Dr. Johnson famously observed that patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel. On that reckoning, Britain must be the world capital of scoundrels at present, with much of the country’s media and public consumed by patriotic fever over the belated disclosure that Prince Harry has been “engaging with the enemy” in Afghanistan.
The British media congratulates itself on having acted out of the highest patriotic motives in keeping silent about the prince’s foreign posting until the story finally broke. Channel 4 News presenter Jon Snow was practically alone among leading British journalists in questioning the willingness of British editors to comply with the Ministry of Defense’s request for a news blackout over the matter. How, he asked, could this be squared with the media’s democratic remit, its supposed duty to inform?
Snow’s dissenting posture led to him being reviled by some as a traitor, the kind of self-hating Briton who would have betrayed his country to the Nazis during World War II. There were those who vowed never to watch Channel 4 News again. Such patriots could turn with confidence to the BBC. Once news of Prince Harry’s military adventure broke, no part of the media was more obsequious in covering it. The BBC played a key part in hyping up the story of the prince as a national hero and thereby ensuring that British people’s heads would not be bothered about the question of the actual objectives and consequences of Britain’s Afghan mission.
In truth, the BBC, with its professionally deferential royal correspondents, has always been plus royaliste que le roi. That it would display its customary servility over the Prince Harry story was only to be expected. Admittedly, the maverick MP, George Galloway, got the chance to criticize the corporation’s docility on BBC Television’s weekly discussion program, Question Time, but effectively Britain’s chief media organization endorsed the British war effort in Afghanistan, lending respectability to overcolored tabloid evocations of Harry’s “bravery”.
Yet for all the media hullabaloo over the prince, much about the presentation of his “exploits” in Afghanistan smacked of desperation. It was hardly coincidental that on the day the story broke — thanks, as it seems, to the US online muckraker Matt Drudge — it was also reported that American intelligence believes the US-led mission in Afghanistan is failing. The government of President Hamid Karzi is now said to control only 30 percent of the country, and thanks to the indiscriminate killing of Afghan civilians by British and American forces, there is increasing native hostility toward the American and British presence. Britain’s political/military establishment has good reason to fear that the British deployment in Afghanistan may lose what public support it enjoys. No wonder it is keen to exploit the patriotic emotions a prince in uniform is guaranteed to induce in large numbers of British people.
If the media was happy to gag itself in return for a major royal story when the fact of the prince’s posting became public, it is because sections of it are suffering from their own brand of desperation. For British newspapers with declining circulations, a royal soldier is a godsend. Consider, too, the desperation the royal family itself has been contending with over Prince Harry, a young man who has been panting to take part in military action but who has hitherto been more familiar to the British public for his habit of emerging from nightclubs in a disheveled state. It will be a vast relief to them that instead of reporting his youthful excesses the British media is now glorifying the prince’s derring-do.
Few can have forgotten the occasion when Harry went to a party wearing a Nazi swastika on his arm, a curious gesture on the part of a prince who would be thought a great British patriot. What makes the present orgy of patriotism more than usually ridiculous is that the prince who has occasioned it does not appear to think much of his own country. He says he treasures his time in Afghanistan, where he apparently sat in front of a computer screen guiding air strikes on “Terry Taleban”, because it amounted to the one experience of normality, the one opportunity to get away from his native land and its nasty newspapers, he is ever likely to get. What does it say about him and about Britain that he believes being in a distant war zone fighting Muslims is the only normality available to him?
Prince Harry’s Afghan sojourn has perhaps afforded short-term propaganda gains for the British government, the media and the military, the last of which has badly needed a PR coup, facing as it is a crisis over recruitment. As it happens, not a few among Britain’s Muslims seem to have become infected by the prevailing patriotic fervor. There has been a striking absence of British Muslim voices protesting against an episode seen across Muslim world as a reaffirmation of Britain’s hostility toward Islam.
But the gains may well prove ephemeral. For all the abuse he has attracted, Jon Snow is not by himself in believing that by colluding with the Ministry of Defense the media has inflicted fresh damage on its credibility. Many British people are now wondering what else is being concealed from them.
The British government is worried that it is suffering from a “deficit of trust”. Last week the deficit grew substantially bigger. As for Prince Harry, he has paid a high price for his frisson of front-line excitement in terms of reduced personal mobility and the need for much-enhanced security.
None of this would matter so much if Britain really were expunging Islamist terrorism by virtue of its military intervention in Afghanistan. However, there is little evidence that the British presence there has yielded any tangible benefits. Harry’s tour of duty in Afghanistan has enabled the media to market a fantasy of him as the People’s Prince battling against the enemies of civilization. If Britain really wished to do well, though, Harry might have been encouraged to undertake overseas humanitarian work. That he has been given the chance to pretend he is a sort of royal Rambo is the measure of how pathetically Britain still clings to its warmongering, imperial past.
