The recent clamor about Britain’s Prince Harry wearing
a Nazi costume to his friend’s “native and colonial”
themed birthday party entirely glossed over its broader scope
amidst the backdrop of a colonial war. The swastika-laden
Afrikans desert costume worn by the twenty-two-year-old heir
to the throne only points to a larger symptom - of which he
is far from the only perpetrator - of fetishizing oppression.
I don’t find the Prince’s particular choice of
costume as alarming (although granted, I do find it alarming)
as his choice to attend a party in which such a costume would
be appropriate. Is there a costume for such a shindig that
wouldn’t be troublesome? I also want to note that Prince
William, Prince Harry’s older brother, went to the party
dressed as a lion. A lion costume is innocuous enough, right?
Not if it is a costume of a native it isn’t. Considering
no one’s ever colonized a lion (unless you count Sigfried
and Roy), his lion referred to the notion of the untamed,
savage “native” (i.e. African). Displaying the
symbols of violence or, as is the case of Prince Harry’s
royal embarrassment, making light of a regime of terror, shows
one’s disconnection with the reality of oppression and
war.
The truth is Prince Harry didn’t even need to WEAR a
costume to show up as a colonizer. The party’s theme
was more narcissistic than it was creative; It was a pastiche
of the partiers’ own lives. Their drivers, handlers,
bodyguards, and maids daily play underling to their overlord.
Everyone pouring the drinks and serving the finger-foods at
the party wore a kind of “native” costume. Prince
Harry and his buddies may have squeaked by in econ and world
history at their exclusive preparatory schools, but they certainly
enjoy the economic fruits of their oppressive ancestral history.
I do not imagine that Prince Harry or Prince William harbor
any overtly racist or anti-Semitic views, but going to a party
and playing along with its bigoted theme is unquestionably
complicity to bigotry. As much, or perhaps even more worth
noting though, is the public and media reactions to the story.
As the media tends to do (after all, at the end of the day,
they too are selling product) it latched onto the sensationalistic/dramatic
aspect of the story, The Prince and The Swastika, and it failed
to view this story through the lens of the more subtle and
pervasive problematic from which it comes. (Passive racism
is still racism, and that includes the passivity of the witnesses.)
While the Prince’s privileged coterie disported in the
garments of a dark past, a present-day colonial war carried
on miles away in the Middle East. Not but a few days after
The Prince and The Swastika, a story broke about another kind
of British government-sponsored “native and colonial”
party, just like the ones on U.S. public dollars. At all of
these “parties” uniformed colonials, at Abu Ghraib
and elsewhere, took turns with the natives, and flashed broad
smiles and thumbs up for the camera.
Jean Baudrillard wrote, “Forgetting extermination is
part of extermination, because it is also the extermination
of memory, of history, of the social, etc.” Old cultural
habits are hard to break. Prince Harry and his friends probably
eschew bigotry, but they can’t seem to let go of the
appurtenances of it. They go through the motions unquestioningly,
uncritically, in an amnesiatic fog. They cleave to its image,
being members, after all, of a generation (of which I am a
member) suckled on spectacle. (Could Baudrillard be right
that our so-called reality has become only an endless self-referential
concatenation of images?)
Play-acting in the symbols of violence and oppression has
become trendy. Hummers consume gads of Middle Eastern oil;
camouflage clothes spill off store shelves. Their preponderance
situates us in a culture of fluid-moving, hollow images and
watered-down critical thinking skills. War is the new team
sport and camouflage the color worn by its fans. The game’s
players coming home in boxes doesn’t seem to quell the
enthusiasm but only stokes the flames.
Anti-colonialist author Frantz Fanon, pictured above, said
that the settler is an exhibitionist, an apt description I’d
say for the current colonial council leading the war in Iraq.
It calls to mind the show of pomposity that was the flailing,
inked, index fingers on the Senate floor. The Prince’s
flirtation with despotic fashion, to my mind, only points
to the ignorance bloated with arrogance that is the fashion
of the day.
March 2005
From guest contributor Carolee Klimchock
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