Here’s how the latest bombshell revelations from Harry and Meghan actually matter in our world:
The enemies of western democracy, including its national adversaries like Russia and China and its domestic democracy-hating elites, have been engaging in endless efforts to undermine it through shaping public opinion in the West. It is not an easy undertaking as it requires clever tactics aimed at getting masses of people to adopt intellectual and moral postures in contradiction to their own self-interests.
The cornerstone approach in this effort has been inciting division. But a critical element of this is also tearing down morality that often involves the demolition of personal values and character. Donald Trump is the epitome of the kind of moral reprobate they encourage, but the goal of using such a person is not to display his degraded sense of self as it is to thrust it against others they seek to degrade and whose moral character and leadership they would destroy.
Our problem in the West is that we fail to appreciate this reality. In fact, since World War II, our intelligence community’s covert operations have cooked up and advanced this same cause, thinking that tearing down morality is a good way to engender a preference for individualism that prefers a free society to a dictatorship. Very wrong.
This is a profound miscalculation that has grown to contribute enormously to the world’s current woes. I am referring to the kind of uncomplicated, simple morality that the vast majority of people adopt as an ordinary matter of living out their lives: the morality of honesty and fair play, that says someone is to be judged by their actions and nothing more, that naturally rejects racial and other prejudices. This is the people’s natural childhood playground morality before factors of ideological and man-made prejudices are added in to create hate and division.
When the Russians or their Western elitist allies intervene in a society it is with an aim to invoke unnatural hatreds. Always.
I have no doubt that a lot of the unbelievably hateful mail that erupted against Meghan since the Oprah Winfrey interview last weekend has come from Russian bots, the same as influenced the 2016 U.S. presidential election and the British Brexit vote: Flat out fake and counting on popular opinion to passively mimic what it perceives the dominant public view to be, augmented by vicious media sources.
(Does anybody not now hate what the racist Piers Morgan has exposed himself to be in this latest incident? No doubt in my mind.)
Am I arguing for the royal family here? Not in the slightest, except to argue that its institutional role in Western society has made it a target of enemies of western democracy.
It is sorely in need of the reforms that its horrific treatment of Harry and Meghan have now revealed. On the other hand, Harry and Meghan and their down-to-earth morality are the epitome of what that royal family has produced. They are the true heirs to its legacy, not the terribly pathetic William and Kate, who’ve so sadly and totally bought into the monstrous myth of how they’ve been told their station in life is to be.
The shortcomings of British royalty are legion, and in this latest case, could bring it down. But for all of it, for better or worse, it has retained a status in the minds of countless millions aligned with western democracy against its vicious enemies that won two world wars against continental tyrannies and fascists and now aligns solidly with the best of U.S. democratic traditions.
Much needs to be cleaned up: The murder and subsequent character assassination of Prince Eddy that left Europe hopelessly exposed to the horrors of the Great War under his brutal younger brother, the pro-Nazi sentiments of Edward VIII who had to be forced from the throne in 1936, the assassination of Princess Diana and many more misdeeds and coverups.
But the British crown has been nobly worn by Elizabeth II for more than a half-century and her role in supporting Harry and Meghan has been essential to this point, reflecting her constructive role in western history.
