A good indication of societal decadence is when it prefers to obsess over fictional offences rather than real ones. I suppose it’s possible that, should fate bring Harry to the throne, he’d turn into a Victor Emmanuel or King Carol of Romania and lend a constitutional figleaf to some Fascist regime. Yet worrying about a minor Royal schoolboy’s alleged Nazi bent seems something of an indulgence at a time when the neo-Nazis get as many votes in Saxony’s elections as Gerhard Schroeder’s Social Democratic Party; when from Marseilles to Paris, Jews are being attacked and their homes, schools, kosher butchers, synagogues and cemeteries burnt and desecrated in a low-level intifada that’s been going on so long the political establishment now accepts it as a normal feature of French life; when the wife of the head of the European Central Bank is not above doing sly Holocaust jokes in public; and when the Berlin police advise Jews not to go out in public wearing any identifying marks of their faith. It’s not just Nazi insignia you don’t see in Germany these days; Nazi wise, the uniforms are the least of it.
But if Adolf Hitler were to return from wherever he is right now, what would he be most steamed about? That in some countries there are laws banning Nazi symbols and making Holocaust denial a crime? No, that wouldn’t bother him: that would testify to the force and endurance of his ideas – that 60 years on they’re still so potent the state has to suppress them.
What would bug him the most is that on Broadway and in the West End Mel Brooks is peddling Nazi shtick in The Producers and audiences are howling with laughter. I don’t know what kick Prince Harry gets out of his Nazi gear, but once long ago I was obliged for an historical scene to wear an SS uniform and I’ve never felt so screamingly camp as when mincing around doing that little flip-of-the-wrist mini-Heil thing.
One reason why the English-speaking democracies were just about the only advanced nations not to fall for Nazism or Fascism is that they simply found it too ridiculous. Bertie Wooster’s famous riposte to the Mosleyesque Sir Roderick Spode could speak for the entire Anglosphere:
The trouble with you, Spode, is that just because you have succeeded in inducing a handful of half-wits to disfigure the London scene by going about in black shorts, you think you’re someone. You hear them shouting, ‘Heil, Spode!’ and you imagine it is the Voice of the People.
That is where you make your bloomer. What the Voice of the People is saying is: ‘Look at that frightful ass Spode swanking about in footer bags! Did you ever in your puff see such a perfect perisher?’
That’s why British party stores stock Nazi outfits – because they’re a joke, and the Brits made them one. So when prissy Krauts want to ban Prince Harry’s party gear they should go suck an old bratwurst.
Alas, tyranny doesn’t always come with a self-evidently hilarious dress code. And the soft, supple, creeping totalitarian inclinations of our present-day rulers are sometimes harder to resist. If I had to pick the single most revolting remark from this bogus Reichsfuror, it would be this:
I think it might be appropriate for him to tell us himself just how contrite he now is.
That’s Michael Howard, the leader of the supposed Conservative Party. What’s conservative about demanding people submit to public self-abasement? Wasn’t it the Commies who used to insist you recant on TV and then disappear into re-education camp? A conservative party ought to be a refuge from the sanctimonious nannytollahs of the age. But, from his shabby Kerryesque opportunism on the war down, Mr Howard has no discernible coherent political philosophy – except for his all-pervasive authoritarianism, into which his repellent call for a display of princely contrition fits all too neatly.
Since Britain seems to hold three-minute silences for something or other every month now, maybe for the next one we could all get together and Prince Harry (in uniform) and his father (in mufti) can lay a wreath to mark the tragic loss of our sense of proportion.
THE UNITED KINGDOM
Ending the debate
A COUPLE OF years back, I mentioned the fatwa against Salman Rushdie and received a flurry of lively e-mails. It was, you’ll recall, Valentine’s Day 1989 when the Ayatollah Khomeini issued his extraterritorial summary judgment on a British subject, and shortly thereafter large numbers of British Muslims went marching through English cities openly calling for Rushdie to be killed.
A reader in Bradford told me he’d asked a West Yorkshire officer on the street that day why the various “Muslim community leaders” weren’t being arrested for incitement to murder. The officer said they’d been told to “play it cool”. The calls for blood got more raucous. My correspondent asked his question again. The policeman told him to “fuck off, or I’ll arrest you.”
Isn’t that pretty much how it’s likely to go once David Blunkett’s new protection for Islam is in place? If you’re the “moderate” imam Yusuf al-Qaradawi, you’ll be invited to speak at the “Our Children Our Future” conference sponsored and funded by the Metropolitan Police and the Department for Work and Pensions. But, if you express concern about ol’ Mullah Moderate, an Islamic lobby group will file an official complaint about you.
Indeed, after Sir John Stevens, Met commissioner and event co-sponsor, said he didn’t want his officers on the same stage as the imam, the Muslim Association of Britain filed an official complaint about his comments. By the time you read this, Sir John might have already called for himself to be investigated by a Royal Commission and found guilty of systemic Islamophobia.
As for “Our Children Our Future”, when it comes to children, the imam certainly has the future all mapped out: as he has said, “Israelis might have nuclear bombs but we have the children bomb and these human bombs must continue until liberation.” Thank heaven for little girls, they blow up in the most delightful way.
If an Anglican bishop were to commend a career as a suicide bomber to his Sunday School charges, you’d certainly hope to be free to question his judgment on the matter. Not that Anglican bishops ever say such things, of course. They’re lost in anguished debate on whether they should license merely celibate gay deans in long-term relationships or go for full-blown robustly active gay bishops, and all the thanks they get for their painful efforts to keep up with the times is wholesale public mockery of Christianity up and down the land – ie, my old friend Alistair Beaton’s satirical Iraq war song, “We’re Sending You A Cluster Bomb From Jesus”.
Meanwhile, Islam is the fastest-growing religion in the western world, but the Home Secretary wants us to pretend that it’s a wee delicate bloom which has to be sheltered from anything unpleasant. The other week, the governor of one of those Nigerian states that now lives under sharia called for the burning of all Christian churches within his jurisdiction. Every Friday, on state TV and radio throughout the Arab world and in mosques somewhat closer to home, the A-list imams call for the killing of Jews and infidels. Well, good for them. But, if they can dish it out so enthusiastically, couldn’t they learn to take it just an eensy-teensy-weensy bit?
One of the reasons Arab nations are in the state they’re in is because of the inability to discuss Islam honestly. I was in Amman for the Jordanian election last year and one of the things you notice is that, although the city does a reasonable impression of a modern dynamic capital, and its press is, by the standards of the region, free-ish, its stunted political culture is subordinate to its religious culture. That’s why, for example, Article 340 of the Jordanian Penal Code – which effectively licenses “honour killings” – always gets renewed when it comes up in parliament.