The Royal Family are exposed as having covered his unpunished criminal
record up but some nagging questions remain. The entire British
Establishment, royal and otherwise, was fascistic and pro-Nazi before the
war, except for a tiny number. Earl Mountbatten,
though his close German relatives were active Nazis, some even in
the SS, was the only anti-Nazi in the Royal Family (his wife's
grandfather was a German Jew married into British aristocracy, he himself
was pro-Communist). But how did Edward differ from a logical mould with
which Prime Minister Baldwin had certainly no
difficulty? When the pre-Abdication crisis came, Sir Oswald Mosley backed
the King but they did not become friends until after the War when both
were in comfortable retreat in France for much the same reason. The support Edward in crisis solicited at
home, against the Establishment was not from the street fascists but from
those who saw the military menace of Nazi Germany, especially Winston
Churchill (then a back-bencher out of line with his party). Mountbatten enlisted the aid of those who wanted
Churchill as PM. His go-between, double-agent/journalist Claud Cockburn,
later described it as an unofficial Conservative-Communist front. It aimed
to appeal to a much wider segment of the public than Mosley. Allied to the natural monarchists and those swayed
by his owns charms, they were thought by the king to be
irresistible.
He was brought up in the monarchical tradition and hedged about with
the divinity that surrounded it. He was worshipped at home and overseas
throughout his youth on a scale now unbelievable. He could do as he
wished, and was built up as a demi-god even among the deprived as someone who was concerned about them (he never
actually did anything) who asked only for their devotion. Hitler had to
work hard to get comparable status. It is understandable Edward liked what
he saw in Germany but had no desire to be a stooge like the King of Italy under Mussolini. It irked him to be
one under Baldwin. The Government only asked him to respect the
'Constitutional obligation not to marry a dubious American divorcee'
lest it destroy the monarchical mystique. The
Establishment, Governrnent and Labour Opposition defeated him. The
'irresistible coalition' vanished. His upper-class friends dropped him
immediately, with sudden engagements in far off corners of the world.
They had wanted to be his closest courtiers and but did not want to fall out with the vindictive new consort who had a
still-unexplained grudge against him (she is now the revamped cosy dear
old 'Queen Mum' of newspaper hype). Edward retired bitter. Even his
staunchest champion, Churchill, ditched him after 'National Rat Week' (Osbert Sitwell) when the moronic new king and
his formidable wife put the boot in.
The subsequent repeated treasons and criminality were invevitable. He
was brought up to do as he wished. What need to obey laws which were
passed for his subjects? The Government recognised he was an attractive
prize for the Nazis who could use him to 'legitimise' an Occupation government. A king is always a king. If the
Russians had not wiped out their royals, the Nazis would certainly have
imposed the 'rightful Emperor'. The Japanese invaders did exactly that in
China. A century and a half before,
the French wiped out their royal family, but not sufficiently. There was
still an heir who led the enemy forces against the French, and later
executed as traitors those like Marshal Ney who had fought for their own
country under Napoleon. The latter died
under suspicious circumstance in the hands of the British, who knew from
their own repeated experience that ex-kings, even frustrated kings, like
tigers wounded by hunters, are dangerous. Nobody should ever again
question the danger', to conservatives no less than revolutionaries, of allowing deposed monarchs and even their
heirs the luxury of being 'kings over the water', even on a coral reef,
even to live at all.
Two corollaries follow, the first being to reconsider the case of
Trotsky, still worshipped by legitimist Bolsheviks..
It seems every anti-Stalinist including anarchists thought the trials
a frame-up, but I personally always suspected what they were judging was
not Trotsky but Stalin, on the basis that someone so ruthless must always
be truthless. I always felt that
though Stalin was a vicious dictator, it does not follow that everyone
with whom he came into conflict was by that token any good (Hitler for
one), and hardly those on whose legacy he attained power.
Why is it unthinkable that Trotsky (with more tragic family reasons
for bitterness) did not do an 'Edward VIII' like most others in his
position? In power, his policy was that the Soviet revolution could be
spread abroad by armed intervention. So
far as the Soviet Union was concerned he never until his dying day (and
his disciples thereafter) advocated internal revoution against Stalin, nor
did the Old Bolsheviks who came up for trial. The 'soviet revolution' had
made Russia a 'workers state', he
argued,all it needed was the overthow of Stalin's dictatorship and
bureaucracy. How do you overthrow or alter a dictatorship exceot by
revolution or by foreign armed intervention? If the first was out, there
was a Leninist precedent of accepting help from Imperial Germany. On the Gerrman side there was no more reason why they
should refrain from helping Trotsky (before Hitler) than they had with
Lenin, while after Hitler, once he started planning war, Trotsky was no
more unacceptable a partner than Litvinov or Molotov later with whom they undoubtedly did collaborate.
There is plenty of evidence, including confessions, that Trotsky
and all of his associates or former colleagues in Russia did collaborate
with the Nazis. The only problem with the evidence is that it was given in
a Soviet court, under Stalin, and nobody believes it for that reason. At any rate, Stalin certainly believed
what he is supposed to have invented himself, and had Trotsky murdered, at
a time when the exile was calling for defence of the USSR, lest he was
placed as the nominal head of an invading army, whether from the West or the centre of Europe.
albert meltzer