By Rab Bruce’s Spider

From an early age, Britons are taught to revere the Royal Family, with the newspapers and TV reinforcing the message at every opportunity. We are subjected to fawning reports of even the most banal of events if it involves a member of the Royal family and these events are often orchestrated so as to divert the public’s collective mind away from other stories which may be damaging to the Establishment. While many people express a preference for a Republican State, the majority of Britons still feel this attachment to the Royals and will turn out in droves to wave Union Flags in order to demonstrate their loyalty and subservience.

While I am happy to include myself in the ranks of those who have no time for what is a relic of a bygone age, an exercise in pageantry and flummery and, above all, an incredible waste of taxpayers’ money, I can’t get too excited about the revelations in the news this morning that some members of the Royal family were admirers of the Nazis in the 1930s. In fact, I’m not at all sure that these count as revelations. They are certainly not relevant to today’s Britain.

While it is quite amusing to see the Establishment scurrying around and attempting to minimise the damage that the latest photographs might cause, we must keep in mind that these events took place 80 years ago. Let’s try to put that into some context. Is it any wonder that a Right Wing Establishment, including the Royal family, should express admiration for a Right Wing political movement which had come to power in Germany? Not really. How many of us have admired something or someone based on incomplete knowledge and then changed our minds when details have emerged which shows our admiration was misplaced? On a much lesser scale to the Nazi sympathies of the 1930s, many people voted Labour in 1997 and were swept up in a wave of enthusiasm which has since turned to bitter disappointment.

But, to get back to the Royals and their admiration for the Nazis. Even if one assumes that they knew about the anti-Semitic actions taking place in Germany but were prepared to put up with those if it meant having a Fascist dictatorship as an ally in Central Europe, their minds were soon changed when Hitler’s expansionist motives became clear for all to see and war eventually broke out. The full resources of the British Empire were thrown into opposing the Nazi regime and it is fairly safe to assume that, even if some among the Royals were not keen on fighting Hitler, they understood the necessity. That’s because the one thing the British Establishment, of which the Royals are the most visible and recognisable manifestation, won’t stand for is being threatened and Germany’s rise was a very real threat to their hegemony. Britain’s role in Europe was being challenged and its willingness to stand behind its treaty obligations were being severely tested. Yet even in 1939 there were those who would have preferred appeasement rather than war. Whether any of the Royals were in that number is largely irrelevant because by the time the war ended the full scale of Hitler’s atrocities had become plain for all to see and even the most ardent Naxi sympathiser would have been well advised to keep their thoughts to themselves.

It is probably safe to assume that many people who admired the Nazis were forced to alter their opinion once details of the Holocaust were revealed. In any event, those still alive today were children at the time and cannot be held responsible for the mistaken views of their older relatives, just as today’s SNP members cannot be held responsible for the pro-Nazi sympathies of the Party’s founders.

Today’s story is nothing more than salacious gossip and should be treated as such. The only positive aspect to it is that it might prompt a few more people to question why this pampered and privileged family are held in such reverence and awe but even that is doubtful. You can expect to be inundated with pro-Royal news stories over the next few weeks as the media moves into overdrive to reinforce the Establishment’s hold over public opinion.