SCENE: the reception area, morning. Sybil is doing accounts. Basil is painstakingly recolouring a map of the world. One of the members of the visiting cultural delegation from Ghana approaches the desk cautiously. He is ignored.
Stephen: Excuse me?
Basil continues to ignore him.
Stephen: Sir? Mr Fawlty?
Basil: Not. Now.
Sybil: Attend to Mr Assamoah, Basil.
Basil: Oh! Right! Stop whatever you’re doing, Basil, it can’t possibly be important!
Sybil: It isn’t.
Basil: But the colours are all wrong! They should be pink! And what’s happened to Rhodesia?
Sybil: Attend to Mr Assamoah.
Stephen: I don’t want to make any trouble…
Basil: Well, you have. So what is it now?
Stephen: It’s about the picture in Mr Asante’s bedroom.
Basil: Leopold II Bringing Civilisation to the Heathen Savages of Darkest Africa? What’s wrong with it?
Stephen: Well, it could be regarded as somewhat offensive…
Basil: Nonsense! Don’t you approve of Civilisation? I suppose it is a bit alien to you.
Sybil: Take the picture down, Basil.
Basil: Take it down? Take it down? Because of some over-sensitive n… w… c… foreigner? That picture is part of the cultural fabric of this hotel! It would be destroying our history and heritage!
Sybil: You bought it at a car boot sale in January.
Basil: And what else do you want me to take down? The British Museum? The Acropolis? The bust of Aristotle in the breakfast room?
Sybil: Not just now, Basil…
[you just know that the episode is going to end up with Basil in scarlet jacket and pith helmet, beating Manuel done up in blackface]
John Cleese’s comment this morning on the Twitter is classic bad faith whataboutery, a neat combination of attempted derailment – other cultures had slavery so why all the fuss just about the Atlantic trade? #VictimsOfBarbaryPiratesMatterToo – and would-be gotcha: we admire the Greeks, but aha! they had slaves too, so if we object to statues of other slaveowners we’re clearly hypocrites.
But one might nevertheless think that he has a point – just not the one he thinks. The idea that “Greek culture depended on slavery” is modern, rather than reflecting ancient debates or self-consciousness; we can as historians see how important the labour of enslaved people was for their economy and society, and how the opposition of freedom and slavery permeated their culture, but that isn’t the same as saying that they consciously constructed a slave society and defended it in those terms. Such defences – or, more commonly, intellectual gymnastics to concede the fact of slavery but downplay its significance in comparison to the glories of Greek Civilisation – are found rather in the late 18th and especially 19th centuries, the work of anguished moderns who fear their culture may never match up to the Greeks and wonder why, or who love the Classical but feel slightly shifty about it. Or, in the case of Nietzsche, who want to mock modernity for cowardice, hypocrisy and lack of culture, because real culture needs slaves but moderns are too scared to admit it.
So, bringing in the Greeks largely serves to confuse the issue. But not entirely, because, different as the ancient institution was from the modern, they are nevertheless connected. Aristotle’s articulation of a theory of ‘natural slavery’ fed directly into modern justifications, and was cited to support modern prejudices about ‘inferior races’; colonising and enslaving whites could think of themselves as civilised men, despite their actions, and as superior beings, despite all the evidence to the contrary, because of their adherence to and recreation of classical culture. Ever since I first read it, I’ve been haunted by this passage from Derek Walcott’s Omeros:
…small squares with Athenian principles and pillars
maintained by convicts and emigrants who had fled
persecution and gave themselves fasces with laws
to persecute slaves. A wedding-cake Republic.
Its domes, museums, its ornate institutions,
its pillared facade that looked down on the black
shadows that they cast as an enraging nuisance
which, if it were left to its Solons, with enough luck
would vanish from its cities, just as the Indians
had vanished from its hills…
Aristotle must fall? In present times, this is a ridiculous distraction, intended as such. But the basic point holds: we should not unquestioningly venerate and commemorate classical antiquity, ignoring its sinister legacy, any more than we should be celebrating human traffickers because they then endowed schools and museums.
Update: just to prove that I’m not one of your opportunistic, bandwagon-jumping iconoclasts, herewith my thoughts on #RhodesMustFall, Colston and damnatio memoriae from back in 2016: Damnatio Memoriae.
Sphinx 
Cleese does seem to be turning into Basil in his old age. I think your Basil is too broad, though. If you think back to That Scene, it’s Basil who tells the Major not to use the N-word – part of the comedy of the character of Basil (as with Alf Garnett) was that, although he was a full-spectrum bigot, he was painfully aware (and was repeatedly made even more aware) of the need not to be bigoted. OTOH, the bigotry was right there on screen (as with Alf Garnett) – the Major wouldn’t have said those words in the first place if Cleese hadn’t written them.
Yes, I think the character of Basil was substantially more sympathetic than his co-creator has become.