The Max Mosley court case in Britain may well end with the most restrictive ruling on press freedom in recent years. Its secondary issues are the swill-bucket matter of Nazi-themed orgies and the lofty issue of sexual privacy.

I’m trying to find some aspect of the case that isn’t fascinating and instructive but persistently fail. All of life is in this British courtroom and a great lashing of Second World War history, too.

Mosley is the 68-year-old president of Formula One racing’s governing body, a job he has managed to keep despite his appearance in a grotesque playlet secretly filmed by the British tabloid News of the World. Last winter, multimillionaire Mosley hired five prostitutes for $5,000 for sado-masochistic rituals.

It was an afternoon peculiar even for the fetish. He spoke with a German accent—”Zey need more of ze punishment, I zink. Ist ganz gut”—dressed the prostitutes in striped concentration camp uniforms, handed out Luftwaffe jackets and military caps and boots, had his head inspected for lice and shaved, and whipped the women with ferocity.

He himself was stripped naked, bent over a bench while shackled and whipped until he bled. Sadly for readers, the tabloid had hidden its videocam in the bra of a prostitute standing directly behind him.

A ‘criminal wounding’

It was hilarious to watch Mosley, dressed in black on a rainy London afternoon, duck into the Chelsea dungeon. It was less funny to watch young women—a single mother, a university student etc.—suffer what the prosecution correctly called “criminal wounding” for cash. And it was sick-making to watch everyone play the prisoner at the hands of pretend Nazis.

Then Mosley did that ill-advised Oscar Wilde thing and took the tabloid to court. The video has been viewed more than 3.5 million times online.

Mosley claims that his sexual tastes of 45 years were a secret from his wife of 48 years (raising questions about those three crucial years after which his wife faithfully didn’t spot lacerations for nearly half a century) and the result has devastated his life and reputation.

Mosley and the law

The Mosley case has a bearing on privacy laws based on Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights.

Canadian singer Loreena McKennitt successfully sued in 2006 over what a judge narrowly defined as privacy related to relationships—he said essentially that personal privacy trumped public interest—Article 8 might well have teeth.

Mosley, madly enough, is denying the Nazi angle. I’m not depraved, just a little violent, is the essence of his argument, something to ponder as you bless the tabloid for pixellating an image that might even give a doctor pause.

For once I pity the tabloid, which says defiantly in court that if re-enacting Nazi sex torture is not “depraved,” then nothing is.

But here’s where we turn a flashlight on history and human nature.

For Max is a Mosley. He is the son of Oswald Mosley, the British fascist leader who hoped to turn Churchill’s country Nazi. Mosley, one of the most sinister figures that nation ever produced, married Diana Mitford, one of the famed Mitford sisters, in Goebbels’ drawing room with Hitler himself in attendance.

When war broke out, Diana, taking 11-week-old Max off the breast, was hustled from her home and sent to a London jail without trial, as is again fashionable now.

The Mosley name

Max grew up being caned at school, fox-hunting, attending Oxford, the usual upper-class upbringing but with the taint of the Mosley name (it forced his parents into exile), leaving him permanently braced for the snub, the stabbing insult.

His miserly father refused to pay for his schooling, but when he became a barrister, he, also a Fascist, defended that same father in court in 1962.

Max, full of self-loathing, keenly aware of the parental Nazi label that ruined his life, showed the same bombast then that he would show in 2008 in replaying his childhood drama.

Poor man, imagine finding something your parents did erotic. The mind boggles. Like pedophiles who are said to do what was done to them, the parents made him endure public S&M and the boy was father to the man.

I don’t understand the key that turns sado-masochism. Novelists try to explain it, but surely it’s the job of journalists. Slate Magazine made an attempt this year, and I am only now recovering from a bad case of hating them for directing me to a coprophagia video.

But the New York journalist Daphne Merkin wrote a 1996 essay in which she said the brief physical pain of being spanked by her nanny was a relief from the prolonged emotional sadism of her parents.

It was “stating, and restating, in an adult arena, the emotional conditions of my childhood âe¦ I believed in a magic trick: If you chose of your own free will to let someone hurt you, then all past hurt would be wondrously undone.”

Secretly human?

Mosley’s sexual depravity, for which he should be prosecuted and perhaps jailed, was using prostitutes, not volunteers. But as reluctant as I am to admit this, it wasn’t as depraved as it seems. Mosley played being both Nazi officer and Jewish prisoner, a sexual scenario I have never before heard of.

Mosley’s crime? He spent 48 years being secretly human—in one year alone he spent $150,000 on S&M—and got caught by excellent technology with millions of people shrieking with laughter at his public humiliation, a carbon copy of the postwar treatment endured in sprightly fashion by his evil father.

Incidentally, I would never have defended Max Mosley, ze monster viss ze German acksent, had it not been for two recent books about the Mitford sisters. Max’s mother was one of the most hated women in Europe until her death in 2003 at the age of 93.

Thanks to good biographical research by Anne de Courcy and Charlotte Mosley (Max’s half-niece), we now know that Diana endured a brutal marriage at the hands of Max’s father.

Her initial passion for him destroyed her own parents’ marriage and helped cause her sister’s suicide. She lost her loving first husband, her fortune, good name, years of motherhood, friends, country, self-esteem and physical health—all because she was too proud to renounce the demon Oswald.

As a result, blood has been running down the back of the pitiable Max Mosley for a lifetime. It was his sexual fate and yes, he should have been given the right to accept it in privacy.

This Week

The New Yorker is in trouble for running a cover illustration of Barack Obama as a Muslim terrorist and Michelle Obama as an Afro’d Black Panther. It has defended its choice by saying it’s just a “funny” cartoon, you humourless perusers. Do New Yorker editors not know that they are best-known for their pomposity? That the allegedly laugh-out-loud Shouts and Murmurs humour column never gets beyond merely puzzling? That the wit of the little cartoons is not dry, but withered? I can cope with the cover being posted on trees in small towns in Alabama this fall, ready for a lynching. But I won’t stand for the New Yorker claiming to be funny. And I only read it for the Seymour M. Hersh articles, so there.