A poll conducted late last year by the BBC found that 50% of Britons don’t know about Auschwitz.
In other words, Prince William knows about the extermination camps, Prince Harry doesn’t. Charles knows, Fergie doesn’t. Baroness Thatcher knows, Mark did but cut a deal and now he doesn’t.
But Fergie does know other things.
”I know what it is like to have very bad press and be continuously criticised,” the duchess said at the weekend, in defence of her thick swastika-wearing nephew-in-law. ”It is very tiring and unpleasant.”
One must bear in mind that to gals like Ferg, ”very tiring and unpleasant” also includes making toast and doing their own nails, but perhaps her irritation is not misplaced.
After all, Harry is no more of a genetically lobotomised lout than millions of other Britons, and they’re not being carpeted.
And besides, what better way for the royal family to accelerate its headlong rush into the open arms of populist mediocrity than by indulging in middle-class fantasies of latent anti-Semitic cruelty and kinky SS uniforms? Oh darling, you look hot in black, and those silver skulls really bring out the colour in your pimples …
Harry’s costume was in poor taste, said the broadsheets, implying that gas chambers are a matter of taste. Luckily one could turn the page to the advertisements for accessories emblazoned with the hammer and sickle of the Soviet Union, that jagged motif that presided damply over the executions of 20-million innocent Russians. But if Joe Slovo has it on his tombstone, it must be okay.
Perhaps it was Harry and the Nazis. Perhaps it was Darfur. Perhaps it was the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. Or perhaps Minister of Sport and Recreation Makhenkesi Stofile is just dumber than a bag full of hammers. But whatever half-formed notions flitted through what we will, for the sake of charity, refer to as the minister’s brain, the result was a prediction that genocide was imminent in South African rugby.
”I told South African rugby that I was not amused by the latest developments in the sport,” he said last weekend, ruffling his petticoats and giving the Prince Regent a little kiss on the cheek, ”and will not tolerate any ethnic cleansing.”
One imagines the gathered press sat silent, trying to convince itself that no public figure could possibly be so stupid and insensitive as to compare race-based handbag-swinging between peevish and overpaid sports administrators with genocide. But the minister plunged on. ”Rugby seems to be moving uncomfortably towards racial cleansing and this is what the country and the ministry of sport will not tolerate,” he said.
Admittedly it takes a rare and uncomplicated soul not to cherish thoughts of mass murder whenever South African rugby’s boorish and fractious politburo undermine the happy game with vain posturing, paranoid sniping and rank incompetence; but Stofile has gone way, way too far.
Forget Harry. If anyone should be made to visit a camp and handed compulsory enrolment in Basic Humanity 101, it is Stofile.
But Stofile isn’t alone. Rugby and basic humanity parted company years ago, when little boys stopped playing barefoot and flyhalves stopped going home to their real jobs. And one can’t help feeling that Dale McDermott was a victim of that human void.
His suicide was newsworthy enough to make newspaper placards around the country, but its causes, and its implications, have been almost entirely ignored. A single obituary in a Sunday newspaper marked his passing; a website rehashed an earlier favourable piece about him.
It would be dangerous — and hurtful to his family — to indulge in amateur psychology, to pin his death on the awful macho insularity of Afrikaner rugby. After all, he had a history of depression that predated his association with the Springboks.
But it must have been an awful realisation for him when, having summoned the courage to blow the whistle on Kamp Staaldraad — the embodiment of all the ugly, frightened, brutalised and brutalising beliefs ingrained in the sport — he saw that he was going to be ignored by Jake White’s new administration; that the cancer remained.
At the time, Joost van der Westhuizen called him ”Judas”. At least we know Joost has read one book, although it’s possible he just got told what happens at the end. The irony of citing a Christian text to condemn a reformer was no doubt utterly lost on Van der Westhuizen.
McDermott’s mother said her son remained loyal to Springbok rugby until the end. One wonders why.