All. I’ve sat on the sidelines through this debate and consequently, as I have a lot of ground to cover this tome may come across as slightly rambling…but as in an Eddie Izzard monologue please stick with me and we’ll reach the denouement eventually.
I’m afraid in this present woke, ‘Cancel Culture’ we’re not really ending up in an Orwellian nightmare which, no matter how apposite it is, was contained in a novel. No, we’re getting very close to what happened outside the Staatsoper in Berlin on 10 May 1933…and that didn’t end well!!
My philosophy has always been ‘What is, Is’! Which may or not have come from ‘The Borrowers’ by Mary Norton?!?
We cannot turn back the clock, but we must always learn from the past and ensure that those wrongs are not repeated…but (isn’t there always a but?)…we cannot and must not try to expunge what happened then! As I’ve quoted before in a strangely similar debate about ‘Butch’ Harris…’ The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there’.
As far as I’m aware Gibson did not name his dog deliberately as a racial slur. No, as said hound was a Chocolate Labrador, he named it after a well-known brand of paint manufactured by one of the UK’s leading paint producers. So, who was in the wrong?? Gibson? Or should we now boycott all Old English Sheepdogs because of their link to a racist paint manufacturer?!? These things are not quite as easy as they first appear!
Back in the day, I was 2ic and senior nav in the RAF’s ‘most operational’ support helicopter squadron. For the disbandment of the Squadron and the retiring of the SH version of the ‘Mighty’ Wessex I planned a round NI and GB flypast of all of the bases, stations and locations that were linked with 72 (Basutoland) Squadron and the venerable ‘Wessii’. As you can see our ‘bracketed’ name is Basutoland, as in WWII the people of Basutoland raised funds to support the war effort, part of which went to pay for 25 Spitfires which flew with No 72 Squadron. They had Sesotho names like Makesi, Moshoeshoe, and Thaba Boisu - the latter a name which had also been given to three Sopwith Camels in World War 1.The original goal was to collect £50,000, but in the end The Basutoland War Fund collected more than £120,000. Because of this 72 Squadron took the honorific title ‘Basutoland’
To honour our heritage I sought, and received, approval to use the callsign ‘Basuto’ for the pan-UK flypast. Holy Moly…I now understand that Basutoland was a was a British Crown colony established in 1884 due to the Cape Colony's inability to control the territory’s Commissioners!!
Shock, horror!! Does this make me some form of unrepentant racist as members of ‘Black Lives Matter’ and their alickadoos would have it!! Of course not, I was just honouring our forebearers from 1917 to 2002.
In addition, those of you who know me, are well aware that I am quite fussy about the spelling of my surname. It is an Anglicised version of an original Gaelic-spelled name. One of my ex-Father-in-Law’s old mates used to call me the ‘soup supper’ as during the Irish Potato Famine of the 1840s the Anglican Church of Ireland would provide soup kitchens…but only for those who took the Anglican Communion. Therefore, one of my, thankfully pragmatic, ancestors probably thought. ‘Well it’s the same God so what the heck!’ and, to save his and his family’s lives he converted from Catholicism. And the fact that I am here, boring you witless, is testimony to the fact that I am incredibly grateful. Again, should I feel appalled, change the spelling back and ‘turn’ as the say in NI? No. ‘What is, Is’. It made me and my family what we have been I the last 180 years or so. I can acknowledge what we had before, but I can’t change what happened in the late 1840s.
What these inane ramblings are getting at is that we are all a product of our pasts – good, bad or indifferent. Could we, should we have done things differently? Of course. But we cannot turn the clock back!! If only we could!! But we can learn from what happened in that ‘foreign country’ and make sure that it doesn’t happen again!!!
What is, Is!!