Christopher Hitchens thinks The King's Speech goes too far in defending its version of history

http://www.slate.com/id/2285695/pagenum/all/#p2

*The King's Speech* RevisitedThe movie's screenwriter goes too far in
defending his version of history.By Christopher HitchensPosted Monday, Feb.
21, 2011, at 8:19 AM ET

[image: The King's Speech. Click image to
expand.]<http://www.slate.com/id/2285936/>
*The King's Speech *Brush even a fingertip against the balloon of Hollywood
ambition and prize-mania, and it can burst with gratifying speed, emitting
huge gusts of narcissism and megalomania. Ever since I, and one or two
others<http://www.tnr.com/article/film/80948/the-kings-speech-film-royal-mess>,
published some criticisms of The King's
Speech<http://www.slate.com/id/2282194/>,
there has been a lovely value-for-money response of outraged ego. Tinseltown
reporters have e-mailed and telephoned me to report that Harvey Weinstein
goes around saying that all who doubt the perfection of his latest offering
are in sinister league with the makers of *The Social Network*. I had some
difficulty in believing that this was really true, but it did cheer me up.
Yet now the film's screenwriter, David Seidler, has given a foam-flecked
interview<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/patricia-zohn/off-the-chuff-oscar-nomin_b_821071.html>to
the Puffington Host, or whatever the hell it's called, in which he
speaks
darkly of a "smear campaign" against his baby, a campaign of which I
constitute a "prong." So perhaps the termites of paranoia *have* been dining
long and well on the Weinstein Co. cortex. A hitherto almost unpunctuated
stream of praise and tribute is not enough—the chorus of adulation must be
unanimous. This is what comes of immersing oneself in the cult of hereditary
monarchy and of seeking to bask in its tawdry glare.

Seidler first unmasks his batteries by saying that I "accuse" him "of not
knowing that Churchill supported David (Edward VIII) not Bertie." I did
nothing of the sort. I accused him of deliberately omitting the fact
(*suppressio
veri*, or withholding the truth) even as he strongly implied that
Churchill's loyalty was to the babbling Bertie, which constitutes *suggestio
falsi*, or the insinuation of untruth. He now tells us that a scene in which
Churchill supported the pro-Nazi princeling "David" was cut from the final
version, allegedly because it "sagged." Well, why not craft a
scene—illustrating the far more fascinating truth of the matter—that does *
not* sag?

Perhaps admitting more than he should, Seidler adds that the decision of the
royal physicians to euthanize the dying King George V (by means of an
injection of morphine and cocaine, designed to ensure that the timing of the
announcement would favor the extreme-right *Times* of London) was also
removed from the film. Did that not-uninteresting detail also sag in the
telling? Or would its inclusion, along with the accurate Churchill scene,
have made it harder to sustain the uncritical and anti-historical reverence
for the palace and for Churchill that the whole movie seems designed to
perpetuate?
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By a similar mixture of *suppressio veri* and *suggestio falsi*, *The King's
Speech* also part-whitewashes and part-airbrushes the consistent support of
Buckingham Palace for Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain and their
unceasing attempt to make an agreement with Hitler that would allow him a
free hand in Europe while preserving the British Empire. Here, let me quote
Seidler again:

Hitchens also accuses Bertie of supporting Chamberlain in appeasing Hitler.
Well, just about everyone in England, except Churchill, did the same.
Hindsight is always 20/20. England had lost the cream of a generation in
WW1. Nobody wanted another war. And England wasn't ready. Chamberlain had to
buy time to gear up war production, which he did; hardly the actions of an
appeaser. When he returned from Munich with "peace in our time" crowds
gathered around 10 Downing Street and cheered him as a hero. Of course the
King and Queen supported him. Constitutionally they had to.

That lame cliché about "20/20 hindsight," usually a bad enough sign on its
own, certainly doesn't apply in Seidler's case. Not only does he get
everything wrong that can be gotten wrong, but he eases himself into an
actual apology and rationalization, *even now*, for the Chamberlain policy.

As I wrote in my original piece:

1) There was a large and growing movement in Britain against the sellout to
Hitler. Extending across the Labour and Liberal parties, and including an
important number of senior Tories, it took the name Arms and the Covenant,
calling for rearmament and the solidarity of all anti-Hitler governments and
parties. Many of its leaders were horribly distressed when Churchill split
the ranks in order to pursue his near-suicidal allegiance to the ghastly
Edward VIII.

2) Chamberlain's deal at Munich did not only hand over the free peoples of
Czechoslovakia, bound and gagged, to Hitler. It also surrendered to him one
of Europe's most important centers of arms manufacture, based around the
enormous Skoda munitions factory. The only "war production" to be "geared
up" by this crazy action was that of the Third Reich, now enlarged and more
aggressive. This was widely noticed at the time. And if any "time" was
"bought," it was for the Führer.

3) The king and queen did not echo or follow public opinion. They helped
decisively to shape it in Chamberlain's favor. He was met by a royal envoy
as soon as he landed from Munich, taken straight to Buckingham Palace, and
displayed on the balcony with a monarchical baptism for his treaty, which
had yet to be submitted to Parliament. The effect on the press and the
public was immense. The mobs in Downing Street came later (and, in fact, it
was only then that Chamberlain uttered his memorable fatuity about "peace
for [not *in*] our time." Seidler's ignorance of constitutional questions—if
it really is ignorance—is near-perfect. The monarchy has no business
publicly taking sides in ongoing debates, let alone pre-empting Parliament.
The monarchist Tory and Churchillite historian Andrew Roberts is quite
correct, in his exhaustive chapter on this subject in *Eminent
Churchillians<http://www.amazon.co.uk/Eminent-Churchillians-Andrew-Roberts/dp/185799213X/>
*, in agreeing with those who describe this moment as "the most
unconstitutional act by a British sovereign."

4) Even the late queen herself told her biographer William
Shawcross<http://www.amazon.com/Queen-Mother-Official-Biography-Vintage/dp/1400078342/>that
she and "Bertie" had been mistaken in doing what they did. She still
attempted the defense that nobody wanted another war (though Munich of
course brought war much closer and on terms more favorable to a Nazi
victory). But this would not explain why she and her husband privately
fought to keep Chamberlain in office even after the war broke out—and tried
to ensure his replacement by the arch-reactionary and appeaser Lord Halifax,
instead of Churchill, when the Nazis were almost at the gates.

In giving this recent interview, then, David Seidler has gone far beyond the
original misrepresentation and falsification that lie at the heart of the
film and has become a propagandist for the Munich faction. As I wrote
originally, *The King's Speech* is an excellently made movie that features
(with the awful exception of Timothy Spall's Churchill) generally first-rate
acting. Oscars should go to those who entertain and amuse. But if the
academy gives an award to Seidler, a man who absurdly fancies himself
subject to persecution when confronted with the historical record, it will
have conferred approval on something, and someone, extremely shabby.


Johne Cook
| http://raygunrevival.com | http://authorculture.blogspot.com |

*“I am not responsible for actions of the imaginary version of me you have
inside your head.”
Attributed to Teresa Nielsen Hayden*

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