Royals' big Harry deal

Editorial

The flap over Prince Harry's appearance in a photograph, at a costume party, wearing a swastika armband has missed the point completely. Critics condemned the incident as massively insensitive – which is a fair assessment – but most have stopped short of getting to the root of the problem.

Teach your children well, goes a song most of us know. It is clearly the case that, at least on the issue of recent European history, the heir apparent to the throne of Britain (and Canada) has failed to do so. Who, if not the third in line for the British throne, should understand the inappropriateness of donning such a despicable costume? Not only as a present prince and a potential future king should Harry have been educated to know better, but as a member of a family that has been dogged with unsavory historical connections to fascism. His father and grandmother and whatever small army of tutors are employed to prepare Harry for his special role have failed unequivocally. The intimate friendship between the former (abdicated) King Edward VIII and British Union of Fascists leader Oswald Mosley, as well as his 1937 visit to Germany as a guest of Adolf Hitler, should have signalled a negative precedent for contemporary royal behavior.
The Duke of Edinburgh, the Queen's husband, is a Greek royal by birth, and members of his family have had close relations with several Nazis, including a brother-in-law of the duke who was a member of the SS.

More recent connections between the Royals and the Nazis involved the father of Princess Michael of Kent, who was posthumously revealed to have been a member of the Nazi party and an honorary member of the SS.

All these unsavory connections should have provided the Royal Family with at least an increased sensitivity – if only for public relations purposes – to any appearance of sympathy to the Nazi movement. They haven't, which should raise serious questions and demand potential remedial work in this regard by the young prince, if not his entire family. A silver lining, if there is one, could come from a very public act of showing sensitivity, an example of which might be, as has been suggested, a visit by the prince to Auschwitz. Should such an event take place, it could be an ideal opportunity for invaluable education on this aspect of modern history.

But the fact that such remedial education would be necessary – for a member of the peerless crowd or the lowliest commoner – suggests a much larger failure to convey the lessons we should have received from 20th-century history.
Though we may recoil at the images of Harry's swastika and demand he undergo some form of educational penance, there is a larger and more immediate issue we should be dealing with closer to home.

It is not only possible, but relatively easy for a graduate of the British Columbia school system to complete 13 years of education without learning even the slightest outline of the Nazi regime's war on Jews or its lessons for contemporary humanity. The Holocaust is covered in elective history classes, but the social studies courses required for B.C. graduation have only the vaguest "learning outcomes" related to fascism and the Holocaust.

Before we join the lambasting of Prince Harry for his failure to grasp the educational imperative presented by the Holocaust, we should look at what our own children – our own princes and princesses – are learning about this cataclysmic epoch of history. It may well range from negligible to nothing. Public school curricula are not as fascinating a topic as the improprieties of the Royal Family, but for their impact on our own society, they are far more relevant.

The lessons of the Holocaust are being passed on nobly by independent organizations like the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre and others worldwide. But the near-absence of requisite Holocaust education as part of a comprehensive, balanced curriculum for young Canadians, suggests that we should, as a general rule, pay less attention to the endlessly engaging foibles of the peerless than we do to the quality of education being received by our own children and their peers.

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