Issue: 22 January 2005	PAGE 1 of 1

Gstaad

Oh please, pretty please, spare me the bull! A friend reports from Washington that those preening, vainglorious blowhards who pose as pundits on American TV have gone ballistic about you-know-whose party costume. Five million homeless, 150,000 dead, thousands of dead and horrifically injured in Iraq, half of Africa dying of Aids while our aid to them is stolen by their leaders, and these unspeakable philistines are outraged over a swastika worn by a young man who didn’t even know that the gallant Afrika Korps never, but never, would have worn one.

Mind you, he’s in the same boat as American GIs who murdered surrendering Panzer troopers in 1945, mistaking their black tanker outfits for Gestapo uniforms. Over in Britain, it is even worse. What is outrageous is the outrage from the usual suspects: hysterical hacks, anti-monarchists and professional grievance advocates. Smarmy, bogus Murdoch hacks deploring Harry’s poor taste. Per-lese, as they say in Brooklyn. Which is where Harry should go and party for a while. Modern Britain is full of tattooed slobs, urine-smelling pubs, violent oiks and keyhole-peeping tabloids. My favourite, needless to say, was the Austrian reaction: ‘German-speakers in Europe must despair of ever being judged by their present behaviour instead of the past...’ The Austrians, alas, don’t know Little Britain and Barbara Waltersised America. (Walters listed Paris Hilton as one of the ten most fascinating people of 2004, and interviewed her as if la Hilton was Marie Curie.) If one grows up on soap operas, as Anglo–American hoi polloi have, names such as Beethoven, Bach, Goethe, Schiller, Hölderlin, Schumann, Schubert, Bismarck, Wagner, Schopen-hauer, Rilke, Remarque, Nietzsche, Junger, Heidegger and Einstein are as alien to them as, say, monogamy was to Don Giovanni.

If G.K. Chesterton were around, he’d tell us a thing or two. Chesterton told the truth robustly and vividly. His epigram, ‘The old tyrants invoked the past; the new tyrants will invoke the future,’ serves as an accurate prediction of the modern world. My friend Andrew Wilski writes from Poland: ‘The aggressive employment of political correctness, the repeated use of slogans to justify lawlessness and war, is strikingly reminiscent of the communist use of revisionism...’ Andrew is an academic who lived under communism for most of his life. He says it is our duty to remember the enormity of communist crimes partly out of respect for the tens of millions of victims. But no one’s holding their breath for a commemoration of the closing of the Gulag.

Which brings me to the opening night party of Dame Edna last month. Lizzie Humphries had seated me next to Joan Juliet Buck, an old friend and ex-editor of French Vogue. She was wearing a hammer and sickle pin on her hat. ‘How would you like it if I wore a small swastika pin on my lapel?’ I asked her. She no like. ‘It’s not the same thing,’ she said. ‘The hell it ain’t,’ said I. Still, it was a pleasant dinner.

About ten years or so ago, Simon Sebag Montefiore wore something similar at a cocktail party. Everyone thought it funny and quaint. It was my turn to no like and I dubbed him Simon Seethrough-MonteCarlo in these here pages. When I was growing up, I used to see militant communists with raised fists, the gesture du jour. The black movement picked it up during the Sixties. No one objected because the chattering elite thought it smart. Che Guevara T-shirts are now the rage in the Home of the Depraved. Jay Nordlinger wrote about the morons who venerate the monster in the National Review. Guevara sent innocent people to the wall and tried to start a nuclear war, yet he’s seen as a hero by Hollywood and the idiots who believe what they see on the screen.

And it gets worse. Paolo Di Canio, a great footballer and one of the few who can read a book without moving his lips, is in hot water because he gave a Roman salute to the crowd at Lazio, the same as the outlawed Mussolini fascist gesture. Even before Nicholas Farrell’s biography of Benito, I was an admirer of the Italian strongman. Mussolini would have been Europe’s greatest statesman if he had not entered the war. He warned Hitler that without Malta the sea lanes would remain British and Rommel would lose through lack of fuel and supplies. He also begged him not to go east. And complained to him after his one-night stay in Athens that starving the gallant Greeks was monstrous. Hitler didn’t want to know. So who the hell are these crooks to tell us which salute we’re allowed? How dare they, and why are we such pussies to comply? The Italian judiciary, as corrupt an institution as Brussels and then some, will judge Di Canio. He should give them a middle-finger salute and go play in China.

Next week, I will be back in Cadogan Square attending some functions. Near my square, a freak-cum-pervert poofter, who claims to have slept with 5,000 men, is appearing at the Royal Court Theatre. Apparently, he troops outside the theatre and performs whatever he performs with passers-by. This is considered art. The outrage is reserved for young Harry. Welcome to little Britain.