This Weekend I'm...in Awe of Churchill

A weekend of not a lot to report. The only significant thing on my mind tonight, as I half-watch Match of the Day 2, is my admiration of Churchill’s rhetoric. The Guardian gave away a little booklet of his ‘We shall fight on the beaches’ speech yesterday and I enjoyed reading it today. It was delivered to parliament as the British army had escaped from Dunkirk, saved from destruction by a tiniest of margins. It was an utter rout and, if it weren’t for Churchill, I imagine that we would have cut some kind of deal with Hitler.

It’s hard to believe in this era of soundbites and governmental wriggling in a macroeconomic straitjacket that a politician could deliver a magnificent speech on which Britain's fate hinged. Can you imagine Blair saying something that moves you or makes the hairs stand up on the back of your neck? I think that living in this era of pygmies makes Churchill’s achievement even more awe-inspiring. We can barely imagine standing on the edge such a national precipice or having a leader who could inspire us to leap, not knowing whether we would survive as a people.

This leads me to a further thought – if we faced the Nazis now, would we be willing to face the sacrifices and privations that Britons stoically accepted in the Second World War? Sadly, I think not – if Hitler offered us free satellite telly and HD TVs, the majority would welcome him with open arms.

Does Anyone Else Do This? No. 5 in an Occasional Series

Er...Guiltily Want To Try On a Nazi Uniform

OK, first things first. It’s just so wrong isn’t it? I abhor what the Nazis did, I really do. I’m not a fascist, anti-semite or misanthropic sexual deviant. However, I’m going to bare my warped soul and admit that I think Nazi uniforms look pretty damn good and I’d love to parade about in one, perhaps clicking my heels a bit and smoking a fag in a cigarette holder.

While the Britisher Tommies were stuck with skulking around crappy khaki serge, the Gestapo were swanning around in sexy black with silver death’s head skulls. In fact, even ordinary German soldiers had far cooler kit than our boys. When I was a kid, I’d always dress my favourite Action Man in the German uniform (even though the Germans were always the villains in my games). Then, when I was slightly older, I have strong memories of seeing a still of Charlotte Rampling in ‘The Night Porter’, wearing a Gestapo peaked cap and very little else.

I suppose the reason the Nazi uniform looked so transgressively sexy on Rampling (and was indeed, I think, designed that way in the first place by the image-obsessed and theatrical Third Reich) is that the SS was, essentially, a death-cult. It’s this air of evil that attracts those with darker imaginations. Admittedly, unlike the elegantly scarred Aryan stereotypes in war movies, they were all inadequate bespectacled freaks. Banal monsters indeed.

After having kind of admitted the fascination to myself, I had a look on eBay for WWII German uniforms and found there’s a disturbingly strong demand for Nazi memorabilia. I don’t know whether they’re people like me, or fucked-up members of the BNP in Farnborough looking for something to put on their mantelpiece with their Samurai swords. I suppose the difference is, I wouldn’t, in reality, go as far as buying this stuff…