Song of the Day 1/27: Noël Coward, “Don’t Let’s Be Beastly to the Germans”

There are those who think we should be nicer to MAGAts, because – this is their theory, not mine – MAGAts vote against their own self-interests in response to liberals looking down on them. That’ll show us, I suppose.

Noël Coward wrote the tune in 1943 as, he said years later, “a satire directed against a small minority of excessive humanitarians who, in my opinion, were taking a rather too-tolerant view of our enemies.” The song was enormously popular when he performed it live, but over the airwaves too many listeners missed the satire, leading the BBC to ban it.

Coward spent the first years of World War II working in the British propaganda office in Paris, an effort he found ineffectual. “If the policy of His Majesty’s Government is to bore the Germans to death,” he quipped, “I don’t think we have time.” Prime Minister Winston Churchill told him, “Go and sing to [the troops] when the guns are firing – that’s your job!” So he embarked on an international tour on which his real role was espionage, similar to Josephine Baker’s efforts in France.

Coward’s London home was destroyed by German bombs in 1941, and he was marked for death in the event of a Nazi takeover of Britain, which helps explain why he had no sympathy for the view of “excessive humanitarians.”