Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy
Fake Heroes - Otto English
Otto English is a bad propagandist and a worse historian. His Fake Heroes doesn’t deserve to be read.
One of the more curious effects of social media is that seemingly ordinary, one might even say banal, people can now forge entire careers pontificating on what used to be called Twitter. Such has been the case of Otto English who runs a somewhat tedious and reactionary Twitter feed. Off the back of this activity he has been invited to write equally wearisome columns in a number of national publications. More incredibly he has been given a publication deal. Fake Heroes is his second offering after his successful debut Fake History.
English brings the same expertise and analytical rigour seen on his Twitter feed to his history writing. This is a problem as the task which he has set himself is by no means an easy one. He must first establish what a hero is before explaining why his chosen candidates fail to meet the bar.
English’s account of how heroes arise begins with Wesley Autrey, a New Yorker who enjoyed a brief period of fame in 2007 after jumping onto some subway tracks to save a man who had fallen after having a seizure. It is clear English regards Autrey as a real hero.
There are clearly two elements to Autrey’s story which make him a hero. First there is a deed of such remarkability that it rises to the level of heroic, second there is veneration. To be a hero is to be seen to be one. David Letterman and George W Bush were as much responsible for Autrey becoming a hero as he was.
It is in the interplay between these two features of the heroic that the ‘fakeness’ can arise. Fake Heroes contains two types of misalignment which cause heroic injustice. There is the title character of each chapter who has achieved recognition for deeds which are insufficient to merit it, and there are those who have undertaken heroic deeds but who have unjustly been denied the recognition. Insofar as he can, it is English’s task to redress these imbalances.
This is all well and good. But there is a large chunk of the theory missing. What does it mean to do something heroic? Why did Americans spend three weeks celebrating a man who’s sole claim to notability was to jump in front of a moving train and live to tell the tale? If you claim, as is this book’s fundamental premise, that some deeds are worthy of being deemed heroic, you are advancing moral claims about the nature of the deeds, and such claims require justification. Why did the ancients regard Hercules as a hero whilst today we would consider him an uxoricidal psychopath? Because they lived under a different ethical architecture. An appreciation of these cultural/ideological differences is essential to understanding historically diverse hero selection.
There are many theories about why we adopt heroes and the moral values they must represent. There are psychoanalytic, marxist, biblical or a dozen other theories you can take your pick from. English declines to openly adopt any. As we shall see, this allows English to import wholesale his rather particularist politics.
Instead of a thoroughgoing theory we get a rather convoluted retelling of the Epic of Gilgamesh and the process by which one might become a hero. English follows Joseph Campbell in describing the archetypal hero story as a monomyth. The monomyth is a tripartite character development whereby a hero leaves their settled environment to undergo transformative experiences before returning with a new outlook on life. As T S Elliot nicely puts it.
We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time. (Little Gidding, Four Quartets.)
This progression is undertaken by characters as diverse as Oddysius and Frodo Baggins. It underlies the plot of everything from Shakespeare's Henry V to Bend it like Beckham. It is a neat theory but hardly all encompassing. For a start, it is hard to see how it applies to those whose heroic deeds are fatal. JFK and Captain Scott of the Antarctic, both of whom feature in this volume, perished. The same might be said for Martin Luther King, Abraham Lincoln and countless firefighters, police officers and soldiers who have died in the line of duty and are often regarded as heroic. All too often the call to heroism is a one way ticket.
Indeed, as English acknowledges, in large part it is Kennedy’s death which makes him a hero and which stops him being wearied by age or condemned by years.
A broader problem with using the monomyth as a device to examine heroes is that it is descriptive of the process by which people become heroes, it does not explain why some are selected and others are not. This is revealed by the fact that, when you think about it, many people go through a process of departure, transformation through hardship, and then return without ever becoming heroic. Millions left the fight in the First World War, suffered appalling experiences before returning greatly altered. As individuals they are largely forgotten. Even those whose deeds were marked out by awards for gallantry are nowadays known only to historians and enthusiasts.
This failure to acknowledge that heroes may serve a broader societal function buttressing an ideological edifice leads English to adopt the position that the majority of his fake heroes have perpetrated a con on their admirers and have misrepresented their deeds to increase their heroism.
For example, It doesn’t seem to occur to him that JFK is a hero because he seemed young, energetic and tanned and this was what the society of the 1960s required. That he wasn’t wasn’t actually any of those things was irrelevant, it was the appearance that mattered. Likewise, a disabled fighter pilot who had got back up to fly again was exactly what the British people wanted to see in the spring of 1940. Douglas Barder was a hero because he was seen to be a hero.
Against this background many of the people included in the book are curious choices. To his credit, English generally steers clear well ploughed foroughs of Churchill, Gandhi and Martin Luther King, who are often the subject of revisionist histories. Instead he lowers his sights: John Wayne, Douglas Barder, Coco Chanel and Scott of the Antarctic. This does have the disadvantage of falsifying the book's subtitle. I am not sure how any of the above, or indeed Andy Wahol or Thomas Midgley, could be said to have changed the world. This reduced stature has the effect of lessening their heroics. Does anyone really think Coco Chanel is a business hero? Douglas Barder appears to forfeit his status merely through being a bit of a shit. Even after reading the chapter of Andy Wahol, I am not sure why he shouldn’t be a hero. English doesn’t seem to particularly dislike him and just thinks he is a bit of a fraud.
That Fake Heroes fails to achieve its fundamental purpose is however the least of this book's problems. Foremost among them is that it is badly written faux-history.
English is almost completely lacking in subtlety. At one stage he takes us through a run of British monarchs: George VI was “out of his depth”, Edward VIII was an anti-semetic, Hitler admitting drunk” who English wrongly accuses of being a wartime Nazi collaborator, George V was “a snob, a bore, an ignoramus and a bully”, Edward VII was a feckless, hedonistic, crowd pleasing playboy who slept with his friends wives, fathered dozens of illegitimate children and left misery in his wake”. Victoria was “self indulgent”, William IV supported slave ownership, George IV was “a lazy, dept-plagued gambler and inveterate drunk”, George III was “likeable” but “mad”, George II was mostly abroad, George I “a gold digging, wife-cheating, rat” who probably murdered his wife. Going further back entire houses are damned. The Stuarts are “bunglers” and Henry VIII was a psychopath who ordered the execution of 57,000 people (again, a deeply questionable historical claim).
I’m not sure who this self-righteous enumeration is for but it would be rejected at GCSE level. You get more contextualisation in a Horrible Histories book (and more wit too). But then historical contextualisation, or even basic moral relativism isn’t something that English goes in for.
For English the past is not a foreign country where strange people do strange things, it is a version of today where people can be condemned for failing to live up to English’s universalisable moral standards.
English adopts a ‘view from nowhere’. He stands above history and judges it against a moral law of which we struggle to conceive, let alone someone who lived centuries ago. Moral presentism also leads the writer down strange byways. To us Coco Chanel’s collaboration is abhorrent because it occurred in the recent past. Likewise we are more repelled by the Atlantic slave trade than we are by its ancient equivalent because it is closer to us in time. Moral judgement fades the remoter we are from an event. English’s complaints about Che Guevara’s cruelty ring true to us because he lived in the same century as us, his comparison of Henry V to Vladamir Putin is laughable because they lived five hundred years apart. Such a distinction does not seem to trouble English.
English does not appear to be able to escape his modern, progressive ethical bubble. He is unwilling to grant Henry V kudos for complying with rules of conflict in late medieval Europe, but faults him for failing to live up to the Geneva Convention of the late twentieth century.
Of course when selecting who to venerate and who we want to serve as role models today it is entirely legitimate to select people on the basis that they adhere to the values we want to promote. This, however, creates a problem of motivation. If someone living many centuries in the past acted in a way which we regard as morally upstanding they may have been doing so entirely incidentally. For example, while same-sex relationships were widely accepted in classical Greece and Rome, this was not rooted in liberal principles of equality or human rights, but in entirely different social and philosophical frameworks which we would find deeply troubling today. To celebrate these societies for their apparent progressivism risks projecting modern values onto a world that did not share them.
Furthermore, this is not what English is doing. His argument is not merely that Henry V et al are inappropriate heroes because their behaviour doesn’t conform to current values but that they should be condemned for failing to adhere to standards which did not yet exist.
This ideological rigidity also leads English to be sceptical of anything he can comprehend.
English appears wholly cynical about the role religion can play in society and as a motivator of good deeds. This lamentable cynicism starts early. His treatment of Anjezë Gonxha’s (As Teresa was born) calling is worth examining at length:
[Mother Teresa’s] ‘call’ is critical to her narrative arc as it is to anyone who seeks to devote their time on Earth to God, but there was perhaps a less spiritual and more practical motivation behind it. Taking vows was in some ways the “best-worst” option available to her. The youngest daughter of three in patriarchal Albanian society had very few prospects and no dowry; becoming a nun provided a ticket to a better life. (p.171)
Aside from the fact that there is no evidence of this (and English cites none) in Gonxha’s particular case, the general proposition, the plausibility of which is the sole basis for English’s theory, also stretches credulity. The idea that there was a general flow of destitute young women into religious orders in the post war Balkans is one unsupported by the evidence. Taking vows of poverty is, after all, a poor way of escaping poverty.
Teresa’s later decision to undertake missionary work in India is traduced as “a search for a new challenge” by someone looking to advance within the Catholic Church. By his own admission he asserts this is because he can’t comprehend what “a call within a call” as Teresa described it, might mean.
As we proceed English’s attacks morph into a general attack on Christianity quoting favourably a former nun saying “This is a religion in which every house of worship, classroom, and private home has as its most prominent feature the image of a bloodied, tortured man”. An staggeringly one-dimensional view.
It is clear that English doesn’t like religion and regards Mother Teresa’s version of it as a cult. Yet to outsiders all the religions look bizarre. That is not to say that the Missionaries of Charity was not a strange organisation. Its rituals bordered on the masochistic and some of its charity practices were unacceptable and should rightly be condemned. But this is not what English is claiming. He is claiming that the whole project was cover for the vanity project of a woman on the make. A sort of Jamestown in Calcutta.
By the end of this unimpressive monologue English’s criticisms are becoming increasingly shrill. “It is possible that some [babies] had been abandoned” he allows, whilst offering no evidence that any were not, “but under what jurisdiction and authority was she operating?”. There is a steady drumbeat of snide remarks about her use of private jets and sourcing funding from dubious sources. Whilst it probably was a mistake to seek donations from Duvalier of Hati, global charities and those in the development community have to beg for money from the super wealthy, and often the super wealthy did not become super wealthy by being particularly nice. This is just how the international development sector works.
Perhaps the most revealing line in the whole book is: “Yes it was her belief system… but to this non-believer it sounds ever so slightly psychopathic”. English clearly lacks the imagination and the inclination to understand a different point of view which renders him incapable of understanding his subject.
The bad historical takes are legion. English is unusual in claiming that the Soviets emerged as the victors of the Cuban Missile Crisis. He also suggests that no one would have heard of Nelson had he not died at Trafalgar, despite the fact that, for half a decade before his death, he was the most famous non-royal in Britain. If death were the key to lasting fame, how does English explain the Duke of Wellington, who survived the same war and remains well known? Elsewhere, he invites us to reflect that “even today, 75 years after its end, we still consider the Second World War as a straight man’s war.” Any serious historian would baulk at advancing such unsupported claims, yet English does so without embarrassment.
This begs the question: why? Is there a market for badly written third rate history books who seem to assume their readers are stupid? The fact is that this is not a history book. It is a piece of propaganda. This is one of a growing number of poorly researched, badly written books by people on the soft left of British politics who we here have taken to calling ‘Waterstones man’, the type of middle income, urbanite voter who believes in an interventionist state which broadly servers their needs and who regards the red wall with a benevolent contempt. The type of person who confuses bland managerialism for radical thought and sees Ed Miliband as a serious intellectual.
Of course English isn’t a Nazi or a Soviet propagandist, his ideology is far more benign, but that doesn’t mean that he isn’t unpleasant. As with O’Brien there is a nasty undercurrent of smugness throughout this book. Not only does English sit in judgement of those who acted in entirely different political contexts, but he sees no need to justify his own moral pronouncements.
Like most propaganda, this book is not to be read by the enemy, it is designed to bolster the believer rather than convert the sceptic. This is how it can afford to be so unimpressive. No sensible person is likely to be converted to republicanism by the infantile screed discussed above or by the absurd biographical skit of Henry V which follows it. It is a stump speech designed to rally the base, ‘The monarchy is illegitimate!’, ‘corporations are corrupt!’, ‘religious people are unhinged fanatics!’. It is all rather like Trump yelling ‘Build the Wall’ at a rally.
English’s refusal to establish a clear moral structure for defining heroism becomes particularly evident here. If pressed, he might claim his ethical framework is simply “don’t be a twat”, but in practice, his criteria for heroism seem entirely subjective. A person is a hero if Otto English says they are. This is how he is able to close the book with a story about his distinctly un-heroic father being a hero.
But this does not mean that English sets himself up as an explicit arbiter of heroism. Rather, his hero-selection process is ideological, whether he acknowledges it or not. The concept of a hero is an empty vessel, a signifier into which individuals project their own values and ideals. English’s progressive 21st-century worldview is the unspoken framework shaping his choices.
Yet, by presenting his own hero selections as based on universal virtues—bravery, compassion, charity, etc he disguises his ideological preferences as neutral and self-evident. The trick is simple: if these choices are framed as “common sense” rather than ideological, any challenge to them can be dismissed as reactionary or bad faith.
This is no different from the ideological hero-selection of any system. In the USSR, the state valorised workers who maximised coal production, not because this was an inherent marker of heroism, but because it aligned with Soviet ideological goals. English’s heroes are chosen in the same way, except he presents his criteria as being free from ideology. In reality, the qualities he celebrates are not universal, but simply what his particular worldview prioritises.
The writing of history is always political, the subject choice, the emphasis, weight and conclusions inevitably are enthused with the politics of the author. But that is not what is happening here. This is politics masquerading as history. You see it in smug asides every time someone with questionable politics is mentioned (Ted Kennedy and Chappaquiddick, Enoch Powell and Rivers of Blood), and in the forced, unfunny jabs at Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and Brexit. These moments do not serve historical analysis; they serve as signals, reassuring the reader that they are among the right-thinking, the enlightened, the morally superior.
Ultimately, Fake Heroes is little more than low-grade propaganda—smug, self-congratulatory, and intellectually insubstantial. Like all propaganda, it should be recognised for what it is—and discarded accordingly.