British Royal Nazi
Salute – a Sign of the Times
By Finian Cunningham
July 20, 2015 "Information
Clearing House"
-
"SCF"
- The British royal family is up in arms – excuse the pun – over old
video footage that shows the young Queen Elizabeth giving a Heil
Hitler salute. A photograph published on its front page by British
tabloid
newspaper The Sun has caused a storm of controversy, with the
British monarchy denouncing it as an invasion of privacy. But the
real significance is that the image shows how Western so-called
democracies were – and still are – so close to embracing fascism.
The video in question
is believed to be dated around 1933, when the present British head
of state was then a six-year-old
princess. She is seen apparently playing with her family in the
monarchy’s Balmoral estate, Scotland. With her right arm
outstretched, the young Elizabeth is pictured giving the infamous
Heil Hitler salute. At that time, Adolf Hitler had just ascended to
power to become Chancellor of Germany and was already implementing
his repressive regime. The Nazi Reich would in a few short years
annex neighbouring European countries and ignite the Second World
War. In 1933, the Nazi Reich was also embarking on its genocidal
programme of mass extermination of peoples designated as «untermenschen»
(sub-human).
Defenders of the
British monarch have dismissed the grainy images of the young queen
giving a Nazi salute as «horseplay». They point out that the
princess and her mother and sister are smiling while performing the
salute, and therefore the image could be understood as a parody of
Herr Hitler.
A royal spokesman
said
of the images: «This is a family playing and momentarily referencing
a gesture many would have seen from contemporary news reels. No one
at that time had any sense how it would evolve. To imply anything
else is misleading and dishonest. The Queen is around six years of
age at the time and entirely innocent of attaching any meaning to
these gestures».
That explanation is
only partially mitigating. Yes, it would be misplaced to condemn a
young child for making the gesture. She would obviously not have
been aware of its vile significance.
Nonetheless, it is
important to understand the image as more than a mere historical
oddity, as British royalists and the British mainstream media would
have us believe.
What the 82-year-old
footage betrays is the sinister close association that the British
ruling class engaged in with fascism. And this was not some aberrant
association pertaining to the distant 1930s. The fascist tendency of
the British state is still very much alive today. And not just in
Britain, but right across so-called European democracies, and indeed
in the United States.
We only have to look
at how the present European Union leadership – dominated by Germany
– is meting out wholesale economic destruction and plundering of
Greece over the «debt crisis». Greece’s democracy is being
vanquished under the dictate of European and global finance capital.
The country’s national assets and resources are being expropriated
by foreign powers with absolute contempt for the democratic mandate
of the Greek public.
We can also look at
how Britain, the EU and Washington are sponsoring a Neo-Nazi regime
in Ukraine, plying it with diplomatic, financial and military
support to wage a murderous war of aggression on an ethnic Russian
population.
Back in Britain, Queen
Elizabeth, now aged 89, just recently passed into law the economic
program of the Conservative government. Prime Minister David Cameron
and his Chancellor George Osborne – both millionaires and the
embodiment of the British ruling class, like the queen herself – are
forcing a draconian austerity regime that will cut public services,
wages and social welfare way beyond what has prevailed over the past
five years. The British government’s economic policy – or perhaps
the more appropriate word is «onslaught» – has been condemned by
trade unions, human rights groups and charities as a vicious attack
on an increasingly impoverished British society.
Cameron’s government –
which was re-elected in May by only 24 per cent of the voting
electorate – has been described as a «parliamentary dictatorship»
whose over-riding objective is to siphon off even more national
wealth to the richest top one per cent, while driving the majority
into deeper poverty. Cameron is also now legislating to outlaw
public sector workers from being able to hold industrial strike
action to defend their dwindling livelihoods.
Meanwhile, it emerges
that the British government has been secretly ordering its military
air force to carry out bombing raids on Syria, along with American
warplanes. The British move is not only in contravention of
international law, it upends a prohibition from its own parliament
on any such military intervention in Syria – a sovereign country
that has not attacked Britain.
So add it up. A
British ruling regime that has dubious democratic mandate, which is
pulverising the majority of workers, unemployed, pensioners and poor
for the enrichment of a tiny social elite, and which is at the same
time bombing foreign countries at will in violation of international
law –that is surely a sign of the real despotic nature of political
power operating in Britain.
To get back to the
Nazi-saluting British royals. Also pictured in the images is the
young queen’s uncle, Edward. Three years after the images were
taken, he was crowned King Edward VIII in 1936. But after less than
a year on the British throne he was forced to abdicate over his
scandalous affair with the American divorcée Wallis Simpson. (She
wasn’t divorced at the time and was legally still married to her
estranged husband.)
It is well documented
that Edward VIII was a fervent supporter of Hitler and German
fascism. He engaged in correspondence with the Führer, and in 1937
following his abdication he travelled to Germany where he was given
a guard of honour by Hitler, Heinrich Himmler and other SS
commanders. Edward – by then relegated to the status of a British
duke – was photographed giving Nazi salutes. At a further meeting
with the Führer at the latter’s mountain fortress at Obersalzberg,
the British royal guest plotted with the Nazi leadership to
reinstall him as Britain’s king if Nazi Germany succeeded in
defeating England in an eventual war,
according to The Independent.
The disgraced British
aristocrat was by no means a maverick. There was a consensus among
Britain’s ruling class during the 1930s that quietly but
enthusiastically endorsed Hitler and fascism as a bulwark against
democracy and socialism in particular. Hitler’s rabid anti-communism
and pathological hatred of the Soviet Union was seen as a strategic
weapon by not only Britain’s rulers but also by American and other
European capitalist elite.
Only days before the
latest uproar over the British royal Nazi salute, the monarchy was
embroiled in another public relations gaffe. The queen’s husband,
94-year-old Prince Philip, while on some public engagement last
week, met a group of community workers from a rundown London
district. The politically incorrect prince quipped to the female
group: «So, who are you spongeing off then?» Spongeing is a
derogatory British colloquialism for people who scrounge money off
the state.
That gaffe says
everything about the pervasive and contemptuous attitude among
Britain’s rulers towards the ordinary public, as seen most
graphically in the brutal economic austerity policies being imposed
by the incumbent Conservative government. The public, in their
elitist view, is simply a mass of people that must be crushed to
serve the privileged interests of the elite.
But this superior –
supremacist – British attitude and its total disdain for the wider
population is extant elsewhere in Europe, the US and increasingly
across the so-called democratic Western world. As with Greece,
democracy is being crushed in order to serve an elite financial
oligarchy; while in the US, foul-mouthed, warmongering
multimillionaires backed by Wall Street capital are the only ones
who have the exclusive privilege of running for president.
Britain’s Queen
Elizabeth’s fascist salute as a young princess is not just a sign of
historical times in the distant past. It is a sign of the present
times where fascism is the ideology lurking behind the facade of
Western democracy.
© Strategic Culture Foundation