With reference to my Churchill rant the other day, I found this article very interesting. It was in the G2 supplement of today's Guardian. When I say today, I technically mean yesterday, of course. This is because I blog at ridiculous times.
One very striking omission from the 100 Greatest Britons list was Saint Patrick, who was almost certainly a Romano-Celt from north Wales, southern Scotland, or the stretch of England's coast in between. Do you reckon he didn't get in because nobody thinks of him as British? Unlike Bono and the Duke of Wellington, say? In fact, I reckon that the Roman Emperor Constantine the Great would be a far more credible entrant than either of them. He was at least half-British, since his mother Helena is thought to have been from Britannia, while he himself was first hailed as Emperor by his troops at Eboracum - modern York - in 306. Could the first 'Christian' Emperor of Rome be a credible nominee for the list?
In other news, I watched a fascinating documentary earlier this evening, called Century of the Self. I think it was on BBC back in May, but a friend managed to track down a copy of it on video, and I watched the first part of it, 'Happiness Machines,' today. It was focussed on how Freud's American nephew, Edward Bernays, used (or abused?) his uncle's ideas in order to manipulate the masses. His ideas were applied in wartime to help get America behind the war effort in WWI, and at the Versailles conference afterwards: there was a highly amusing shot of the very aged Bernays in 1991 munching away and making strange slurping noises, declaring 'Democracy for all nations: that was our big slogan...'
His ideas were used in peacetime too, as he took Freud's ideas and showed big companies how people's unconscious desires could be manipulated so they could be persuaded to want and buy things that they didn't need. Impressively, he seems to have been almost single-handedly responsible for persuading women to take up smoking; he associated it with freedom, and in one spectacular coup had a team of 'suffragettes' light their 'torches of freedom'. Women apparently really only took up smoking after that stunt.
In politics too his ideas proved very useful. Calvin Coolidge and Franklin D. Roosevelt used his ideas to great effect, but in the long term it seems that it was Roosevelt's opponents in big business who really gained from Bernays' techniques... managing to link democracy with unfettered free-market capitalism in the modern mind. I'm not sure about this, but these two concepts seem to go hand in hand nowadays; could Bernays be responsible for this?
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