SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
prince harry
Prince Harry's PR Firestorm Creates Opportunity to Rethink Militarism
The criticism Harry has faced about his comments on Afghanistan is an opportunity to dig deeper and take on the dominant narratives in our society about war more broadly.
Jan 19, 2023
In the wake of Prince Harry’s new book Spare, leaked excerpts that he had killed 25 people in the war in Afghanistan shocked readers. He reflected on what it’s like to take a life in war: “You can't kill people if you think of them as people. You can't really harm people if you think of them as people. They were chess pieces removed from the board. Bads taken away before they could kill Goods. I'd been trained to ‘other-ize’ them, trained well. On some level I recognized this learned detachment as problematic. But I also saw it as an unavoidable part of soldiering.”
There was deep anger over Prince Harry’s admission. One British Army colonel told The Independent, “That’s not how you behave in the army.” But we shouldn’t be angry that he told the truth about the dehumanization inherent in warfare. We should be angry that the truth isn’t told more often.
On the Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Prince Harry said he revealed these details about his time in Afghanistan to address the very real crisis of high veteran suicides. "I made a choice to share it because having spent nearly two decades working with veterans all around the world, I think the most important thing is to be honest and be able to give space to others to be able to share their experiences without any shame," he told Colbert.
The Costs of War Project, an organization with which we consult, found that at least four times as many active-duty personnel and war veterans of post-9/11 conflicts have died of suicide (30,177) than in combat (7,057). It’s laudable that Prince Harry is seeking to support other veterans. And the criticism he’s facing about his comments on Afghanistan is an opportunity to dig deeper and take on the dominant narratives in our society about war more broadly.
As Americans, we are often warned against critiquing or opposing war in the name of our patriotic duty. We watch movies that glorify war, and are taught at a young age that the causes of U.S. wars are always just or well-intentioned, and that any damage done is simply the price of protecting our freedoms.
Here’s what we’re not told: Nearly a million people have died in the post-9/11 wars, an overwhelming number of whom were civilians. The disproportionate impacts of these wars have been born by Muslims and people of color; nearly all of the 85 countries in which U.S. counterterrorism operations have occurred are in Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. The dehumanization that Prince Harry describes stems in part from the systemic racism that undergirds militarism.
"Working to chip away at the dominant narrative that sanitizes war could be Harry's most powerful legacy of all."
What’s more, the New York Timesreported that there are more militant groups operating now than when we embarked on these wars 20 years ago. The post-9/11 wars have actually been a main driver of conflict and recruitment in places such as Burkina Faso and Somalia.
We also aren’t told that War is big business, subsidized by taxpayers.
As the U.S. military budget tops $850 billion, other countries spend a fraction of what we do on their militaries. In fact, the U.S. spends more on war than the next nine countries combined. Spending on affordable housing, education, and healthcare in the U.S. are deprioritized by congressional leaders in favor of funding war.
But who actually gets the money we allot to the Pentagon? Costs of War has noted that nearly half of the Pentagon’s spending goes to military contractors, and a large portion of these contracts have gone to just five major corporations: Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, Raytheon, and Northrop Grumman.
It should be no surprise then that weapons makers have spent $2.5 billion on lobbying since 9/11, employing, on average, over 700 lobbyists per year—more than one for every member of Congress.
It’s not just K Street where the industry shines. National security pundits on TV news too often have undisclosed ties to the weapons industry, ensuring that the media narrative serves the interest of militarism, not true peace and security.
As Prince Harry told Stephen Colbert, context is everything. We must acknowledge not only the full toll that our wars take, but also, the systemic motivations behind them.
Although a prince, Harry was a young man when he served in Afghanistan as an army officer. Now, he’s older than his mother was when she died, and has built a platform to “drive systemic cultural change,” according to the website of the Archewell Foundation, which he and Megan Markle founded.
He can take this PR firestorm and create real cultural change when it comes to understanding the full impact of and systemic reasons for militarism. Working to chip away at the dominant narrative that sanitizes war could be Harry's most powerful legacy of all.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Like the Diana Story, Meghan's Fight With the Royals Will Ensure Nothing Really Changes
The Royal Family, the perpetuation of privilege and the erosion of democracy will march on as before, in the same long and glorious British tradition.
Mar 09, 2021
Oprah Winfrey's interview with Meghan and Harry is a perfect case study of how an important political debate about the corrupting role of the monarchy on British life gets shunted aside yet again, not just by the endless Royal soap opera but by supposedly progressive identity politics.
As so often, a focus on identity risks not only blunting our capacity for critical thinking but can be all too readily weaponised: in this case, as the media's main take-away from the Oprah interview illustrates, by providing an implicit defence of class privilege.
The racism directed at Markle--sorry, the Duchess of Sussex--and baby Archie is ugly, it goes without saying (but maybe more to the point, must be stated to avoid being accused of ignoring or trivialising racism).
The concern expressed by a senior royal during Markle's pregnancy about Archie's likely darker skin colour does indeed reveal how deeply ingrained racism is in the British establishment and how much it trickles down to the rest of British society, not least through the billionaire-owned media.
Princely 'birthright'
But more significant is how the racism demonstrated towards Markle and Archie has played out in the media coverage of the interview and the resulting "national conversation" on social media--nowadays, the only real barometer we have for judging such conversations.
The problem is that, via Oprah, the Sussexes get to frame the significance of the House of Windsor's racism: both in the threat that, when Charles ascends to the throne, grandson Archie will be deprived of his princely "birthright" because he is of mixed race; and in the fact that Harry and Meghan have been hounded from Palace life into celebrity-style exile in the US.
In the process, an important, democratic conversation has yet again been supplanted about why Britain still maintains and reveres these expensive relics of a medieval system of unaccountable rule based on a superior (if no longer divine) blood line.
Instead, the conversation initiated by Oprah is a much more politically muddled one about whether it is right that a "commoner" woman of colour and her mixed-race son are obstructed from fully participating in this medieval system of privilege.
Image makeover
A real political debate about privilege--one that demands greater equality and an end to racist presumptions about blood lines--has been obscured and trivialised once again by a row of the kind preferred by the corporate media: whether most of the Royal Family are too racist to realise that a woman of colour like Meghan could help them with a twenty-first-century image makeover.
As a result, we are presented with a false binary choice. Either we cheer on the Royal Family and implicitly condone their racism; or we cheer on Meghan and implicitly support her battle to better veil the feudal ugliness of the British monarchy.
It ought to be possible to want Archie to live a life equal to "white" babies in the UK without also wanting him to live a life of pomp and circumstance, designed to ensure that other babies--white, black and brown--grow up to be denied the privileges he enjoys by virtue of royal birth.
\u201cThis is your reminder that Versailles gets double the number of visitors compared to Buckingham Palace.\n\nThe way for the country to really get an economic boost from the royal family is therefore to chop all their heads off.\u201d— Craig Murray - (@Craig Murray -) 1615242460
Divisive and enervating
What the Oprah interview does--is designed to do--is derail the intersection of class and race in politically damaging ways.
A meaningful democratic struggle prioritises class unity as the battering ram against establishment power that long ago learnt to protect itself by dividing us through our competing identities. Class struggle does not ignore race; it embraces it and all other socially constructed identities used by power to rationalise oppression. Class subsumes them into a collective struggle strengthened by numbers.
Struggle based on identity, by contrast, is inherently divisive and politically enervating, as the Meghan Markle case illuminates. Her challenge to Royal "tradition" alienates those most invested in ideas of monarchy, "Britishness" or white identity. And it does so while offering no more than a sop to those invested in breaking glass ceilings, even of the kind that aren't worth smashing in the first place.
Meghan's fight for the first mixed-race British prince is no more politically progressive than the celebration by the media two years ago of the news that for the first time women were in charge of the military-industrial complex--the one that rains down death and destruction on "Third World" men, women and children.
Value for money
Strange as it is to recall now--in an age of social media, when anyone can comment on anything, and the "mainstream" media's billionaire gatekeepers have supposedly been sidelined--ordinary Britons discussed abolishing the monarchy far more in the 1970s, when I was a child, than they do nowadays.
Getting rid of the Royal Family--like getting rid of nuclear weapons, another topic no one talks about seriously any more--was mainstream enough then that Royalists were often forced on to the defensive. As the mood soured among a vocal section of the population, the Queen's defenders were forced hurriedly to switch from arguments rooted in deference and tradition to more utilitarian claims that the Royals offered "value for money", supposedly boosting commerce and tourism.
Prince Charles' engagement in 1981 to a beautiful, demure teenage "English rose", Princess Diana, looked to many, even at the time, suspiciously like a move to reinvigorate a tired, increasingly unpopular brand.
The media spectacle of a fairytale romance and wedding, followed by years of controversy, disillusionment and betrayal, culminating in divorce and finally Diana's death / murder, very effectively distracted the British public for the next 16 years from the question of what purpose a Royal Family served. It became only too clear what role they played: they kept us engrossed in a real-life, better-than-TV drama.
Champions of identity
Diana's supposed struggle to grow from adolescence to womanhood in the glare of media intrusion and under the strictures of "The Firm" created the prototype for a new type of apolitical, Mills and Boon-style identity politics.
Following Diana's escapades--from the secular saint who cleared landmines to the raunchy princess who had illicit sex with her riding instructor, an army major no less--was far more thrilling than the campaign to end the monarchy and the regressive landed class it still represents.
Diana's life story helped pave the way to the reinvention of the left through the 1990s--under Tony Blair in the UK and Bill Clinton in the US--as champions of a new social issues-obsessed non-politics.
Both were ushered into power after reassuring the newly triumphant corporate elite that they would harness and divert popular energy away from dangerous struggles for political change towards safe struggles for superficial social change.
In the UK, that was achieved most obviously in Blair's assiduous courtship of media mogul Rupert Murdoch. Importantly, Blair persuaded Murdoch that, as prime minister, he would not only preserve the economic legacy of the Thatcher years but head further down the path of deregulation.
Murdoch--himself no fan of a British monarchy that had always looked down on him as a vulgar Australian--also understood that the inevitable soap opera quality of exceptional individuals battling the UK's rigid hierarchy of privilege, spurred on by Blair's New Labour, would prove great for sales of his newspapers. Just as Oprah knows that the only tangible consequence of the Harry and Meghan interview is that it will rake in many more millions for her own media empire.
Sticking It to the Man
In the new era of identity-saturated non-politics, demands for equality mean removing obstacles so that more women, people of colour and the LGBT community can participate in institutions that represent power and privilege.
These battles are not about overthrowing those systems of privilege, as earlier identity-based struggles such as the Black Panthers' were. Success serves simply to placate identity-focused groups by helping those of most "merit" elbow their way into the preserves of established power.
Those achievements started with the most visible, least significant areas of the economy, such as sport and celebrity, and led over time to greater access to the professions.
The current excitement among some on the left at Meghan's "Sticking It to the Man" appears to derive from the disruptive threat she poses to the House of Windsor--not to its economic, social and political power, but to its status as the last hold-out against Blair's identity-fuelled "revolution".
Narrative twist
Diana's emancipation story helped distract us for nearly two decades from confronting central questions about the nature and role of the British establishment in preserving and veiling power.
Now Meghan Markle is expanding the identity story in a new direction, one that once again embraces the story of a young, "headstrong" woman scorned by the Royal Family for snubbing tradition. But this time there is an alluring contemporary twist to the narrative: the Family's resistance to diversity and its refusal to own its racist past.
Unlike Diana who stood alone and seemingly fragile, Meghan and Harry offer a more relevant, modern picture of a confident, professional young couple standing and fighting together for what is fair, for what should be theirs by right.
This feels important, bold and empowering. But it is the precise opposite. It is more Mills and Boons, but this time with diversity thrown in to generate more appeal on one side and more hostility on the other.
Meghan's story will continue to work its magic: fascinating, infuriating and pacifying us in equal measure as we focus on what is private, unknowable and can be endlessly contested rather than what is universal, visible and impossible to refute.
Meanwhile, the Royal Family, the perpetuation of privilege and the erosion of democracy will march on as before, in the same long and glorious British tradition.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Racism Among the Royals? Really?
While Queen Elizabeth the person may be off the hook for asking about Archie's complexion, the monarchy's not off the hook for colonialism or white supremacy.
Mar 09, 2021
Shock, horror! There is racism among the royals. I know sarcasm is the laziest form of humor, but is there something about a hereditary white monarchy that we don't yet understand?
In what's being called a "hand grenade" interview with Oprah Winfrey on Sunday, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex let rip about the misery they'd endured as the royal family's first mixed-race couple and alleged that someone--not Queen Elizabeth or her husband--even questioned the likely skin tone of their yet-to-be born baby.
In the context of the Divine Right of Kings, the "who-said-what-to-Harry and Meghan" question is most certainly missing the white supremacist forest for the trees.
Now the who-said-what-to-whom racism chase has started. This was always going to be a clickbait cash cow for commercial media, and so it has been. Even as much of the world tried to mark International Women's Day, March 8th, the media closed in on one woman, Queen Elizabeth, and her entourage.
A palace under pressure and a game of high-profile "gotcha" is good for clickbait and ratings, but it doesn't help us understand racism.
In the context of the Divine Right of Kings, the "who-said-what-to-Harry and Meghan" question is most certainly missing the white supremacist forest for the trees.
In fact, the whole Meghan vs the Monarchy episode is only worth talking about because of the way it illustrates just what we as a society have been doing wrong when it comes to talking about racism.
Understood as a personal attitude problem, the utterly unscientific assertion that human beings are different on account of their skin tone is a nasty phenomenon that we uproot by upbraiding individuals. There's no excuse for racist words or acts in our multicultural society, we mostly agree.
But looking at racism as a personal problem, we miss the bigger picture, which in this case is a twelve-hundred year-old system by which a single family holds unaccountable power over the United Kingdom's parliament, its military and its church. That includes Scotland, Wales and a hunk of Ireland. The Queen is also titular head of 14 other countries, including many Caribbean and Pacific islands.
When the British Empire was at its height, the Crown ruled lucratively over 412 million people across one quarter of the globe. There's nothing democratic, secular or multi-cultural about that.
So, while Queen Elizabeth the person may be off the hook for asking about Archie's complexion, the monarchy's not off the hook for colonialism or white supremacy.
And while we're talking about systems, for International Women's Day, UNICEF reported that ten million additional child marriages of girls of color may occur before the end of the decade, threatening years of progress. Did you see that headline anywhere?
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular