I have worn a swastika armband. When I was a teenager I was determined to shock and upset as many people as I possibly could. I was a socialist (or maybe an anarchist) and I loathed racists but I borrowed a nazi armband from a school friend (more on him later) and for a while it was a part of my wardrobe. It certainly did the trick. The oh so nice people of Surrey were very offended. They were, mostly, very right-wing, they were opposed to sanctions against the racist South African government, some of them even disliked Jews. Nevertheless they considered this symbol to be obscene.
The boy I borrowed the armband from was a collector of nazi memorabilia. He was a member of the conservative party’s libertarian Freedom Association and the right-wing Monday Club which advocated voluntary repatriation of foreign immigrants. He was also, oddly, a keen supporter of Israel and very anti-Arab. His name was Andrew Smith and I always imagined that his fascist tendencies were an affectation, particularly because they seemed so inconsistent. Later on he became even more right-wing, worked for an organisation called Western Goals UK and helped organise a visit to the UK by the French fascist Jean-Marie Le Pen.
So I can agree with Harry Windsor that it was “a poor choice of costume”. And I can sympathise with him in the face of the hypocritical cant that has been directed towards him. It is only a symbol, after all, it doesn’t actually mean anything. Nobody has much reason to suppose that he is, like some of his ancestors, actually a fascist. What I have found particularly confusing is the criticism of him from the Jewish community. I’d like to suggest to those people who have been so outspoken about Harry’s choice of fancy dress that wearing a nazi armband doesn’t make him a fascist any more than carefully avoiding Nazi armbands stops Ariel Sharon from being one. Harry’s not the one running prison camps in the desert, building a wall around a ghetto, authorising the extra-judicial murder of his political opponents.