Royal family or a president?

"Ilovecheese, remember you'd get his awful wife for first lady and Brooklyn taking enormous numbers of pictures of them. We'd be inundated with images of his tattoos, her strange leg-out stance, Harper in her latest expensive, trendy gear (being 'adorable' no doubt) Romeo modelling for every fashion house under the sun and the youngest boy churning out rap music for our delectation."

Bring it on!

MaryEliza wrote:

It’s precisely because it’s inherited that it’s wrong - there’s no defence against idiocy is there? After all Charles is next in line. And Edward 8th - you do know he was a Nazi sympathiser and Edward 7th etc etc - - you can’t defend a system just using the Queen as a raison d’être

That is a lot for the Windsors to live down, certainly. But they did it during the war when the King and Queen , and Princess Elizabeth, behaved impeccably.

I thimk there is a defence against idiocy and so on. The Prince Regent took over from George III.

The Queen mother was filmed teaching her children Nazi salutes and Philips brothers were all in the Nazi party ,Impeccably means different things to different people !

I agree - not so impeccable it seems:

(Guardian 2015) A couple of extracts -

"........ In 1933, Edward (later Duke of Windsor) said of the Nazi regime: “It is the only thing to do. We will have to come to it, as we are in great danger from Communists, too.”

"The royal family was also particularly susceptible to such fears because some of their German relatives had from the outset been great admirers of Hitler. To this day, the royal archives have ensured that correspondence between the monarchy and these German relatives remains closed to historians. Other archives – in Germany – reveal the substance of contacts between Queen Mary, her sons – George VI, the Duke of Windsor and the Duke of Kent – and their German cousins."

Dr Karina Urbach is a senior research fellow at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London. She is the author of Go-Betweens for Hitler (Oxford University Press)

And one, but perhaps the most telling, of the Duke of Edinburgh's unguarded comments:

To then Paraguay dictator General Stroessner: “It’s a pleasure to be in a country that isn’t ruled by its people.”

It was filmed in 1933, when Hitler wasn't seen as such as an ogre as he later proved himself to be. He was more a figure of fun to many, and an antidote to Communism by others.

That distinctive salute was often mocked to make fun of Herr Schickelgruber and his pretentiousness. So was the goose-stepping of his forces. That is the kind of thing you do when someone points a movie camera at you - a take-off of some easily recognisable public figure, and no-one was more recognisable at that time.

You can't take a bit of home movie of a family fooling around (found and triumphantly published years later by the Daily Mail) as proof that the whole lot of them were Nazi sympathisers.

Edward VIII and his wife went and met Hitler in 1937, not all that long after the abdication, when they were estranged from the rest of the Royal Family. His aims at domination were becoming more obvious then. Perhaps they were hoping to link up with a rising power who could return the ex-King to his former glory? Or perhaps the Nazi ethos suited Mrs Simpson's views?

In 1933 Hitler was in power and anti-semetuc legislation was being enacted - if he wasn’t seen as a threat it was because of the deeply entrenched anti semetism in British society especially amongst the aristocracy and uppe classes

He was a flamboyant legitimate leader of a foreign country where these laws were being passed constitutionally, however unpleasant they are from our more enlightened viewpoint where we see where they were leading. He had some characteristics which made him gift to impersonators. Remind you of any current world leader?

The queen mother's gift for wicked mimicry was well-known. Was she perhaps mocking her brother-in-law for HIS admiration of the strutting Hitler? Or just mocking the way Hitler performed for the cameras?

The threat then wasn't to Britain. Germany had been rendered impotent (supposedly) after WW1. Hitler was a ridiculous bombast to most people. That was why he wasn't stopped earlier. It wasn't ALL about the Jews.

No it wasn't Elegran it was also about socialists, the disabled and the mentally ill. The Nazis introduced measures to deal with all of these people between 1933 and 1937. Similar measures were in place in other countries- like compulsory sterilisation in California. Did other countries know what was happening? Probably but they were watching with interest to see what would happen.