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
queen elizabeth ii
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
The Death of a Queen and the Whitewashing of Empire
The queen will be mourned by the millions who loved her, but as Charles becomes king, a reckoning must be made with the monarchy's role in the world.
Sep 13, 2022
ollowing the death of Queen Elizabeth, no one in the established media is taking any chances with the public mood. Public affection for the late queen is not in doubt, and yet BBC journalists are whipping up paroxysms of grief that wouldn't be out of place in North Korea.
The BBC's Johnny Diamond and Nicholas Witchell have wrung out every possible emotive line about the queen's selfless devotion to service and the nation's unending sorrow. Yet an objective view of her reign must separate her personal qualities from the role the monarchy has played in the service of Britain's imperial interests, machinations and crimes over the last 70 years.
The examples are too numerous to list, but in every major crisis since the queen was crowned, amid a period of troubled decolonisation, the monarchy played its part.
Britain's close ties to the shah of Iran prior to and following a British and US-backed coup in 1953 is a perfect illustration of the way the monarch functioned to legitimise neocolonial policies through direct relations with pro-western dictators. Shah Pahlavi ruled with a brutal secret police and was put into power because his elected prime minister had nationalised Iran's oil industry - a highly strategic part of Britain's Middle East imperial possessions.
Once safely installed, the oil profits flowed once more. The queen received the shah as an official guest in 1959 and made a state visit to Iran as the shah's guest in 1961. Further mutual visits followed, and relations were extremely cordial.
Of course the queen did not author the 1953 coup - that was Prime Minister Winston Churchill and US President Eisenhower - but she helped strengthen relations with Iran over the decades by forming a personal relationship with the shah and his wife, until he was overthrown in the revolution of 1979.
Backing autocracy
Britain attempted to continue its imperial influence across the Middle East through the support for the royal regimes that it put in place and supported in Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Libya and the Gulf emirates. In the post-war period of anti-colonial revolt, several of these monarchs were overthrown to the great chagrin of Britain.
In the case of Libya, King Idris, formerly the leader of the Sanussi tribe and emir of Cyrenaica, was awarded the Grand Cross of the British Empire for his support in the defeat of German and Italian forces in North Africa during World War II.
The queen's cousin Earl Mountbatten (who oversaw the precipitous and disastrous partition of India in 1947) was a close friend of Idris and used to visit him in Libya and stay at his royal palace. In return Idris supported the UK and France during the attack on Egypt in 1956, and provided the US with a major airbase near Tripoli, home to 4,600 Americans. All of this was lost in Muammar Gaddafi's coup of 1969.
The British policy of installing and supporting monarchies across the Middle East sits oddly with the UK's proclaimed support for democracy, when no democratic or constitutional reform has taken place in most of these UK-backed regimes. The British royal family plays an essential role in maintaining an autocratic model of diplomacy and personal relations with regimes including Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Oman.
These regimes support western economic interests across the Middle East, while also pouring billions into the British economy, pumping up invisible earnings and buying up luxury property and Premier League football clubs.
The queen's love of horses was shared with her good friend Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the emir of Dubai, who notoriously kidnapped two of his daughters, one in the middle of the English countryside in 2000, the other in the Indian Ocean in 2018. It was reported that the queen would no longer be seen in public with the emir following the recent court case confirming the kidnappings.
Commander in chief
Much is made of the non-political nature of the monarch and the way the queen stayed out of politics and kept her views to herself. But no matter her discretion, her role was hardly non-political.The queen was the head of state and the commander-in-chief of the British Armed Forces. All soldiers had to swear an oath of loyalty to her before deployment to Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere. These wars have left devastation and hundreds of thousands dead.
As the queen said in her broadcast to the armed forces in 2009 as Britain's iniquitous role in the Iraq war came to an end: "Wherever you are deployed in the world, you should be assured that I and the whole nation are deeply thankful for the part you play in helping to maintain peace around the globe."
Her grandson Prince Harry is only the latest royal who served during a war where British forces have been accused of war crimes; the deaths of scores of civilians in night raids, executed in a macabre game of body counts that was covered up at the highest levels of the army, according to a recent BBC investigation.
The Duke of Sussex served in the British Army for 10 years and was deployed to Afghanistan twice during Nato's 20-year intervention in the country, first in 2007 on the frontline as a forward air controller, and then again as a copilot gunner with the 662 Squadron, part of the army'sAttack Helicopter Force.
His father, King Charles, has visited the Gulf region many times, enabling the continued sale of British weapons to the Saudi regime in its bloody war in Yemen that has seen thousands killed in air strikes. This aspect of the royal family's function within the British state is currently being airbrushed.
Many have praised the role of the queen in transitioning the UK to a post-colonial power through her role as head of the Commonwealth. But more critical voices have raised the question of the way in which Britain withdrew from its colonies and dealt with the legacy of empire during the queen's reign.
The sense of criminals fleeing a crime scene is hard to avoid: mass burning of colonial files began in India and, from the early 1960s, the British government engaged in Operation Legacy, destroying countless records of the British colonial regimes. As a commentator wrote on Twitter: "Now is the time to discuss this kind of detail because [the queen's] death is being used to push a sanitised history of her reign."
For the duration of the period of mourning that is now being enforced nationwide, criticism of the monarchy by the 22 percent who support a republic is being treated as a form of dissidence, with protests against the royal family shut down by the police. The truth is support for the monarchy has declined significantly in recent years, and the debate about its role domestically as the pinnacle of a semi-feudal system of land ownership and class hierarchy will not go away.
The queen will be mourned by the millions who loved her, but as Charles becomes king, a reckoning must be made with the monarchy's role in preserving a corrupt authoritarian system across swathes of the Middle East.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Mourn the Queen, But God Save the People
Great Britain hasn't just lost a monarch. The British social welfare state, once a shining beacon for Western democracies, is also dying.
Sep 09, 2022
Every human death is a loss. But Queen Elizabeth lived a long and, from most accounts, good life. The people close to her have lost a mother, a friend, a real person. They shouldn't be dismissed. Neither should the British citizens who mourn her. The grief people feel for a public figure is real, even if what they're really mourning are the passing days of their lives.
I wish we lived in a world where it wasn't necessary to put this particular death into perspective, but we don't. Shortly before her death, the Queen met with the new prime minister of Great Britain. Liz Truss was chosen for that position by the less than 200,000 dues-paying members of the Conservative Party, some 0.3 percent of the British electorate. That's right: a handful of party stalwarts, predominately white, male, and older, paid for the privilege of choosing the country's leader. They call that "democracy."
The grief people feel for a public figure is real, even if what they're really mourning are the passing days of their lives.
Truss is a hard-right extremist in the Trump mold, a pro-fossil-fuel extremist who has already begun filling sensitive environmentally-related positions with climate deniers like Jacob Rees-Mogg. As a result, more people will die. More than half of Britons think she will be a "poor" or "terrible" Prime Minister, and they're sure to be right.
It didn't have to be this way. Not so long ago, the British social welfare state was an example for the world to follow. Its dismantlement began under Margaret Thatcher and was carried on by the Bill Clinton-like "New Labour" leadership of Tony Blair in the 1990s. Once back in office, the Conservatives stepped up that effort with ferocious abandon. Post-industrial Britain is reeling from the upward transfer of wealth now, just like its breakaway American colony. Special relationship, indeed.
A New York Timesarticle remarked in passing that the Queen's family "is known for its longevity," noting that Elizabeth's mother died in 2002 at the age of 101. That's not just good genes. The House of Windsor receives the best medical care imaginable, is fed a steady and healthy diet, and is housed in comfort. Those comforts, promised to everyone by the British social welfare state, have an enormous impact on longevity. A report from the King's Fund notes that in 2018-20, males in the poorest 10 percent of areas in England died almost a decade earlier than males in the 10 percent wealthiest areas, with an 8-year difference among females. Each of these deaths is a tragedy, too.
What's more, as in the US, conservative mismanagement of the Covid-19 pandemic took many more lives than necessary in Great Britain, made worse by the ongoing evisceration of the NHS. At least 168,000 excess deaths in Britain have been estimated since the pandemic began. (The population of Great Britain is roughly one-fifth that of the United States; Americans should multiply these numbers by five to get a visceral sense of their impact.)
Most of these unremarked deaths occurred in considerably less comfortable places than Balmoral. A recent study showed that 90,000 Britons die in a state of poverty every year. More than one in four working-age women die impoverished, a number that climbs substantially among minorities.
The war in Ukraine has resulted in energy shortages which have hit the British population especially hard. As the Associated Press reports, "A cost-of-living crisis in Britain is about to get worse, with millions of people paying about 80% more a year on their household energy bills starting in October ... people will pay 3,549 pounds ($4,188) a year for heating and electricity."
Those shortages haven't hit everybody hard. They've opened the floodgates for energy company profiteering, with Bloomberg reporting that "UK gas producers and electricity generators may make excess profits totaling as much as PS170 billion ($199 billion) over the next two years."
Liz Truss's preferred "solution" is to use government funds to cap out-of-pocket consumer costs at $2,800 US per households. That's still very expensive for many Britons. Her proposal also represents an enormous transfer of wealth from the British public sector--that is, the British people--to the same energy companies that have been scooping up public wealth since the war began. The obvious solution, a windfall profits tax on those companies, is not on the table.
This entire crisis could have been avoided Thatcher had not sold off the publicly-owned British energy sector to private interests in the 1980s. That dismantlement of public resources is directly responsible for the current immiseration of the British people.
It is this crisis that led to the bizarre spectacle of a British morning news program's "spin-the-wheel" contest for struggling listeners: we'll give you 1,000 pounds or pay your energy bill for four months, whichever the wheel decides. As the Washington Post reports:
Viewers of British TV show, "This Morning," watched as the wheel spun, eventually coming to a stop. "It's your energy bill!" host Phillip Schofield shrieked. The caller expressed relief at his prize, which would cover the costs of his bill for four months. "Oh my god, thank you," the winner said.
The Post says that people called the show "tone deaf," "distasteful" and "dystopian," while Russian television gloated. It's another flicker of flame from Britain's burning social contract.
Great Britain hasn't just lost a monarch. The British social welfare state, once a shining beacon for Western democracies, is also dying. On a human level, every death is an occasion for mourning. But who mourns the needlessly dead or the system that could have saved them? If people could learn to care half as much about every victim of poverty or inadequate healthcare as they do about one person, we might yet build a just society.
They will play "God Save the Queen" and "God Save the King" many times in the days to come. But who will save the people?
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular