Honor without deifying | The Press

Images of Irish, Oceania natives, Indians and Africans ostensibly showing their contempt for the British Crown online have shocked people mourning the Queen’s demise.

But, to understand this other look at British royalty, however indelicate it may be in this time of mourning, you have to side with the victims whose ancestors have been despised and trampled on by this family with a very dark past. Since the death of the monarch, carriers of anecdotes who call her great because she spoke to them, asked a question or simply smiled flooded the media. However, apart from having benefited from a stroke of luck from the cosmic lottery which distributes genes, what did Elizabeth II do with her gigantic power? Did she try to do actions similar to those that made Princess Diana always so precious in hearts?

In 70 years of reign, has the Queen apologized for all the planetary horrors attributable to the British Crown?

I will take the example of China here to illustrate my point. In the 19th^e century, China, with its 400 million inhabitants, traded with the European powers and the emperor demanded gold or silver bullion to get paid. A request that ended up irritating Great Britain. As a workaround, the British East India Company, founded in December 1600 by a royal charter from Queen Elizabeth Iʳᵉ, would shamefully choose to drug China by buying part of its tea and silk for thousands of tons of opium. grown in his Indian colony. Britain will turn China into a land of drug addicts where skeletal zombies out of touch with reality sleep in opium dens. For the modus operandi, the British Royal Company advanced money to Indian growers who, after the harvest, delivered the resin to it. The drug was then sold at auction and the British traffickers who took possession of it set sail for China to exchange it mainly for tea and silk.

The ravages in the population were such that Emperor Xuanzong ended up rebelling against the all-powerful Queen Victoria. No longer able to bear the degradation of his people, the viceroy of the province of Canton threw into the sea tons of opium which had been sleeping in warehouses. The British Crown is furious and tempers are rising in London. On April 7, 1840, the debate around the motives, reasons and merits of the war that was preparing to force China to keep its borders open to dealers British rages. Some elected officials uncomfortable with this shameful trade made their voices heard. William Gladstone, a very influential political figure in the Liberal Party, opposed this dishonorable war in these terms: “A war more unjust in its origin, a war more planned in its preparation to cover this country with perpetual shame, I do not don’t know of any in the whole story. The British flag, which floats proudly over Canton, is hoisted only to protect an infamous contraband traffic. »

Heavily armed ships of its mighty Royal Navy would still attack China in what would be called the First Opium War. The Chinese emperor, overwhelmed, signed a surrender in 1842, agreed to open his country wider to drug traffickers and paid heavy war indemnities to the winner. In October 1856, the Chinese revolted again. They board a British ship and imprison the sailors. This time, it was with the help of France that England returned for the Second Opium War, which ended in 1860.

This second defeat will cost the Middle Kingdom a fortune and force it to open up more widely to the industrial era. In other words, to allow oneself to be obediently exploited by the European powers.

The greed for tea, silk and other local products led the British Crown to bring to its knees and profoundly destroy this millennial civilization that was Imperial China. In other words, despite all the decorum that surrounds it, the cloud that floats over their famous “five o’clock tea” from Buckingham Palace does not have the immaculate whiteness of milk. It will be necessary to wait until 1912 for China to start recovering again, under the leadership of Mao Zedong.

Even during the handover of Hong Kong, Prince Charles, commissioned by his mother, still had nothing but contempt for China. How do we know? In 2006, a British judge authorized the publication of the pages of the prince’s diary devoted to the Hong Kong handover ceremony in 1997. This exposure came as the prince continued the Mail on Sunday who had divulged some of his moods during this trip. Charles began complaining about the quality of airplane seats before spewing all the contempt he had for the Chinese authorities. He likened President Jiang Zemin’s guard to ghastly wax figures, called his speech an ugly sight worthy of the Soviet era and called the Chinese flag-raising ceremony “the ultimate horror”. The prince even allowed himself to regret the end of the Empire, sighing in his diary. This is the behavior of the man who became Charles III as China celebrated the end of more than a century and a half of British control over Hong Kong Island. After the Nanjing Peace Treaty of 1842, which marked the end of the First Opium War and forced China to cede Hong Kong, the country began a long journey through the desert which the Chinese call “the century of humiliation”. “.

These are similar stories that explain the less sympathetic view that many peoples who suffered from colonialism and British supremacism cast on the British Crown.

Even the pope came to Canada to apologize. However, in the racist and assimilationist project that played out in the boarding schools for Aboriginals, there was the ideological signature of the British Crown. Why did Justin Trudeau, who called the Queen one of his favorite people in the world, not ask her to come to Canada to apologize? Did Elizabeth II apologize for all those thinkers of racism, racialism and heredity of intelligence who were ennobled by the British Crown and their ideologies put in the service of slavery, corporations colonialism and apartheid? No. Elizabeth simply passed 70 years of reign without making a wave; to do well the work for which she was programmed: to travel, to smile, to be amused by the natives in the four corners of the Empire whose end her son regretted.