I think you will find that the PC world we live in now is turning full circle. 'Nigga' is a well used word in the black rap music culture. It is only racist to use the term if you are adopting a derogaory tone, but the mainly white middle class new labour touchy feely people, who are only happy when they have a 'cause' to defend, have chosen to rewrite history on a number of topics, to defend their ok yah Ken Livingstone place in their little world. These are the same sort of people who sat on Brent Council in the 80s, and banned a Clint Eastwood film from being shown because the baddy, played by Lee Van Cleef wore a black hat and rode a black horse, thus stereotyping black as evil. Hello????
Anyway, Ive stashed my soapbox at the back of 245 and will relay a story from my time in the very early days of Tornado on the 617th Tactical Strike and Interdiction Sqn (Countryside redevelopers to the 3rd Reich). One of the newer roles after the move was that of airfield attack, and 4 jets were often launched to go and rattle windows for the good old TACEVAL at other units. One day though, all radio callsigns both ground and air were hastily changed to 'Blackdog', after one such surprise attack at a USAF base in East Anglia, where the black Base Commander choked on his Hershey Bar when he heard the call "****** formation running in now". I was later told that the matter got as far as the SofS for Defence for comment and profuse apology.
So quite rightly, we should all stamp out racism in any form it shows its ugly head, but what is in the annals of time should stay there unmolested, and without censorship from the Nanny State. Or we could end up saying that it wasnt true the Lancaster was a better bomber than the Stirling, for fear of upsetting our northern bretheren!
CC