After her the Deluge-neoliberalism's last dirge.
(spoiler alert, if you love the monarchy go no further because there be dragons near.)
Since 2020, we have lived through too much history. We live during a time of plague that will not abate despite capitalism's attempts to deny its lethality. There is a war in the Bloodlands of Europe that has a potential to annihilate us all the longer it continues. The climate crisis is out of control and unfixable unless we end consumerism. The cost-of-living crisis has begun to overwhelm not just the poor; but the ordinary worker and middle classes.
Fascism is entrenched in every developed economy and will become the dominant political ethos everywhere if the centre and left-wing political parties and their news media don’t combat the reasons for its resurgence- which are many. But can be distilled down to one element-greed of the 1% and the ones who do their bidding.
Too much history in so little time has spooked us. We are experiencing the same fear, apprehension, and resentment our ancestors experienced just before revolution or repression knocked on their doorstep. The times are a changing to something darker and less understandable. It scares me, and I am sure it scares you too; because we don’t know how the cards will turn out for us, our families, our friends, or our society.
A monarch died in the 22nd year of the twenty-first century, and if capitalism were a benevolent force for good, the British Crown would have been extinct a long time ago. Hereditary monarchies, like inherited wealth, breed in ordinary citizens' hereditary subservience. I am sure in London’s great queue of grief; mourners are claiming an ancestor or two of theirs also joined a queue and walked silently, passed a sealed coffin with the corpse of a mouldering king or queen inside to pay their respects. The notion that one family from one class- the 1%, is the best in the world, the noblest, the wisest, the kindest and the best to lead is authoritarianism by another name. It stifles democracy. Even wanting to join the club of the 1% erodes democracy. Fidelity to the 1% suffocates our pursuit of happiness and our right to purposeful lives that build sustainable societies for everyone.
Covid and all the other terrors that followed it destabilised us personally and our societies. We feel adrift and long for reminders of permanence. The death of a Queen who had been the constitutional head of our government for seventy years is going to create anxiety in people, especially people that have lived through austerity, Brexit, Covid, and Boris Johnson during the end of her reign.
Louis the Fifteenth was no fool when nearing death, he exclaimed, “after me the deluge,” because the revolution of 1789 soon followed his mortal end. Is the deluge coming for us? Considering that the walls that protected our society from political upset were breached irreparably by governments when they sold the Welfare State for a song to the 1%, I would say yes.
So much sadness for a woman who did not represent the interests of the ordinary person but institutions that kept the average citizen in their place is the stuff of well-orchestrated propaganda. It is a Death of Stalin moment for Britain and the Western World. Queen Elizabeth's funeral is about preserving a system of inequality and keeping us complicit in the crimes of both empire and capitalism. Government, big businesses, the news media and the entertainment media sanitised the monarchy because the entitled from those groups profit immensely from our democracy, not representing the many over the few. It is hard to hate an institution or what it represents; when the head of it has tea and marmalade sandwiches with Paddington Bear. That is why the news media has crafted this monarch's funeral as a burial of the nation’s much-loved “Granny, " rather than one of the world's largest private landowners.
The funeral of Queen Elizabeth makes us witness not only her ending but the ending of that which we cannot return to the normal that we knew in 2019.
Not this week or next, but soon we will begin to ask ourselves WTF just happened because emotionally, we became like North Korea in 2011 when their dear leader Kim Jong-Il died.
We are on the cusp of something new, terrifying but also liberating. The tectonic plates of politics and the world’s economies are grinding together. So, buckle up for a ride not seen in generations because we are in the whirlwind of change.
