Comment

Reflections on Enid Blyton and other matters in The Sunday Telegraph

David Berry

I've never been impressed by a newspaper that offers 'free' compact discs in order to sell extra copy. In The Sunday Telegraph's May 21st 2006 edition the paper attempted to lure readers to buy a copy by giving away Enid Blyton's, The Famous Five's, Five Go Adventuring Again! Blyton has often been accused of racist discourse and an innate fear of the foreign, which was addressed by Joanna Briscoe in The Guardian Saturday May 13th, who used the term 'swarthy gypsy face' to highlight Blyton's view of things foreign. With this in mind I wondered if there would be any correlation between the Blyton giveaway (or even Blyton in general) and some of the narrative inside the paper.

'THE MARCH OF ISLAM' in black bold and upper casing was the first intriguing clue, followed by 'NUCLEAR POWER IS NOT THE ONLY WEAPON IRAN HAS AT ITS DISPOSAL … ITS POPULATION IS GROWING SEVEN TIMES FASTER THAN BRITAIN'S'. Perhaps Blyton's fear and deeply ingrained suspicion of 'Johnny Foreigner' was well and truly alive after all. This was the lead to a lengthy extract from Niall Ferguson's latest book, which will remain nameless because the Sunday Telegraph, which appears as part-agent for Ferguson's works, appears to spend quite a lot of its time publicising what can only be described as the paper's favourite son. Ferguson also wrote an article in the main part of the paper and believe it or not the paper featured a review of the aforementioned unnamed book accompanied by a picture of Ferguson suitably perched inside a 'Lancaster bomber' with a quote beneath: 'Danger comes he [Ferguson] says, when ideologies and politicians combine'. Like his liberal minded brethren (Edward Shils for example) 'ideology' is always pernicious and never the product of liberalism, and more often than not it's the product of the other.

Moving back to 'THE MARCH OF ISLAM' extract there is a reference to the migration of Muslims into Christianised Europe: 'Predictably, the growth of Muslim communities has generated some resentment on the part of what we might call old Europeans' says Ferguson; oh those 'old Europeans', how well we know them! Of course, no evidence is provided and no clear definition of what 'old Europeans' are, but I have a sneaky feeling they're white and possibly without beards! Ferguson continues: 'There is clear evidence that whatever the economic benefits of immigration [that's cheap labour by the way] there are also real costs for unskilled indigenous workers'. This diatribe is written in the spirit of Enoch Powell's 'River of Blood' speech in 60s Britain where Powell, like Ferguson, warned of the apparent impending dangers of 'immigration'.

In a reference to Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Ferguson states:

'If the French had failed to defeat an invading Muslim army at the battle of Poitiers in 732, would all of Western Europe have succumbed to Islam? "Perhaps", speculated Gibbon'.

Despite the French victory over the Muslim army, Ferguson nevertheless, is out to remind us that through the backdoor, so to speak, they're here:

'Yet today work is all but complete on the new Centre for Islamic Studies at Oxford, which features, in addition to the traditional Oxford quadrangle, a prayer hall with a dome and minaret tower'.

According to Ferguson there are enemies all around us, who wrote not that long ago in The Sunday Telegraph of the impending dangers to the Western world from Socialism in Latin America (See 'Dear Mr Bush … A message from an intellectual: Niall Ferguson care of the Sunday Telegraph'). Of course it wasn't that long ago that the political right were warning us of the 'MARCH OF SOVIET STALINISM'. It's an old trick of theirs; exaggerate the truth, create the enemy, the phantoms, in order to justify the existence of a society and even attacking others, by military as well as economic means.

In Ferguson's article, in the main part of the paper, ('Wishful non-thinking won't stop the economy vaporising') he laments the fact that: 'Last week, after years of drifting downward, financial volatility came back with a vengeance. Stock markets plunged …' and that: 'Commodity prices have been on a rollercoaster ride'. This article is written in the context of a declining economic power that is in serious debt: 'The Anglophone empire today is not a creditor but a debtor… And the threat it faces is not a neighbouring great power, as Britain did in 1914, but something more nebulous - Islamist terror? A new Iranian empire? - and potentially harder to defeat'.

I think I now understand his logic in referencing Gibbon's works from his book extract, which serves as a warning, metaphor and reminder to the West's decline against what he believes to be the new enemy, though I'm not entirely sure whether Islam is more or less an enemy than Socialism. Perhaps it's a fad thing!

Interestingly, included in the Sunday Telegraph was an eight-page supplement with selections taken from The New York Times. Was there any Blytonesque type narrative here I wondered? It didn't take me long to join more dots, for on page two I found an article by Thomas L. Friedman entitled 'The Post-Post Cold War' where the author argued that: 'The post-post-cold war is a multipolar world, where US power is being checked from every corner'. China and Russia receive a mention and there's also a reference to the Latin American 'danger'. Moving on Friedman moves into a higher gear with his usual polemic against the 'Southern Threat': 'Hugo Chavez's Venezuela, which is like Castro's Cuba on steroids in the post-post-cold-war [is] leading a new wave of nationalisations and anti-Americanism in Latin America'. Not to be outdone by Ferguson, Friedman too can't resist the Islamic reference: 'and, of course, Iran - using its oil windfall to go nuclear' also poses a threat.

Oh those foreigners, now the Blyton giveaway makes perfect sense!