KEVAL MARIMUTHU
QUEEN ELIZABETH II was more than just a person. To different people, she represented a diverse spectrum of ideas. For some, she was emblematic of a colonial empire steeped in pillaging and plundering. Adorned with glittering jewels, ruby red as the blood spilled in their attainment. Whatever wild fantasies come to mind, they only exist because of her indelible cultural legacy.
Her passing is a gentle reminder that she was, just as all of us are, a person with her desires, torments and challenges, a living, feeling being. She reigned longer than most alive today, in the minds of many an almost immortal figure, for she is all we have ever known. Her influence in recent history cannot be understated. In Britain, the Queen was an almost permanent fixture of life. She was the monarchy.
Queen Elizabeth II understood her role from a very young age. The horrors of World War II witnessed first hand imprinted duty onto her character. She was no longer just a person. She became part of the State. Her greatness was not in her flamboyance or oratory prowess but rather her adherence to service to the country and a sense of humility that mortified the vainest of tyrants.
Wealth and power are one thing, but to be a queen like her was a complete rejection of the self. The understanding that you cannot act, be, or feel how you want to. Your emotions are state policy, your every action is focus-grouped, constantly under surveillance for the slightest slip-up, and no longer an individual but rather an extension of the State. Your life controlled by a coterie of assistants and civil servants.
It is hard to separate the crown from the empire and the individual from the crown. The Queen was not the empire. She was its greatest foe. Elizabeth oversaw the successful decolonisation of the empire on which the sun never sets. In this context, she is not "the chief monarch of a thieving raping genocidal empire," as one university professor in the US put it.
The premise of this emotionally-charged hyperbolic statement is that "the sins of the father are the sins of the son." In liberal democracies, we have long since disabused ourselves of that fallacious notion. The collective punishment advocated should be reserved for authoritarian states like North Korea. We in the West view individuals as responsible for their actions, not their descendants or those who look similar.
Should we call for reparations from the descendants of African kings who enslaved their fellow man? The supply chain began with them. Have they been absolved of their complicity? The notion of British soldiers venturing into the African hinterlands, hunting for chattle, is not based on reality. It wholly ascribes fault to the British. It is a caricature of slavery, removing nuance and the roles of other groups in the process. Let us also not forget the British ended the global slave trade. They did not start it but finished it.
The death of Elizabeth II, by the Grace of God, marks the end of an era. It is symbolic of the epoch-making shif
