
http://www.virginmedia.com/music/features/worst-career-moves.php?page=2-
March 8, 2015 at 2:12 pm -
I know Bowie infamously expressed similar sentiments around the time of his ‘Nazi salute’ at Victoria Station. Mind you, copious coke consumption does tend to induce visions of grandeur.
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March 8, 2015 at 2:25 pm -
I love Bowie’s comment that if coke leaves holes in people’s brains, then his must resemble swiss cheese.
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March 8, 2015 at 2:26 pm -
Hah! And yet arguably his finest work was done ‘under the influence’.
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March 8, 2015 at 2:38 pm -
He moved from the coke capital of the world to the heroin capital of the world for a large number of those works.
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March 8, 2015 at 1:45 pm -
Historically accurate, and I see your point Petunia. There are several things going on with these ghastly ISIS people. One is just hatred: hatred of all things “other”, hatred of what does not conform, and just hatred of beauty. Also all cultural supremacists like to eradicate the past; take away the past and you take away the identity of people, of nations.
In the modern world of Britain we see such attempts to wipe out the past in other, more subtle ways, as you have highlighted. It riles me considerably when I hear this new found emphasis of “British values”, when the values of Britain and the British working class in particular have for so long been derided, scorned and actively undermined at every time by “the Establishment” and its obsessional love affair with multiculturalism. -
March 8, 2015 at 3:42 pm -
Petunia, it is my observation that Art is a casualty in the culture wars. Early Christians destroyed old scrolls and sculpture during the last days of Rome. Pagans in turn destroyed Christian art, as have Christians. As have Islamists.
The bad news is that this will always happen. Fanatics down the ages have tried to eradicate all art in the name of their so called ‘pure’ belief system. The good news is they never quite succeed.
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March 8, 2015 at 5:36 pm -
The “Medieval Warm Period” has had a pasting but at the moment is surviving, a revisionism of the historical temperature record is taking place in the Global Warming fervour . And all of Europe is being homogenised under the religion of socialism which leads us back to Islamification.
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March 8, 2015 at 5:37 pm -
I’ve often wondered why there are few artefacts from early human times – perhaps the insanity of the Taliban, and now ISIS, arose before and wiped out the monuments of pre-history. But, as said above, ALL religions have tried at times to obliterate the past, especially when it does not concur with their own nonsense.
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March 8, 2015 at 5:43 pm -
Book burning is ever popular. The great library of Alexandria was among the first…….
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March 8, 2015 at 6:44 pm -
and done so effectively that we no longer have an exact date for it, I believe.
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March 8, 2015 at 6:05 pm -
We’re indoctrinated into looking at Islamic Fundamentalists as savages, but are we in the West any better in this simplistic black & white world?
Social Media seems to be encouraged a similarly brutal and unforgiving mindset – tweeting pictures of, say, someone 1 person is deemed to have done a wrong deed – clouting his dog or something – results in hundreds of retweets. That method means anyone can be instantly defamed and can used for all manner of vengeful malicious purposes – and tried and convicted by social media. Next step – hanging them from lamp-posts for their sins? This behaviour is most alarming in the young who have been educated not to question “the narrative” and that they have the right to judge anyone and everyone. -
March 8, 2015 at 6:12 pm -
I hate the rewriting of history to fit with current ideals. Instead of learning from mistakes now the mistakes are simply removed. The pardon proposed to all convicted of homosexual offences is just stupid. It was the law at the time rightly or wrongly, times are thankfully different now but I can’t see the point of these apologies from the slave trade, Irish famine, world war 1 cowardice. In time I am sure the next generation won’t know much about the past. George Orwell was right when he wrote about this in 1984, now JS and the others are non persons.
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March 8, 2015 at 8:17 pm -
March 8, 2015 at 11:06 pm -
The last time that I saw ‘Doctor In The House’ on the BBC they cut the scene that explained how Tony Benskin got out of his proposal of marriage to one of the student nurses. In the original film this had been part of a major sub-plot; how would the ace womaniser Benskin escape his accidental entrapment by one woman?
The solution was for him to propose to every other nurse on duty that night, something that was only revealed in the missing scene. Why did it go missing? Presumably because it was also revealed that one of his conquests included an ethnic African nurse and the implication that a mixed-race relationship was unlikely then is ‘too offensive’ for today’s ‘liberals’.
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March 8, 2015 at 11:20 pm -
I’ve noticed the odd line disappear from repeats of ‘Porridge’ and the like – usually race-related; and any Savile reference will be instantly excised, of course. If anyone under 25 comes to such programmes with little knowledge of social attitudes in the 70s, they’d probably find it even harder to understand the grudge so many have against the decade when there’s no evidence to back them up.
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March 9, 2015 at 12:25 pm -
I would have it was more likely to be cut because of the frivolity of the whole sequence would have offended feminist sensibilities, rather than the dynamic with one nurse in particular. Other British films around the same time were exploring the issue of inter-racial relationships (e.g. Pool of London, Sapphire, etc.), and TV was much further behind.
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March 9, 2015 at 12:32 pm -
And Capt Kirk was kissing Lt Uhuru, or was it Mr. Spock…
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March 9, 2015 at 11:08 pm -
I doubt we’ll ever see a release of the Goodies episode “Scatty Safari” on DVD or have it shown again on TV. The plot relates to the Goodies running a Safari park containing celebrities rather than animals. At one point someone portraying Jimmy Savile swings across the screen. The Goodies decide to add a new exhibit to the Safari Park – Rolf Harris; in fact they manage to get a pair of Rolf Harrises who breed like rabbits and fill the whole land with a plague of Rolf Harrises until the Goodies as Pied Pipers manage to lead the Rolf Harrises to ATV (where they will never be seen again). It would take more than editing the odd line to produce a version of this which would now be considered suitable for release (though it’s still a favourite of mine).
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March 11, 2015 at 4:41 pm -
Yes – there was a Ripping Yarn – Across the Andes by Frog, where Michael Palin’s team come to meet the British Consul (?) Denholm Elliot. In the original, he was emerging from a building, zipping his flies up, and said “Anybody want a woman?” in the repeat I saw a few years later, that line had been cut.
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March 11, 2015 at 4:51 pm -
I have the series on DVD and didn’t notice if that had been cut; I’ll have to check.
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March 11, 2015 at 11:58 pm -
Let me know.
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March 9, 2015 at 1:39 am -
This would make a great subject matter for an article or video. If all the lines, scenes, and people of British TV and Film are now being edited out of our cultural history could be collected and presented. It would be quite revealing as to how the UK has changed under the guidance of their new cultural overlords. All for our benefit of course.
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March 9, 2015 at 4:34 pm -
An excellent observation. I was beginning to think that my previously prized memory was beginning to fail me when watching TV repeats.
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March 9, 2015 at 4:39 pm -
Ooops. Too many ‘beginnings’ in there. Sorry Pardon!
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March 9, 2015 at 4:57 pm -
It all started with Nigger in The Dambusters
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March 9, 2015 at 7:07 am -
The TOTP repeats have suffered too, and not just by the elimination of episodes hosted by “undesirable” presenters. BBC4 had been happy to leave Elvis Costello’s “one less white nigger” untouched, as well as The Jam’s “Be kind to queers”, but after C4 aired its “It Was Alright In The 70s” documentary including the Barron Knights doing the “slant-eyes” face in their hit “Food For Thought” – coincidentally (?) due to air on BBC4 just days later – the song was hastily trimmed from the show we ended up seeing. The Beeb’s reasoning? They consider the TOTP repeats to be “entertainment” rather than “history” and therefore can be censored accordingly. So that’s why they’re on the minority interest “intellectual” channel BBC4 then.
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March 9, 2015 at 11:40 am -
I don’t see the fifties of my later teenage as ‘boring’. We had grown up with austerity. The constant whining, amid cushiness, that goes on now is irritating. We had the joy of Rock and Roll. We jived and jazzed about on our many dance floors. I loved trad jazz and the strange pick up your feet jive. We didn’t get drunk. I was a girl on a scooter. Who was told I would fall off the contraption. I didn’t fall off. My mother rode pillion in the late twenties and early thirties. So she had no say against my transport. Judging our lives from a distance and sneering about it seems to be a hobby now. When sixties pop kicked in and very young groupies started haunting venues and airports, things went a bit crazy. That was their choice to chase after these ‘persons of note’. Did they really want just an autograph? The seventies and ‘the summer of love’. Flares that covered platform soles. Floppy hats, long skirts and long hair. Is all that a sin. What about all those drugs used now? Not there then. Then the boys were so pretty with lovely hair. The mums hated it. Now men curl up when they see their seventies selves….why? Current fashions, visible thongs and bras and straps, body decorations, pelmets and tights on thunder thighs are as naff as can be.
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March 9, 2015 at 12:31 pm -
“What about all those drugs used now? Not there then.”
Different times have different recreational drugs. Amphetamine use was rife in certain youth sub-cultures the 1960s and 1970s – something the recent Northern Soul film wasn’t shy of acknowledging.
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March 9, 2015 at 12:03 pm -
conscious case of erase/rewind, comprising the removal of records by Gary Glitter, Phil Spector and Jonathan King from vintage playlists and the removal of anything featuring Jimmy Savile, Stuart Hall or Rolf Harris from repeat schedules.
An artist in Australia has apparently revised his own artwork by painting out Rolf Harris and painting in someone else.
http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/rolf-harris-brushed-aside-by-abused-entertainer-20150224-13n8k5.html
“voted as the 102nd most popular entertainer in a list of 100…was molested as a child so for us it became an easy decision to replace Rolf Harris with someone who had been in that situation”
http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/feb/25/rolf-harris-erased-from-painting-of-australian-showbiz-greats
http://www.qvm.com.au/blog/launch-variety-entertainers-century-painting/
Words used in jest in 2006 (http://www.sheffieldforum.co.uk/archive/index.php/t-112225.html) became all too serious in 2014 (http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-27779830).-
March 9, 2015 at 5:08 pm -
All we have to do now is figure out who the heck the rest of them were in the first place…
Where’s Barry Mackenzie and Crocodile Dundee?
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