God Save the Queen. Or, Maybe not
By Larry Romanoff for PRAVDA, January 14, 2022
Westerners seem to hold a fondness for monarchies;
pleasant remembrances of times past, the pleasures of the "court",
colloquial recollections of quaint beheadings and the capriciousness of
rulings, and envious mention of the 'King's prerogative' on a wedding night.
Altogether a generally uncritical recollection.
We tend to think of the British monarchy today, or
possibly the smaller incarnations existing in Monaco, the Netherlands or
Belgium, rulers who tend now to be not only civilised but also marginalised.
But monarchies were not always thus, and rather too many disappeared in the
smoke of revolutions because entire populations revolted against the frequent
and unpredictable brutality of the rulers, the callous and cynical lack of
concern for the populace, and general bad management.
Monarchies
and Dictatorships
Monarchies and dictatorships are functionally very
similar, differing primarily in the method of succession planning, both being a
form of government where one person holds absolute power, the exercise of which
was not always predictable. Both Monarchies and dictatorships tended to pass
power to the next relative in line. The primary difference between the two is
that monarchies often claimed a 'divine right' to rule, having been
conveniently selected by God, whereas a dictator, sadly but still unashamedly,
passed power onto his son. But the only real difference, certainly in the
public imagination, is that dictators just didn't have the class of monarchs.
There truly is something special about these hard-to-get divine appointments.
But our recollections are little more than us having
what we might call a convenient and selective memory. We recall what we choose.
For downright brutal inhumanity, monarchies have never had much to be proud of.
King Leopold of Belgium killed 10-15 million people without hesitation. A
Transylvanian prince, eager to explain something to his subjects in a way they
could understand, had his soldiers gather 20,000 subjects and chop one arm and
one leg off each one. Monarchies were equally as inhuman as were the worst of
dictators, and the British were arguably the worst of the lot.
The
British Royal Family
