It seems there are pictures of the English royal family giving nazi salutes and being otherwise chummy with them...
It seems there are pictures of the English royal family giving nazi salutes and being otherwise chummy with them from the early 30's. I missed this brouhaha, but it occurs to me that this particular article is handling it relatively well. That is, it is important to know the full context of history, even though it is often unpleasant, embarrassing, and/or painful when things come out later on.
There's also someone who'd been documenting the reality of France during WWII, and how it was hardly the universal resistor to the conquering Nazis as it is frequently portrayed. I find that pertinent because the Nazis and what happened in and around WWII did not spring out of nothingness.
For example, hating jews, gypsies, communists, homosexuals, and others was not exactly original or unacceptable. Using that sort of thing as a tool to manipulate a populace is distinctly unoriginal, and continues to be used today. The idea that everyone was just shocked, shocked! I tell you, is thoroughly untrue. However hard it might be, it is very important to take a hard look at the messy reality around things like this and rather than try to simplify or hide it, think about what it was and why it was and if we really feel that that is unacceptable, what are we doing to change it so it doesn't happen again?
http://nypost.com/2015/07/22/should-the-queen-be-judged-by-her-decades-old-nazi-salute/
http://nypost.com/2015/07/22/should-the-queen-be-judged-by-her-decades-old-nazi-salute
There's also someone who'd been documenting the reality of France during WWII, and how it was hardly the universal resistor to the conquering Nazis as it is frequently portrayed. I find that pertinent because the Nazis and what happened in and around WWII did not spring out of nothingness.
For example, hating jews, gypsies, communists, homosexuals, and others was not exactly original or unacceptable. Using that sort of thing as a tool to manipulate a populace is distinctly unoriginal, and continues to be used today. The idea that everyone was just shocked, shocked! I tell you, is thoroughly untrue. However hard it might be, it is very important to take a hard look at the messy reality around things like this and rather than try to simplify or hide it, think about what it was and why it was and if we really feel that that is unacceptable, what are we doing to change it so it doesn't happen again?
http://nypost.com/2015/07/22/should-the-queen-be-judged-by-her-decades-old-nazi-salute/
http://nypost.com/2015/07/22/should-the-queen-be-judged-by-her-decades-old-nazi-salute
"Who wants ice cream?"
ReplyDeleteJudging the half-year king for his nazi sympathies is one thing, but rewriting the headline "should an 86 year old woman be judged harshly having play-acted a symbol later shown to be problematic when she was fucking seven, FFS?" provides an even better example of Betteridge's.
ReplyDeleteEven leaving aside the whole historical context. She. Was. Seven.
Jasper Janssen Yes, but the article contains a picture of her trying to do it much more recently. She's failing due to old age, but surely in cases of Nazism it's the thought that counts?
ReplyDeleteThat's kind of my thought, Jasper Janssen. She was a little kid, so obs clickbait headline ans is duh, no. However, I don't agree that all this info about the British (and other) royalty, government, leadership, etc. should stay buried.
ReplyDeleteFact is, lots of influential people and ordinary people bought into several narratives that made WWII possible in all its aspects. Plus, it's a good insight into just exactly how privileged and removed people in certain socioeconomic classes felt they were. It's not like this stuff doesn't keep happening, or people magically are different.
We're raising a fuss about privilege over here in other contexts, well, this is a classic example of it and the damage it can do. It's important to know this stuff, not to sell papers, but to understand it and change it so it doesn't keep happening.
F-L Silver this isn't about privilege or being disconnected at all, though. The privilege is what results in there being photographic records of it, but there were an awful lot of British sympathizers at that point in time in the middle and lower classes as well.
ReplyDeletePlus, as far as I can tell, they're playing the game of "imitate that forceful fellow in the newsreels that makes those funny gestures", not necessarily the "let's show how much we adore Herr Hitler!" game.
I don't see any particular need to keep it buried, but I also don't see any need whatsoever for the Sun to put 'Heil Britannia!' style headlines all over the front page, either.
(And to take it forward in time a little: when the Germans actually invaded us, the Nationaal-Socialistische Bond (NSB[1]) was right there to cheer them in, and they weren't a small organization even before they got the imprimatur of the occupying forces.)
[1] to this day, "NSBer!" Is one of the most hurtful and heavily laden insults one can hurl in NL. It's particularly used for those who could be broadly considered to be snitches.
I didn't see specifically what the Sun did, although that sounds like them. I didn't know about the history of that in The Netherlands, or the modern extension. If you get taught anything, you might have to read the Diary of Anne Frank, or get told how everybody in Amsterdam disobeyed the Nazis. Speaking of a form of privilege, I would never be able to comprehend fully what this was and is in any part of Europe (or other places where the war and its history were a daily reality).
ReplyDeleteI suspect part of my reaction is that I know that it is almost never taught, and frequently denied, that there were ever supporters and sympathizers here in the US and Canada. It is frequently glossed over that there were POW camps here in the US where German prisoners had to work on farms and such, but were surprisingly well treated and not infrequently sympathized with. Not all the people fighting in the German forces disagreed with any of the Nazi propaganda. A lot of Americans and Canadians had the exact same attitudes and opinions. We get all morally superior and high and mighty and pretend otherwise, but it isn't true and there is still plenty of rhetoric that would be very familiar to a Nazi from the 30's or 40's.
So if something kicks people here in their complacency a little, I don't think it's a bad thing.
F-L Silver looking it up, they went with "their royal heilnesses", but I think my point stands :)
ReplyDeletehttp://www.niod.nl/sites/niod.nl/files/LdeJong_12delencompleet_0.jpg
ReplyDeleteLoe de Jong, director of the NIOD, Netherlands institute for war documentation, made it his life's work to publish this work in 14 parts spread over 29 volumes about WWII (it's available under a CC license if you want to read the 18.000 pages...). As I understand it, quite a large proportion deals with dividing the country into "good" and "bad" — there wasn't much room for shades of gray in his worldview. Current thinking is there was a lot less white and more gray around than the narrative he made.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kingdom_of_the_Netherlands_During_World_War_II
There's a saying in NL, for when you have hard choices to make with no good options — 'like a mayor in wartime'. Some resigned, some stayed on and tried to mitigate the atrocities, some stayed on and actively helped the Resistance. Some didn't survive.
My grandparents' generation was pretty badly traumatized by the war years — one set of grandparents lived in Arnhem ('a Bridge too far') and spent the Hunger Winter evacuated (my grandma really deeply disliked the farmers she was with), returning to a mostly bombed out, severely looted city. In the other set, my grandpa was a lathe operator and was put to work in a munitions factory near Berlin, under regular bombardment, and my grandmother's stepfather was a Jew who was hidden away, with a hiding place in the attic to go to whenever there was a raid.
The Hunger Winter itself is a pretty big part of the trauma, for many — it was a very cold winter, combined with the German state being mostly overthrown (the south of NL was already liberated at the time), and food and fuel were very very scarce — people burnt the trees in the streets, the sleepers from the tram tracks, the furniture and the attic doors & walls, and anything else made of wood, and ate anything down to, famously, tulip bulbs. Not quite Stalingrad, where even the neighbors weren't always safe from the cook pot (never mind the pets and rats), but bad enough.
There's a weekly free newspaper here that basically just collects oral history of the city during the past, and one story that stayed with me was how around that time, as children (8-12ish), they would sneak into the railway yard at night and hope that the (steam) trains had accidentally dropped some coal in between the ballast, so that they might have fuel that day. Sometimes the stokers would even accidentally on purpose drop some coal.
One of the kids got shot doing that one night, it was mentioned.
Oh, and re: their royal heilnesses: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3165923/Pictured-Queen-taught-NAZI-SALUTE-Edward-VIII-secret-1933-film-Balmoral.html
ReplyDelete(I know, daily fail, but it's a surprisingly well written article)
(This series of comments brought to you by insomnia.)
Thanks, insomnia. I feel like I'm being prurient, but I'm actually pretty interested in trying to understand things and not just from one perspective. I feel privileged to have grown up in a country where I was not possibly going to starve, be shot at, find unexploded ordnance in my garden, etc. Of course, that's entirely because 4 generations ago, or so, people left for those exact reasons (and the like).
ReplyDeleteMeanwhile, there's an odd posting crossover, because the only reason I know about the Hunger Winter is Audrey Hepburn mentioning it was why she was so committed to UNICEF. The coal thing, though, weirdly, is more personal. Finding coal along the tracks was something my dad did as a small child because they were that poor and he's old enough that it was contemporary (he got married late). Only, there wasn't fighting happening physically here, and nobody was going to get shot.