Swastikas and the EU

The European Union may be accomplishing the impossible. In floating the idea of a ban on Nazi regalia among its 25-member nations, it’s turning Britain’s Prince Harry, who was recently photographed at a costume party wearing a Nazi uniform, into a sympathetic figure.

Like humorist P.G. Wodehouse, who was interned by the Nazis after they invaded France and then got into hot water with the Allies for imprudently delivering several rather droll, if clueless, radio addresses from Berlin to England in 1941, Harry has been drubbed by Fleet Street for his indiscretion. “Harry the Nazi,” screamed the Sun, which bought and published the incriminating photo of the uncouth princeling.

Harry’s misfortune was not to have a Jeeves, Wodehouse’s all-knowing butler character, on hand to cough discreetly about his employer’s inappropriate habiliments. The truth is that George Orwell’s famous (and brave) defense in 1945 of Wodehouse applies to Harry as well: He’s too much of a noodle to have understood what he was really doing, which is why the hysterical reactions to his antics are more interesting than Harry himself.

Britain’s former armed forces minister, Doug Henderson, is huffing that Harry should not be allowed to begin military training and defile Sandhurst.

Then there are the Germans, who get to occupy the moral high ground for once. “In a Europe grounded in peace and freedom, there should be no place for Nazi symbols,” said Markus Soeder, general secretary of the Christian Socialist Union party.

Meanwhile, EU spokesman Friso Roscam said, “It may be worth looking into the possibility of a total ban, a Europewide ban.”

No, it isn’t. Germany is a special case, and making Nazi symbols officially verboten across Europe would only make them more attractive to youths. Creating an artificial fuss about Nazi uniforms and resorting to legalisms would not make the problem go away. Anyway, Germany’s real neo-Nazis don’t wear swastikas, at least in public.

Still, for the British tabloids, which have targeted the royals as well as Brussels for decades, it would serve them right if the EU were to adopt anti-Nazi measures. Britain’s Euro-skeptics, constantly looking for totalitarian impulses from EU bureaucrats, would be forced into defending Europeans’ right to wear Nazi paraphernalia. After the tabloids’ relentless attacks on Prince Harry, that would be an entertaining spectacle.