Review of Green media David Bellamy: Jolly Green Giant
Beware of TV Pop Celebrities!, 23 Feb 2011Beware of TV Pop Celebrities!
I'm not very keen on Bellamy's book. It has a certain amount of personal history but not much on the media—which after all was his world for some time.
[1] This book is littered with typos, or at least has several dozen—suggesting he's something like near-illiterate—how can any self-respecting person publish an 'autobiography' containing belladona, troushea, Tolkein, Kund for Kundt, Scarfell, connurbations, Arduvedic, council for counsel, Kit Peddlar, the 'Quekett Microsope Club'. A paper in Nature supposedly on thermodynamics with 'infers' in place of 'implies'.
[2] He also seems to have little overall grasp of arithmetic. He lauds Italy for having, he says, largely adopted a one-child policy; in a world with populations exploding every year by (e.g.) 4 million just in Nigeria, Bellamy is clearly out of it in some sense.
[3] He has little grasp of technology and productivity in general. He is aware (for example) there may be an oil shortage, but doesn't seem able to factor that in or admit consequences.
[4] He also has little grasp of world events, at least outside bits of the academic world and bits of the official publicity world. (BBC and ITV credits in the book are roughly equal; first appearance dated 1970). Bellamy says (for example) says nothing on ecocide in Vietnam and Laos and Cambodia, which he certainly should have known about; or on mass killings in Indonesia. Chomsky's comment on 20 mile valleys in Korea being scooped out get no mention. Bellamy was therefore an establishment approved house radical. But ... see later.
[5] He's slightly reminiscent of Patrick Moore; the BBC love tame scientists who are naive politically—they fit in perfectly with the BBC world-view. In this book (2002) Bellamy is a fully paid-up CO2 and 'global warming' believer. However, for reasons obviously not revealed here, he seems to have dropped that position. It's important to realise he is almost unique in TV history—the BBC has lied in all its existence, on everything from the 'Holocaust' and Vietnam War to Iraq, 9/11, and Islamic sex habits. However, not one single person has ever resigned or been sacked—or at any rate not publically, or not yet. So Bellamy is almost alone in this.
[6] The 'green' movements he's been in are, of course, largely phoney. The 'carbon tax' fraud is one. Their silence on population is of course another. Rather oddly he attributes the 'population scare' to Ehrlich (1971), seeming not to have heard of Taylor's Biological Time Bomb or both Ehrlichses' Population Bomb. Or even Malthus. However (p 257—but this book is not indexed) in 1974 he joined 'Population Concern' which seems to have changed its name a few times. He is entirely unaware of the secret forces to promote huge immigration into Europe and the USA. The motive appears to be to replace whites—though Bellamy naturally has no idea about this. I expect he'd say it's ray-shist.
.... Anyway. Beware of TV names! Remember their programmes are commissioned, scripted, checked, edited—nothing unwanted will emerge.