For King and Covid
Trigger Alert! (always wanted to write that): If you harbour fond thoughts for the late QE11, it may be best to look away now but if you do read on, please don’t take anything below personally. One thing that the last few years of the Derangement Syndromes of Brexit, Trump and Covid, and the various woke wars, has shown us is the need for tolerance civility in debate between people with different views. Thre especially needs to bemore respect for the views of the dissidents who challenge an often fraudulent status quo or unmerited consensus, people like the ‘anti-vaxxers’ and other ‘Deplorables’ (I’m one of these, now!) who cop most of the ill-informed scorn and vilification.
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It’s Royal Fever time again and down here in the colonies we have just ever so somberly participated in a National Day of Mourning (Thursday, 22 September) on a special public holiday decreed by our republican-inclined, Australian Labor Party Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, to honour the deceased Queen in a marvelously anachronistic display of veneration of the Crown. “Now is not the time” for a debate on a republic, declared the smiter of monarchs, joining in the oppressive conformity for every Australian to get with the program of adoring and celebrating the wonders of Monarchy.
Any dissenters have been harshly dealt with. Indigenous Rugby League Womens player, Caitlin Moran, who has represented Australia in international rugby league, has been suspended for one game and copped a 25% total contract pay cut (suspended, pending good behaviour) for a critical private social media post - the Queen (“this dumb dog”) dying made it a “good fkn day”, she casually logged on Instagram, about the expired, titular head-of-state of Australia and overseer of a former global empire which once hunted and poisoned the Caitlin Morans of past Aboriginal tribes.
Aborigines of like mind (the Warriors of Aboriginal Resistance) and their white, uber-woke allies of the far-left, organised protests on the day against the “genocide and dispossession and colonialism that the Queen represented” with a call to “Abolish the Monarchy”. Alas, lead balloons have gained more altitude than this political demand as ‘the nation’, including most erstwhile republicans, unified behind the Great Weep and Wail.
Although 40% to 43% of Australians support a Republic, public opposition to the monarchy upon the (popular) Queen’s death has been corralled to the political ghetto of identity politics, whose inhabitants’ ultraleft tactics and insults (statue-toppling and vandalism, flag desecration and niche demands to rename Australia’s national day from ‘Australia Day’ to ‘Invasion Day’) have only encouraged further social division whilst discrediting their own cause of Aboriginal advancement.
For King and Covid
The current atmosphere of Royalist political conformity in Australia reached disturbing Covid-like levels. A raised Royalist temperature has always been present in Australia with major epidemics of fawning over every royal engagement, marriage, birth, death, birthday and sundry procreative life cycle milestones but the dramatic Covid instruction in obedience to authority and tyrannical social unity may have primed the population for the latest eruption of Royalty worship.
Ordered by our supreme medical caste, we gave control of our minds and bodies to Public Health monarchs and the Royal Pharma family, and ‘Doing the Right Thing’ during Covid (staying home, wearing the mask, rolling up the sleeve) has now found its political echo in the official exhortation, and popular observance, of a minutes’ silence at 11.00 am on the day of mourning - the establishment expects every citizen to do their duty and to get down on bended knee, bow the head and bare the shoulder, for both King and Covid. They have not been disappointed by the compliance displayed. It no doubt helped that the Queen had told all her Commonwealth ‘subjects’ not to be selfish and to get the jab whilst her exemplary wearing of the Mask also sold that useless but harmful piece of Covid theatre to her followers.
If you are prepared to abase yourself to one set of rulers/experts then why not to any other, as the large majority of Australians have just shown with their reverential observance of the Mourning Day so soon after 98.0% of us aged 16 and over have had at least one Covid jab, 96.3% have had two, 71.7% have had three and 40.2% (of those aged 30+) have gobbled up four of the wretched things, whilst some 2.2 million Australian kids aged 5-15 have had two shots.
Likewise, a large majority of Australians broke out the bunting and, with serf-like devotion, lapped up the establishment media’s royalty fetishism with its sycophantic coverage served up with breathless and uncritical awe in an impressive display of journalism on bended knee. And, just like the media, rank-and-file citizens frowned on any dissenters from the Royalist Narrative, like the Mourning Day protesters who burnt the Australian flag with its upper left-hand (Union Jack) corner that is ‘Forever England’.
So the National Day of Mourning got celebratory, saturation billing, exactly one memory-holed year ago to the day when the heavily militarised police in the lockdowned state of Victoria, under the authority of the state Labor Premier, Daniel Andrews, shot and terrorised Australian civilians (including families and children) with rubber bullets, during a protest at Melbourne’s Shrine of Remembrance against Andrews’ world-record lockdown (262 days) and restriction regime.
There was, of course, no mourning for that day of police-state violence or any of the other sub-violent but sinister days when Andrews’ blackshirts ‘moved on’ a 38-week pregnant woman for resting on a park bench during the one hour a day when he allowed people out of the house for exercise. There was also no official remembrance of the fifty thousand other Victorian citizens who were subject to criminal sanctions for breaching lockdown restrictions such as being out after dark or congregating with more than two people. There will also be no mourning for the dead and injured Australians, young and old, from the disastrous gene therapy, a literal population-wide experiment and one approved, in word and example, by the Queen, herself.
Lessons not learned, right and left
The Left’s failure to oppose the disastrous Covid nonsense was a monumental betrayal of its own political vision, values and principles. On Covid, the Left foolishly trusted the capitalist class system (including Big Pharma), its state apparatus, the corporate/state media and the rest of society’s elites, including the pubic health estate, that profited, in terms of power, wealth and influence, from the fake ‘emergency’ of a ‘pandemic’ that never was.
So, the patronage of the Indigenous anti-Monarchy protests by Socialist Alternative (Australia’s largest radical left group whose lineage derives from the UK’s SWP/IS for those interested in political party exotica) under the banner of ‘No Kings, No Cops, No Capitalists’ was stunningly ironic. Four-square behind the Covid authoritarianism of Big Government, Big Pharma, Big Media, Big Medical Men in White Coats, and Big Health Bureaucrats (like, in the US, the Fabulous Fauci: the Fairground Fakir - and his sidekick, the colourful scarf lady, Dr Deborah Birx, who wrapped the sceptical Trump around her little lockdown-loving finger), the Covid Left’s credibility is now fully exhausted and, just as the pre-WW1 ‘Marxist’ parties lined up with their national ruling classes in the European trench slaughter of their working classes, no rote invocation to abolish kings and capitalists can get that credibility back. When it really mattered, both the fake Marxist parties of early last century and this went missing. Those on the Left who resisted the Covid madness (take a bow, Left Lockdown Sceptics, and the delightfully old-fashioned Trotskyist Workers League) have been more rare than an honest ‘public health’ bureaucrat.
The Right’s failure to learn from ‘Covid’ has been equally notorious. Some of the first and best writers against lockdown, Covid authoritarianism and pseudoscience came from the Right (mostly from its more libertarian fringes) but their insights into the malign nature of propaganda, the political imperative of freedom and wariness of the state seem to have evaporated post-Covid.
First, it was back to the old script with support for the US/NATO proxy war against Russia, a rival geo-political capitalist economic power which, in their hearts, they still seem to think of as Red Russia (‘Putin worked for the KGB!’, they say, failing to acknowledge hat it was only as a desk-bound intelligence analyst, a dime a dozen in most state bureaucracies).
Now we have the eyelid-fluttering infatuation with Monarchy by all the political Right who have shown themselves to be keen players of Royalist bingo - the first to get a full card from the lockstep official commentary on the Queen’s death (all those trite, cloying clichés about the Queen who ‘gave so much to our country’ through her ‘life of service’, her dedication to ‘public duty’, her ‘quiet dignity’, her peerless ‘grace’, her ‘poise’, her ‘divine deportment’, her ‘unifying of the nation’, her ‘common touch’) gets to shout out ‘Long Live the King!’ and wins a Royal hand wave.
All the liveried pomp and horse-and-carriage pageantry, those outward markers of the glorious ‘tradition’ that ‘gave meaning to the populace’ and which has been under woke assault for so long, is embraced without any embarrassment and no awareness that all of the verbal sludge and parade-ground show is on a par with the Covid theatre of ‘safe and effective’, “staying apart keeps us together”, the plexiglass, the sanitiser and all the other ‘social distancing’ palaver that was the Great Covid Panic. Royalist hysteria is mass formation psychosis 2.0, just like its immediate Covid hysteria predecessor. Self-abasing madness, all of it.
What is the Monarchy all about, really?
So, we all went with the flow and chimed in with the pre-fabricated national sentiment that the Queen was so wonderful and magnificent, as well as just like everybody’s dear mum, that we must all grieve copiously as instructed. Don’t mention a republic. Don’t dare ask what it is that the royal parasites actually do, for the answer may come back that the Queen’s two main talents, like the rest of The Royal Firm, were (1) to have chosen the right parents and (2) the ability to avoid doing any actual work at all during her 96 years of pampered, born-to-rule luxury.
True, it’s no easy job being the living embodiment of democracy in the British Isles and the colonies - reference the insipid oratory of Liz Truss at the UN that “our constitutional monarchy, underpinned by a democratic society, has delivered stability and progress” (and, for those still playing along, if your card had ‘stability’ or ‘progress’ in relation to reporting on the departed Monarch, then, congratulations, it’s a ‘Bingo!’ win for you).
It’s even tougher at those times when democracy delivers the wrong result, as when the Queen’s representative in Australia, Governor-General Sir John Kerr, sacked a twice-democratically-elected, progressive Labor Government in 1975 (personal disclosure – the Whitlam Labor government elected in 1972 ensured the abolition of the military draft that would have otherwise granted me an unwanted ticket in the 1973 conscription lottery) after consultation with the Palace on their, coyly termed, ‘reserve powers’ to oust any government they disapprove of in any part of the Commonwealth group of nations.
Such antique powers of the ‘absolute monarchies’ of old may be a rarity now that we have capitalist, rather than feudal, class societies but the rump monarchy’s cultural power remains undiminished and the primary, if mostly subliminal, lesson it continues to deliver is the inevitability of social hierarchy - ‘Know Thy Place, Commoner’, in the more direct language of ye olde times. ‘We are not ordinary people’, is the not-so-subtle message delivered through infatuation with the Royals, aimed at reinforcing the subordinate place of the great unwashed whose job it is to obey the commands of every elite stratum whether business, political, cultural, or, now, ‘public health’.
Hierarchy is the natural order, says every royal genuflection and every reverential bit of media coverage. Just by existing, the Monarchy reminds the working class, those who have to dress themselves in the morning instead of having a valet on tap, that having a better-class of person, a more intelligent official, a more qualified ‘expert’ to look up to is a core part of society whose commands, on virus management as on anything else, are to deferentially obeyed.
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Conclusion: Monarchy is a political virus
Monarchy is not just a monumentally expensive waste of space populated by an elite entitlement, privilege and prerogative that should have died out in the Middle Ages. It is, more importantly, a politically toxic cultural institution reinforcing the ‘natural order’ of a society to be forever divided into Royals and Commoners, rulers and subjects, upstairs and downstairs.
The rubbish bin of history awaits these mediaeval relics. They should get on just fine there with the lockdown lunatics and the spike protein priests of Covid when these latter-day elites eventually join them. Together they can share amongst themselves their pre-scientific superstitions and their pompous arrogance without doing any further harm to their ‘subjects’. Whether the Royal King or the ‘Covid’ King, it’s time to take out the rubbish.
For King and Covid
Not offended at all, I liked the Queen, and willing to give Charlie a go though not particularly optimistic , , not that I have a choice. I didn’t watch the funeral and would have rather not had the day off - somehow I think it had more to do with the Victorian grand final holiday. I don’t really like what KC stands for , the Q at least didn’t appear to meddle or tell people that they had to worry about climate change etc. If we were a republic, would it really make much difference ? What powers would el President have, would he just be a figure head, would he be elected etc etc . Here I am up in Qld and every takeaway has signs saying, staff shortage, please be patient. Meanwhile, we have 800,000 unemployed people and we need to bring in more migrants - no mention of these at the jobs summit. I feel we have bigger problems, like maybe reforming the welfare system, to incentivise people to take some pride in earning a living or contributing to society. There’s a Scottish dude called Scott Campbell who who (imho) posted a great substack post called “Half Mast” or something like that, a different perspective on QE2. Agree that discourse is very uncivil these days, I got a very nasty response when I merely I expressed my view about giving Charlie a chance.