By Vashna Jagarnath
All this The Crown craze, what the hell is happening to the world?
I understood the Downton Abbey thing, even though it was the glamorization of a deeply unfair social and economic system. However, The Crown is a complete endorsement of an outmoded and enormously undemocratic system of privilege that remains and continues to impact heavily on inequality, not just in Britain but also in all her former colonies, both in terms of class and racial privilege.
The humanization of this family of dinosaurs, through good acting and great costumes, basically gives them a free pass for all the wrongs that have been committed and continue to be committed by this undemocratic system of power and privilege.
This Netflix series has done a huge disservice to struggles against tyranny and structural inequality that continue unabated today. It has done this by bringing this archaic and privileged royal family right into your living rooms and creating the false impression that they are familiar to the rest of us and face the same struggles as most of us. However, anyone with half a brain will realize that the series just plays on our emotions and in no way could this family share any of the problems that 99% of people on this planet experience.
For a start, most families have not, unlike this royal family, through no work or achievement of their own except the accident of their birth, inherited more land than anyone else on this earth. For example, according to the latest statistics, the queen, as an individual, not the representative of a state, owns 6.6 billion acres of land worldwide, including Great Britain, Northern Ireland, Canada, Australia and a few other spots here and there, not forgetting the Falkland Islands. She is the biggest landowner on the planet.
To provide further context, the size of South Africa is 301, 4 million acres, and the size of Britain is 59,9218 million acres.
Also, just a reminder that these 6.6 billion acres, just part of the personal wealth of the queen, did not come from the royal family nicely negotiating and buying the land against its true market value. No, it came through plunder, violence, exploitation, and oppression of most of the globe through colonialism, imperialism, and slavery! Even in Britain itself the royal family becomes royal through violent dispossession.
Next time anyone feels sorry for the young queen sitting on the throne with her head heavy with the jewels of the crown, remember that we in South Africa can easily unburden her of the stolen weight she carries by us taking back the diamonds stolen from South Africa and currently sitting in her crown.
Also, please don’t get me started on Prince Harry’s newly found “wokeness.” If he feels so bad about his privilege, maybe he should begin with some wealth and land redistribution, or apologizing for his role in the imperial wars that has and continues to devastate the Middle East.
I am not saying all this because I am bitter and don’t want viewers to enjoy TV in times of great difficulty. I am saying this precisely because this is not innocent entertainment. It is sophisticated propaganda.
The recent spate of Pax Britannica films and series that have made their way to our screens—from the various films on the “royal” family to those on Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher all serve to humanize a deeply corrupt and inhumane system of colonialism and imperialism. Churchill and Thatcher were both crude and racists, and they were people who did massive damage in their own society and elsewhere.
These films seek to reinforce the notion of Pax Britannica, which was a deeply held set of (racist) beliefs by Britain that they were the good and benign police of the world bringing about peace and prosperity.
These TV series are carefully crafted to produce “Stockholm Syndrome”—an identification with one’s oppressor. People in Britain and across the world are poor because of the Royal Family, Churchill, Thatcher and the rest of the English elite (among other global imperialists). The next time fans feel sorry for a trolled Camilla Parker Bowles, remember she has immense lakes on many, many acres of land to drown her sorrows in.
Let’s get back to reality.
Let’s support everyone working to turn Britain into a republic and to socialize the wealth of the royal family. There is no need to take the French option. They can be moved to a council house and make use of the NHS (National Health Service) and all the other forms of social support won by organized labor.
Vashna Jagarnath
Dr. Vashna Jagarnath is Director of Friends of the Workers and Pan Africa Today. She is also Deputy General Secretary of the Socialist Revolutionary Workers Party and Senior Researcher Associate for the Centre of Social Change at the University of Johannesburg.
