There are not many methods of cooking birds which are peculiar to Britain. The British regard as inedible many birds – for instance, thrushes, larks, sparrows, curlews, green plovers and various kinds of duck – which are valued in other countries. They are also inclined to despise rabbits, and rabbit-rearing for the table has never been extensively practiced in Britain. On the other hand they will eat young rooks, which are shot in May and baked in pies. They are especially attached to geese and turkeys, which (at normal times) are eaten in immense quantities at Christmas, always roasted whole, with chestnut stuffing in the case of turkeys, and sage and onion stuffing and apple sauce in the case of geese.
Fish in Britain is seldom well cooked. The sea all round Britain yields a variety of excellent fishes, but as a rule they are unimaginatively boiled or fried, and the art of seasoning them in the cooking is not understood. The fish fried in oil to which the British working classes are especially addicted is definitely nasty, and has been an enemy of home cookery, since it can be bought everywhere in the big towns, ready cooked and at low prices. Except for trout, salmon and eels, British people will not eat fresh-water fish. As for vegetables, it must be admitted that, potatoes apart, they seldom get the treatment they deserve. Thanks to the rain-soaked soil, British vegetables are nearly all of excellent flavour, but they are commonly spoiled in the cooking. Cabbage is simply boiled – a method which renders it almost uneatable – while cauliflowers, leeks and marrows are usually smothered in a tasteless white sauce which is probably the “one sauce” scornfully referred to by Voltaire. The British are not great eaters of salads, though they have grown somewhat fonder of raw vegetables during the war years, thanks to the educational campaigns of the Ministry of Food. Except for salads, vegetables are always eaten with the meat, not separately.
George Orwell, “British Cookery”, 1946. (Originally commissioned by the British Council, but refused by them and later published in abbreviated form.)
December 26, 2020
QotD: British meals – fish, fowl, and vegetables
November 11, 2020
QotD: Appeasement and shifting allegiances between the wars
Although it was in every way more pardonable, the attitude of the Left towards the Russian régime has been distinctly similar to the attitude of the Tories towards Fascism. There has been the same tendency to excuse almost anything “because they’re on our side”. It is all very well to talk about Lady Chamberlain photographed shaking hands with Mussolini; the photograph of Stalin shaking hands with Ribbentrop is much more recent. On the whole, the intellectuals of the Left defended the Russo-German Pact. It was “realistic”, like Chamberlain’s appeasement policy, and with similar consequences. If there is a way out of the moral pigsty we are living in, the first step towards it is probably to grasp that “realism” does not pay, and that to sell out your friends and sit rubbing your hands while they are destroyed is not the last word in political wisdom.
George Orwell, “Who are the War Criminals?”, Tribune, 1943-10-22.
September 29, 2020
Modern Classics Summarized: 1984
Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 24 Feb 2017It’s the mother of all dystopias! Long before YA dystopia rose to power, before the age of Young Attractive Heroes who Rebel Against The State and Also Find Love, there was just Winston Smith — a middle-aged man in poor health who Rebelled Against The State and Also Found Love. It just ended much less prettily for him.
1984 codified most of the modern dystopia tropes — absolute control of the media, black-bagging people who spoke out, and a lot of popular terms like “doublethink”, “big brother”, and “thought police”. Unfortunately, a lot of those terms got stripped of context and thrown around for the sake of Extra Edge, and as a result they get used a little haphazardly. And there’s nothing Red hates more than misused terminology, so here’s the video outlining the ORIGINAL meaning of 1984!
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August 17, 2020
QotD: Orwell and faith
I spent a day with Orwell just before he died. I sat on his sanatorium bed, tried to smoke the frightful cigarettes he insisted on making for himself. I heard him say: “The problem of the world is this: Can we get men to behave decently to each other if they no longer believe in God?”
Charles Curran, “Orwell: The man behind 1984 — and all that”, Daily Mirror, 1954-12-14.
August 11, 2020
August 7, 2020
August 1, 2020
QotD: Voluntary self-censorship
Obviously it is not desirable that a Government department should have any power of censorship (except security censorship, which no one objects to in wartime) over books which are not officially sponsored. But the chief danger to freedom of thought and speech at this moment is not the direct interference of the M.O.I. [Ministry of Information] or any official body. If publishers and editors exert themselves to keep certain topics out of print, it is not because they are frightened of prosecution but because they are frightened of public opinion. In this country, intellectual cowardice is the worst enemy a writer or journalist has to face, and that fact does not seem to me to have had the discussion it deserves.
Any fair‐minded person with journalistic experience will admit that during this war official censorship has not been particularly irksome. We have not been subjected to the kind of totalitarian “co-ordination” that it might have been reasonable to expect. The press has some justified grievances, but on the whole the Government has behaved well and and has been surprisingly tolerant of minority opinions. The sinister fact about literary censorship in England is that it is largely voluntary. Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban. Anyone who has lived long in a foreign country will know of instances of sensational items of news — things which on their own merits would get the big headlines — being kept right out of the British press, not because the Government intervened but because of a general tacit agreement that “it wouldn’t do” to mention that particular fact. So far as the daily newspapers go, this is easy to understand. The British press is extremely centralized, and most of it is owned by wealthy men who have every motive to be dishonest on certain important topics. But the same kind of veiled censorship also operates in books and periodicals, as well as in plays, films and radio. At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right thinking people will accept without question. It not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other but it is “not done” to say it, just as in mid‐Victorian times it was “not done” to mention trousers in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.
At this moment what is demanded by the prevailing orthodoxy is an uncritical admiration of Soviet Russia. Everyone knows this, nearly everyone acts on it. Any serious criticism of the Soviet regime, any disclosure of facts which the Soviet Government would prefer to keep hidden, is next door to unprintable. And this nation-wide conspiracy to flatter our ally takes place, curiously enough, against a background of genuine intellectual tolerance. For though you are not allowed to criticize the Soviet Government, at least you are reasonably free to criticize our own. Hardly anyone will print an attack on Stalin, but it is quite safe to attack Churchill, at any rate in books and periodicals. And throughout five years of war, during two or three of which we were fighting for national survival, countless books, pamphlets and articles advocating a compromise peace have been published without interference. More, they have been published without exciting much disapproval. So long as the prestige of the U.S.S.R. is not involved, the principle of free speech has been reasonably well upheld. There are other forbidden topics […] but the prevailing attitude toward the U.S.S.R is much the most serious symptom. It is, as it were, spontaneous, and is not due to the action of any pressure group.
The servility with which the greater part of the English intelligentsia have swallowed and repeated Russian propaganda from 1941 onward would be quite astounding if it were not that they have behaved similarly on several earlier occasions. On one controversial issue after another the Russian viewpoint has been accepted without examination and then publicized with complete disregard to historical truth or intellectual decency. To name only one instance, the B.B.C. celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Red Army without mentioning Trotsky. This was about as accurate as commemorating the battle of Trafalgar with out mentioning Nelson, but evoked no protest from the English intelligentsia. In the internal struggles in the various occupied countries, the British press has in almost all cases sided with the faction favored by the Russians and libeled the opposing faction, sometimes suppressing material evidence in order to do so. A particularly glaring case was that of Colonel Mihailovich, the Jugoslav Chetnik leader. The Russians, who had their own Jugoslav protégé in Marshal Tito, accused Mihailovich of collaborating with the Germans. This accusation was promptly taken up by the British press: Mihailovich’s supporters were given no chance of answering it, and facts contradicting it were kept out of print. In July, 1943, the Germans offered a reward of 100,000 gold crowns for the capture of Tito, and a similar reward for the capture of Mihailovich. The British press “splashed” the reward for Tito, but only one paper mentioned (in small print) the reward for Mihailovich; and the charges of collaborating with the Germans continued. Very similar things happened during the Spanish civil war. Then, too, the factions on the Republican side which the Russians were determined to crush were recklessly libeled in the English leftwing press, and any statement in their defense, even in letter form, was refused publication. At present, not only is serious criticism of the U.S.S.R. considered reprehensible, but even the fact of the existence of such criticism is kept secret in some cases. For example, shortly before his death Trotsky had written a biography of Stalin. One may assume that it was not an altogether unbiased book, but obviously it was saleable. An American publisher had arranged to issue it and the book was in print — I believe the review copies had been sent out — when the U.S.S.R. entered the war. The book was immediately withdrawn. Not word about this has ever appeared in the British press, though clearly the existence of such a book, and its suppression, was a news item worth a few paragraphs.
George Orwell “The Freedom of the Press”, 1945 (written as the introduction to Animal Farm, but not published in Orwell’s lifetime).
July 23, 2020
George Orwell’s “What is Fascism?”
TIK
Published 21 Jul 2020George Orwell wrote a short piece in 1944 asking the question: What is Fascism? George Orwell (Eric Arthur Blair) died in 1950. His work is technically not in the PUBLIC (STATE) domain in the UK until the end of this year. If Orwell’s estate wishes to make a Fascist-copyright claim on this video, feel free. I’m not monetizing it anyway, and will simply take the video down.
To see yesterday’s suppressed video on Greece under Fascist and National Socialist rule in WW2, click here https://youtu.be/oT2NPAoXeSk
To learn why the word PUBLIC means STATE, click here https://youtu.be/ksAqr4lLA_Y
If you’re looking for a Graphic Designer, here’s a good one: https://www.terriyoungdesigns.co.uk/
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📚 BIBLIOGRAPHY / SOURCES 📚
Full list of all my sources https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/…
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Want to ask a question? Please consider supporting me on either Patreon or SubscribeStar and help make more videos like this possible. For $5 or more you can ask questions which I will answer in future Q&A videos. Thank you to my current Patrons! You’re AWESOME! https://www.patreon.com/TIKhistory or https://www.subscribestar.com/tikhistory
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ABOUT TIK 📝
History isn’t as boring as some people think, and my goal is to get people talking about it. I also want to dispel the myths and distortions that ruin our perception of the past by asking a simple question – “But is this really the case?”. I have a 2:1 Degree in History and a passion for early 20th Century conflicts (mainly WW2). I’m therefore approaching this like I would an academic essay. Lots of sources, quotes, references and so on. Only the truth will do.
This video is discussing events or concepts that are academic, educational and historical in nature. This video is for informational purposes and was created so we may better understand the past and learn from the mistakes others have made.
Full text of Orwell’s “What is Fascism?”, first published in Tribune in 1944 is available here.
July 8, 2020
June 27, 2020
March 14, 2020
“The people who write such things are thinking with their epidermis and genitalia, which is to say they’re not thinking at all”
In Quillette, Matt Johnson remembers the great anti-identitarian writer and speaker, Christopher Hitchens:
Hitchens thought fearlessly. As Martin Amis put it, he liked “the battle, the argument, the smell of cordite.” This is why he told the publisher of God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything to organize a book tour that ran through the pulpits of the American South instead of remaining confined to the coasts. It’s why he relished every opportunity to lambaste Bill and Hillary Clinton in front of liberal audiences. It’s why he went after Mother Teresa and Princess Diana. He was an inveterate iconoclast — if there was a bloated reputation to puncture or a cherished dogma to deflate, he saw it as a duty and a pleasure to do so.
It’s no surprise that this oppositional inclination, coupled with blistering rhetorical ability, made Hitchens a deadly debater. After his death in December 2011, countless tributes and articles about Hitchens emphasized what a force he was in the studio and on the debate stage — his erudition and wit, his fluency, his seemingly superhuman memory. Hitchens is unforgettable for all these reasons, but people don’t miss him because he could turn a phrase or win an argument on CNN — they miss him because he thought for himself and refused to apologize for it. He didn’t want to write and speak as the representative of a community: “My own opinion is enough for me,” he told the audience at a debate on free speech in 2007, “and I claim the right to have it defended against any consensus, any majority.”
“Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban,” Orwell wrote in his original introduction to Animal Farm (which was, ironically, suppressed). He continued: “Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness.” While there was far more official censorship in Orwell’s time, we’re living through an era of pervasive self-censorship, and as Packer explains, this type of silencing is “more insidious than the state-imposed kind, because it’s a surer way of killing the impulse to think, which requires an unfettered mind.”
[…]
Hitchens detested tribal and parochial feelings of any kind, which is why he was dismayed when he witnessed the emergence of identity as a catalyst for political mobilization in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In his memoir, Hitch-22, Hitchens attacked radicals who thought it was “enough to be a member of a sex or gender, or epidermal subdivision, or even erotic ‘preference,’ to qualify as a revolutionary.” When Hitchens first heard the expression “the personal is political,” he knew “as one does from the utterance of any sinister bullshit that it was — cliché is arguably forgivable here — very bad news.” As he put it in a 2008 article:
People who think with their epidermis or their genitalia or their clan are the problem to begin with. One does not banish this specter by invoking it. If I would not vote against someone on the grounds of ‘race’ or ‘gender’ alone, then by the exact same token I would not cast a vote in his or her favor for the identical reason.
It’s easy to imagine what Hitchens would have thought about a recent New York Times headline that declared “The Next President Should Not Be a Man” or a prominent writer and activist who announced that she “will not support white male candidates in the Dem primary.” The people who write such things are thinking with their epidermis and genitalia, which is to say they’re not thinking at all. You don’t have to bother defending candidates’ principles and positions when gender and race are the only relevant variables.
February 19, 2020
January 17, 2020
December 23, 2019
QotD: British meals – puddings
Suet crust, which appears in innumerable combinations, and enters into savoury dishes as well as sweet ones, is simply ordinary pastry crust chopped beef suet substituted for the butter or lard. It can be baked, but more often is boiled in a cloth or steamed in a basin covered with a cloth. Far and away the best of all suet puddings is plum pudding, which is an extremely rich, elaborate and expensive dish, and is eaten by everyone in Britain at Christmas time, though not often at other times of the year. In simpler kinds of pudding the suet crust is sweetened with sugar and stuck full of figs, dates, currents or raisins, or it is flavoured with ginger or orange marmalade, or it is used as a casing for stewed apples or gooseberries, or it is rolled round successive layers of jam into a cylindrical shape which is called roly-poly pudding, or it is eaten in plain slices with treacle poured over it. One of the best forms of suet pudding is the boiled apple dumpling. The core is removed from a large apple, the cavity is filled up with brown sugar, and the apple is covered all over with a thin layer of suet crust, tied tightly into a cloth, and boiled.
British pastry is not outstandingly good, but there are certain fillings for pies and tarts which are excellent, and which are hardly to be found in other countries. Treacle tart is a delicious dish, and the large or small mince pies which are eaten especially at Christmas, but else fairly frequently at other times, are almost equally good. The mince-meat with which they are filled is a mixture of various kinds of dried fruits, chopped fine, mixed up with sugar and raw beef suet, and flavoured with brandy. Other favourite fillings are jams of various kinds, lemon curd – a preparation of lemon juice, yolk of egg and sugar – and stewed apples flavoured with lemon juice or cloves. An apple pie is often given an exceptionally fine flavour by including one quince among about half a dozen apples.
The other main category of puddings – milk puddings – is the kind of thing that one would prefer to pass over in silence, but it must be mentioned, since these dishes are, unfortunately, characteristic of Britain. They are preparations of rice, semolina, barley, sago or even macaroni, mixed with milk and sugar and baked in the oven. The one made with barley is somewhat less bad then the others: the one made with macaroni is intolerable to any civilised palate. As all of these puddings are easy to make, they tend to be a stand-by in cheap hotels, restaurants and apartment houses, and they are one of the chief reasons why British cookery has a bad name among foreign visitors.
There are, of course, XXX countless other sweet dishes, including the whole range of jellies, blancmanges, custards, soufflés, ice puddings, meringues and what-nots, which are much the same in all European counties. A few oddments which do not fit into any of the above categories are pancakes – British pancakes are thinner than those of most countries, and are always eaten with lemon juice, – batter pudding, which is made of much the same ingredients as Yorkshire pudding, but is steamed instead of being baked and is eaten with treacle, and baked apples. The apples are cored but not peeled, filled up with butter and sugar, and cooked in the oven: it is important that they should be served in the dish in which they are cooked With cooked fruit of any kind British people always eat cream, if they can get it. In the West of England a particularly delicious kind of clotted cream is made by slowly simmering large pens of milk and skimming off the cream as it comes to the surface.
George Orwell, “British Cookery”, 1946. (Originally commissioned by the British Council, but refused by them and later published in abbreviated form.)
December 10, 2019
QotD: British breakfast – “Not a snack but a serious meal”
First of all, then, breakfast. Ideally for nearly all British people, and in practice for most of them even now, this is not a snack but a serious meal. The hour at which people have their breakfast is of course governed by the time at which they go to work, but if they were free to choose, most people would like to have breakfast at nine o’clock. In principle the meal consists of three courses, one of which is a meat course. Traditionally it starts with porridge, which is made of coarse oatmeal, sodden and then boiled into a spongy mess: it is eaten always hot, with cold milk (better still, cream) poured over it, and sugar. Breakfast cereals, which are ready-cooked preparations of wheat or rice, taken cold with milk and sugar, are often eaten instead of porridge. After this comes either fish, usually salt fish, or meat in some form, or eggs in some form. The best and most characteristically British form of salt fish is the kipper, which is a herring split open and cured in wood-smoke until it is deep brown colour. Kippers are either grilled or fried. The usual breakfast meat dishes are either fried bacon, with or without fried eggs, grilled kidneys, fried pork sausages, or cold ham. British people favour a lean, mild type of bacon or ham, cured with sugar and nitre rather than with salt. At normal time it is not unusual to eat grilled beef steaks or mutton chops at breakfast, and there are still old-fashioned people who like to start the day with cold roast beef. In some parts of the country, for instance in East Anglia, it is usual to eat cheese at breakfast.
After the meat course comes bread, or more often toast, with butter and orange marmalade. It must be orange marmalade, though honey is a possible substitute. Other kinds of jam are seldom eaten at breakfast, and marmalade does not often appear at other times of [the] day. For the great bulk of British people, the invariable breakfast drink is tea. Coffee in Britain is almost always nasty, either in restaurants or in private houses; the majority of people, though they drink it fairly freely, are uninterested in it and do not know good coffee from bad. Of tea, on the other hand, they are extremely critical, and everyone has his favourite brand and his pet theory as to how it should be made. Tea is always drunk with milk, and it is usual to brew it very strong, about one spoonful of dry tea leaves being allowed for each cup. Most people prefer Indian to Chinese tea, and they like to put sugar in it. Here, however, one comes upon a class distinction, or more exactly a cultural distinction. Virtually all British working-people put sugar in their tea, and indeed will not drink tea without it. Unsweetened tea is an upper-class or middle-class habit, and even in those classes it tends to be associated with a Europeanised palate. If one made a list of the people in Britain who prefer wine to beer, one would probably find that it included most of the people who prefer tea without sugar.
After this solid breakfast – and even now, in a time of rationing, it is usual to eat a fairly large bulk of food, chiefly bread, at breakfast – it is natural that the midday meal should be somewhat lighter than it is in many other countries.
George Orwell, “British Cookery”, 1946. (Originally commissioned by the British Council, but refused by them and later published in abbreviated form.)