Give The Kid A Fucking Break

I don't normally follow celebrity "news", as it's not news, and is used to distract us from the real issues at hand. But I heard about this one on the radio and thought I'd weigh in.

For those who don't know, Prince Harry is one of Princess Diana's two offspring. His brother will take on the worthless title of King of England in a few more years.

What got Harry into the news was that he had the bad taste to go to a party in a full Nazi dress uniform. Someone took his picture (of course), sold it (of course), and Harry ended up on the front page of The Sun, dressed up all Nazi-style.

Some Jewish groups, in fact quite a few of them, from one end of the planet to the other are screaming bloody blue murder.

Now, while his action was fairly tasteless, I don't understand what the big deal is. Well, sadly I do. I suspect most of the "outrage" is just some folks looking for publicity for their various organizations. I suppose I can't blame them, but feel obligated to point out some issues I've got with this whole thing:

Issue #1: Our society, in fact Western society in general, absorbed as much of the Nazi technology and social control mechanisms as we could lay our grubby hands on. Turbine engines (the kind on airplanes and in powerplants), modern aircraft designs, rockets, superhighways, propaganda techniques, political manipulation, modern insecticides, nerve gas and audiotape are all Nazi inventions. We didn't invent them, and we weren't working on them at the same time. We took them from the Nazis wholesale (and we were entirely right to do so). Oddly, I'm not hearing anyone getting bent out of shape about the existence of freeways. My point here is that the Nazis were evil, but not an absolute, unalloyed evil. If not for their existence, we would not enjoy the same standard of living that we currently do.

Issue #2: Harry is 20 years old. Who hasn't done something stupid and utterly offensive in their twenties? My entire twenties were a non-stop festival of me being stupid or offending people. Give the kid a fucking break.

Issue #3: The Holocaust was not a historical footnote; a lot of folks died. But even large, world-changing events fade into history, and that's what the Holocaust is now, especially for those of us under the age of fifty. History. Not an outrage that requires any immediate attention, but just another outrage in a far too great series of human-manufactured horrors. And who pays attention to history? Shit, you'd think that this nation would have been stung badly enough by Vietnam to never allow another one, and here we are not thirty years later right up to our necks in exactly the same fucking quagmire as before. NOBODY pays attention to history. Especially not twenty-year old rich kids.

So, for all those who might be expecting some outrage, you'll not find it here. There's plenty to get bent out of shape about these days. A twenty-year old kid wearing the uniform of a sixty-years dead regime is not worthy of our attention, not while American soldiers are dying at the demented whim of our insane president and corrupt Congress. Save your outrage for that. It'll be in the history books soon enough, for another generation to ignore.