Fox has been relatively famous for a while before this interview. I’m not going to be able to view Inspector Lewis in the same light anymore, given his character was somewhat of a decent guy.
Kind of a Mel Gibson moment happening right now, minus the drunken ranting.
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One soldier in every six in the British Army was Indian, with Sikhs comprising one-fifth of the Indian contingent when the war began.
Rare images of Sikh soldiers
History is largely written through omission.
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Thankfully, some historians have been attempting to change that in the past few decades…
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Wow. How disappointing. I loved Lewis, and the Hathaway character in particular. Heck!
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Well just to be fair, as a percentage of soldiers serving on the Western Front, the percentage of Indian soldiers (of all sorts, not just Sikhs) was significantly lower in 1917 than it had been in 1915.* In 1915 the British had not yet managed the huge Kitchener expansion with all the New Armies made from men that had enlisted when the war began. The shortage meant that a large number of colonial troops were brought in from India. Of course they served in segregated units, partly because of racism, and partly for the perfectly reasonable fact that you want everybody in the unit to speak the same language. So a single Sikh DID feel a little “shoehorned in,” but they justified that by saying that the truck was full of “casuals,” ie. soldiers that were not really part of the unit but were travelling with them, just as the main character was. Separated from his unit, a messenger, or a liason from the next division over, we really don’t know exactly what his story is, but one can imagine a reasonable one.
Generally, they got a lot of details right, like the German trenches being much nicer than the Allied ones. Frankly, I was more bothered by the scene when the main character is walking along the tilted steel I-beam of a bridge. Which would be nearly impossible with the hobnail boots British soldiers were issued.
edited to add-
- If you look at Victoria Crosses awarded to soldiers and officers in the Indian Army (some to soldiers of Indian descent, some of European descent) , you will find that in 1915 most of the were for actions on the Western Front and in 1917, most of them were for actions in Mesopotamia. When the manpower crises were lessened, most Indian units were reassigned, justified by the belief that they weren’t suited to the colder climate. But of course a darker racism was probably also part of that decision.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Victoria_Cross_recipients_of_the_Indian_Army
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He always has his “music” to fall back on!
Edit to add " "
“It feels incongruous” I feel like maybe with some nudging (and maybe some mushrooms) he could make the leap to understand it’s that institutional racism he doesn’t believe in that’s responsible for his “feelings” that are at odds with the reality of how things were?
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Of course, this is the feedback loop of choice among many:
- Deny there were people of color / women / minorities who accomplished important things in history.
- Cite history books, documentaries, fiction, etc that omit said contributions.
- Denigrate history books, documentaries, fiction, etc that shows contributions outside of dominant paradigm as unrealistic, unrepresentative, forced, or revisionist.
- Repeat.
As a friend likes to say, you can’t logic someone out of a belief they didn’t logic themselves into.
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The same Jeremy Vine who retweets fascists?
I shouldn’t be surprised all the arseholes hang out together.
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They both went to £40k per year schools.
That does seem to be a trend.
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More clearly: I still believe what I said, I just didn’t express it very well.
Next Hollywood will be telling us that gay people existed before 1976.
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So basically he’s a racist Inspector Clouseau.
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Lord Frederick Roberts—the Commander-in-Chief in India from 1885 to 1893—was an enthusiastic proponent of the theory of the “martial races” and reshaped the class components of the Indian army, in particular replacing men from the “unmartial” south with the “martial” races of the north.
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right-wing politicians and media have taught their constituents to talk like this
when consistency doesn’t win, being consistent is counterproductive
if you can get votes from racists, and from people who think racism doesn’t exist, and from people who think anti-racists are the real racists, just by contradicting yourself three times in the same sentence, then making a coherent argument instead would be throwing most of your votes away
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Someone who was ignorant-yet curious, might have used the surprise as an excuse to learn more about WW1.
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Fox is worried about the PC pile-ons stifling his freedom of expression! The Man is gonna shut him down!
His record label is Fox Cub Records.
Owned by Lawrence Fox.
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I heard a line recently about how the English for a long time went out conquering and colonizing and then when the empire was over they got ticked when people followed them home.
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They did not “follow them home”… the British government passed a law allowing former colonial citizens the right to move to the UK. They weren’t stray dogs, they were people who had been given a right in exchanges for decades of violent occupation that often stripped their country of its wealth. That was the LEAST the British government could have done to make up for that.
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