That the Queen is dead is hard to miss, you’d probably have to be dead yourself not to notice. More noticeable still is the 24/7 obsequious TV coverage reminiscent of what a ‘very British coup’ might look like. Slow, soft, deceitful and repetitive.
Instead of marshal music and rolling tanks, or the massed show formations of a North Korean junket (that’s coming later at the coronation), we get Vaselined soft photoshops, innocent and ancient child-like voice recordings and a complete inversion of “horrible histories”.
A monarch forced to preside over the decolonisation of a thousand years of her predecessor’s violence, welcoming (under arms, blackmail or bribery) rich and poor nation alike into her father’s new extended British family. The commonwealth of exploitation.
A pastoral symphony of unbroken harmony of oppressor and oppressed uniting in the divinely ordained body of the sovereign. The murderous queen bee of a hive dominated by her parasites. We are told of Elizabeth’s gentle and generous nature, leaving us unable to imagine her capable of doing harm.
As if she needed to. She was the apex of a thousand-year tyranny where the greedy, ambitious, patronised or paid lackeys around her took over a quarter of the globe and a third of its population.
The grandfather that brought us Amritsar, the father that brought us the Indian famine and partition, the daughter who brought us Bloody Sunday and Iraq. Every single living lackey and killer sworn to her by oath. Neither a century nor generation over that last thousand years has failed to raise a hand against this slaughter in our story of resistance which remains largely untold because the victors possess the whitewash.
Perhaps amongst the best known, still living in popular legend, the North and East Anglia against Norman Feudalism, the great Peasants Revolt in the south east of 1381 against tyranny and Poll Tax, the midlands and the east in the 15th/16th centuries against the theft of and private enclosure of common land, the radical dissenters of the English Civil War that ended one of our three Charles’s, the Luddites and loom wreckers of the 18th century, and perhaps most famously, the martyrs of Tolpuddle and Peterloo in the 19th century. Their global imperialist wars of slaughter and the defeated revolutions that opposed them dominate the next century.
Abroad, rebellion, famine and massacre are redescribed as civilisation, development and order. Only Antarctica remains unbloodied by the Realm, unless you count the near extinction of its wildlife species (and we do).
Charles deserves neither sympathy nor support, he is bent on dynastic continuation, historical sanitisation and validation of the power of capital and the state that continues to wage its relentless war of exploitation and annihilation.
The power of this might appear symbolic but it is not immaterial. It is being used at this minute as a potent and successful weapon against our class, as it’s supposed representatives, the unions, so vocal moments ago, capitulate and submit to a pause in the renewed but still nascent wave of class struggle, an armistice. In reality a submission in the face of power and its control of our history and whitewash of our story.
The tragedy is the illumination of the relationship between those who claim class leadership and the class they claim to oppose. History screams rebellion and redress, not submission and participation. The Queen is dead, it is an opportunity not a tragedy.
AnarCom Network 