[Levin]

Shola Mos-Shogbamimu
17 Sep 2022


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For some, this occasion marked the mourning of a much-loved sovereign, while others believe she had blood on her hands. She was the last colonial queen, in whose name unspeakable acts were undertaken even after the formal end of colonialism, when the playbook of British imperialism was executed under the guise of modernisation and commonwealth.

The queen’s legacy is now so whitewashed and shrouded with exaggerated epitaphs that, while respecting people’s right to mourn her passing, I feel compelled to shred this revisionist history with some pointed truth-telling.

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The British monarch is an unelected head of state, a position incompatible with a progressive and advanced society in the 21st century. What is worse is that the British monarchy literally lives off wealth built on the backs of enslaved Africans. It looted trillions of dollars of wealth from Asia and Africa and plundered nations for their natural resources. The queen was the charm offensive wheeled out to give a face of respectability to the monarchy’s racism and anti-Blackness.

Another irrefutable legacy of the queen is her failure to take responsibility for the actions of her government while reaping power and benefits from it.

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The queen can’t be the reason for Britain’s greatness without also taking ownership for atrocities committed by governments under her – for which she never personally apologised. Not for the brutal suppression of the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya, in which torture, rape and the imprisonment of 1.5 million people were tools deployed by the British. Not for Britain’s horrific role in almost a million deaths in the Biafran war in order to protect its strategic interests in Nigeria. Not for the injustices, poverty and underdevelopment that former colonies still endure because of British colonialism. Not for the jewels and artefacts stolen from Asia and Africa that adorn the walls of Buckingham Palace and British museums.

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history shows that Queen Elizabeth knew she was ultimately responsible. In 1995, she signed an apology to New Zealand’s Maori for atrocities and land theft committed in the name of her ancestor, Queen Victoria. When a personal apology was demanded, New Zealand’s minister of justice at the time said: “The queen acts through her governments and doesn’t do things personally.”

He said the quiet part out loud. Indeed, the queen always acted through her government. The buck stopped with her. If she could sign an apology to the Maori for crimes under an ancestor, she could have done the same for atrocities committed in Kenya, Nigeria and Northern Ireland under her rule.

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While Queen Elizabeth could avoid scrutiny, transparency and accountability under the cloak of reverence and deference, none of her successors will be able to. We live in a different time

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surveys show that young Britons are particularly clear about not wanting the monarchy to continue. A regressive institution of entitlement is not sustainable. For instance, it makes no sense that in the worst cost-of-living crisis in recent history – with thousands of people homeless and dependent on food banks, and millions paying exorbitant energy prices – we the British people will pay a mini fortune for the queen’s funeral. Remember, the queen’s personal worth was more than US$500m and the royal family’s assets amount to US$28bn. We pay for our own funerals. Why can’t her estate pay for hers?

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a new generation that has grown up relatively indifferent to the royal family is waking up, asking questions and demanding changes to the entrenched systemic inequalities that the monarchy symbolises.


https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2022/...e-monarchy

[Levin]

Queen Elizabeth is not innocent of the Crown’s crimes


Priyamvada Gopal
Priyamvada Gopal teaches in the Faculty of English at Cambridge University.


14 Sep 2022


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we are repeatedly instructed that this death is a profoundly significant moment not just for the whole country but the Commonwealth and the entire world.

Most denizens of the Commonwealth – Britain’s former colonies – live precarious existences of their own, many battling catastrophic floods or famines that are nowhere in the headlines. They are unlikely to be “reassured” by the existence of a distant queen or, frankly, troubled by her demise. Many vulnerable Britons, too, face far from peaceful illness and death this winter.

Self-absorbed grandstanding is perhaps to be expected from a British media not known for nurturing diversity of opinion in a country where large portraits of the queen are now plastered serially across billboards, bus stops, tube stations, malls, cinemas, and thoroughfares, accompanied by daily public ceremonies and costumed pageantry.

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It is entirely incoherent to separate the queen from the Crown and, thereby, the British state.

With the end of Elizabeth’s reign, open criticism has been voiced – largely by denizens of former colonies from Ireland to Nigeria – of the Crown’s responsibility for colonisation, enslavement, indenture, extraction, dispossession, ethnic cleansing, and violence. It has also been pointed out that the royal family’s wealth is inextricably tied up with the projects of enslavement and colonisation even as the sources of royal riches remain shrouded in opacity.

Where the response is not outright denial, there is the suggestion that one can mourn the queen separately from the empire she headed as it disbanded slowly, though never entirely, from her accession onwards. One commentator believes her to be “the antithesis of stereotypes of Empire” and the sunny side of Britishness.

This is exactly how history gets airbrushed. In 1952, as the young Elizabeth, committed in her own words to “our great imperial family”, was informed at a safari lodge in Kenya that she had acceded to the throne, Britain had commenced a long and brutal counterinsurgency in that country, one that would see thousands of innocents jailed, tortured, and executed. This was not atypical of decolonisation, which was far from always gradual and peaceful.

The first years of her reign would also see tremendous suppression of anticolonialism in Cyprus, Malaya, and elsewhere. Through resistance, peaceful and violent, Britain was forced, colony by colony, to abandon the imperial project. Although she never distanced herself from either the British Empire or its atrocities, the queen is known to have accepted the reality of anticolonial nationalism

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This does not mean she gifted independence to subjugated states or that she eased them into nationhood.

As Britain’s ruling classes scrambled to control the narrative of the loss of imperial power, they produced the myth of decolonisation as a managed and planned process.

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The trouble with myths is that they prevent an honest reckoning with history or what Elizabeth II euphemised as “difficult episodes in our past” which she was clear should not be revisited. Such an attitude simply consolidates Britain’s ongoing imperial amnesia and tendency to praise the British Empire without acknowledging the many harmful consequences that still shape the lives of millions today. The descendants of the enslaved and the colonised are repeatedly exhorted to “move on from this painful legacy”, to use former Prime Minister David Cameron’s words.

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it is perfectly possible, indeed normative, to have elected heads of state and government while maintaining precisely as grotesquely unequal a society as in Britain.

The American fascination with the British monarchy is in part explicable through the fact that a tiny number of multibillionaires, unanointed monarchs, own more than half that country’s wealth. If we want a more democratic and equal world, it is not just the British monarchy that must be abolished but plutocracy itself.


https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2022/...-the-crown