- X marks the spot part one - 20th December 2024
- Time on your hands… - 19th December 2024
- Order of the British Endgame - 18th December 2024
During 23 years with the BBC and 41 years in journalism, our Editor Phil Parry has always been intrigued by different ways of looking at events and how fraudsters would deny facts even when confronted with the truth – this is now put centre stage by a new book which says we have been given false historical information.
I have done my best.
The fraudsters I have uncovered have denied the truth, even when I have shown it to them.
Perhaps we have also been fed a huge lie with talk of the ‘Byzantine’ empire, or ‘Byzantium’.
The writer Anthony Kaldelis certainly seems to think so.
A review of his book out this year THE NEW ROMAN EMPIRE: A HISTORY OF BYZANTIUM, in the London Review of Books (LRB) declared that these terms were “…the fraudulent legacy of 19th-century scholars determined to claim the heritage of Roman antiquity for (North-) Western Europe, dispossessing its rightful heirs and smearing them, perversely, with tropes of Oriental despotism invented by the Greeks of the classic age”.
This sort of fraud (if indeed Mr Kaldellis is right) has a contemporary equivalent.
It reminds me of how tricksters would try and pretend facts were other than they were, despite my confronting them with the truth.
Conmen could be utterly convincing because they seemed to believe their own lies.
On one occasion I tracked down and interviewed for the BBC Cymru Wales (BBC CW) current affairs programme Week In, Week Out (WIWO), a crook who had duped people out of their life savings.
He was pretending to be someone else, but on camera I showed him his REAL birth certificate.
I said: “This is you isn’t it?”.
He replied: “No it isn’t!”.
On another I presented one man, who I filmed on the doorstep, with a long list of all his past aliases which were an attempt to cover up the truth of matters.
Again innocent people had been hurt by his activities.
“That’s not me”, he declared.
There would be a flat denial of what actually happened, and who people were.
Maybe the reality of these events is only now emerging – like calling an empire ‘Byzantium’…
The memories of Phil’s remarkable decades long award-winning career (when using ‘jargon’ or ‘business-speak’ was a complete no-no) as he was gripped by the rare neurological disabling condition, Hereditary Spastic Paraplegia (HSP), have been released in a major book ‘A GOOD STORY’. Order the book now!
THE NEW ROMAN EMPIRE: A HISTORY OF BYZANTIUM is published by Oxford.
Tomorrow – how the head of the Post Office (PO) stepping down, saying that it had “been an extraordinarily challenging time for the business and for Postmasters“, throws the spotlight once again on the central role of Wales in the shocking scandal.
