Chris
Hedges: Monarchs Belong in the Dustbin of
History
The royals are oligarchs. They are guardians
of their class.
By Chris Hedges
September 13, 2022:
Information Clearing House
--No
institution helps obscure the crimes of
empire and buttress class rule and white
supremacy as effectively as the British
monarchy.
The fawning
adulation of Queen Elizabeth in the
United States, which fought a revolution to
get rid of the monarchy, and in Great
Britain, is in direct proportion to the fear
gripping a discredited, incompetent and
corrupt global ruling elite.
The global oligarchs are not sure the
next generation of royal sock puppets –
mediocrities that include a pedophile prince
and his brother, a cranky and
eccentric king who accepted suitcases
and bags stuffed with $3.2 million in cash
from the former prime minister of Qatar
Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber Al Thani,
and who has millions stashed in
offshore accounts – are up to the job. Let’s
hope they are right.
“Having a monarchy next door is a little
like having a neighbour who’s really into
clowns and has daubed their house with clown
murals, displays clown dolls in each window
and has an insatiable desire to hear about
and discuss clown-related news stories,”
Patrick Freyne wrote last
year in The Irish Times. “More specifically,
for the Irish, it’s like having a neighbour
who’s really into clowns and, also, your
grandfather was murdered by a clown.”
Monarchy obscures the crimes of empire
and wraps them in nostalgia. It exalts white
supremacy and racial hierarchy. It justifies
class rule. It buttresses an economic and
social system that callously discards and
often consigns to death those considered the
lesser breeds, most of whom are people of
color. The queen’s husband Prince Phillip,
who died in 2021, was notorious for making
racist and sexist remarks, politely
explained away in the British press as “gaffes.”
He described Beijing, for example, as
“ghastly” during a 1986 visit and told
British students: “If you stay here much
longer you’ll all be slitty-eyed.”
The cries of the millions of victims of
empire; the thousands killed, tortured,
raped and imprisoned during the Mau Mau
rebellion in Kenya; the 13 Irish civilians gunned
down in “Bloody Sunday;” the more
than 4,100 First Nations children who
died or went missing in Canada’s residential
schools, government-sponsored institutions
established to “assimilate” indigenous
children into Euro-Canadian culture, and the
hundreds of thousands killed during
the invasion and occupation of Iraq and
Afghanistan are drowned out by cheers for
royal processions and the sacral aura an
obsequious press weaves around the
aristocracy. The coverage of the queen’s
death is so mind-numbingly vapid — the BBC
sent out a news alert on Saturday when
Prince Harry and Prince William, accompanied
by their wives, surveyed the floral tributes
to their grandmother displayed outside
Windsor Castle — that the press might as
well turn over the coverage to the
mythmakers and publicists employed by the
royal family.
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 U.K.
saw its income
fall for the longest period since
records began in 1955 and 227,000
households experience homelessness
in Britain.
Royals, to the ruling class, are worth
the expense. They are effective tools of
subjugation. British postal and rail
workers canceled planned
strikes over pay and working conditions
after the queen’s death. The Trade Union
Congress (TUC) postponed its
congress. Labour Party members poured
out heartfelt tributes. Even Extinction
Rebellion, which should know better,
indefinitely canceled its
planned “Festival of Resistance.” The BBC’s
Clive Myrie dismissed Britain’s
energy crisis — caused by the war in Ukraine
— that has thrown millions of people into
severe financial distress as “insignificant”
compared with concerns over the queen’s
health. The climate
emergency, pandemic, the deadly folly of
the U.S. and NATO’s
proxy war in Ukraine, soaring inflation,
the rise of neo-fascist movements and
deepening social inequality will be ignored
as the press spews florid encomiums to class
rule. There will be 10
days of official mourning.
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. By
the time India won independence in 1947
after two centuries of British colonialism,
Her Majesty’s Government had
looted $45 trillion from the country and
violently crushed 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.
Following a protracted lawsuit, the British
government agreed to
pay nearly £20 million in damages to
over 5,000 victims of British abuse during
war in Kenya, and in
2019 another
payout was made to survivors of torture
from the conflict in Cyprus. The British
state attempts to obstruct lawsuits stemming
from its colonial history. Its settlements
are a tiny fraction of the compensation paid to
British slave owners in 1835, once it — at
least formally — abolished slavery.
During her 70-year reign, the queen never
offered an apology or called for
reparations.
The point of social hierarchy and
aristocracy is to sustain a class system
that makes the rest of us feel inferior.
Those at the top of the social hierarchy
hand out tokens for loyal service, including
the Order of the British Empire (OBE). The
monarchy is the bedrock of hereditary rule
and inherited wealth. This caste system filters
down from the Nazi-loving House
of Windsor to the organs of state security
and the military. It regiments society and
keeps people, especially the poor and the
working class, in their “proper” place.
The British ruling class clings to the
mystique of royalty and fading cultural
icons as James Bond, the Beatles and the
BBC, along with television shows such as
“Downton Abbey” — where in one episode the
aristocrats and servants are convulsed in
fevered anticipation when King George V and
Queen Mary schedule a visit — to project a
global presence. Winston Churchill’s bust
remains on
loan to the White House. These myth
machines sustain Great Britain’s “special”
relationship with the United States. Watch
the satirical film In
the Loop to get a sense of what this
“special” relationship looks like on the
inside.
It was not until the 1960s that “coloured
immigrants or foreigners” were
permitted to work in clerical roles in
the royal household, although they had been
hired as domestic servants. The royal
household and its heads are legally exempt
from laws that prevent race and sex
discrimination, what Jonathan Cook calls “an
apartheid system benefitting the Royal
Family alone.” Meghan Markle, who is of
mixed race and who contemplated
suicide during her time as a working
royal, said that an unnamed royal expressed
concern about the skin color of her
unborn son.
I got a taste of this suffocating
snobbery in 2014 when I
participated in an Oxford Union debate
asking whether Edward Snowden was a hero or
a traitor. I went a day early to be prepped
for the debate by Julian Assange, then
seeking refuge in the Ecuadorian Embassy and
currently in His Majesty’s Prison Belmarsh.
At a lugubrious black-tie dinner preceding
the event, I sat next to a former MP who
asked me two questions I had never been
asked before in succession. “When did your
family come to America?” he said, followed
by “What schools did you attend?” My
ancestors, on both sides of my family,
arrived from England in the 1630s. My
graduate degree is from Harvard. If I had
failed to meet his litmus test, he would
have acted as if I did not exist.
Those who took part in the debate – my
side arguing that Snowdon was a hero
narrowly won – signed a leather-bound guest
book. Taking the pen, I scrawled in large
letters that filled an entire page: “Never
Forget that your greatest political
philosopher, Thomas
Paine, never went to Oxford or
Cambridge.”
Paine, the author of the most widely read
political essays of the 18th century, Rights
of Man, The
Age of Reason and Common
Sense, blasted the monarchy as a
con. “A French bastard landing with an armed
banditti and establishing himself as King of
England against the consent of the natives,
is in plain terms a very paltry rascally
original…The plain truth is that the
antiquity of the English monarchy will not
bear looking into,” he wrote of William the
Conqueror. He
ridiculed hereditary rule. “Of more
worth is one honest man to society, and in
the sight of God, than all the crowned
ruffians that ever lived.” He went on: “One
of the strangest natural proofs of the folly
of hereditary right in kings is that nature
disproves it, otherwise she would not so
frequently turn it into ridicule, by giving
mankind an ass for a lion.” He
called the monarch “the royal brute of
England.”
When the British ruling class tried to
arrest Paine, he fled to France where he was
one of two foreigners elected to serve as a
delegate in the National Convention set up
after the French Revolution. He denounced
the calls to execute Louis XVI. “He that
would make his own liberty secure must guard
even his enemy from oppression,” Paine said.
“For if he violates this duty, he
establishes a precedent that will reach to
himself.” Unchecked legislatures, he warned,
could be as despotic as unchecked monarchs.
When he returned to America from France, he
condemned slavery and the wealth and
privilege accumulated by the new ruling
class, including George Washington, who had
become the richest man in the country. Even
though Paine had done more than any single
figure to rouse the country to overthrow the
British monarchy, he was turned into a
pariah, especially by the press, and
forgotten. He had served his usefulness. Six
mourners attended his funeral, two of whom
were Black.
You can watch my talk with Cornel West
and Richard Wolff on Thomas Paine here.
There is a pathetic yearning among many
in the U.S. and Britain to be linked in some
tangential way to royalty. White British
friends often have stories about ancestors
that tie them to some obscure aristocrat.
Donald Trump, who fashioned his
own heraldic coat of arms, was obsessed with
obtaining a
state visit with the queen. This desire
to be part of the club, or validated by the
club, is a potent force the ruling class has
no intention of giving up, even if hapless
King Charles III, who along with his family
treated his first wife Diana with contempt,
makes a mess of it.
The fawning adulation of
Queen Elizabeth in the United States, which
fought a revolution to get rid of the monarchy,
and in Great Britain, is in direct proportion to
the fear gripping a discredited, incompetent and
corrupt global ruling elite.
The global oligarchs are not sure the next
generation of royal sock puppets – mediocrities
that include a pedophile prince and his brother,
a cranky and
eccentric king who accepted suitcases
and bags stuffed with $3.2 million in cash from
the former prime minister of Qatar Sheikh Hamad
bin Jassim bin Jaber Al Thani, and who has
millions stashed in
offshore accounts – are up to the job. Let’s
hope they are right.
“Having a monarchy next door is a little like
having a neighbour who’s really into clowns and
has daubed their house with clown murals,
displays clown dolls in each window and has an
insatiable desire to hear about and discuss
clown-related news stories,” Patrick Freyne wrote last
year in The Irish Times. “More specifically, for
the Irish, it’s like having a neighbour who’s
really into clowns and, also, your grandfather
was murdered by a clown.”
Monarchy obscures the crimes of empire and
wraps them in nostalgia. It exalts white
supremacy and racial hierarchy. It justifies
class rule. It buttresses an economic and social
system that callously discards and often
consigns to death those considered the lesser
breeds, most of whom are people of color. The
queen’s husband Prince Phillip, who died in
2021, was notorious for making racist and sexist
remarks, politely explained away in the British
press as “gaffes.”
He described Beijing, for example, as “ghastly”
during a 1986 visit and told British students:
“If you stay here much longer you’ll all be slitty-eyed.”
The cries of the millions of victims of
empire; the thousands killed, tortured,
raped and imprisoned during the Mau Mau
rebellion in Kenya; the 13 Irish civilians gunned
down in “Bloody Sunday;” the more
than 4,100 First Nations children who died
or went missing in Canada’s residential schools,
government-sponsored institutions established to
“assimilate” indigenous children into
Euro-Canadian culture, and the hundreds of
thousands killed during
the invasion and occupation of Iraq and
Afghanistan are drowned out by cheers for royal
processions and the sacral aura an obsequious
press weaves around the aristocracy. The
coverage of the queen’s death is so
mind-numbingly vapid — the BBC sent out a news
alert on Saturday when Prince Harry and Prince
William, accompanied by their wives, surveyed
the floral tributes to their grandmother
displayed outside Windsor Castle — that the
press might as well turn over the coverage to
the mythmakers and publicists employed by the
royal family.
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 U.K. saw its income
fall for the longest period since records
began in 1955 and 227,000 households experience homelessness
in Britain.
Royals, to the ruling class, are worth the
expense. They are effective tools of
subjugation. British postal and rail workers canceled planned
strikes over pay and working conditions after
the queen’s death. The Trade Union Congress
(TUC) postponed its
congress. Labour Party members poured
out heartfelt tributes. Even Extinction
Rebellion, which should know better,
indefinitely canceled its
planned “Festival of Resistance.” The BBC’s
Clive Myrie dismissed Britain’s
energy crisis — caused by the war in Ukraine —
that has thrown millions of people into severe
financial distress as “insignificant” compared
with concerns over the queen’s health. The climate
emergency, pandemic, the deadly folly of the
U.S. and NATO’s
proxy war in Ukraine, soaring inflation, the
rise of neo-fascist movements and deepening
social inequality will be ignored as the press
spews florid encomiums to class rule. There will
be 10
days of official mourning.
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.
Following a protracted lawsuit, the British
government agreed to
pay nearly £20 million in damages to over
5,000 victims of British abuse during war in
Kenya, and in 2019 another
payout was made to survivors of torture from
the conflict in Cyprus. The British state
attempts to obstruct lawsuits stemming from its
colonial history. Its settlements are a tiny
fraction of the compensation paid to
British slave owners in 1835, once it — at least
formally — abolished slavery.
During her 70-year reign, the queen never
offered an apology or called for reparations.
The point of social hierarchy and aristocracy
is to sustain a class system that makes the rest
of us feel inferior. Those at the top of the
social hierarchy hand out tokens for loyal
service, including the Order of the British
Empire (OBE). The monarchy is the bedrock of
hereditary rule and inherited wealth. This caste
system filters
down from the Nazi-loving House
of Windsor to the organs of state security and
the military. It regiments society and keeps
people, especially the poor and the working
class, in their “proper” place.
The British ruling class clings to the
mystique of royalty and fading cultural icons as
James Bond, the Beatles and the BBC, along with
television shows such as “Downton Abbey” — where
in the 2019 film version the aristocrats and
servants are convulsed in fevered anticipation
when King George V and Queen Mary schedule a
visit — to project a global presence. Winston
Churchill’s bust remains on
loan to the White House. These myth machines
sustain Great Britain’s “special” relationship
with the United States. Watch the satirical
film “In
the Loop” to get a sense of what this
“special” relationship looks like on the
inside.
It was not until the 1960s that “coloured
immigrants or foreigners” were
permitted to work in clerical roles in the
royal household, although they had been hired as
domestic servants. The royal household and its
heads are legally exempt from laws that prevent
race and sex discrimination, what Jonathan Cook
calls “an apartheid system benefitting the Royal
Family alone.” Meghan Markle, who is of mixed
race and who contemplated
suicide during her time as a working royal,
said that an unnamed royal expressed
concern about the skin color of her unborn
son.
I got a taste of this suffocating snobbery in
2014 when I
participated in an Oxford Union debate
asking whether Edward Snowden was a hero or a
traitor. I went a day early to be prepped for
the debate by Julian Assange, then seeking
refuge in the Ecuadorian Embassy and currently
in His Majesty’s Prison Belmarsh. At a
lugubrious black-tie dinner preceding the event,
I sat next to a former MP who asked me two
questions I had never been asked before in
succession. “When did your family come to
America?” he said, followed by “What schools did
you attend?” My ancestors, on both sides of my
family, arrived from England in the 1630s. My
graduate degree is from Harvard. If I had failed
to meet his litmus test, he would have acted as
if I did not exist.
Those who took part in the debate – my side
arguing that Snowden was a hero narrowly won –
signed a leather-bound guest book. Taking the
pen, I scrawled in large letters that filled an
entire page: “Never Forget that your greatest
political philosopher, Thomas
Paine, never went to Oxford or Cambridge.”
Paine, the author of the most widely read
political essays of the 18th century, Rights
of Man, The
Age of Reason and Common
Sense, blasted the monarchy as a con.
“A French bastard landing with an armed banditti
and establishing himself as King of England
against the consent of the natives, is in plain
terms a very paltry rascally original…The plain
truth is that the antiquity of the English
monarchy will not bear looking into,” he wrote
of William the Conqueror. He
ridiculed hereditary rule. “Of more worth is
one honest man to society, and in the sight of
God, than all the crowned ruffians that ever
lived.” He went on: “One of the strangest
natural proofs of the folly of hereditary right
in kings is that nature disproves it, otherwise
she would not so frequently turn it into
ridicule, by giving mankind an ass for a
lion.” He called the monarch “the royal
brute of England.”
When the British ruling class tried to arrest
Paine, he fled to France where he was one of two
foreigners elected to serve as a delegate in the
National Convention set up after the French
Revolution. He denounced the calls to execute
Louis XVI. “He that would make his own liberty
secure must guard even his enemy from
oppression,” Paine said. “For if he violates
this duty, he establishes a precedent that will
reach to himself.” Unchecked legislatures, he
warned, could be as despotic as unchecked
monarchs. When he returned to America from
France, he condemned slavery and the wealth and
privilege accumulated by the new ruling class,
including George Washington, who had become the
richest man in the country. Even though Paine
had done more than any single figure to rouse
the country to overthrow the British monarchy,
he was turned into a pariah, especially by the
press, and forgotten. He had served his
usefulness. Six mourners attended his funeral,
two of whom were Black.
You can watch my talk with Cornel West and
Richard Wolff on Thomas Paine here.
There is a pathetic yearning among many in
the U.S. and Britain to be linked in some
tangential way to royalty. White British friends
often have stories about ancestors that tie them
to some obscure aristocrat. Donald Trump, who fashioned his
own heraldic coat of arms, was obsessed with
obtaining a
state visit with the queen. This desire to
be part of the club, or validated by the club,
is a potent force the ruling class has no
intention of giving up, even if hapless King
Charles III, who along with his family treated
his first wife Diana with contempt, makes a mess
of it.
=====
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