Every channel filled with saturation bullshit. Every royal sycophant outdoing each other with their fulsome adulation. Scouring the voluminous records for evermore esoteric snipets of banal trivia.
‘Oh what a glorious symbol of empire she was, a mother to us all, etc, etc. An odd sort of mother that never offered a hug in 70 years on the job. Maybe mothers are different in England.
The queen died of ‘old age’ on the 8th of September.
On that same day 365,000 other people died all around the globe.
I felt the same about her death as I did about theirs.
I felt nothing. I didn’t know them. I didn’t know the queen. Who did, prey tell? Maybe her darling son Charlie, who called her mummy, how sweet.
In all the years of her reign she never said anything that I found at all interesting or amusing, just an endless string of meaningless platitudes.
…and she never said sorry, not once in the 70 long years of her endless reign, did she ever find the time or the grace to apologize for the countless atrocities committed in her name.
Of all the crimes against humanity perpetrated by the British Government while the queen was their titular head, the death of the Irish hunger strikers in 1981 will always stand out for its sheer cruelty and lack of common decency.
The I.R.A. was at war with the British government in Northern Ireland.
A captured combatant was treated as a P.O.W. under the Geneva convention.
That all changed when the British built the infamous Maze prison, especially designed for torturing members of the IRA. That torture is well documented by the United Nations Commission on Human Rights.
The inmates of The Maze were no longer treated as P.O.W.s, but as common criminals. The I.R.A. soldiers protested vehemently against this reclassification. First by refusing to wear civilian clothes, draping themselves in their blankets. Then they escalated to the ‘dirty protest,’ where they smeared their cell walls with their own excrement.
The newly elected Prime Minister of Britain, the notorious Margaret Thatcher, was unmoved. So the protesters went on hunger strike.
Their leader was Bobby Sands. He was 27 years old when he stopped
eating food. He died of starvation 66 days later, on May 5th 1981.
The Iron Lady did not bat an eyelid. That horrible woman sat back and watched as all 10 hunger strikers slowly wasted away. Totally refusing to negotiate their simple request to be treated as prisoners of war rather than common criminals.
But their deaths did not go in vein. The Irish in Northern Ireland eventually succeeded in their struggle for dignity, while Marget Thatcher went on to unleash her merciless cruelty upon the hapless coal miners.
…and where was The Queen of England and Australia during this whole disgusting and shameful episode. She was to be found sitting in her glorious palace keeping her mouth shut, offering not one single word of approbation or sympathy, as one by one those brave young men slowly succumbed to starvation.
I for one, will never forgive her for that callous silence.
If I ever found myself the titular head of a criminal organization such as the British government when they launched something like the Iraq war, I like to think I would have the common decency to resign my post, return my ill-gotten gains to the common folk, open at least some of my palaces to the homeless and spend the rest of my days making amends for the unspeakable horrors perpetrated in my name. If Charles, who has made it quite clear in the past that he would much prefer to be a tampon than the king of England, refuses to do the honorable thing and abdicate, I will condemn him as yet another gutless wonder.
The only decent members of the royal family are Harry and Megan, who have shunned the whole rotten deal and have requested a blood transfusion, replacing all that blue blood with normal red blood like the rest of the human race.
Ben Boyang 2022
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Background to the hunger strikes…..
Bobby Sands, the hunger strikers & The Good Friday Peace Agreement
Further Reading…..
Ben's Blog 