The Dangerous undercurrents of the Queen's Funeral

I had hoped to complete my speech calling for the abolition of the British Monarchy today, but I found that my readings concerning the complexities of the actual nature of the British Royal Family and the City of London, and their ties to global finance and to other massive frauds, requires much more thought. It is critical for me to get the point across in a concise and an effective manner employing a few powerful metaphors and so by to avoid the treatise, the dissertation, the academic study such as I devoted my time to in an earlier stage in my life.

But I did want to share this quote from Barbara W. Tuchman’s book The Guns of August (1962) that describes the end of the seemingly stable and chummy world order of the 19th century embodied in the all too solid and pompous funeral for Edward VII in 1910.

That funeral too was packed with a gaggle of establishment figures clinging to the last shreds of whole cloth, just like the politicians gathered from around the world in London now) as the contradictions of overproduction, out of control global finance and the growth of an arms industry dedicated to destroying the world in its search for profits started to tear everything to literal pieces. There would not be much left eight years later.

Tuchman writes,

“So gorgeous was the spectacle on the May morning of 1910 when nine kings rode in the funeral of Edward VII of England that the crowd waiting in hushed and black-clad awe, could not keep back gasps of admiration. In scarlet and blue and green and purple, three by three the sovereigns rode through the palace gates, with plumed helmets, gold braid, crimson sashes, and jeweled orders flashing in the sun. After them came five heirs apparent, forty more imperial or royal highnesses, seven queens—four dowager and three regnant—and a scattering of special ambassadors from uncrowned countries. Together they represented seventy nations in the greatest assemblage of royalty and rank ever gathered in one place and of its kind the last. The muffled tongue of Big Ben tolled nine by the clock as the cortege left the palace, but on history’s clock it was sunset, and the sun of the old world was setting in a dying blaze of splendor never to be seen again.”

Yes, one can feel sad that something familiar was lost. But the cancer had already spread everywhere just beneath the surface in Edwardian, post-Victorian, England.

If anything, looking at the horrific drive for war in the Ukraine, the spread of the conflict to Uzbekistan and elsewhere, and the complete lack of any counter arguments in the mainstream media against war, against COVID 19 fraud, the complete lack of questions from the vast majority of those we think of as expert about the decay of systems, leads us to conclude that the situation now is worse than 1910. Of course the nature of war has changed, but the resulting devastation, by injection, or by 5G, will be at least as devastating.

Hermann Broch described this period of obscene inattention to the real economy and the contradictions of international relations in his novel The Sleepwalkers (1932) which looks at the process from the German side. Broch described in that novel the ability of the best and the brightest to be sleepwalkers, to be sophisticated as lawyers, professors and bureaucrats, but at the same time to be completely asleep as to where they were going what they were doing. That is sleepwalking, after all, engaging in complex tasks while being fast asleep.

(My thanks to Chris Marsden for introducing this quote in his article “The queen’s funeral and the spectre of war and revolution” of September 20, 2022)