The Queen Is Dead...

The news over the last few weeks has been like a tediously long hallucinogenic trip that has overstayed its welcome. 

But what it has done for the world's understanding of how much we are still beholden to the idea of a supposedly divinely preordained 'chosen' bloodline to represent the standard of what being human entails is... revelatory, to say the least.

The pomp and splendour and ceremony and the keeping of 'tradition' via the funeral rites for a long-reigning monarch and the investiture of a new one has certainly beguiled the world, taking with it every last vestige of self-respect and dignity that we, as a species, once collectively thought we possessed.

With respect to the post-colonial world, the scales have scandalously fallen from our vision of 'empire', revealing a not so much decolonised world as one whose nostalgia for a violent submissive past has not worn thin despite decades of supposed evidence-based academic reckoning and multi-national self-determination. 

You can hear it all around you - plaintive responses of, "the 'Commonwealth', the 'Commonwealth'" abound whenever any mendacious readings of the horrors of British colonisation are challenged. Leave aside the blatant inequity with which treaties and arrangements for withdrawal from their colonies by Britain were negotiated with the rudimentary representatives of its erstwhile subjugated lands only after they were stripped bare of any semblance of agency with which they could capitalize on their remaining 'natural resources' after the 'global economy' had had its say.

This isn't a curious all-encompassing amnesia so much as a shouting down of all unbiased thinking and expression.

The West has certainly revealed itself over the past few weeks for what it has always been; a craven, despairing beast unwilling to face upto its cannibalistic mercantilist history that dominated so much of the world for hundreds of dark and terrifying years (for the subjugated). A time in which large swathes of the world lost its own 'history' and 'culture' and 'traditional practices' and socio-religious identities. 

I cannot abide a world that 'they' have made up, whatever human sensitivities I may hold for the passing on of a 90-year old affectatious white woman. A culture and a people that has not gotten over its predatory past must be confined to the dustbin of history. 

'Their' time is at an end.