03/10/2012
On Monday last, we saw a story in the
Daily Mail, having David Cameron's Oxford tutor, Vernon Bogdanor, characterising the Second World War as the "People's War" because of the paternalistic "humanity" of war leaders - Field Marshall Montgomery amongst them.
I tackled the article then, but felt I had not done justice to it â not fully conveying quite how offensive this top-down, elitist view of the War really is, perverting and distorting the truth in a way that scarcely can be imagined.
By coincidence, I recently obtained all the copies for 1940 of the
Daily Worker, which is the one newspaper that did try to report what was really going on during the Blitz. Had I not already researched this subject thoroughly,
in my book, I might have been tempted to dismiss its reporting as Communist propaganda. Almost everything reported, however, checks out.
I will come back to this, as the material really does need wide exposure, but I thought I would just offer a taster, with a cartoon from 14 September 1940, conveying the contempt with which the "capitalist press" was regarded when its fearless reporters forayed out into the East End to see for themselves the damage caused by Nazi bombers.
Contemporary evidence demonstrates how accurate that view of the media was, while one might also observe that, in terms of the media's general conduct, nothing much has changed.
