When you go on holiday the easiest entertainment is to watch
the DVDs left by your land-lady, especially when the internet is iffy.
Our first evening we watched Gone With The Wind (it
went on forever), the second evening, The History Boys.
Both were promoting poison.
The poison of Gone With The Wind is obvious. It
portrayed the black slaves as if they had an idyllic time as much-loved members
of the plantation family. What was all the fuss about?
It’s propaganda, seeking to legitimize a foul and
brutal system. It starts sickly and gets worse – especially when the negro
carpet baggers are seen later in their smart waist coats smoking cigars.
At least the racist propaganda in Gone With The Wind
comes with a great dramatic story and larger than life characters who have a
flicker of morality.
There is hardly a story in The History Boys and not a
flicker of morality. It’s all about propaganda for paedophiles.
The teacher we are all meant to love is the bumbling, widely
read, eccentric Hector – who gropes boys and so faces the sack. The teacher we are meant to be
ambivalent towards is the smooth know it all Irwin; but our respect for him
sinks at the end when we find out that he has lied about being a student at
Oxford, and – much more sickening – when he is ready to listen to a disgusting
proposal from Daikin, one of his pupils. Then there’s the caricature of the
headmaster who pinched the behind of his secretary. Daikin is her boyfriend and
he blackmails the headmaster. Reinstate Hector – or your misdemeanours go
public. Hector is reinstated.
What is left in the viewer’s mind is that everyone has got
strange sexual urges, and so – guess what? – it’s best not to judge anyone.
That’s the propaganda for paedophiles (we are just another
group, please accept us) and it is all brought to an emotional finale at the
end when Hector dies in a motor-cycle accident and we are urged to join in the
eulogies for him at his memorial service.
Just in case the viewer has not had enough of homosexuality
one of the boys, Posner, is in love with Daikin (quite a man – the school
secretary, Irwin, and Posner) and this is never reciprocated.
Propaganda has no respect for truth. Its purpose is to
emotionally convince the viewer.
That’s exactly what is going on here, faithful to another
grim mantra of the film: it’s worth lying.
In 2015 1.7% of the population identified themselves as
being bi or homosexual. Now suddenly in ‘The History Boys’ in a group of ten,
40% are bi or homosexual. It’s unlikely. But that’s the propagandist’s game. To make
something shared by a very small minority look as if it is massively
wide-spread.
The propaganda has been very successful. I will never forget
asking a well-respected journalist what the percentage of gays was in the UK
and his confident response was 10%. As said, it’s less than 2%.
And anyone who has ever worked in schools will know that
what is depicted in this film is ludicrous. If any teacher allowed a pupil to
take off their trousers in a lesson pretending to be a girl (as happens in an
early scene) he or she would get sacked. The same goes for the proposal Daikin makes to Irvin.
It’s got nothing to do with reality. It’s fantasy in the
mind of the writer - and his determination to promote a treacherous and
animalistic view of human sexuality. There is not a flicker of morality about
the preciousness of sex for marriage.
At least in Gone With The Wind the selfish cynical
moral compasses of Rhett Butler and Scarlet O’Hara are countered by Ashley and
Melanie Wilkes and their code of honour.
There is no code of honour in ‘The History Boys’.
Pity our generation.
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