The Blackadder View of History and What's Wrong With It

Well, first of all, exactly as with the National Curriculm GCSE History syllabus, they completely ignore almost any reference or discussion of the British Empire;

Except for this one :

"George, the British Empire at present covers a quarter of the globe, while the German Empire consists of a small sausage factory in Tanganyika."

What does this achieve? Straight away, you have reduced the nature of German Imperialism in Africa to something comically benign and non-threatening to the African continent and populace (which is hardly true), whilst dismissing out of hand the notion of Imperial Rivalries of the great European powers as being a credible or serious motive for global Total War;

In doing so, this statement implicitly endorses the rightness and justness of British Imperialism with the same rosé-tinted fin-de-siècle sentimentalism central to the myth of the Liberal Empire as a Civilising Force in the world.

Everyone clear on that point? 

The First World War wasn't  about imperialism, we are told.

It also can completely ignores the historical record of ethnic cleansing, genocide and pillage in South West Africa, so brutal and bloodthirsty that the UN eventually gave it to South Africa as a mandate for safekeeping after World War II.

This is a theme with traces back quite some way through previous series - the British Empire reached the peak of its power, reach and influence at or shortly after the Napoleonic Wars and the Regency period - but although the Wars against Napoleon (or, as the conflict is somewhat uniquely re-framed, against The French) are heavily referenced in places, the only foreign subject nation of the British Imperial Project to be specifically made mention of in any significant sense are the Scots.

The main creative force wielding a pen behind the scenes on Blackadder was of course Ben Elton, and being a trendy 1980s New Lefty, the show its becomes an in-house BBC polemic for the Marxist View of History, filtered through the historical worldview of the Frankfurt School to make manifest the spirit of cultural pessimism and the ugliness inherent in life under Capitalism - the only thing which happened in World War I was the meat-grinder of the Western Front, an explicit instance of Class War on the fields of France - but the words eugenics or population control are never mentioned, and to make matters worse, everyone on both sides in either trench is white - where are the Indian Troops, the Algerians, Francophone black Africans, or even the black U.S. troops who caused race riots on their return home from Europe just at the sight of them wearing the uniform of the U.S. Army in Chicago (and this is 40 years before Rosa Parks).

"If you do not understand White Supremacy (Racism)-what it is, and how it works-everything else that you understand will only confuse you".

- Neely Fuller Jr.