David Starkey, Bluff King Hal, UKIP, and Donald Trump

Some of the students and staff at Cambridge University suggest the school should remove famous historian David Starkey from a university promotional campaign, since Starkey keeps saying racist things. For instance, during “an appearance by the historian on BBC Newsnight in 2011 when he referred to Enoch Powell’s ‘rivers of blood’ speech as being right “in one sense” and said: “The whites have become black; a particular sort of violent destructive, nihilistic gangster culture has become the fashion” or when he claimed “the Rochdale child exploitation ring who groomed white girls for sex had values ‘that were ‘entrenched in foothills of the Punjab’ and “needed to be ‘inculcated in the British ways of doing things.’” You know. Because the British have never sexually exploited children from another ethnicity and those silly Punjabi racists need to learn from the white man’s example. 

I would like to point out, in fairness, that David Starkey also says sexist things. Lots of sexist things.

However, for now let’s look at David Starkey, racism, and his claim that Nigel Farage, the racist leader of the incredibly racist right-wing political party UKIP (or as I like to call them UKKKIP) is really very like noted feminist and moderate Henry VIII. Actually, Starkey said that Henry VIII was the first UKKKIP leader, if we want to get technical, but that let’s be honest – the implication was that Bluff King Hal and Nigel Farage are two peas in a loyal British pod.

Was Henry VIII the spiritual an cultural predecessor to Nigel Farage? I don’t think so. After all, Henry was always importing foreign workers — like French gardeners and Italian architects and German artists and Farage thinks anyone working in Britain should have been born there. Moreover, Henry was always into European politics and getting England into the thick of continental trade, whereas Farage wants Britain to be as isolationist as possible.

I would argue that the true successor to Henry VIII would be Donald Trump, if it was anyone.

Donald Trump and Henry VIII both:

• Married two women who were recent immigrants to their husband’s lands
• Divorced their first immigrant wife in the midst of scandal
• Had really rich, successful daddies who left them pots of money
• Managed to blow most of the dough their daddy left them but still remained wealthy
• Convinced of their own financial acumen despite ample proof to the contrary
• Thought they remained good looking in middle age, when they did NOT
• Felt free to criticize other people’s looks, without any awareness of the irony
• Believed they were entitled to tell others what to do based on the lucky fortune of their parentage and wealth
• Thought they had a lot of political savvy but blundered frequently
• Have been accused of being narcissists

The last one is the one that intrigues me the most. I’ve already written about the possibilities of Henry VIII being a psychopath/narcissist, but what about Trump?  Without a doubt Trump shows a lot of narcissistic tendencies, but is he really a narcissist, or is this just one of those cases where his wealth makes him act like a sociopath? The rich, in general, act like sociopaths even when they aren’t technically sociopaths … they are just being selfish, entitled, spoiled elitists.

At any rate, Trump is enough like Henry VIII that I would never vote for him to be President of the USA because history has recorded what a mess Henry made of his kingdom during his reign and that’s not something I’d like to emulate in a POTUS. Plus the whole register Muslims for being Muslim thing. Call me silly, but I don’t think Nazism is the way to go.