Clash of Crap

I have just watched the end of a BBC2 documentary called 'Clash of Worlds'; it is almost completely ahistorical. I say 'almost completely' because its narrative touches on real events, however the filmmakers have clearly decided that a contemporary spin must be put on history to, in the BBC parlance, 'sex it up.' So The Mahdi must become a modern version of Osama bin Laden - though, in the cause of relativism he must also be, confusingly, a great scholar, a merciful statesman and a canny general - and General 'Chinese' Gordon, along with Kitchener and pretty much every other notable Briton mentioned in the course of the programme, must be a religious extremist of comparable fanaticism. To suit this cultural relativism Gordon's support for the abolition of slavery becomes a mark of his zealotry, while Muhammad Ahmad's rule is simply a little harsh...

The historical, and historiographic, inaccuracies in this programme's account are too numerous to recount, but it is in the spuriously tacked-on contemporary bookends that the total bankruptcy of its thesis becomes clear. As tonight's episode drew to a close, the parallel between the Mahdi and bin Laden was laid out: bin Laden looks 'similar' to The Mahdi and he went to the Sudan. Sounds pretty watertight to me.