[Marxism] Aesthetics, Erotics, ?colonials and natives?, ?sex bomb?

["Y. K." <ykleftis@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Some people really know how to party....


****The media fig leaf of denunciation may have saved fascism and its
royalist sympathizers from walking naked:


----
Main site:

http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/0,1518,336667,00.html

Print version:

SPIEGEL ONLINE - January 13, 2005, 06:35 PM
URL: http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,336667,00.html
Scandal in Britain

When Harry Met Hitler

By Matthias Matussek in London

The British royals seem to have a knack for making it into the headlines.
But Prince Harry dressed up as a Nazi? That went too far even for the
English semse of humor. The young prince showed up at a party wearing a Nazi
armband complete with swastika. What was he thinking?

REUTERS
Prince Harry the Nazi
With a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other, "Trouble Harry"
looked cool and casual at Saturday's party at Harry Meade's place, the son
of the three-time Olympic champion show jumper. There was only one problem
with the image: His outfit didn't fit in terribly well with the magnificent,
country-estate fete in Wiltshire. He was sporting a swastika badge on his
arm. And it didn't take long before he got photographed.

Almost as noteworthy as the sand-colored shirt -- reminiscent of "Desert
Fox" Erwin Rommel (Hitler's favorite general) -- with a Nazi Wehrmacht
emblem on the collar, was the jacket Prince Charles's still-maturing son
wore to the costume party. It had the black, red and gold flag of post-war
Germany on the back. A German on the outside, a Nazi on the inside seemed to
be the message. Very tasteful -- just like the costume party's theme:
"colonials and natives."

The tabloid newspaper The Sun dished up the photo to more than 4 million
Brits this morning, who shook their heads at the breakfast table as the
paper watched its circulation soar. And of course, the partygoer the paper
managed to interview was shocked. "What on earth was Harry thinking of?" the
guest told the paper. "A senior royal dressing up as a Nazi for a laugh? If
that is his idea of a joke, it went down like a lead balloon with many."

But the scene didn't seem to bother people much when it happened on Saturday
night. Apparently, the party continued and grew quite lively after Harry's
grand entrance. Harry's brother William came as a mix of a lion and a tiger
complete with stuffed paws, and the girls dressed as Asian belly dancers. If
these jeunesse doree of British money, sports and blue bloods who have since
been running to the media were actually shocked, then it was at best highly
concealed -- at least if you go by the pictures of lively revelry published
so far.

In Harry's mind it must have just been another party trick, another
provocation -- the equivalent of his recent fisticuffs in a London nightclub
and his recent drinking episode which ended with him passed out on the
streets of Buenos Aires. He just sees it as an empty-headed fashion
statement.

REUTERS
Harry's better side: packing charity relief for the victims of the South
Asia tsunami last week.
As a result, the kind of apology we've become accustomed to from Harry also
fell flat this time. "It was a poor choice of costume," he said. But it was
actually a good deal worse. "Shocking and astounding," was the response from
the editor in chief of Britain's Jewish Chronicle newspaper. Jewish victim's
organizations are protesting and the country's been turned on its head. Only
three weeks before the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz,
where Prince Edward will represent the royal family in a memorial service,
the Windsors are on the verge of an image meltdown.

"Perhaps Harry should also go there," the Sun's columnist writes, clearly
concerned about rehabilitating the royal. The paper, of course, is laughing
all the way to the bank as it collects on Harry's train wreck, just as it
did from revelations about his mother, Lady Diana.

A wardrobe malfunction evokes uncomfortable royal memories

But Harry's wardrobe malfunction also managed to strike a sensitive nerve.
The English aristocracy was not quite as anti-Nazi as modern-day England
would like to believe.

During the war, of course, the royal family tried to present itself as a
heroic example of resistance and refused to move to the countryside to
escape German bombs. When Buckingham Palace was damaged in a bombing run,
Queen Mum is famous for saying, "I'm almost glad we've been bombed. Now we
can look [London's] East End in the face." The young Queen Elizabeth also
helped out where she could.

DPA
The Duke of Windsor, the great great uncle of Prince Harry, and his wife
Wallis Simpson met with Adolf Hitler in 1937.
News stands and The Sun are laughing their way to the bank over Harry's
latest snafu.>But on the other hand, there was widespread sympathy and
admiration among the English royals for Hitler. Edward VII was still
praising the murderous dictator as late as 1937 -- a full three years after
the harshly anti-Semitic Nuremberg Laws were passed and when concentration
camps already dotted the Reich -- and Lord Halifax, the English Foreign
Secretary until 1940, called Hitler "the greatest of all Germans" and saw
him as a valuable bulwark against communism. As late as 1940, Hitler still
thought that England would stay neutral while he took over the rest of the
European continent.

World War II, which became England's "greatest hour," retains a large place
in England's conscience even today. Hardly an evening goes by in the UK
without a television special on the war, Churchill's resistance, or on
German war crimes. There are soap operas featuring dim-witted Nazis and
heroic small-town Britons, and documentary series about Rommel and his
daredevil lightening operations in Northern Africa. With such a menu, it
isn't surprising that today's party-going youth -- with their paltry
attention spans -- reach for such a tasteless costume.

It wasn't so very long ago that the editor in chief of the Daily Mirror,
Richard Desmond, goose-stepped around in front of the board of the Daily
Telegraph yelling "Sieg Heil" because his paper was to be sold to the German
Springer Verlag publishing house -- a publisher that has reconciliation with
the Jews written into its statutes.

The disgust in Britain over Harry's costume, in other words, is not free
from hypocrisy. The tabloids Daily Mirror and Daily Mail even managed to
find a second, equally shocking scandal to grace their front pages: Queen
Elizabeth reportedly said during the reception of a 19-year-old social
worker that London has no chance against Paris to land the Olympic Games in
2012.

Now that's a scandal!

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

© SPIEGEL ONLINE 2005
All Rights Reserved
Reproduction only allowed with the permission of SPIEGELnet GmbH

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
More about this issue:

Related SPIEGEL ONLINE links:    ?  SPIEGEL Surfs the Web: Prince Harry in
the Press (01/13/2005)
http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,336640,00.html
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------




****I don?t think this would have worked on the ancient greeks...
and watch out for the ?blowback?!:

----
Sex a weapon

14jan05

A "SEX bomb" that would make enemy soldiers irresistible to each other was
considered by the US military.

Declassified documents reveal the Pentagon toyed with the idea of an
aphrodisiac chemical weapon in 1994.
The gas would have made enemy soldiers sexually irresistible to each other.
The weapon's developers said homosexual behaviour among troops would deal a
"distasteful but completely non-lethal" blow to morale.
The plans, unearthed from a US air force laboratory in Ohio, were published
in New Scientist magazine.
- Milanda Rout

http://www.heraldsun.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5478,11934710%255E663,00.html

_________________________________________________________________
Express yourself instantly with MSN Messenger! Download today - it's FREE!
http://messenger.msn.click-url.com/go/onm00200471ave/direct/01/


_______________________________________________
Marxism mailing list
Marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism