I actually found this quite funny when I saw the headlines on BBC News Online this morning.

I couldn't believe the fuss that ITV News were making of it. "Is the Army right for Harry?" and other assorted crap about it. To be frank, it doesn't matter the fact that he dressed up as a Nazi. It was a fancy dress party, and I'm sure that the invitation didn't say at the bottom "No Nazi's".

My Brother dressed up as Hitler to go to a Fancy dress party, and he looked exactly like the real thing, and people thought it was great. All Harry did was put on an armband. I've been a republican for years - it's a much better way to go.

(As a sidenote, my Comments are giving me a few problems at the moment. Not only the comment spam, but also that whenever someone puts a link when they post a comment, if someone clicks on it, they get a forbidden message, and can't go to the URL unless they type it in. Time for an upgrade to MT 3.1x I think. Hope you get it sorted out soon :) )

I don't think dressing up as a Nazi is OK at all. It's crass, ignorant and insensitive.

OTOH, I don't see why being crass, ignorant and insensitive should bar him from a career in the Army. Best place for him. ;-)

For those Americans that don't watch reruns of "Are you Being Served?" on PBS, a "fancy dress partry" means a costume party, not a black-tie party or anything like that, so this doesn't mean that Harry's tuxedo has a swastika on it.

Personally I'm with Laura-Ann. It was a fancy dress party for goodness sake! If I went as the devil would people think I was a Satanist? Would they assume I was promoting or otherwise approving of Satanists? Of more concern is the party's theme of 'colonists and natives'. Hello?

The devil isn't real, and Satanists haven't killed eight million people.

Sorry, no, not eight million - that's just how many died in the camps. The full total for WWII is over fifty million. Now, dressing up as Stalin, that's a better comparison. And I woudn't think that was funny, either.

"Colonists and natives"? What do you expect from the arisocratic classes? After all, Harry is the man who, when asked about the background of an 'unsuitable' girlfriend, is said to have replied that she was "not black or anything".

But nevertheless, wearing a costume does not make me an apologist for the original wearers of the costume. Wearing a Scarlett O'Hara/southern belle dress wouldn't mean I approved of slavery, and wearing a Mao jacket wouldn't mean I approved of the millions who died in China as a result of the Cultural Revolution. Wearing a costume is wearing a costume, which means that the nazis currently singing and dancing on the West End stage aren't being accused of anything.

Sorry, Katherine, we'll have to agree to disagree. For me, symbols carry weight, and a Nazi uniform isn't comparable with a southern belle dress.

Nazis weren't *uniquely* evil, not even in scale - c.f. Stalin and, as you say, Mao. But none of these groups should be forgotten or trivialised.

As for The Producers, well, the whole point of that is that they are using Nazi imagery *because* it's unacceptable. The unacceptability of it is the whole point.

If anything demonstrates that the Nazi uniform hasn't been forgotten it's the hoo hah over this. But again, this assumes that wearing it to a fancy dress party trivialises the issues. It might trivialise the uniform, but that is not the same thing. I say again, there is no suggestion that wearing the uniform indicates approval.

This whole kaffufle also places a lot of significance on a man third in line to the throne, as if he is speaking for or to people. Personally, since he doesn't speak to or for me I couldn't give a monkeys what he does with his time. If he stood for election in a Nazi uniform, or matched through the streets of Bradford wearing it then I'd be right there with you, but he didn't. He wore it to a party, full of people wearing costumes that would, under the wrong circumstances, offend any number of people.

I guess we are going to have to agree to disagree. And don't get me wrong, I can see the point. I just don't think anyone would be making it if it were anyone other than a member of the Royal Family wearing it, and that accords them more important than I am prepared to give them.

I think that in separating the symbol from the value that the symbol, err, symbolises, you are talking about a level of subtlety that Harry and his family aren't capable of understanding. ;-)

You are quite right that I'm treating the whole obsolete lot of them as being far more interesting than they are.

I don't see why there is such uproar about Harry wearing a Nazi uniform. It seems to me that, whether appreciative or angry, Brits (and English in particular) just love to get worked up about the Royals. More than anything else, this tells me that they need the Royals.

1. I find it interesting that a lot of the papers that slammed Harry for this innocuous non-act were aggressively pro-Nazi in the 30's. Aggressively. As in, refused to run columns speaking out against Hitler, and indeed trying to assassinate the characters of any prominent political figure.

2. The UK needs the Royal Family. The country would lose billions of pounds of GDP through damage to the tourist industry. Certainly downsizing of the Royals is called for, but republicanizing an economically obsolete, industrially decrepit, devolving former empire with an increasingly Americanized culture, pathologically bad food and hotels, and few significant international tourist attractions unrelated to its Royalty, is akin to intentionally choking oneself to death on a piece of month-old bread one wasn't asked to eat in the first place.

3. Parallel to the thread of hypocrisy running through this affectation of scandal is the thread of self-delusion. The fact that thousands upon thousands of Englishmen pretend to be offended by something which a few of them have themselves done; which many of them have seen done before by others; and which the majority of them laughed at when John Cleese and others have done it on television; all this hints at the cold truth about the English, in particular, as a race. That cold truth that virtually every member of this wholly advantaged, spectacularly unoppressed and unburdened people hold Royals to a higher standard because they fundamentally believe that some members of society are superior to others. With little of the stark egalitarianism of the dozens of peoples whose lives they once ruled, the English are capable of only the basest, crassest form of republicanism - namely despotism. Again, hark back only a half century to the bullyish naivete with which so many English embraced fascism before they were forced -yes, forced- to save the world from it.

The English are a wonderful people, possessed of countless gifts. They are the premiere race in on of the few truly great countries in the world. At furthering democracy, freedom and order they have done pretty well, on the whole, and better than any of their contemporary nations save possibly one. But they haven't the talent for republicanism, and they certainly haven't the experience to make it work in their own country.

And know this: a republican form of government will not itself cure a single one of the ills that ails England. If anything, the English and British success at building a rights-based constitutional monarchy has given yet another lie to the misbelief that republics are freer societies.

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