As with everything currently on our tellies, says Douglas Murray in The Spectator, Ben Macintyre’s new Colditz drama appears to “reflect the values of our little cultural-revolutionary period”. According to the historian, the aim of the show is to “dismantle the ‘mythology’” by focusing on the “appalling racism” at the castle – not that of the Nazis, mind, but of the British prisoners of war. So Douglas Bader, perhaps this country’s most “celebrated Spitfire fighter ace”, is now depicted as “a monster… racist, snobbish [and] brutally unpleasant to anyone he considered of a lower socioeconomic order”.
This is just another example of so-called “anti-racists” trying to “dismantle, problematise and indeed disappear our history”. White people who “demonstrated extraordinary heroism” must be torn down, because they simply can’t satisfy the ultra-liberal standards of today. But while we rubbish our history as a racist “myth”, we’re more than happy making up new myths that favour other social groups. Take the “doolally, race-obsessed Americans”, who decided when making a new Netflix series that Cleopatra was “not a Macedonian”, but a “prototype African-American”. Of course, creators kept schtum about the Egyptian queen’s absolutist ways and slave-owning. There’s an “asymmetry” in the fact that our history must be rewritten as solely negative, while the history of other groups can only ever be positive. “Here would be my deal. We are allowed to have our heroes and you are allowed to have yours.”