Mein Holiday Kampf
AFTERTHOUGHT JOHN WELLS
Major Somerset Courtenay-Smythe (née Serge Dzhugashvili Schickelgruber-Smythe), the keen Labour party supporter and distinguished col- lector of contemporary English currency, is perhaps best known as the proprietor of the ruthlessly progressive Happy Times Mental Health Farm Holiday Camp on the Isle of Dogs. Despite persistent invitations from press, radio and television to give some indication of his political thinking, he has consistently re- fused to discuss the subject in public, and has contented himself with denying rumours that he is about to seize power or form a coalition government with Mr Cecil King and Captain Robert Maxwell.
`The hour,' as he has explained in his quaintly accented English, 'is not yet ripe.' A recent un- signed article in Camp and Catnper, the official organ of the trirtounic, may, however, provide, as he put it to me over a thirty-guinea lunch last week at Chez Guevara, 'some little hint as to which way the water is blowing': `How, I am often asked by the proprietors of nasty down-at-hole, ill-organised, slop-shid, easy-going recreational establishments, are we to get our holiday camp out of the doodledrums and on the move again? How can we establish once more the muscular authority, the bright- eyed acceptance of inspired leadership, the smack of tough punishment that were so in- sanely fashionable in the 'thirties? How are we to root out tooth and nail those non-Aryan elements, in particular the slave-races of Asia and Africa, momentarily cluttering up our green and pleasant living-space? Bonnie and Clyde are back, they patiently explain, also the long droopy skirts, curly bobs, brilliant red lipstick, doublechested chalkstriped suits, why not the sexually kinked jackboots and swastika arm- pants, the "I'm backing the Third Reich" spirit of the goosestep in the Black Forest?
`Things, I always hasten to answer, are not going too badly. It is, however, a mark of tiny and shrunken political minds that they are never able to adjust their dress before leaving one period and entering another. Consider as an example the Holy Roman Catholic Church and its Anglican Splintering Group, still as they say camping about in the costume of their Roman and mediaeval ascendancy. Dressed in some more suitable clothing they might still be a political force in our own age. Observe on the other hand the so-called cloth-capped socialist, who has found it impossible to fling away his cap and muffling without at the same time allowing his principles to fall round his ankles. Learning from these twofold examples we must not, therefore, cry over the spilt milk, jackboots and armpants, but learn to recog- nise the same indomitable spirit attired in the blue natty suitings, colourful kipper ties and funfurs of the 'sixties.
`Secondly, I outline certain practical proposals I have placed in force in my own experimental holiday camp and which I deviously hope will continue to catch on elsewhere. Of these un- questionably the most important is instilling in the happy inmates an enormous and paralysing sense of Weimar-style boredom, apathy and disillusionment. This, I am happy to be in a position to report, has already been achieved to a degree surpassing even my most wild aspirations. By means of the highly drained Greyshirts, those officials of the camp whose responsibility it is to concern themselves with the administration, organisation, control and amusement of the campers, it has been possible to hammer the holidaymakers into a damp, soggyish and malleable compost, in which the tender shoots of authoritarian and dictatorial rule grow and flourish with the greatest encour- agement.
`How, I am further questioned by my less suc- cessful colleagues, has such a state of affairs then been arrived upon? By the savage beating down of flimsily-clad sun:lovers with the knout and the burglar's chum? By the brutal regi- mentation of timetables and tabletimes, by the imposition of hard and quick rules and laws for behaviour? In no way. On the contrarywise, it has been arrived upon in a manner more suited to the whims and fashions of our age : laws and restrictions have been thrown out of the fanlight; new mildly irritating restrictions and laws have been introduced in their place, it is true, but all under the hat of progressive reformations. Organisation as such has been allowed entirely to fall together and collapse beneath the flimsy veil of diverting gimcracks and seven-day-wonderful steeplehunts, paper races and novelty excuse-mes. From pearly morning until late in the dusk the loudspeakers announce plans and future events which never take place, constantly adding contradictionary orders, confusing pieces of misinformation, and agonising reshuffiements. Before long, surprise surprise, happy campers groan in despair and begin to long for tough leaderage, good old days of the Blitz, gutters running with blood on time and so further and so forth.
`Having in a thoughtful and longsighted manner instilled fashionable ideas of progress, effeminate hairdos, and the chic social appeal of banner-carrying demonstrations into our younger campers, it has then been our policy to exaggerate grossly any incidence of uppish- ness in the youthful sectors, working for hours to create sensationalistic snaps of the uppish young at grips with our Greyshirts and their assistants, fanning the tiniest flame with the harsh breath of public outrage. By these methods our fundamentally conservative oldies are soon in a mind to force authoritarian methods into our hands and to demand the use of more pungent weapons, soon ironically to be turned upon themselves. Our greatest vic- tory, though, without question, has been in the field of the race-problem. Less shrewd operators have boggled at a situation whereby in the face an apparently liberal, Jew- and Niggerloving thought-climate, a policy of apartheid has suc- cessfully been introduced. But the prospect is yet brighter.
`This is but a beginning. With our policies be- ing carried out in so superb a way by our innocent-numskull Greyshirts beneath-0 de- licious farce!—the banner of socialism, with our campers demoralised, steamrollered flat as a plumcake beneath the endless petty-criminal lying of the loudspeakers, such suggestions as "temporary internment areas" for racially impure visitors, cranium-measuring to deter- mine Semitic or Asiatic extraction, examination of racial backgrounds to the third and fourth generation, telephone tapping and examination of the mails to ensure the correct functioning of our new abortion laws, arming of the police to cope with uppishness among the triminals and "wider powers" for dealing with political offenders are all just around the bend. The hour indeed is not yet ripe, but it is ripening very nicely. Thank you.
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