11 September 2022

Elizabeth Windsor, the state of the UK, etc

The Sex Pistols's Anarchy in the UK is today a most ironic title for a country which is now destined to right-wing anarchy: free trade, minor state intervention, etc. I've just noticed this in The Guardian, which shows a far truer picture of the monarchy in general than the one depicted in the whole of the national daily press (with the exception of the Morning Star):

'Harvard University history professor Maya Jasanoff wrote in the New York Times that the Queen’s stoic presence in life as a “fixture of stability” underlined a “stolid traditionalist front over decades of violent upheaval”.

She pointed out that months after Elizabeth II learned of her father’s death from treetops in Kenya and became queen, British colonial authorities in Kenya suppressed a rebellion against the colonial regime known as Mau Mau, which, according to the New York Times, “led to the establishment of a vast system of detention camps and the torture, rape, castration and killing of tens of thousands of people”. The British government eventually paid £20m in a lawsuit by Kenyan survivors.

Cornell University professor Mukoma Wa Ngugi decried the “theater” surrounding the Queen’s death. He tweets "If the queen had apologized for slavery, colonialism and neocolonialism and urged the crown to offer reparations for the millions of lives taken in her/their names, then perhaps I would do the human thing and feel bad. As a Kenyan, I feel nothing. This theater is absurd." I'd prefer to call it an insane fascist circus.

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