Fascism and the UK

[Taverner]

Anyone noticed how every so often, you get a rock star or royal who endorses Fascism, or has a rather unhealthy interest in it?

Wasn't Queen Victoria's brother openly fascist?
David Bowie went through that whole "Thin White Duke" phase
Bryan Ferry, who, in my opinion, was the basis for the said Duke, not only loves foxhunts, but also gets downright violent and calls his studio the "Fuherbunker"
Then of course Prince Harry just loves him some Nazis...

I guess it shouldn't be so surprising - the UK is the same size as California, and we've home grown some fascists of our own here. Michael Fucking Wiener (aka Savage) just to name one

Its just I expect it out of the US

[enlightenment]

1. WHAT are you talking about?

Queen Victoria's brother was openly fascist? She didn't HAVE a (legitimate) brother. Are you referring to Edward VIII?

Bowie was referring to his drug use . . .

Ferry was misquoted - the rag that did it apologised to him for it. And how does foxhunting equate to fascism?

Prince Harry needs a good kick in the arse.

Good grief. Are you just bored?

[Taverner]

3. Edward VIII - that's him

I don't think Ferry was misquoted at all - he has referred to his office as Fuherbunker on many occasions

And it's not just that he's a foxhunter, but one who gets violent with animal rights activists, along with his son.

Yes, I know Bowie was on cocaine at the time. Cocaine is one helluva drug, and I know from first hand experience that you say/do/think the stupidest things when on it. HOWEVER, his statements did not come out of the blue. During the 1970's, there was a strong resurgence of the National Front, and that's what made his statements seem so chilling at the time.

I don't blame Bowie - I blame coke

[enlightenment]

12. I understand the point you're trying to make,

but it really becomes a question of A+B=Z. To say that Bowie was a fascist because he took on the persona of the 'white duke' during the same period that there was a resurgence of the National Front is a bit specious. As you said yourself, people do stupid things when they're high.

Most people do accept that Ferry was misquoted; if you choose not to, that's your right . . . and again, what does his opposition to the anti-foxhunting folks (violent or otherwise) have to do with fascism? I don't keep up with his activities and accept that he may be a violent jerk in that regard (personally, I abhor sport hunting of any kind; killing for fun is grotesque); but how does that behaviour make him a fascist?

I'm really not trying to be nit-picky, Taverner, just suggesting that these kind of broad-brush statements aren't very useful for getting your point across!

[Taverner]

14. Bowie wasn't a fascist - he played one

Responding to the sentiment at the time...Bowie was no more a fascist as the Thin White Duke then he was a Spaceman during the Ziggy era

[Taverner]

15. Thing is it was a muddled point

I didn't really have it clear in my mind at the time

[enlightenment]

16. Okay -

thinking out loud (so to speak) . . . free associating . . .

*gets me into hot water all the time!*

[Taverner]

17. What can I say, I've been experimenting with Eno's Oblique Strategies

:shrug:

[enlightenment]

19. hehe.

B-)

[no_hypocrisy]

2. The Duke of Windsor went to visit Germany where they kissed his

royal ass after he abdicated from the throne. Historians have debated his fidelity to Britain. Some have gone as far as to postulate that a deal was made that in exchange for his support of Nazis conquering and controlling Britain, he would be re-installed as a martinette. Back in the saddle again so to speak.

Not to mention the fascists during WWII in Britain, Diane Mitford and her husband.

[mr blur]

4. You're wrong about Ferry, Bowie was a dickhead,

our royal family is a bunch of inbred halfwits and Victoria didn't have a brother.

[Taverner]

7. I meant Edward VIII

I'm clueless when it comes to lineage

[EmilyAnne]

5. Football matches seem to bring out the Fascism in many of the fans. It was the same when I lived in

Russia. There was always a debate about whether violent groups of males who attack immigrants were "hooligans" or actually "skinheads."
A lot of blatant fascism would be dismissed as "acts of hooliganism." Basically, it was a version of "boys will be boys." Human rights organizations and liberal groups saw them as skinheads. Putin himself would call them hooligans.

I sense the same thing in parts of Europe, including the UK. The anti-Pakistani comments of UK teenagers, the beatings of immigrants by angry football fans, the monkey sounds made from the stands to intimidate black players, these things are all dismissed in the mainstream as hooliganism. They seen as regrettable things to shake one's head at and maybe write a few editorials about, but they are not indicative of any real ideology. I disagree. I think they do reveal a messed up belief system and, when economic problems arise, especially high unemployment, they will start to come to the surface in far more violent ways. This is what I saw in Russia and in Spain while living there.

With the royal youngsters, I think its clumsy attempt to connect to the common, working class, football fan sort of guy. Kind of like the Hip-Hop GOP wanting to be "down."

I thought it turned out Bryan Ferry hadn't really praised the Nazis and the studio name was a false rumor. The Thin White Duke was a cocaine fueled idea of an insane character. Came after Ziggy Stardust, right? I'm not sure about Bowie really embracing fascism, but nothing would surprise me about him. I have all of Ferry's and Bowie's albums, by the way.

A last opinion here...while the US is rife with institutionalized racism, overt displays like those you mentioned are usually nipped in the bud here. I think that has given some Americans the false notion that we have conquered our past and they aren't willing to dip beneath the surface to address the truth about racism in the US. They don't even want to entertain the possibility of it. It makes them angry. Just look at the reaction to Al Sharpton. People don't merely disagree with him, they HATE him.

[enlightenment]

9. You might want to read Gary Armstrong's book on the subject, if you haven't;

"Football Hooligans: Knowing the Score" - a good (and readable) sociological study of violence among footie fans. A Google partial preview here:
http://books.google.com/books?id=yHRW05w9IKUC&printsec=frontcover

[LeftishBrit]

6. Where do you get this about Bryan Ferry?

Never heard that at all, and I think it would have come up in the meejer here.

And Queen Victoria didn't have a brother - if she had, he would have become king and she would never have reigned. Moreover, she died about 30 years before the onset of fascism; so you're off by a generation in any case.

We HAVE had fascists here - notably Oswald Mosely and his British Union of Fascists. And the BNP could be considered as neo-fascist. But not the people you're discussing.

As for Prince Harry, I think he's an irrelevant, thick, upper-class twit who is flippant and clueless about fascism, but not an actual fascist.

[Hardrada]

8. Sir Oswald Mosely, wasn't it?

And he had quite a following and wrote a good memoir of that era explaining how he came by his ultraright ideas. He was originally a BEF officer and then became a socialist!

[Paladin]

22. He's That Prick......

....who accused T.E. Lawrence (of Arabia) of having Nazi sympathies----after Lawrence was dead and couldn't refute the charges.....

[Octafish]

10. The Nazi Roots of the House of Windsor

Thanks, Taverner. This is a most important topic -- until all fascists are outted, jailed or buried.

The Nazi Roots of the House of Windsor

by Scott Thompson
Printed in The American Almanac, August 25, 1997.

One of the biggest public relations hoaxes ever perpetrated by the British Crown, is that King Edward VIII, who abdicated the throne in 1938, due to his support for the Nazis, was a ``black sheep,’’ an aberration in an otherwise unblemished Windsor line. Nothing could be further from the truth. The British monarchy, and the City of London’s leading Crown bankers, enthusiastically backed Hitler and the Nazis, bankrolled the Führer’s election, and did everything possible to build the Nazi war machine, for Britain’s planned geopolitical war between Germany and Russia.

Support for Nazi-style genocide has always been at the heart of House of Windsor policy, and long after the abdication of Edward VIII, the Merry Windsors maintained their direct Nazi links.

So, when Prince Philip, co-founder with Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), tells an interviewer that he hopes to be ``reincarnated as a deadly virus’’ to help solve the ``population problem,’’ he is just ``doin’ what comes naturally’’ for any scion of the Anglo-Dutch oligarchy (see page 8 for more quotes from Prince Philip).

To get beyond the soap opera stuff and truly understand the Windsors today, it is useful to start with Prince Philip. Not only was he trained in the Hitler Youth curriculum, but his German brothers-in-law, with whom he lived, all became high-ranking figures in the Nazi Party.

Before his family was forced into exile, Prince Philip had been in line of succession to the Greek throne, established after a British-run coup against the son of King Ludwig of Bavaria, who became King Otto I of the Hellenes. Having dispatched King Otto in 1862, London ran a talent search for a successor, which resulted in the selection of Prince William, the son of the designated heir and nephew to the Danish king, Crown Prince Christian. In 1862, Prince William of the Danes was installed as King George I of Greece, and married a granddaughter of Czar Nicholas I in 1866. Prince Philip is a grandson of Queen Victoria, and he is related to most of the current and former crowned heads of Europe, including seven czars.

The marriages of Prince Philip’s sisters definitely strengthened the German aristocratic ties. During 1931-1932, Philip’s four older sisters married as follows: Margarita to a Czech-Austrian prince named Gottfried von Hohenlohe-Langenburg, a great-grandson of England’s Queen Victoria; Theodora to Berthold, the margrave of Baden; Cecilia to Georg Donatus, grand duke of Hesse-by-Rhine, also a great-grandson of Queen Victoria; and, Sophie to Prince Christoph of Hesse.

Three of Philip’s brothers-in-law were part of a group of German aristocrats who were Anglophile and pro-Nazi at the same time, and who remain a subversive force in Germany to this day.

CONTINUED...

http://american_almanac.tripod.com/naziroot.htm

Real class. Fascists of the First Rank.

So, it’s really not surprising when GOP bigwigs suck up to the British royals.

[muriel_volestrangler]

18. "American Almanac" was a Lyndon Larouche publication - complete fantasy

by a man who is both violently dangerous, and who makes things up out of thin air.

See eg http://www.publiceye.org/larouche/synthesis.html

Larouche, it should harely need saying on DU, is completely full of shit.

[Octafish]

20. Touchy subject of royal links with Nazi Germany

Didn't know that, muriel_volestrangler. What about the facts of the article? They appear to check out.

Touchy subject of royal links with Nazi Germany

By Patrick Sawer, Evening Standard Last updated at 00:00am on 13.01.05

Linked by blood but twice divided by war, the royal family's relationship with Germany, its people and its troubled history has long been a sensitive one. The photograph of Prince Harry wearing a swastika has echoes of one particularly disturbing incident involving the family, one which seared itself into the British collective memory - that of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor meeting Adolf Hitler in 1937.

The ex-King Edward VIII and his wife were known sympathisers of the Nazis and their policies, a feeling shared by a large number of British aristocrats who admired the way Hitler was dealing with the Communists.

The Nazis regarded the duke, who had abdicated over his affair with divorced American Wallis Simpson, as a potential ally and a possible head of state for a subjugated Britain.

But his flirting with Hitler's regime threatened to undermine years of work by the royal family to distance themselves from their German roots.

The modern royal family was founded in 1840 when Queen Victoria married Albert of Saxe-Coburg, a Germany duchy, creating The House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. Such was the ill-feeling towards all things German during the First World War that in 1917 Victoria's grandson King George V - an honorary Field Marshal in the German army - thought it prudent to renounce the German name and titles and adopt that of Windsor.

It was a masterful PR exercise, replacing the Teutonic surname with that of a quintessentially home counties town.

His son Edward VIII once declared: "There is not one drop of blood in my veins that is not German." Both he and George VI were bilingual in German and English.

Throughout the Twenties and Thirties, the royals were steadfastly opposed to conflict with their ancestral fatherland. Indeed George V's wife Queen Mary always maintained that Britain had "backed the wrong horse" in 1914.

CONTINUED..

http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/article-15924727-details/Touchy+subject+of+royal+links+with+Nazi+Germany/article.do

BTW: I don't like a lot of what Larouche says. I do know that a lot of what he's said regarding the British royals and the BFEE checks out.

[muriel_volestrangler]

21. Sure, they had lots of German relatives, some of whom were Nazis

but it's the bits saying that Philip himself was therefore a fascist or Nazi, or that he was 'allied with Edward VIII' that have no basis. Philip did spend the war in the British Navy, fighting Nazis.

Larouche has a conspiracy theory (designed to keep his paranoid followers worried, I suppose) that the British Empire is still controlling the world, or attempting to, and is a successor of shadowy forces that have done this for thousands of years. So he has to paint the British royal family as uber-Nazis. The royals are average rich people - fairly selfish, but they're not Ernst Stavro Blofeld.

[Octafish]

25. Don't know about the royals. I am worried that the NAZIs are still with us.

Know your BFEE: Like a NAZI

BTW: I am a revolutionary, by definition, because I am a democrat. I will never be another man or woman's "subject."

[iverglas]

23. thanks for saving me the bother

-- I didn't actually know that and would have had to go googling. Although you did take away the lovely surprise I would have got. ;)

Here's one for you:

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B0DE0D9143EF93BA25751C0A961948260&n=Top/Reference/Times%20Topics/Subjects/F/Frauds%20and%20Swindling

One of the indicted Larouche aides named in that 1987 article (I just discovered it a few weeks ago) was my first live-in love. Talk about googling surprises.


I just wanted to add: if Harry is, as has been noted here, "an irrelevant, thick, upper-class twit", we should recall that he only got half his genes from Philip, and be thankful. ;)

[citizen snips]

11. other countires were worse.

[Taverner]

13. Yes, Uncle Joe was a mass murdering FUCKHEAD

Honestly, any discussion of Fascism needs to take into account the Soviet Fascism under Stalin

[citizen snips]

24. Neville Chamblian gave the nazis Czechoslovakia

absolutely sickening.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Munich_Agreement

[BooScout]

26. Considering how much the UK fought & sacrificed in WWII

Your title and your examples of facism & the UK are pretty slimey not to mention assinine.:eyes: