Mad Melanie Phillips has started using the subject-line “Weimar Broadcasting Corporation” for “her”:http://www.melaniephillips.com/diary/archives/001080.html “rants”:http://www.melaniephillips.com/diary/archives/001081.html against the BBC. I have to say, it sounds rather a good idea. How about “these guys”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weimar for a new board of governors:
bq. Weimar is one of the great cultural sites of Europe, since it was the home to such luminaries as Bach, Goethe, Schiller, and Herder. It has been a site of pilgrimage for the German intelligentsia since Goethe first moved to Weimar in the late 18th century. The tombs of Goethe, Schiller, and Nietzsche may be found in the city, as may the archives of Goethe and Schiller.
And we’d still be able to turn over to Channel 4 for “Wifeswap”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/003305.html …..
{ 17 comments }
Des von Bladet 03.07.05 at 4:37 pm
I spoke to Goethe’s agent; ‘pparently he’s staying dead for the foreseeable. (I was hoping it was a tax dodge a la Hotblack but no such luck.)
harry 03.07.05 at 5:02 pm
You should have linked to her other anti WBC rant — attacking it for anti-semitism for broadcasting Trilby as its Womans Hour serial. She is, seriously, nuts (even discounting my filial partiality to one of her betes noir).
Des von Bladet 03.07.05 at 5:08 pm
The pictures are particularly damning, especially on radio. (It’s the first link of the two (2), and well worth boggling at.)
harry 03.07.05 at 5:27 pm
Sorry, I only noticed one link. I see things much better on the radio.
Paul 03.07.05 at 5:34 pm
I see that Ms. Phillips has written a book called All Must Have Prizes. I’ve just encounted that phrase in Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty (where Gerald Fedden, the Conservative MP likes to repeat it). Is this a stock Tory phrase?
Paul 03.07.05 at 5:45 pm
(I mean, I can see why that line from Alice might be a stock Tory phrase, I’m just wondering if it is.)
notmyrealname 03.07.05 at 7:22 pm
Ms. Phillips says: But one has to question why the BBC […] has chosen this moment to serialise this fourth-rate example of Victorian fiction, whose one attribute is that it will undoubtedly confirm and deepen the prejudice that […] the Jews are a sinister conspiracy that controls the world.
I can see that. Further, is there a conspiracy at Crooked Timber to silence attempts by Mel Phillips to expose the BBC’s conspiracy to promote fear of Jewish conspiracy?
Maybe I shouldn’t have said that so loud.
harry 03.07.05 at 7:29 pm
What worries me is the conspiracy among some readers of CT to expose the conspiracy at CT to silence attempts by Mel Phillips to expose the BBC’s conspiracy to promote fear of Jewish conspiracy…
derek 03.07.05 at 9:24 pm
How appropriate that Melanie “Coulter” Philips, of all people, should be down on all things Weimar. Now who does that remind me of…?
John Emerson 03.08.05 at 12:30 am
I recently did a very small bit of reading on the last days of the Weimar Republic and the Weimar emigration to the US. It wasn’t exactly news to me, but I was still amazed not only by the strength of left/right anti-democratic / anti-liberal opinion in Germany, but also by the feebleness of the support given by the Republic’s supporters. “The best lack all conviction”, etc.
And a considerable proportion of the emigres to America maintained their contempt for liberalism, with a special contempt for American liberalism because of its lack of philosophical depth (or whatever). It seems that they might have noticed that high German culture, with all its seriousness, thoroughness, and profundity, had taken steps to destroy Western civilization three times in seventy years, and that maybe the problem was there.
Yeah, yeah, the French were just as bad. But anyway, I’m pro-Weimar, pro-“American-Weimar”, and while anri-Bush, not too crazy about European bragging about their high civilization.
dsquared 03.08.05 at 3:18 pm
I note from the second of those links that she is effectively accusing Michael Grade of being no better than the Weimar republic. If I were him (actually, obviously, if I were Michael Grade I would have better things to do than give a shit but there you are), I’d remind her which top-five monotheistic religion-which-is-also-an-ethnicity I was a member of and start doing the whole Ken Livingstone bit on her.
dsquared 03.08.05 at 3:20 pm
I note from the second of those links that she is effectively accusing Michael Grade of being no better than the Weimar republic. If I were him (actually, obviously, if I were Michael Grade I would have better things to do than give a shit but there you are), I’d remind her which top-five monotheistic religion-which-is-also-an-ethnicity I was a member of and start doing the whole Ken Livingstone bit on her.
Chris Baldwin 03.08.05 at 4:10 pm
Did Melanie Phillips spend the early eighties living in a student house with a punk, a hippie and one other guy? Because she cetainly sounds like it.
hick 03.08.05 at 8:43 pm
Much as I dislike siding with tories or neo-cons, this Mad Mel broad does seems like a British version of the US liberal Mommycrat, one who thinks Sesame Street was some profound statement of humanist ethics. A stint in the infantry might have done her well.
If it were up to the feminists, any show (or novel) which portrayed any minority or jewish person in a bad light would be banned, though mockery of caucasian males would be acceptable.
Dan Simon 03.09.05 at 7:25 am
All this unseemly, over-the-top malice towards Melanie Phillips is completely mystifying to me–unless it’s some kind of naughty-but-safe thrill to speak rudely about somebody who’s complaining about anti-Semitism. Just think–if she were complaining about anti-Arab bigotry in famous English literature, you’d all have to treat her with a lot more solemn respect.
rjw 03.09.05 at 6:41 pm
Listen to melanie phillips on the BBC’s moral maze and make up your own mind. I’ve made up mine. Mad is the word. And not half as smart as she thinks she is.
Matt Weiner 03.11.05 at 3:55 pm
Indeed, Dan. Because the only difference between Melanie Phillips and Edward Said is the one you’ve cited.
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