The
British royal family papers over the
pillage it continues to benefit
from.
The
death of Queen Elizabeth II, the
longest-serving monarch of British
royalty, has sparked global fascination
and spawned thousands of
clickbait reports of the details of her
funeral.
Americans,
who centuries ago rejected monarchy, are seemingly
obsessed
with the ritualism, bizarrely mourning the
demise of an elderly and
fabulously wealthy woman who was born into
privilege and who died of
natural causes at the ripe old age of 96
across the ocean.
Perhaps
this is because popular and long-running TV
shows
about British royalty
like The
Crown
have convinced us that we know intimate
details about the royals –
and worse, they cause us to believe we
should care about a family
that is a symbolic marker of past imperial
grandeur.
But
for those who are descended from the
subjects of British imperialist
conquest, the queen, her ancestors, and
her descendants represent the
ultimate evil empire.
India
and Pakistan
India,
my home country, celebrated its 75th
anniversary of independence
from British rule this year. Both my parents
were born before
independence, into a nation still ruled by
the British. I heard many
tales while growing up of my grandfather’s
absences from home as he
went “underground,” wanted for seditious
activity against the
British. After independence in 1947, he was
honored for being a
“freedom fighter” against the monarchy.
Despite
the popularity and critical
acclaim
of The
Crown
and movies and shows like it, I found a far
stronger connection to
the new superhero series Ms
Marvel,
if for no other reason than the fact that it
tackles the horrors of
partition,
a little-known (in the US) legacy of the
evil empire.
As
Pakistani writer Minna
Jaffery-Lindemulder
explains in New Lines,
“The British changed the borders of India
and Pakistan at the
eleventh hour in 1947 before declaring both
nations independent,
leaving the former subjects of the crown
confused about where they
needed to migrate to ensure their safety.”
As
a
result, 15
million
people felt forced to
move
from one part of the South Asian
subcontinent to another, a mass
cross-exodus with an estimated
death toll ranging from half a
million
to 2 million.
Today,
those contested
borders,
callously and recklessly drawn in 1947 by
British officials acting at
the behest of the crown, remain a source of
simmering tensions
between India and Pakistan that occasionally
erupt into full-blown
wars.
This
is the legacy of British monarchy. The
United Kingdom enjoys a
distinction in Guinness
World
Records,
for the “most countries [62] to have gained
independence from the
same country.”
‘Morally
unremarkable’
One
could argue that Elizabeth, who was gifted
the throne and its title
in 1952, did not lead an aggressive empire
of conquest and instead
presided over an institution that, under her
rule, became largely
symbolic and ceremonial in nature. And
indeed, many do just that,
referring to her, for example, as an “exemplar
of
moral decency.”
Rahul
Mahajan, author of Full
Spectrum Dominance
and The
New Crusade,
has a different opinion, referring in an interview
to Elizabeth as a “morally unremarkable
person with a job that
involved doing extremely unremarkable
things.”
Mahajan
explains further, saying that this was “a
highly privileged person,
given an opportunity to influence world
events in some degree, which
she had to do nothing to earn, who never did
anything particularly
remarkable, innovative, or insightful.”
While
Elizabeth’s 70 years on the throne were
mostly spent overseeing an
ostensible unraveling of British Empire in a
world less tolerant of
occupation, enslavement, and imperial
plunder, just a few months into
her role as queen, the British violently put
down the Mau
Mau
rebellion
in Kenya.
According
to a New York Times story
about how citizens in African nations today
have little sympathy for
the dead monarch, the squashing of the
rebellion “led to the
establishment of a vast system of detention
camps and the torture,
rape, castration and killing of tens of
thousands of people.”
Even
if Elizabeth was not responsible for
directing the horrors, they were
carried out in her name. Over the seven
decades that she wielded
symbolic power, she never once apologized
for what was done during
her rule in Kenya – or indeed what was done
in her family’s name
in dozens of other nations in the Global
South.
It’s
no wonder that black and brown people the
world over have openly
expressed disgust at the collective fawning
of such an ugly legacy.
Professor
Uju
Anya
of Carnegie Mellon University, who
is Nigerian, is under fire for her
frank dismissal of Elizabeth after
posting on Twitter that she “heard
the chief monarch of a thieving
and raping genocidal empire is
finally dying. May her pain be
excruciating.”
Kehinde
Andrews,
a black-studies professor at
Birmingham City University, wrote
on
Politico that he cannot relate to
his fellow Britons’ desire to
mourn Elizabeth, a woman he
considered to be “the No 1 symbol
of
white supremacy” and a
“manifestation of the
institutional racism
that we have to encounter on a
daily basis.”
Preserving
status
quo
Elizabeth
may have appeared a benign, smiling elder
who maintained the
propriety expected from a royal leader,
but she worked hard to
preserve an institution that should have
long ago died out.
She
was
handed the throne as a consequence
of her uncle, the Duke
of
Windsor,
abdicating as King Edward VIII in
order to marry a twice-divorced
American. Both the marriage to a
divorcee and the fact that the
couple turned out to be Nazi
sympathizers
marked a low point for the royals.
“The
monarchy
was in a really good position to
fade away with this kind of
clowning around,” says Mahajan.
But it was Elizabeth who “rescued
the popularity of the monarchy.”
Further,
Elizabeth quietly preserved the ill-gotten
family fortune that she
and her descendants benefited from in a
postcolonial world.
“One
thing
she could, and of course should,
have done and said something
about is the massive royal
estate,” says Mahajan. Observers
can
only estimate
the royal family’s worth (Forbes puts
the figure at US$28 billion),
assets that include stolen
jewels
from former colonies, pricey art
investments, and real-estate
holdings across Britain.
Britain’s
new king, Charles III, now inherits the
fruits of the evil empire.
According to Mahajan, Charles “is
apparently very bent on taking
his fortune and investing it in such a way
as to make himself as rich
as possible.”
According
to
The
New
York Times,
“As prince, Charles used tax
breaks, offshore accounts and
canny
real-estate investments to turn a
sleepy estate into a
billion-dollar
business.”
The
International
Consortium of Investigative
Journalists in 2017 found
that both Elizabeth
and Charles
were named in the leaked “Paradise
Papers,”
indicating
that they hid their money in
havens to avoid paying taxes.
Fleecing
taxpayers
and living off stolen wealth –
monarchy’s original
modus operandi – appears to be
central to Elizabeth’s legacy, one
she passes on to her son (who also
won’t
pay
an inheritance tax
on the wealth she left him).
The
British monarchy, according to Mahajan,
“mostly represents a real
concession to the idea that some people
are just born better and more
important than you, and you should look to
them.”
Mahajan
adds, “It’s a good time for the popularity
of this institution to
fade away.”
This
commentary
was provided by the Independent
Media
Institute.
