Screw the British Monarchy, I'm on Harry and Meghan's Side
I just don't like kings and queens. Sorry. It's the 21st century now - grow up.
One of my favorite Substack writers lately
has devoted her Substack to trying to educate people about propaganda and media manipulation, with an emphasis on Russian efforts of this time-honored espionage tradition. I plan to dig into her work more deeply and write more about it soon given my expressed interest in the subject from my time working with Lt. Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa who wrote about it extensively in his four books:
However, she tackles the propaganda subject in other realms too and her write-up about the Prince Harry-Meghan Markle Netflix series is worth checking out:
Read the whole thing for her thoughtful analysis of how the series is a form of counter-propaganda and propaganda-expose of the relationship between the British Royal family and the British media tabloids which obsess over them.
I just wanted to point out my sympathy here on the larger topic, my emphasis added:
Anyhoo, this is all to say that I was (obviously) not above watching Netflix’s new docuseries, Harry and Meghan. I had only briefly tuned into their royal wedding and occasionally got some glimpses of their royal dramas on Twitter, but I didn’t know a whole lot about the couple. Basically, I was the perfect target audience for their series, which is — and I’m speaking here with my scholarly hat on — essentially a white propaganda piece intended to sway hearts and minds to their side. (If you’re not taking my course and interested, I cover this concept in Class 2 — it’s not necessarily a bad thing.) Whatever you want to call it, it worked, at least on me: I left the series convinced that the British monarchy is a dysfunctional and exploitative institution that crushes dreams and breaks souls. (To be honest I already believed that from watching The Crown, but this sealed it.)
That is a good summary of my position too on the British monarchy both in broader history and in its machinations during the 20th century and creeping now into the 21st.
As one who took the Tea Party, founding fathers fetishization perhaps a bit too seriously, I have what I regarded as a pretty naturally American distrust and dislike of the British crown. After all, if it didn’t suck as much as it did and wasn’t as unjust as it inherently was, our nation never would have had to fight for its independence.
But one needn’t take an American patriotic approach to the subject to simply see the institution as amoral, unjust, and infantilizing to the British people as a whole. Just look at the men who Queen Elizabeth unleashed onto the world - King Charles and Prince Andrew are hardly moral, admirable men.
Seriously - it’s the 21st century. How are there still medieval-style monarchs still in existence? And how can so many Americans be obsessed with and sympathetic to them? Rhetorical questions. And don’t even get me started on the much worse ABSOLUTE monarchs in the Middle East like in Saudi Arabia… At least the British monarchs are now at least somewhat constrained in their power in spite of possessing mountains of wealth and public idolatrous worship.
Humans just naturally prefer to have some tribal leader ruling over them rather than having to struggle with living free and being wholly responsible for their own destiny.
Thank you so much, David!