Goodbye to the queen, goodbye to the fairy tale

I don’t know that the 10 days of pomp and pageantry that attended the death of Queen Elizabeth is going to do the reign of King Charles much good. Unless of course the funeral was meant to signal, truly, the end of an era and the start of serious downsizing and decolonizing complete with apologies and reparations and repatriation of looted wealth. In which case it was an impressively extravagant show of love and respect, even, a well-deserved last-hurrah for a queen who did a stupendous job selling white supremacy to the world. Otherwise, if it’s going to be business as usual under Charles, then the recent ostentatious display of vast wealth is grist for the mill of anti-monarchists of all colors and stripes in a world where the happy rich are obscenely few and the oppressed poor are obscenely many.

Read Chris Hedges’ Sept 12 essay, Monarchs Belong in the Dustbin of History. https://therealnews.com/chris-hedges-monarchs-belong-in-the-dustbin-of-history

The royals are oligarchs. They are guardians of their class. The world’s largest landowners include King Mohammed VI of Morocco with 176 million acres, the Holy Roman Catholic Church with 177 million acres, the heirs of King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia with 531 million acres and now, King Charles III with 6.6 billion acres of land. British monarchs are worth almost $28 billion. The British public will provide a $33 million subsidy to the Royal Family over the next two years, although the average household in the UK saw its income fall for the longest period since records began in 1955 and 227,000 households experience homelessness in Britain.

… In 1953, Her Majesty’s Government sent three warships, along with 700 troops, to its colony British Guiana, suspended the constitution and overthrew the democratically elected government of Cheddi Jagan. Her Majesty’s Government helped to build and long supported the apartheid government in South Africa. Her Majesty’s Government savagely crushed the Mau Mau independence movement in Kenya from 1952 to 1960, herding 1.5 million Kenyans into concentration camps where many were tortured. British soldiers castrated suspected rebels and sympathizers, often with pliers, and raped girls and women. Her Majesty’s Government inherited staggering wealth from the $45 trillion Great Britain looted from India, wealth accumulated by violently crushing a series of uprisings, including the First War of Independence in 1857. Her Majesty’s Government carried out a dirty war to break the Greek Cypriot War of Independence from 1955 to 1959 and later in Yemen from 1962 to 1969. Torture, extrajudicial assassinations, public hangings and mass executions by the British were routine….  

And watch the Sept 14 video of Double Down News, The Dark Side of British History You Weren’t Taught in School @GeorgeMonbiot

the text.

MONBIOT. In Britain we present the colonial project as being about teaching the natives table manners and double-entry bookkeeping. In India the British manufactured a famine in the 1870s out of nothing. There were food surpluses, massive amounts of food, but the governor Lord Lytton insisted this food be exported wholesale to Britain. The ensuing starvation killed at least 12 million people, possibly as much as 29 million people.  All relief works were banned except for hard labour in labour camps, where the inmates received the same rations as the inmates of Buchenwald and where there was a 94% death rate per year.

This was all done in the name of liberal free-market capitalism; of course, the British did something similar in Ireland. In Kenya soon after the Second World War there was an uprising, by the Kikuyu people who wanted their land back. The Kikuyu were herded into concentration camps and fortified villages. Almost the entire population of over a million people. People were systematically tortured to death. They invented a new kind of pliers, whose purpose was first to crush men’s testicles and then to cut them off. They raped women with bayonets, they raped men similarly. A favored technique was to Ram sand up the rectum with a stick. Sometimes they were rolled up in barbed wire, and kicked around the compound until they bled to death.

Some of the British soldiers boasted about this; this is within living memory. The Colonial Secretary lied about it, the papers documenting it were burnt. The impact of the rich and powerful Nations has been so phenomenally murderous and destructive that it is being completely airbrushed from our national consciousness.

In order to justify the land grabbing colonial projects, you had to create an ideology: we the Europeans or the Americans, have come to rescue the rest of the world from its depravity and backwardness. But in order to do that you have to be able to demonstrate that the rest of the world is depraved and backward. From this arose the racism that is still with us today. It was a necessary component of the colonial project.

Some people might claim; well, okay, we broke a few eggs to make this omelet.  As if all those human beings were eggs! But look at the omelet, isn’t it fantastic! Look we’ve made this fantastic omelet! Forget about all that unpleasant stuff and let’s just celebrate where we are.

Where we are is a continuation of the project: we commodified people’s land, and people’s labour, and turned it into our property. We’re also destroying the rest of the living world alongside it.

We don’t have to be like this. We are the same human beings as anybody else. We’re all part of the same big human family. We just have to recognize that, accept that.

Of course within Western countries there are plenty of brilliant people, resisting colonization within our own countries, and external colonization of other people’s countries. These are the voices which must come to the fore, those who emphasize altruism and kindness and generosity, and empathy for others. Those who recognize that skin color and any other difference of language, of religion, of background is completely irrelevant, by comparison to what we share, which is our humanity.