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GREAT BRITAIN
THE SHADOW OF EMPIRE OPINION by Hari Kunzru ... My Family Fought the British Empire. I Reject Its Myths. 
Credit...Jack Taylor/Getty Images Original article: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/11/opinion/queen-hari-kunzru-imperial-delusions.html Peter Burgess COMMENTARY I am not impressed by this writer's point of view. I do not agree with where the writer is on this subject, but read it carefully and concluded it was srprisingly superficial for something publiched by the New York Times. However, I got curious and wanted to know more about the writer and why he held his positions. The Wikipedia entry for Hari Kunzru surprised me. He is very well educated and has considerable writing experience and credentials which is in contrast to what to me is a very simplistic perception of what the Monarchy and the Queen means to me as a rather ordinary Brit born in 1940. I am perfectly aware that there were a lot of things associated with Empire that were bad, but there was much that was good. The British Empire, on balance, preformed rather well and over a period of more than a century engaged in a massive global collaborative effort to bring progress based on the practices of the time to a wide range of societies. All sorts of inequalities persisted during the time of British Empire ... but inequalities have not disappeared. The heavy hand of the British constitutional monarchy ended a long time ago, but in many cases there is an ongoing heavy hand of all sorts of people who seek to wield power and influence. My own impression is that the British Monarchy has done more to unite people through tolerance and quiet leadership than a lot of other powerful people in politics and business and the military ... and in my view the world would be a far worse place if the QEII had not lived her life. Peter Burgess | ||
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NYT OPINION ... GUEST ESSAY
My Family Fought the British Empire. I Reject Its Myths. By Hari Kunzru ... Mr. Kunzru is the author, most recently, of “Red Pill.” Sept. 11, 2022 On my desk I have a scuffed silver coin that I had to rummage through a box to find. It was given to me in 1977 — there was one for every child in my British primary school — to commemorate the Silver Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II. I was 7 and she had already been on the throne for 25 years. My memories of the Jubilee are unsurprisingly fragmented, a few images of bunting and cake and plastic Union Jack hats. Later I received another coin, commemorating the marriage of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer, and every few years throughout my life there has been another anniversary, or a wedding, or latterly a tabloid scandal to remind me of the monarchy’s role in what, on occasions such as these, commentators refer to as “the life of the nation.” Queen Elizabeth’s death at the age of 96 ends the longest reign in British history, and comes at a time when the life of the nation — and its future — feels uncertain. The queen’s last public appearance was greeting the fourth prime minister in seven years. Brexit has destabilized the nation’s relationships with its closest neighbors. Covid has left deep scars, inflation is at a 40-year high and, as winter looms, an energy crisis looks set to impoverish many British households. In 1978, before my coin went away into its box, the acerbically conservative poet Philip Larkin was asked to write a verse commemorating the Jubilee. He responded with a quatrain: In times when nothing stoodIt’s interesting to me that even then, the queen’s psychological value to the country she ruled lay in continuity. Since the inauguration, in 1952, of what postwar optimists termed the “new Elizabethan age,” enormous social changes had taken place, summed up by Larkin’s own humorous observation that “Sexual intercourse began/In nineteen sixty-three,” at a time “Between the end of the ‘Chatterley’ ban/And the Beatles’ first LP.” Like the 2020s, the 1970s were times of economic hardship, social unrest and a sense of national diminishment. Many felt, like Larkin, that the country was worsening and “growing strange,” dog-whistle language for the presence of immigrants from the former colonies and their second-generation children. There we were, standing in morning assembly, fingering our silver coins and singing the national anthem along with the others. 
Queen Elizabeth at a Silver Jubilee celebration in 1977.Credit...Anwar Hussein/Getty Images Then, as now, many Britons mourn the nation’s lost imperial grandeur, and for them the pageantry of monarchy and Elizabeth’s presence as its leading player have been a balm for the ache of a changing world. The British elite have always understood that the monarchy is a screen onto which the people project their own fantasies, and Elizabeth’s greatest asset as queen was her blankness. She liked dogs and horses, and rarely betrayed strong emotions. She seemed to accept that her role was to be shown things, so very many things: factories and ships and tanks and local customs and types of cheese and the right way to tie the traditional garment, to receive bouquets of flowers from small curtsying girls, and in return never to appear bored or irritated by what was surely often a boring public role. The queen bridged the colonial and post-colonial eras. But for those of us who have a complicated relationship to Britain’s imperial past, the continuity represented by Elizabeth was not an unmitigated good. My father’s side of our family was made up of staunch Indian nationalists who worked for the end of imperial rule in 1947. Like many other people around the world whose families fought the British Empire, I reject its mythology of benevolence and enlightenment, and find the royal demand for deference repugnant. Elizabeth was queen when British officers tortured Kenyans during the Mau Mau uprising. She was queen when troops fired on civilians in Northern Ireland. She spent a lifetime smiling and waving at cheering native people around the world, a sort of living ghost of a system of rapacious and bloodthirsty extraction. Throughout that lifetime, the British media enthusiastically reported on royal tours of the newly independent countries of the Commonwealth, dwelling on exotic dances for the white queen and cargo cults devoted to her consort. My hope is that as the screen of Elizabeth falls away, Britons may find it easier to recognize the unhealthiness of a dependency on imperial nostalgia for self-esteem. Despite his pledge to continue his mother’s legacy, the new King Charles III will struggle to be such a blank screen for the projections of his people. He is widely disliked because of his treatment of his wife Diana. Unlike his mother, he is known to be a man of opinions. His “black spider” memos, handwritten letters and notes given to government ministers on topics from agriculture to architecture, have led to concerns that, as a ruler, he will be tempted to overstep the strict constitutional bounds of the monarchy and dabble in politics. He ascends the throne in an age of unprecedented media scrutiny, and his private life has been fodder for decades of public gossip. And he, unlike his mother, does not represent unbroken continuity with Empire. Of course there has always been an anti-royalist tradition in Britain. “She ain’t no human being,” sang the Sex Pistols back in the Jubilee Year, earning a ban from the BBC for lèse-majesté. Derek Jarman’s visionary film “Jubilee” imagined the first Queen Elizabeth transported by her court magician from 1589 to an apocalyptic contemporary London, where she sees her namesake mugged for her crown. For every Briton who believes that the bedrock of the nation is the monarchy and the hierarchy it authorizes, there’s another who will remind you that the billionaire Windsors changed their name from the German Saxe-Coburg-Gotha only during the awkwardness of the First World War. “There is no future in England’s dreaming,” warned the Sex Pistols. It’s usually taken to be an expression of nihilism and despair at living in country so shackled by its past. As I turn over the coin on my desk, I hope that with the death of Elizabeth II, who performed the ceremonies of the past so well, her subjects will start to dream of the future once again. Written by Hari Kunzru ... Hari Kunzru (@harikunzru) is the author, most recently, of “Red Pill.” A version of this article appears in print on Sept. 12, 2022, Section A, Page 20 of the New York edition with the headline: The Queen Was a Blank Slate for the Imperial Delusions of Her People. -------------------------------------- More on the death of the Queen Opinion | Serge Schmemann Queen Elizabeth Embodied the Myth of the Good Monarch Sept. 8, 2022 Opinion | Maya Jasanoff Mourn the Queen, Not Her Empire Sept. 8, 2022 Opinion | Tina Brown Queen Elizabeth II Understood the Weight of the Crown Sept. 9, 2022 Opinion | Patti Davis The Royal Grief You Will Not See Sept. 9, 2022 The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com. Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. 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