Doctor and sidekick - welcome into the Vortex!
I don't watch television very much. I watch Doctor Who even less. The Doctor's rapid breathy mutterings, the quickfire witty one-liners, not to mention the quality of sound issuing from our ancient television set, mean that things pass me by before I've had the chance to realise that I've missed them.
I caught some of last weekend's episode, however. The Doctor and sidekick Clara touched down in Sherwood Forest at the time of Robin Hood. Strange things were afoot, as they tend to be in this programme. Eventually, the Doctor sorted it out. A bunch of robots from far away had landed and transformed their spaceship into a castle (disguise your nefarious intentions with a cloak of respectability). They had recruited the Sheriff of Nottingham as their human emissary/puppet leader. He was the public face, so that the ordinary folk didn't realise who was really behind everything, or what their true motives were. The robots were eventually revealed to be what they really were - robots, shadowy enemy figures, not human, in fact inhuman.
Thus far the programme presented a reasonable description of how lots of things really happen in the world of human affairs. Things got even more interesting, though, when the Doctor continued to insist that Robin Hood was a robot, too. Robin, champion of the masses and the Great Good - surely not. Naturally enough, he denied the accusation. The Doctor explained his reasons. Bad guys like the robots need to establish some good guy as apparent opposition, to give the ordinary folk 'the illusion of hope, and for them to keep on working.' It was Lenin who famously stated that the best way to control the opposition is to be it, and the notion of 'controlled opposition' is well-known in alternative research circles. Actually, not just the notion, the reality: check it out in Ukraine, the Middle East, almost anywhere that strife flares up which the Western governments take notice of. Things begin to make a bit more sense. Controlling the opposition, becoming the opposition, is a major ploy, it would seem, in moulding world affairs to your own pattern.
In the end, Robin Hood turned out to be a proper human being, not a robot after all. Yippee! But I found it curious to see the notion of controlled opposition being rolled out on the BBC, on a Saturday evening. Is this a mocking of public stupidity? Shove it in people's face and they still don't realise what's going on. The Doctors gets it. Why doesn' t everybody else?
