This new contagion is a pestilence of biblical proportions

A splendid diatribe ganps. Wrong' uns they are but there are probably Chinese folk who read this very board and will be at best slighted and at worst mortified by what you say.

I think Elgin had the right idea when he razed the Summer Palace. I'm with GMF's contention that he[Elgin] believed it would release the Chinese from there demagogue fixation.

We have the right idea in that we are fixated by our musicians, actors and poets, ergot our artists. Any country enthralled by its political leaders is headed for catastrophe. We stole a march on the rest of the world when we somehow became confident enough to take the rotten píss out of the powers and satirize and caricature them without fear of reprisal. It was the publication of Punch in 1841 that first signalled that our emergence from the darkness was well underway. Remember though that only forty years previous to that seminal event we would still hang, draw and quarter a human being.

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Originally Posted by Herbert Augustus Chapman

A splendid diatribe ganps. Wrong' uns they are but there are probably Chinese folk who read this very board and will be at best slighted and at worst mortified by what you say.

I think Elgin had the right idea when he razed the Summer Palace. I'm with GMF's contention that he[Elgin] believed it would release the Chinese from there demagogue fixation.

We have the right idea in that we are fixated by our musicians, actors and poets, ergot our artists. Any country enthralled by its political leaders is headed for catastrophe. We stole a march on the rest of the world when we somehow became confident enough to take the rotten píss out of the powers and satirize and caricature them without fear of reprisal. It was the publication of Punch in 1841 that first signalled that our emergence from the darkness was well underway. Remember though that only forty years previous to that seminal event we would still hang, draw and quarter a human being.

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Two points, Herbs old chap.

1. Us taking the piss out of the powers that be predates Punch and the early Victorian era. During the French Revolutionary Wars, the state gave a pension to Gillray to draw his cartoons mocking our rulers (royal and politicos) as they knew that if we aren't allowed to take the pîss, as is our birthright, we may get a bit guillotiney ourselves.

Under the first Georges, when we had our first PM, Walpole from c.1720, we had Hogarth's satirical cartoons and Swift's satire. His Modest Proposal - in which he suggested that the Irish poor sell their off-spring as food to the rich to deal with the famine - was 1729, I believe.

In Voltaire's Candide - 1759, 2 years after Admiral Byng's execution - Candide is in the Venetian aristo's library, and sees that the Brits, uniquely, had free speech where we were free to mock our rulers, and Candide says it must be great to have a country with such cultural freedom. The Aristo responds that the English are weird, as they like to shoot an admiral every once in a while pour encourager les autres. {Voltaire went to school with the Duc de Richlieu who was commanding the French ships Byng was facing, and the Duc wrote a letter to the British admiralty - despite the fact that the 7 Years War was still in full swing - saying that it wasn't Byngs fault as there was no wind. The Navy responded that it didn't matter - if a RN admiral sighted French ships and didn't sink or capture any, he was to blame, even if there was no wind to allow him to get into range. This is why Voltaire had a bit of a hang up about it.}

But as you see, Herbs, our piss-taking culture goes back to the early Enlightenment. After the post-Civil War restoration of Charles II, part of the deal was that we could say what we wanted. No state oppression or it's axe time again. Then when we had the Glorious Revolution, Billy O didn't care what we said, as long as Parl voted more money for his wars with France. Then we get Anne of Denmark and the Hanoverians, and being furriners, they couldn't really threaten to execute born and bred Brits for doing what we do.

So I reckon you're well over a century out, dating it to Punch in 1841. More like 150-200 years.

2. That is a great Flashman, isn't it? The point about us trashing their palace was that it was the only way of punishing the emperor, not the poor peasants. So it was actually a civilised decision. Especially as we were helping the slitty-eyed fück put own the Taiping Rebellion at the same time.

{Us ripping out the insides of the Red Fort in Delhi after the mutiny isn't forgivable, however. The Moghul Emperor had nothing to do with the uprising, it was the rebels who asked him to replace the Brits as ruler. He'd have rather just sat in his palace writing poetry. But anyway, we sent him off to Burma, and ripped out the Red Fort for barracks and stables.}

So in the space of a couple of years, we trashed the two greatest palaces in Asia.

But have you read GMF's autobiog of fighting in Burma, Quartered Safe Out Here? This explains why in the Flashman books, all the natives are the best soldiers. In all the books, I can find only one example of Flashman doing something nice without any hope of advantage. In the Ethiopian one, when the army's arrived and is disembarking, he spots an Indian NCO with a campaign medal from the Sikh Wars so sits down and shares a chapati with him as they have a brief chinwag.

GMF's brigade had Gurkhas and Baluchis as the two non-white battalions, and he saw they we both ten times better than the white soldiers. Also, the Sikhs he was with. His experiences out there basically explain the Flashman books where, if you read between the lines as with Kipling's poems such as the Grave of the 100 Head, it's showing that the white toffs weren't a patch on the native soldiers and they were the ones who won us and guarded our empire.

Oh, and if some Chink is mortified by what I've written, tell the cünt to get the fück out of Tibet and I may address the language I use.

When the tiger-cock munchers can stop the monsoon with a smile as HHDL can, then tell them to get back to me. Any race that causes Buddhist monks to burn themselves to death id literally Godforsaken and I hope they all die of this new virus thingummy.

Cor Blimey ganp. I am only here for a little irreverent discourse now and then. You mustn't charge off to the InterTitty like that and come back armed with tiresome and quite unnecessary facts (unless you're putting a swivel eyed loon like b in his place of course - then it is perfectly acceptable).

Anyway, I would never know Swift was a satirist unless my English teacher told me. Bit like not realizing Much Ado About Nothing was a 'comedy' ;-)

Was it really safe to ridicule the powerful in 17th century England?

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Originally Posted by Herbert Augustus Chapman

Cor Blimey ganp. I am only here for a little irreverent discourse now and then. You mustn't charge off to the InterTitty like that and come back armed with tiresome and quite unnecessary facts (unless you're putting a swivel eyed loon like b in his place of course - then it is perfectly acceptable).

Anyway, I would never know Swift was a satirist unless my English teacher told me. Bit like not realizing Much Ado About Nothing was a 'comedy' ;-)

Was it really safe to ridicule the powerful in 17th century England?

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1. I would never know Mustafi ws a CH if the Arsenal manager hadn't said he was one.

2. C18th ridicule, certainly. Yes, it really is. You really should read Candide, it's the greatest work of Enlightenment philosophy and as easy to read as a Beano or Viz cartoon strip. But the C17th stuff does go back to the 1660 Restoration. That was an unwritten part of the deal. You can trace our formal right to ridicule until then. {But even in the 1620s, wood-cuts were going round slagging off the CofE and other sects and that was still legal.} We are Britishers, Herbs. {We may have our faults - Sperz fans, Tory Brexiters, Wes - but we have been allowed to take the piss in ways no other country was pre-Boney, and generally wasn't until 1848-1918. Fact.}

So yes. Punch was the first magazine but we'd been doing the cartoons (Hogarth, Gillray) and the writing (Swift) for long before 1841.