EXCERPT:
As Harold Pinter liked to say, these deceptions are almost ‘witty’ in their audacity.
The new king said of his mother:
‘She set an example of selfless duty which, with God’s help and your counsels, I am resolved faithfully to follow.’
The ideal, endlessly repeated, is not to discover Truth, Happiness and Freedom for ourselves as creative, free-thinking individuals. Rather, it is to reject our personal needs and interests – rejected as ‘narrow’ and ‘selfish’ – to focus on ‘service’, on performing a ‘duty’ pre-defined for us by the mumbo-jumbo of patriotic ‘tradition’. Tolstoy captured his moment and ours exactly:
‘All these people do what they are doing unconsciously, because they must, all their life being founded upon deceit, and because they know not how to do anything else… Moreover, being all linked together, they approve and justify one another’s acts – emperors and kings those of the soldiers, functionaries, and clergymen; and soldiers, functionaries and clergymen the acts of emperors and kings, while the populace, and especially the town populace, seeing nothing comprehensible in what is done by all these men, unwittingly ascribe to them a special, almost a supernatural, significance.’ (Leo Tolstoy, ‘Writings On Civil Disobedience and Non-Violence,’ New Society, 1987, p.109)
Thus, the Archbishop of Canterbury, who said:
‘Her Majesty showed us that when we build our lives on God’s faithfulness, we are on the solid ground of eternity that cannot be shaken.’
There is indeed nothing comprehensible here. Alas, human folly is such that many of us find these comments all the more impressive for that reason – we are surely in the presence of truth so profound that it escapes our feeble understanding.
***
The Unquestioned Institution Of The Monarchy
Former diplomat Craig Murray also highlighted the absurdity of the notion of media ‘impartiality’ when press and broadcasting are so blatantly pro-monarchy:
‘Think seriously on this. 29% of the population want to abolish the monarchy. Think of all the BBC coverage of the monarchy you have seen over the last decade. What percentage do you estimate reflected or gave an airing to republican views? Less than 1%?’
He continued:
‘Now think of media coverage across all the broadcast and print media.
‘How often has the media reflected the republican viewpoint of a third of the population? Far, far less than a third of the time. Closer to 0% than 1%. Yes, there are bits of the media that dislike Meghan for being black or are willing to go after Andrew. But the institution of the monarchy itself?’
Murray concluded:
‘There can be no clearer example than the monarchy of the unrelenting media propaganda by which the Establishment maintains its grip.
‘The corporate and state media are unanimous in slavish support of monarchy. Thailand has vicious laws protecting its monarchy. We don’t need them; we have the ownership of state and corporate media enforcing the same.’
In 2015, author Irvine Welsh observed that:
‘The UK is now a pointless entity, existing solely to protect entrenched privilege and continue the transference of the country’s resources to a global elite.’
The Queen sat atop this unjust system of extreme inequality, just as her eldest son, King Charles, does now. She was the figurehead of an unhealthy and divided British society, corrupted by hereditary wealth, degraded by the racist and exploitative legacy of Empire, and scarred by a highly-stratified class structure in which most people are struggling to obtain a decent standard of living.
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