SOUNDTRACK: JAMES NEWMAN-“Embers” (England, Eurovision Entry 2021).
.Eurovision 2021 is over and the big news (aside from drug-taking accusations against the winner) is that the entry from England received zero. Nul points.
This is not unique, but it’s not something that anybody wants. It’s actually better to not make the finals than to make the finals and get nul points, because no one is going to forget that.
So just how bad was “embers?”
I’m not going to defend the song, because I would never listen to it on purpose–it’s not my thing. But by the same token I can think of a lot of songs that are much worse than this.
This song is just kind of bland. It thinks its big and catchy with the horns and the “light up the ROOM!” line. But really it just doesn’t do much. I could see this song playing in a club and people would dance to it and then forget it. No one would ask who it was or request it again.
And maybe that’s worth nothing.
[READ: May 26, 2021] 52 Times Britain was a Bellend
Bellend is such a great insult and it is exclusive to Britain, which is a shame.
Also a shame is just how terrible Britain as a country has been throughout history.
Obviously any global superpower is going to be dickish–you get power by crushing others. You could write this same book about the United States and cover just the last four years.
But Felton, whom I’ve never heard of before, but who is apparently a huge Twitter presence, narrowed history down to 52 (one a week) examples of Britain being absolutely horrible (and somehow managing to make it funny).
How did he decide on these events? Well, they are judged by today’s standards (saying “I’m from the past” is no excuse).
What you’ll get here is a good overview of fun and horrifying times when we were cartoonishly evil, from a comedian just as appalled as you are about what shits it turned out we were in the past.
Most of the terrible behavior involves other countries. Like starting wars with China because they wouldn’t buy British opium. Or making Zanzibar pay for the bombs that Britain dropped on them.
On 27 August 1896, the British took part in a war that lasted less time than a documentary about the same war.
The Anglo-Zanzibar War was about Britain disagreeing with who took over the throne of Zanzibar. The British assembled three cruisers, two gunboats, 150 marines and sailors to fight against 2,000 untrained civilians: “Thirty-eight minutes later, the war was over.” 500 Zanzibari men and women were dead and then “we made the survivors cover the cost of the shells we had used to kill 500 of their fallen allies.”
How about trying to destroy an enemy by making anthrax cakes–feed it to the cows and the cows then infect the people.
There’s a lot about hurting people for doing things that the might normally do.
Like: “We beat the shit out of the Welsh for speaking Welsh in Wales.” In 1800, the English took over Welsh schools and punished the children for speaking Welsh. If you were caught speaking Welsh, you had to wear a Welsh Not (a piece of wood to wear around their necks). Whoever was wearing it at the end of the day was beaten “by someone trusted with their wellbeing.”
As Britain sailed the seven seas, they were usually looking for things to steal. And steal they did. But in the 20th century, countries started realizing that they should be asking for their things back. So Britain passed a law forbidding he British Museum from returning any of its holdings.
Britain encouraged a famine. No, not the Irish one, the Indian one. This one came from Winston Churchill. Yes, he is one of England’s greatest heroes. But he was also a prick. He was quoted as saying “I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.”
Despite the famines raging in India, Britain insisted that India continue to export food and refused to import any. They even exported food to other countries–why give the food to millions of Indian people who are already quite hungry when they could be giving it to Europeans who are already well fed enough.
It’s frankly amazing that anyone in India likes anyone from Britain. What with putting the British East India Company in charge of India (!) for many years (essentially an evil version of Twinings) and then created Pakistan which caused untold violence and suffering. In 1857 when residents of India (Muslim and Hindu) got tired of England being in charge, they rebelled. But they weren’t strong enough to win. To get revenge, Britain paid Hindu speakers to speak against Muslism and and Muslims to speak out against Hindus. Then they insisted that voting be separated by religion. They created a divide that wasn’t there and by the time World War II, The Muslim League was demanding to be given their own separate country. So England sent Cyril Radcliffe to India (where he never been before) and gave him five weeks to create Pakistan–drawing an arbitrary border that left all kinds of people the wrong side, and millions displaced and millions dead.
And then of course there was the Irish famine as well.
With a similar attitude toward India, The Great Famine (“known as the potato famine in the UK as a way of implying a million fussy Irish people died because they wouldn’t eat mash”) was furthered along by the attitude put forward by Thomas Malthus. Based on the behavior of rabbits, he thought that the population of the Irish would “correct” itself if there was not enough food: “Intervening and trying to save people–giving starving people food–would only prolong suffering… [we should] let them die out until the population reached a sustainable level.”
Britain was also horrible to animals–putting an elephant in the Tower of London and feeding it meat or an ostrich and feeding it nails (no one bothered to read how to care for them). And slaughtering 400,000 puppies and kittens in a week because they claimed they MIGHT be harmed in the upcoming war. Or how about tying the legs of geese together and throwing them down a chimney so that they would flap and clean it.
Oh and you know how they sent their criminals to Australia. Well, apparently the really bad criminals were executed. So the ones who were sent across the world (many of whom died along the way) were accused of minor things. Like stealing a handkerchief. Or like the seventy year old woman who stole cheese to eat.
Not to mention abominable treatment of women. From muzzles with spikes in them (put onto women who argued that their husbands were abusive), to the Witchfinder General who found witches wherever he could
And so much about religious violence! Oliver Cromwell and his Puritans banned Christmas for thirteen years.
The British also introduced anti-homosexuality laws in countries where people weren’t adhering to “our own repressed view of sexuality.” Homosexuality was common and widely accepted in these countries–they had no need or desire for such laws . They started in India (again, poor India) and essentially made consensual gay relationships equivalent to rape and pedophilia. Slowly, British attitudes changed but not before they left these countries and these laws in place–where homosexuality is prosecuted as strongly as ever.
And here’s a horrible gift that kept on giving. In 1840, Britain freed the slaves. The government decided to compensate the salve owners but not the salves. The government pad £20 million to 3,000 slave owners (that’s about £2,300,000,00 in today’s money) by borrowing 40% of the country’s national budget. This debt was paid off in 2015. Thus, any descendants of slaves have been paying taxes were also paying “sorry we’re taking tor property away money” to the people who kept their ancestors as slaves.
And as if all of this weren’t enough, Britain also burned the records of how evil they’d been. In Northern Rhodesia, officials were ordered to destroy all papers which were likely to be interpreted, either reasonably or by malice as indicating racial prejudice or religious bias on the part of Her Majesty’s Government.” A hell of lot of papers went suddenly missing. Some were burned. Some were placed in crates and sunk to the bottom of the ocean–“It’s not a great sign when you’ve probably done something so bad or racist that it should only be read by a fish.”
But hey at least heir comedians are funny.
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