Well she is part German

[Gob]

[Scooter]

I think it's bullshit. They are doing something else. There is no way in fucking hell that the elder Queen Elizabeth would have EVER done such a thing.

[rubato]

Well it is the English press, the place Rupert Murdoch learned to lie so prolifically that he founded the Fox network.


yrs,
rubato

[Gob]

Buckingham Palace has said it is disappointed that footage from 1933 showing the Queen performing a Nazi salute has been released.

The Sun has published the film which shows the Queen aged about seven, with her mother, sister and uncle.

The palace said it was "disappointing that film, shot eight decades ago... has been obtained and exploited."

The newspaper has refused to say how it got the footage but said it was an "important and interesting story".

The black and white footage, which lasts about 17 seconds, shows the Queen playing with a dog on the lawn in the gardens of Balmoral, the Sun says.

The Queen Mother then raises her arm in the style of a Nazi salute and, after glancing towards her mother, the Queen mimics the gesture. Prince Edward, the future Edward VIII, is also seen raising his arm.

The footage is thought to have been shot in 1933 or 1934, when Hitler was rising to prominence as Fuhrer in Germany but the circumstances in which it was shot are unclear.

A Palace source said: "Most people will see these pictures in their proper context and time. This is a family playing and momentarily referencing a gesture many would have seen from contemporary news reels.

"No one at that time had any sense how it would evolve. To imply anything else is misleading and dishonest."


http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-33578174

[oldr_n_wsr]

"No one at that time had any sense how it would evolve. To imply anything else is misleading and dishonest."

Bingo


Oh and
Ho hum news day?

[Big RR]

I recall my mother telling me when she was in school before WW2, they used to say the pledge of allegiance with the same salute (I've seen it in old movies for the pledge of allegiance as well). It doesn't necessarily have anything to do with Hitler.

[MajGenl.Meade]

You are correct in what you wrote there, Big RR. However, often you are charitable to a point beyond common sense.

In 1933 there was no particular odium attached to the Nazi salute. Hitler became Chancellor in January 1933 and was much in the news. He was (technically) the deputy head of state of Germany.

But this shows which way the wind blows. Hitler came to see Edward as a friend at court and was disappointed at his abdication. I suggest that the Prince of Wales in 1933 was not teaching his family the Pledge of Allegiance.

[Big RR]

Well meade, you may well be right, you are making a reasonable assumption--I just don't see any real evidence supporting your position.

And as for being too charitable; I just don't see the problem with that. especially when trying to ascribe motive to things depicted in photos taken 80 years ago. there are plenty of stories of Edward and his supposed collaboration with the Nazis, but again very little hard evidence.

[MajGenl.Meade]

Perhaps it's the lack of sleep - I'm a bit over-critical today, eh? Oh wait - that's normal!

I thought I was very charitable about Eddy teaching them the salute in 1933 - it was just all the headlines on Faux news. But you know, given the choice between your theory that US kids sometimes said the Pledge with a similar salute and the date of 1933/Hitler becoming Chancellor/Nazi salute becoming known world-wide - I'm going to back my hunch that Eddy was teaching them the news. And not how to be USians.

As to his collaborationism - I doubt it amounted to much. He was valueless as a non-monarch. Nevertheless he argued tirelessly for neutrality (should have been in Congress in 1861 eh?); he thought the Nazis had the right idea; he was an encourager. Again, not a hill of beans really. Just a lot photographs, including (but I've not found it) giving the Nazi salute while in Germany.

Edit: maybe these be they - c'mon, I hear you say, he's just waving

[MajGenl.Meade]

Here he is making Mrs Simpson give the old Pledge of Allegiance to the local slogan "Europe will be Fascisst" in Italy

[Econoline]

I took Big RR's point to be that before WW2 and the rise of fascism, the "Roman salute" may have been more commonly used in many more circumstances (even in the US) than it was when it later became associated with Mussolini and Hitler...and that the change in attitude probably happened over the course of several years rather than instantaneously.

[wesw]

I never saw anything about it on fox news.....

[MajGenl.Meade]

Yes I quite understood Big RR's desire to suggest that the Royal Family had only been playacting as American schoolchildren or ancient Romans. The Italian fascist salute was around in 1922 when Mussolini took over - and the Nazis were using it as early as 1928 and probably before.

There is no evidence that Romans ever used a salute like this stiff armed one - all those stem from 16th-19th century works of art and it was to those that Mussolini referred. Of course, folks (including Romans no doubt) have been waving their arms about in various positions to indicate a salutation, a wave of acknowledgement and so on. You can see it in many ancient works, Roman too.

I just don't really understand the point of pretending that Eddy VIII in 1933 was doing anything other than copying/aping/demonstrating the most popular salute in all of Europe.... at the time. No harm, no foul.

[Scooter]

It was something they no doubt saw in newsreels of the era. It's more than a little obscene to try to throw dirt on the Queen and her sister, who were children, and their mother, who was the furthest one could imagine from anything resembling a Nazi sympathizer, when one was too young to remember what happened and the other two are dead.

Which leaves Edward. That he demonstrated some Nazi sympathies later on is difficult to deny; that he was any more a Nazi sympathizer than the typical Briton of his day is not at all clear. But this was still 1933. Hitler had only been in power for a few months; Germany was still, nominally, a democracy, and Hitler not yet a dictator. Nor had he yet accomplished anything that Edward might have admired or been concerned about. The process of stripping away civil liberties had begun, but the situation was probably not yet any worse than in the string of dictatorships that had emerged from Versailles, or for that matter during the various periods of rule by decree in the Weimar Republic. None of the foreign policy issues that would later bring the UK into conflict with Germany had yet come to pass, so what would there have been about Nazi Germany or Hitler for Edward to admire or sympathize with?

Indeed, would the playboy heir apparent, who never showed the slightest interest in educating himself to do the job, have taken the time to read Mein Kampf or otherwise learn about Hitler's plan for Lebensraum, which at the time sounded like the ravings of a nut.

Or were those newsreels all he knew about what Germany was becoming, and did he see that ridiculous mustache and that gesture speeded up by the technology of the day, and believe Hitler to be as cartoonish as most of the world did in those days?
Did the man who thought of nothing but amusing himself find the gesture amusing, and copied it for his sister-in-law and nieces in that spirit?

I have no use for Edward, but it seems that in this case someone was trying to connect dots that didn't yet exist, if they ever did. And they did it at the expense of people who did not deserve the sleazy insinuation.

[MajGenl.Meade]

Let us be reminded that Scooter doesn't read my stuff so he came up with the same conclusion as I did entirely on his own.