MEGXIT MEETS THE DUKE AND DUCHESS OF WINDSOR – ROYAL RACISM REDUX

Fascism is racism dressed up in a fancy political frock.  Whether the haute couture comes from the House of Mussolini or Hitler, Modi or Franco, Nigel Farage or Stephen Miller, these society designers are all throwing the same nasty party after the runway show, with the same guests of (dis)honor:  the foreigner, the Jew, the Muslim, the immigrant, the person of color.  Remove the fascist party dress and you’ll find naked racism stripped bare. 

 

Racism and fascism are so prevalent that they rarely catch our attention without a story.  And when that story is a love story, racism and fascism make headlines.  And when the lovers are Royals, well, then, POW!  This is the tale of two Royal love stories separated by over 80 years:  the Greatest Love Story of the 20^th Century, the story of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, and what’s shaping up to be the Greatest Love Story of the 21^st Century, the story of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex. 

Starting in the current century, hear the saga of Meghan Markle and Prince Harry, the latest victims in the timeless fashion of British racism.  While not as widely discussed or as blatant in the UK as it is in the US, racism is fully enmeshed in British colonial and modern history, as this article from Afua Hirsch, a black British journalist writing in The New York Times at NYT Black Britons, notes:

In Britain’s rigid class society, there is still a deep correlation between privilege and race. The relatively few people of color — and even fewer if you count only those who have African heritage — who rise to prominence and prosperity in Britain are often told we should be “grateful” or told to leave if we don’t like it here.

The legacy of Britain’s history of empire — a global construct based on a doctrine of white supremacy — its pioneering role in the slave trade and ideologies of racism that enabled it, and policies of recruiting people from the Caribbean and Africa for low-paid work and then discriminating against them in education and housing, is with us today.

Racism quite simply played a pivotal role in Meghan and Harry’s decision to withdraw from their Senior Royal duties.  The Sussex Royals, as they’ve branded themselves in an oh-so-21^st-century mode, have been harassed along racial lines since they started dating.  Back in 2016, Harry pleaded with the media to stop the “wave of abuse and harassment” against Meghan, citing a "smear" on the front page of a national newspaper, "racial undertones" in opinion pieces, and "outright sexism and racism of social media trolls."

Since their marriage and the birth of their son, Archie, it’s gotten so bad that they’re voluntarily exiling to Canada.  The announcement to decamp may have come as a surprise to the Firm and the British tabloids, but it comes as no surprise to Hirsch, who names and shames the racist factors compelling their decision:

If the media paid more attention to Britain’s communities of color, perhaps it would find the announcement [of Meghan and Harry’s withdrawal from royal duties] far less surprising. With a new prime minister whose track record includes overtly racist statements, some of which would make even Donald Trump blush, a Brexit project linked to native nationalism and a desire to rid Britain of large numbers of immigrants, and an ever thickening loom of imperial nostalgia, many of us are also thinking about moving.

If you think her analysis is a little overwrought, have a look at the Royals' reaction to Reverend Curry's benediction at the wedding above, read the affronts below, and then delve into this shocking story of Britain’s recent deportation of Caribbean Commonwealth citizens from the Windrush Generation who entered Britain between 1948 and 1970 at LRB Windrush.

From the Daily Mail:

EXCLUSIVE: Harry's girl is (almost) straight outta Compton:  Gang-scarred home of her mother revealed - so will he be dropping by for tea?

·         Prince Harry's new girl, Suits star Meghan Markle, is from Crenshaw, LA

·         Crenshaw has endured 47 crimes in the past week - including murder

·         Gangs, including the Bloods, count the neighborhood as their territory

·         Markle's social worker mom, Doria Ragland, lives in the run-down area

·         And the actress's aunt, Ava Burrow, is in nearby gang-afflicted Inglewood

Boris Johnson’s sister (!), writing for The Daily Mail (photo of Meghan from the article, above):

So I have done my due diligence on Miss Markle, and this is where I stand. Genetically, she is blessed.  If there is issue from her alleged union with Prince Harry, the Windsors will thicken their watery, thin blue blood and Spencer pale skin and ginger hair with some rich and exotic DNA .

Princess Michael of Kent’s choice of accessories:

A British princess apologized on Friday for wearing a brooch considered "racist" to Meghan Markle's first meeting with the royal family. The apology came after Princess Michael of Kent wore a blackamoor brooch on her left shoulder to the queen's annual Christmas lunch at Buckingham Palace. Some deemed it a slight to Meghan Markle, who attended the event with her fiancé Prince Harry.

 

This cruel tweet from a BBC 5 Live presenter:

The BBC has sacked Danny Baker, saying he showed a "serious error of judgement" over his tweet about the Duke and Duchess of Sussex's baby.

The tweet, which he later deleted but which has been circulated on social media, showed an image of a couple holding hands with a chimpanzee dressed in clothes with the caption: "Royal Baby leaves hospital".

And last but not least, from The Spectator:

Obviously, 70 years ago, Meghan Markle would have been the kind of woman the prince would have had for a mistress, not a wife”.

Which takes us back more than 70 years ago to the Duke and Duchess of Windsor (above), Royal white supremacists, examples of the hand-in-glove relationship between racism and fascism.  Anyone who’s a fan of The Crown or The King’s Speech or even moderately conversant with modern British history knows the story of Wallis Simpson and King Edward VIII, aka the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.  She was the gay American twice-divorcée who captivated the crown and forced the abdication of a monarch.  What’s less well-known is that Mrs. Simpson and the King were upper-crust racists of the type described by Hirsch, and that they were also avid devotees of Hitler, Mussolini, and fascism in general. 

There is ample evidence of this.  A 1988 biography, Wallis: Secret Lives of the Duchess of Windsor by Charles Higham, reviewed in the London Review of Books at LRB Wallis, chronicles Mrs. Simpson’s fascist arc.   She was born into a wealthy upper middle class family and married a US Air Force officer named Earl Spencer.  The couple moved to Washington, where she promptly became romantically involved with Mussolini’s Ambassador and the First Secretary to the Embassy of Argentina, at that time a brutal dictatorship.  

Ever the restless social climber and wanna-be shaper of world events, Wallis left her cuckolded first husband for a shipping magnate named Ernest Simpson, a US naval intelligence officer.  She herself was recruited by naval intelligence to carry secret messages to anti-Communist Chinese warlords.  Making the most of her Mata Hari brief, Wallis had two more affairs while in China, both with Mussolini fascists.  The LRB article notes:

[H]er feeling for Fascism cannot be attributed only to her men friends. On the contrary, the ‘new social order’ brayed around the world by the Italian dictator and his representatives fitted precisely with Wallis’s own upbringing, character and disposition. She was all her life an intensely greedy woman, obsessed with her own property and how she could make more of it. She was a racist through and through: anti-semitic, except when she hoped to benefit from rich Jewish friends; and anti-black (‘Government House with only a coloured staff would put me in my grave,’ she moaned when, many years later, her husband was the Governor of the Bahamas). She was offensive to her servants, and hated the class they came from.

Her third husband, the Duke of Windsor, fka King Edward VIII (above), was cut from the same bolt of fascist-racist cloth, per the LRB article:

Of all the bonds which united this dreadful woman to the glamorous Prince of Wales in the late-Twenties, none was so strong as their shared politics. Charles Higham’s biography sets out the facts about the Prince’s Fascist leanings and sympathy with the Nazi cause and the corporate state in Italy. The Prince was proud of his German origins [the royal family name until the end of WWI was Saxe-Coburg-Gotha], spoke German fluently, and felt an emotional, racial and intellectual solidarity with the Nazi leaders. As early as July 1933, with Hitler only just ensconced as German Chancellor, Robert Bruce-Lockhart records conversations between the Prince and the grandson of the former Kaiser, Prince Louis-Ferdinand: ‘The Prince of Wales was quite pro-Hitler and said it was no business of ours to interfere in Germany’s internal affairs either re Jews or anything else, and added that the dictators are very popular these days, and that we might want one in England before long.’

King Edward VIII’s known Nazi sympathies and his secret affair with Wallis Simpson created a danger to national security which so alarmed the British government, that Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin ordered MI5 to surveil the couple.  He and his Cabinet, including the Archbishop of Canterbury, finally gave the King an ultimatum:  either give up your mistress or the throne.  Per LRB:

In all the innumerable versions of the ‘Greatest Love Story of the Century’ it is assumed that the British Establishment, led by Stanley Baldwin and the Archbishop of Canterbury, could not stomach the idea of a monarch marrying a twice-divorced woman. The objections, it is said, were moral and religious. The truth is, however, that …[t]he real objection to the liaison between the King and Mrs Simpson was that both were Nazi sympathisers….

The prospect of a Nazi King backed up by an infinitely more able and resourceful Wallis Simpson was intolerable. If the King wanted Mrs Simpson, he would have to get out. If he wanted to stay as King, she would have to be banished. The King’s choice (the ‘woman I love’, and exile) came as a great relief to the Government.

The King abdicated in December, 1936; he married Simpson in June, 1937, and the couple took the titles of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.  Not in the least chastised by his forced ouster, even after their marriage both continued to champion the Nazi regime.  This piece in biography.com at biography details their two-week trip to Germany in October, 1937, where they were feted by Göring and Goebbels and visited the Führer at Berghof.  Throughout the trip, the Duke enthusiastically returned the Nazi salute. 

This all proved a bit too much for the British Establishment, and the Windsors found themselves exiled from Britain to the colonies.  Their exile was involuntary, and it flowed from their Royal racism and fascism.  They were sent to Bermuda, where the Duke became governor of the island and Mrs. Simpson’s needs, to her endless chagrin, were served by people of color.  Delicious!

For the Sussex Royals, the exile is officially voluntary, but it actually flows from racism directed at them, some of which is rumored to come from the Royal Family itself.   

Unlike the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex will live not on a sunny, semi-tropical island but in frosty British Columbia, where they will seek to meet their own needs on their own terms in what they believe to be a more tolerant country.  I wish them well.

Despite the high profile these Royal couples in love give to fascism on the one hand and racism on the other, there really isn’t much new here.  Both sentiments are still very much in fashion around the world.  The ugliness of that fact tends to rivet our attention when the perpetrators or victims are celebrities in their own right.  And really, nothing quite says celebrity like a Royal.

Keep it real!

Marilyn