One of the fundamental enemies of our class has died.
The response to the death of ‘Prince’ Phillip has been as expected; the media has gone into meltdown, the politicians are fawning over his memory, and for the rest of us life goes on. His death, much like his life, had very little material impact on the lives of the vast majority of working class people. Had the frenzy of media-enforced mourning not happened, many of us wouldn’t even have noticed his passing.
Phillip Mountbatten neatly summarises (well, summarised) everything wrong with the Royals specifically, and the British ruling class generally. Racist in the least subtle and most entitled way imaginable, he was a caricature of the image you get in your head when someone says “posh bloke”. He was personally repugnant, and his family consumed vast amounts of what should be publicly-owned resources whilst contributing nothing. He was at the head of a family that has included rapists, nonces, arms dealers and Nazi-sympathisers, not to mention some light inbreeding. And that’s just the last few generations. His public image was constantly in need of repair because of his actions, and the legacy of the royal clan. On a royal visit to China in the mid 1980’s (long before senility could become an excuse) he told British students “If you stay here too long you’ll all be slitty-eyed”. Professor of Black Studies Kehinde Andrews of Birmingham University said “He was a throwback to old-school racism. Painting him as a benign, cuddly uncle of the nation is simply untrue”.
But even knowing all that, he was still someone’s husband and someone’s father. Is it wrong of us to revel in the death of an old man, only two months away from getting his 100 year letter from his own wife?
No it’s not wrong, and those on the left who say it is have given in to the moral pressure exerted on our class to be polite and courteous, qualities never offered to us by the people we’re now apparently supposed to feel sorry for. Much like when Thatcher died, our communities are being asked to not only to respect, but to revere the memory of one of our enemies. He may not have been as proactive as Thatcher in attacking working people, but he was one of the cornerstones of the establishment that keeps working class communities impoverished and exports British imperialism around the globe.
Gratifyingly, this opinion appears to be shared by huge swathes of people. On Saturday the 10th of April The Independent reported that BBC and ITV viewing figures had fallen by a staggering 60% because of the unending coverage of the royal death. The backlash against this obsessive broadcasting has been so severe that the BBC has had to set up a dedicated helpline to deal with coverage complaints. Readers should cast their minds back to 2011 and the death of Kim Jong-il, the leader of the DPRK (North Korea). The DPRK came under international attack – not to mention a lot of mockery – because of the way in which the nation mourned it’s leader. Western media, including the BBC, published absurd stories about funerals where attendees were forced at gunpoint to cry, and notably about how the DPRK’s media coverage included nothing but news of the Leader’s death. These criticisms, and the media’s apparent love of healthy criticisms of political leaders, now come across as a bit hollow.
Our class should not be guiltily manipulated into feeling sorrow at the death of this man. He was an elderly relic of a mostly dead aristocracy at best, and an active participant in a family of criminals and morally bankrupt cartoon villains at worst. We owe no loyalty whatsoever to the royals, and the pathetic fawning of the mainstream media should fool no one. The press are propping up the system that sustains them. These are the people that hacked the phones of dead children, not the grieving subjects of a kindly old prince. We should reject their moralism, and we should reject the Monachy.
No Tears for Dead Royals
