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Notes -
How about some television talk.
I was looking for a show to watch on a second screen while I played the new Trails in the Sky 2nd Chapter and came across Slow Horses - BBC spy show about MI5 and a group of remedial agents. My parents have been watching for years and always recommend it. I loathe most modern television but for whatever reason decided to give it a shot.
It’s very much as expected. The first half of season 1 is all about a “loathsome” right wing terrorist cell, the Sons of Albion. Get this - these right wing youths kidnap an innocent British British-Asian boy and plan to behead him live on the internet in an ISIS style video. But wait, it’s actually a rouge opp carried out by the evil girlboss intelligence minister. They then do a double fakeout where the Sons of Albion get wise to the setup and the scary right wing guy goes on a rampage and attempts to carry out the beheading.
This is a completely ludicrous plot line and it appears that Apple’s Slow Horses is going to be every bit as awful as I expected for a show developed after 2016. Does Hollywood imagine there are actually these sort of right wing terror cells just waiting to activate? Despite all evidence to the contrary and dozens if not hundreds of other instances of racial and political violence perpetrated against white people? Or is the goal to get boomers all worked up about dangerous right wing ideologies. Are they stupid or liars?
For anyone here who’s watched it, does Slow Horses get better? Is there anything of value here?
I’m separately on season 4 of Le Bureau des Legendes - a French foreign intelligence tv drama produced by Canal and very highly regarded by anyone in the Anglosphere that’s seen it. It’s the show that Paramount’s The Agency is based on. And I must say the The Bureau is truly excellent. Season 1 aired in 2015 so it’s only mildly annoying with politics. Very mild. It’s really great and worth a watch if you haven’t seen it. I have a lot of thoughts on it that I can share if anyone is interested. But it reminds me a lot of 24, with less action and more drama.
Every once in a while I check in with myself and try and make sure I'm not becoming overly sensitive on culture war matters. I think you doing that here.
For one thing, the show is just great.
For another, it's designed to make you think it's about certain themes when it isn't (for instance the question of if River is meant to be in Slough House). The villains are often part of that (and the over arching theme is usually more system-failure and banal corruption than any specific political bugbear).*
Lastly, while the UK obviously has some stupid and exaggerated fear of right wing extremism, it's not as stupid as it seems because they actually have had white people committing acts of terror is recent memory (the troubles).
*Many of the villains are women, and ethnic women, and one of those women is also a hero. It does not deal with morality in a childlike and unipolar way.
I don't think anyone thinks like that here in the UK. The Troubles were Irish separatists, and were not considered 'white' (or non-white), nor 'right-wing'. Irish violence (both terrorism and Mob-related) has been common enough in the last century to have its own category.
Just going by your message, what Slow Horses is doing is mixing the British fear of skinheads and working-class hooliganism with the fear of Islamist extremism. The IRA never used videoed beheadings as a method of stoking fear, they used shootings, bombings, torture and mutilation. Whereas al-Qaeda and ISIS were famed for it.
Whether reversing the races to present crimes committed by muslims against whites (to instead be crimes by whites against muslims) should be considered Culture War is something I leave to the reader's judgement. I suspect the primary reason for doing it is that it's politically easiest. Right-wing whites (especially working class ones) have no special interest groups worth a damn.
I think you are correct that it's because of easy targets and all the other usual CW stuff and at the same time the UK has had recent severe organized terrorism performed by Whites, unlike the US (which mostly has psychotic actions and a few small isolated political ones).
What I'm trying to say is that there's no semantic box in the British mind which contains both the IRA and the 'Sons of Albion'.
It would be like saying, "To understand the current reaction to Patriot Front, you need to understand America's history of white violence: the Italian Mafia ravaged America for nearly a decade".
No American (IMO) would write that. The Godfather portrays violence by whites, but it's not the same kind of violence and they're not the same whites.
Rightly or wrongly, there's a semantic cluster in the American mind which goes 'KKK -> Jim Crow lynchings -> Patriot Front'. There isn't one that goes 'Mafia -> Patriot Front'.
In the UK there is a semantic cluster containing 'Enoch Powell's rivers of blood speech -> Oswald Moseley -> the BNP and EDF -> Sons of Albion'. There is not IRA -> Sons of Albion.
But if you took a man off the street and gave him "recent severe organized terrorism performed by Whites" I doubt the IRA would leap to his tongue. He might get it eventually.
Perhaps for the British, but they are nearly a minority in their own country at this point, no?
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