To think that Jeremy Paxman was bloody rude on Britain's Great War?

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Watching now on BBC1, and he's doing a bit on Conscientious Objectors. He's not only referred to them as 'cranks', but was quite pointed and rude to a surviving member of one of their families:
"But don't you think he needed to do his bit?' Etc?

I think that's rather inappropriate, especially given that I think a number of them have since been pardoned.

And conscripting people into war has since been condemned, and rightly so.

I think if you make programmes about history you should have the mental agility to keep two sets of thought in your head simultaneously:

a) this is how many people would have thought at the time

b) I don't have to base my own judgment on the lowest common denominator my own era, let alone a different era

Otherwise you'd end up judging those who hid Jews from the Nazis as cranks, merely on the basis that the people around might not agree with them.

He didn't even credit O Cuiv with his current status. It is relevent that Dev's shadow is still strong. It seemed almost pointed not to include he is the third generation of Devs family to be active on politics.

The Eye in The Door is very informative and accurate from what I know.

Paxman is routinely rude, sneering and unable to see other points of view. He is a lazy interviewer who relies on aggression. He was not suddenly going to transform into a nuanced commentator/interviewer for this programme.

Well summed up Angela, that's why I left the room when the programme came on!

Paxman was up for doing Question Time but got passed over cos he couldn't help but be rude to ordinary folk in the audience as well as the politicians, I understand.

There is a revisionist view now that actually the Great War as it was then known was not what we were told, that Haig wasn't such a bad bloke as he did at least get it right eventually and also introduced the Poppy appeal, and that in fact the Hun was bad and had to be stopped, albeit not as bad as the Nazis.

Previously one might have thought, well, who can blame anyone for wanting to avoid that senseless slaughter. At the time, I don't know, I thought the whole adventure was seen as a jolly laugh, one is startled to read in Greenmantle, the sequel to The 39 Steps, that Hannay the narrator refers to 'that shindig at Loos' or some such phrase: thousands died at Loos, it was a disaster I think - Kipling's son, who he sent off to be a hero, died there too, plus the Queen Mother's brother if I recall correctly. Not quite up there with Passendale but not far off. I was surprised to find in Paxman's programme that folk were rounded up to be enlisted and many tried to get out.

That interview didn't help that Paxo towered over the interviewee.

I am among those who thought Paxman was playing devil's advocate. I have found these programmes interesting so far. When so many men were volunteering it is small wonder that those who didn't were held in such low regard. The men they were talking about would not even go and drive ambulances or work in the hospitals.
I also thought Michael Portillo's programme on Radio 4 about the beginning of the war was very interesting.

Conference, no one is disputing that CO's were generally held in low regard by their contemporaries (and frequently paid a terrible price for their stance - forced labour or solitary confinement without clothes in an unheated cell in winter, because they refused to put on a uniform?), but JP made it plain that he, personally, in 2014, thought of the absolute COs as 'cranks' and said so to a descendant, which I think jarred.

The COs were incredibly brave, IMO. Total respect.

Paxman's Empire book is v disappointing. Totally derivative and bombastic. I was, rather idiotically, hoping for something better.

I have always found the jingoism about WW1 quite shocking. My Grandad was a left wing young miner in South Wales when war broke out, a protected occupation so he was not compelled to enlist. From what he told me, pretty much the whole community (quite politicised and left wing), regarded the whole thing as a bosses war, right from the start, and considered anyone who joined up, a complete mug.

My DH's northern granddad on the other hand, joined up when he was 14 (with his cousin, who was killed). In their family they were considered brave, adventuring, patriotic heroes.

Of course in the last couple if decades there's been lots of revisionist stuff in the media about WW1 being a tragic waste of life, and now DH's family's attitude is more on the same page as mine. the difference was quite startling though.

I can forgive Paxman for his opinions, even though he is getting paid enough to have the sense to keep them to himslf. What I cannot forgive is the big, big ie that England thought it was a just war. Vwry few Pals came back! That's why they had to enlist people. For what thoygh? To fight Germans. To kill oedinary people of another nationality. Heinous! (Fighting Nazism is a very different matter.) Wilfred Owen anybody? Seigfried Sassoon?

Well, or another nationality, true but possibly of another culture. To be fair, all Englishmen would be foreigners us now ('the past is another country' etc) so we may be less able to distinguish between the English and the Germans. But if we can generalise nastily about the English types back then (all jolly patriotism, a bit starchy and clueless) then why not about Germans?

And it was broadly defensive against the aggressive Germans in particular the Prussians. You couldn't say that about Henry V and Agincourt (he went out there to pick a fight, only narrowly turned potential disaster around and wiped out the French) - still, even more different times.

Sorry no, those Englishman were mine and my husband's grandparents. We grew up with them. They are not alien to us. Just because revisionists come along when they have all died and not here to speak out against it doesn't make the revisionists arguments true.
We can generalise nastily about the Germans now too, if you like, but my point was that, using that racism as propaganda to make men hate and kill an enemy didn't make Britain great, it stripped people of something they dearly wanted back again.

Sorry, just come back to the thread!

I found his tone just horrible. If I'd have been that woman he interviewed, I'd have been really upset because his tone towards her was bullying.

Well, to be fair, the Germans had overrun France and Belgium, our allies. Some antagonism was surely to be expected. They were shelling our Eastern seaboard (from Zeppelins?).

Apart from the rationale of the war, it's still a controversial issue, whether individual conscience trumps national need. People seem to accept the Quakers but not always across the board. I'm glad Paxman is taking a rigorous stance in putting both sides. The C.O.s were brave in standing up for their beliefs, but their stance should not detract from the bravery of those who did actually go over the top and die at the Somme. A different sort of bravery, perhaps.

Read some of the personal accounts. They're heartbreaking. Those men/boys knew they were going to die.

A pp referred to those who joined up and then changed their minds as cowards. Personally, I have huge sympathy for the poor shell-shocked soldier in the trenches who was physically incapable of doing more than collapse in a sobbing heap when the whistles blew. I wouldn't call them cowards.

Thymeout, well put!
I can see both sides, quite honestly. The true heroes of WWI were the tunnellers at the front. They won the war. But then again, why are they any more heroic than the 500,000 who lost thier lives going over the top that day (due to a massive error of judgement on the part of the commanding officer)?

If the aristocracy had had a the presence of mind to employ negitiators to sort out their differences at the start, the whole war could have been avoided with some compromise. Then maybe WWII would not have happened either. All I am saying is, this isn't new thinking, people knew it back then but TBTB wouldn't listen. If we go back to thinking WWI was unavoidable, we forget the lessons that previous generations have learned from the whole ordeal and we are in danger of history repeating itself.

I was the one saying those who changed their minds were cowards, and you are right context is everything. What about a man who joined the navy, got on a ship to the other side of the world and then jumped ship and went AWOL (having seen no action)? That was more the kind of thing I had in mind, which is what another relative did. That was cowardice and he knew it, and he regretted it for the rest of his life.

Thankyou, Yegods...

I agree with you that diplomacy could/should have prevented the whole dreadful tragedy. I think they simply didn't realise what 'industrial war' would be like. At the beginning, the Belgians still thought they could employ their cavalry, in dress uniform. At least, we'd had the recent experience of the Boer War. And, of course, it was all going to be over by Christmas.

I agree that the war should have been avoided. But once it was underway, really, what can you do? Let Germany win I suppose you are saying YeGods... Which might just work, I mean maybe things would have been okay in the long run; you would have avoided the rise of Hitler and WW2 on that point. Not sure they knew that at the time, or just how bad trench warfare would turn out to be.

Oh, and I don't personally brand it racism or call it such that the English were fighting the Germans in this context, in fact I find it odd when people cry 'racism' when at worst they mean xenophobia. As if killing Germans in a war they started is the same as exterminating the Jews.