Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan: The Impacts of Colonialism Outlive the British Queen

I owe the breadth and depth of my conscious awareness, of my path of continuously shedding layer after layer of ignorance and illusions, of my fierce and passionate commitment to truth and to working together to build a just and equitable world — and so much more! — to courageous truth-tellers such as Amy Goodman and her husband Dennis Moynihan. Deepest bow of gratitude, love, and respect. May we all be inspired to be passionate seekers of truth and to sharing and acting upon what we are learning. We're all related, all family, all in this together! 🙏 Molly

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan

It has long been said that “the sun never sets on the British Empire,” referring to the United Kingdom’s colonies around the globe. Will the death of Queen Elizabeth II trigger further shrinking of the empire, as former colonies now in the British Commonwealth debate whether to permanently sever ties? With its history of slavery, concentration camps, executions and torture, what would reparations and accountability look like?

On her 21st birthday in 1947, Elizabeth, five years before her coronation as Queen, said, “I declare before you all that my whole life whether it be long or short shall be devoted to your service and the service of our great imperial family to which we all belong.”

Elizabeth was in South Africa, a British Commonwealth nation, one year before its white minority imposed the racist policies of apartheid over the majority Black and other non-white populations. Over the next half-century, South Africa’s apartheid regime, shored up by the United Kingdom and the United States, demonstrated that not all in the Queen’s “imperial family” fared well.

“I would like to see the dismantling of this notion of the Commonwealth,” Cornell University Professor Mukoma Wa Ngugi said on the Democracy Now! news hour. Mukoma was born in the U.S. but raised in Kenya, the son of renowned Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o.

“‘Commonwealth?’ Whose wealth?” Professor Mukoma wa Ngugi asked. “The book I’m working on now on Africans and African Americans took me to Keta in Ghana, where slaves were taken from. It’s very depressed [by] the aftershocks…or the trauma of slavery. Maya Angelou called it melancholic.”

“I left Keta. Then I went to Bristol in England. Bristol was a slave-trading port. It’s thriving…Most people know it now because of the dismantling of the statue of [Edward] Colston [during the George Floyd protests in 2020], who was one of the slave traders. We can see the effects of slavery, of colonialism. We can see how the wealth of England was built.”

In 1952, Elizabeth was in Kenya when she learned of the death of her father, King George VI, and became Queen. Kenya suffered for decades under British colonial rule. An organized armed resistance rose up in the 1950s, called the Mau Mau. Harvard historian Caroline Elkins documented Britain’s violence against Kenyans in her Pulitzer Prize-winning book “Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya.”

“Nearly 1.5 million Kikuyu, or Africans, were detained in detention camps, or emergency villages, barbed-wire villages, as a way of suppressing Mau Mau,” Elkins explained on Democracy Now! “This was a story about systematic violence, torture, murder and massive cover-up…serious crimes happened on the queen’s imperial watch. Her picture hung in every detention camp in Kenya as detainees were beaten in order to exact their loyalty to the British crown.”

Many nations still struggle with the impacts of British colonialism. “Formerly enslaved and colonized nations and people, like those of the Caribbean, including Barbados, have been inserted in that international order in a structurally subordinate and exploitative manner,” David Comissiong, Barbados’s ambassador to the Caribbean Community, said on Democracy Now! last December, just after Barbados severed its Commonwealth relationship with the UK, removing Queen Elizabeth II as head of state and declaring itself sovereign. “Barbados was the first society in human history that was built totally on the basis of slavery — its economy, its social system, its ideology. That’s our history. The royal family was deeply involved in the British slave trade and the system of African enslavement,” Comissiong said.

The Prime Minister of the Caribbean nation of Antigua and Barbuda, Gaston Browne, announced this week that the country will hold a referendum within three years to decide on complete separation from the UK.

Dorbrene O’Marde, the chairperson of the Antigua and Barbuda Reparations Commission and an ambassador-at-large of Antigua, said this week on Democracy Now! that Queen Elizabeth II “managed to cloak the historical brutality of empire in this veneer of grandeur and pomp and pageantry and graciousness…We need to examine that history a lot more closely.”

Queen Elizabeth’s eldest son has succeeded her, and is now King Charles III. He will be confronted with rising demands for accountability and reparations for the generations of colonial exploitation that enriched the United Kingdom and the royal family, himself included. The Windsor family’s estimated wealth is in the billions of dollars.

“The CARICOM reparations plan talks of development,” Dorbrene O’Marde said. “where the hurt of enslavement and genocide continues to exist and continues to impact the lives of Caribbean people today…You have committed crimes against humanity and there is a moral and an ethical demand that you acknowledge these crimes.”

King Charles III should heed the call of these former colonial subjects, and answer for the innumerable harms inflicted worldwide in the name of the British monarchy.

Please go here for the original article: https://www.democracynow.org/2022/9/15/the_impacts_of_colonialism_outlive_the?utm_source=Democracy+Now%21&utm_campaign=536afc8b68-Daily_Digest_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_fa2346a853-536afc8b68-191574905

Dismantle the Commonwealth: Queen Elizabeth’s Death Prompts Reckoning with Colonial Past in Africa

I can hardly express my gratitude and the breath of fresh air that I experienced in listening with my husband to this broadcast. Ron and I had been consistently turning off the endless news glorifying Queen Elizabeth in the wake of her death. Corporate funded media consistently neglected to present the larger picture, a larger picture so essential for us to know, understand, absorb, and transform if the endless suffering and death, racism and entitlement, injustice and inequality is to be seen for what it is and finally, finally!, ended. This massive silence was especially disturbing given the vast opportunity that the death of Queen Elizabeth presented to highlight the full expanse of what has transpired under her watch. 

As long as the truth about colonialism and empire is denied, is held in silence, is not given the light of day there can be no healing, no justice and reparations, no transformation of the deadly status quo that permeates so much of our world and perpetuates the ignorance and apathy, greed and entitlement, racism and cruelty and violence that is rooted in the profound suffering, displacement, and death of millions. 

This must change. It must. We need to care! We need to stop justifying, glorifying, and colluding in the toxic poison of empire and colonialism. Another is possible! — Molly

The death of Queen Elizabeth II has focused global attention on the British royal family and renewed criticism of the monarchy both inside the U.K. and abroad, especially among peoples colonized by Britain. “There’s a degree of psychosis that you can go to another people’s land, colonize them, and then expect them to honor you at the same time,” says Kenyan American author Mukoma Wa Ngugi, who teaches literature at Cornell University and whose own family was deeply impacted by the bloody British suppression of the Mau Mau revolution. He says that with Queen Elizabeth’s death, there needs to be a “dismantling” of the Commonwealth and a real reckoning with colonial abuses. We also speak with Harvard historian Caroline Elkins, a leading scholar of British colonialism, who says that while it’s unclear how much Queen Elizabeth personally knew about concentration camps, torture and other abuses in Kenya during her early reign, the monarchy must reckon with that legacy. “Serious crimes happened on the queen’s imperial watch. In fact, her picture hung in every detention camp in Kenya as detainees were beaten in order to exact their loyalty to the British crown,” says Elkins.

Please go here for the original program: https://www.democracynow.org/2022/9/12/queen_elizabeth_dead_british_colonialism_africa

Mary Oliver: Song For Autumn

Song For Autumn

 In the deep fall
don’t you imagine the leaves think how
comfortable it will be to touch
the earth instead of the
nothingness of air and the endless
freshets of wind? And don’t you think
the trees themselves, especially those with mossy,
warm caves, begin to think
of the birds that will come – six, a dozen – to sleep
inside their bodies? And don’t you hear
the goldenrod whispering goodbye,
the everlasting being crowned with the first
tuffets of snow? The pond
vanishes, and the white field over which
the fox runs so quickly brings out
its blue shadows. And the wind pumps its
bellows. And at evening especially,
the piled firewood shifts a little,
longing to be on its way.

— Mary Oliver 

 

Mary Oliver: Real Prayers Are Not the Words, But the Attention That Comes First

 The little hawk leaned sideways and, tilted,
rode the wind.  Its eye at this distance looked
like green glass; its feet were the color
of butter.  Speed, obviously, was joy.  But
then, so was the sudden, slow circle it carved
into the slightly silvery air, and the
squaring of its shoulders, and the pulling into
itself the sharp-edged wings, and the
falling into the grass where it tussled a moment,
like a bundle of brown leaves, and then, again,
lifted itself into the air, that butter-color
clenched in order to hold a small, still
body, and it flew off as my mind sang out oh
all that loose, blue rink of sky, where does
it go to, and why?

— Mary Oliver 

Blessing for a Child born in Autumn

Born into the color of chrysanthemums –

umber and amber,

purple and gold and bronze,

may you have color in life.

Born into the leaf-falling

and the life-clarifying time,

of the scarlet-chasing of maples,

and the dark true silhouettes

of oak and elm,

bare as bones,

may you always be able to shed the

scattered things,

and find roots deep,

to outline in the glow of sunset

the naked beauty of your soul.

Born into the abundance of pumpkin

and Indian corn, of squash,

and apples, red as joy,

born into a ripeness,

when the earth is warmer

than the wind, born into

the grey and weathered ingathering

of working fields and barns,

and the shabby rich fruition

of roadside farmstands,

may you have harvest, and touch

the bounty you have planted.

Born into the season of all souls,

ghosts and saints, season

of bonfires to hallow the hunting dark

and lanterns to shine

the wandering spirits in,

may you have wandering in you,

and a holiness no cloister

can define;

may a great creative fire

be kindled on the horizon of you;

and, yet, may there always be windows

where love lights a candle

to welcome you home.

 

— Maren Tirabassi 

 

Henry Giroux: When Books Are Banned

Blessed are the truth-tellers, the artists and poets, the visionaries and wisdom-keepers, the activists and authors who illuminate the larger pictures of what is essential for us to see, know, absorb, and act upon. Henry Giroux is certainly among them. May we be passionate truth-seekers. May we listen and be changed, deepened, inspired, and grow in compassionate and fierce activism and truth-telling ourselves, ever expanding how it is that we act out of the consciousness of a higher good for us all. — Molly

The rise of fascist politics across the globe has frightening echoes with a poisonous past indebted to racial cleansing and a politics of disposability. When books are banned, black and brown people are dehumanized and shipped across borders as if they were garbage to be thrown away, teachers and librarians are punished for teaching about a genocidal past that right-wingers wish to erase, universities turn their backs on the growing threat of tyranny by focusing on learning objectives instead of civic issues, politics is degraded by calls for political violence, women's rights are nullified, and the courts are corrupted by right-wing extremists, fascism no longer becomes a threat, it crashes down on us like an atomic explosion. If we don't act collectively to address this nightmare, an authoritarian past will become our new reality.

— Henry Giroux 

https://www.henryagiroux.com/ 

 

 

Joanna Macy: Out of This Darkness a New World Can Arise

Photo by Molly

Out of this darkness a new world can arise, 

not to be constructed by our minds so much as to 

emerge from our dreams. Even though we cannot see 

clearly how it's going to turn out, we are still called 

to let the future into our imagination. We will 

never be able to build what we have not  

first cherished in our hearts.

 

— Joanna Macy

 

John O'Donohue: Beannacht

Beannacht / Blessing

On the day when
The weight deadens
On your shoulders
And you stumble,
May the clay dance
To balance you.

 

And when your eyes
Freeze behind
The grey window
And the ghost of loss
Gets into you,
May a flock of colours,
Indigo, red, green
And azure blue,
Come to awaken in you
A meadow of delight.

 

When the canvas frays
In the currach of thought
And a stain of ocean
Blackens beneath you,
May there come across the waters
A path of yellow moonlight
To bring you safely home.

 

May the nourishment of the earth be yours,
May the clarity of light be yours,
May the fluency of the ocean be yours,
May the protection of the ancestors be yours.

 

And so may a slow
Wind work these words
Of love around you,
An invisible cloak
To mind your life.

 

— John O'Donohue