No Irish jubilee celebrations for an imperial monarch

By Lasair Dhearg

Irish Republicans, and indeed Republicans throughout the world, will never celebrate the lives of any monarch and especially one who resides in massive palaces in England.

Barbados declares itself a republic. Yes! It can be done!

Ceremony swearing in Dame Sandra Mason as Barbados’ first President, November 29, 2021.

For the information of readers, we are reposting two articles on the declaration of Barbados, November 30, 2021 that it will become a republic.

Renewal Update

Today, November 30, Barbados became a Republic. The Republic of Barbados was declared at a ceremony late in the evening on November 29 at the National Heroes Square in the capital, Bridgetown, to coincide with the anniversary of Barbados’ formal independence from Britain, 55 years ago.

With this action, Barbados has become the fourth of Britain’s previous colonies in the Caribbean to become a republic, following Guyana, Trinidad and Tobago and Dominica which have had already taken this path forward.

Peoples of the Caribbean give ‘working royals’ a fitting reception

The visits in March and April of the so-called working members of the British royal family to Commonwealth “realms” were shocking for their display of racist condescension, extravagant living and wasteful expenditures. | Margaret Villamizar

Protest in Jamaica against the Royal Visit, March 23, 2022.

Organized to mark Queen Elizabeth II’s 70 years on the English throne, these “Platinum Jubilee” tours to the 14 former British colonies that retain the British monarch as their official head of state have taken different members of the “House of Windsor” to six Caribbean countries, Australia and Papua New Guinea. The latest such tour brought “heir to the throne” Charles and his wife Camilla Parker Bowles to Canada from May 17 to 19.

Message given the Queen on her 1997 visit to Newfoundland

SHESHATSHIU, CANADA: As Queen Elizabeth II’s motorcade drives by, an Innu woman holds up a sign protesting Canada’s claim to their lands in Sheshatshiu, Newfoundland during the Queen’s 26 June 1997 visit. AFP PHOTO/CARLO ALLEGRI

As is well known, in Newfoundland the genocide of the Beothuk Indigenous people occurred due to the slave trade and brutal treatment carried out by colonial powers of which the English set the pattern, something the Indigenous peoples have repeatedly raised. 

Queen Elizabeth II visited Labrador in June, 1997 to mark the quincentennial anniversary of the “discovery” of Newfoundland by the Venetian John Cabot (Giovanni Caboto), who was commissioned by Henry VII of England.

Royal family’s fortune from the slave trade

From the enslavement and deportation of the Irish to British colonies in Oceania and the West Indies to the kidnapping of Africans, the British Crown made much of their vast personal wealth from the human slave trade. Every monarch and their family from Elizabeth Tudor onwards were financiers and beneficiaries of this trade in human flesh.

Victoria Day – Empower yourself now

Statue of Queen Victoria, symbol of colonial rule, toppled in front of Manitoba legislature during Cancel Canada Day action, July 1, 2021.

May 23, the third Monday in May, is officially slated as Victoria Day. This has been the case since 1845 when the birthday of Queen Victoria was celebrated and, at one time was officially called Imperial Day. Since then, it is used in England to celebrate the reigning monarch, no matter when they were actually born. In this sense, it is an out-dated practice which Quebeckers had the good sense to name Patriot’s Day to celebrate the rebellion against British rule in 1837-38. For Ontarians, it marks the beginning of good weather. Before climate change, when weather was more predictable, it used to mean that the ground was no longer frozen so planting could start and also that plants would no longer be subject to frosts.

But the fact remains that Canada’s institutions are tied to an anachronistic system. The recent visit to Canada of the so-called heir to the throne, Prince Charles, and his wife Camilla Parker Bowles was, in fact, to celebrate the jubilee platinum anniversary of the Queen’s reign. Pictures of her jubilee celebrations in England featured the more than £1000 gowns worn by members of the Royal Household as it is called – a reminder that those who rule over the people definitely live in another world that has nothing to do with the majority except for the fact that they carry its burden on their backs – a burden we must break with in order to renew the democracy in Canada so that it is set by the people and favours their interests, not the interests of the likes of the “Royals” and their retinues comprised of the party governments that keep them going.

– Laura Chesnick, Independent candidate in Windsor-Tecumseh in the Ontario election

Queen Victoria – The Famine Queen

On the Occasion of Imperial Day (now called Victoria Day)

Recently campaigns have been underway in Ireland, like that in Cork, to remove the name Queen Victoria, known as the “Famine Queen”, from street signs. That her main statue at Leinster House in Dublin survived until 1948 (26 years after the creation of the Free State) is something of a miracle. She was monarch when Ireland was beset by a famine organized by rich English and Irish landowners and millions starved or emigrated. After gathering dust in Ireland for some years, Victoria got a trip to Sydney, Australia to be “planted” outside the Queen Victoria Building, despite some bids from Canadian buyers. Writing in the Irish Times, Myles na gCopaleen (Brian O’Nolan/Flann O’Brien) the following month was not overly bothered with its removal – her statutes were more harmful than her statues, as he put it. “Besides, look at it this way,” he wrote. “Time has given the mere Irish their revenge. The fact is that Victoria has turned green. Of hue she approaches our decent Irish letterbox. And it is the price of her.”

Excerpt from Tony Seed, Signs of Change in Ireland

High time Canadians renounce the monarchy and everything it brings with it

British Royals’ “Jubilee Tour”

Statue of Queen Victoria, symbol of colonial rule, toppled in front of Manitoba legislature during Cancel Canada Day action, July 1, 2021. A statue of Queen Elizabeth was also taken down.

The little “Jubilee Tour” to Canada of the so-called Working Royals – Charles, who ruling elites presume to be the future King of Canada, and his wife Camilla – illustrates that it is high time Canadians renounce the monarchy and everything it brings with it.

Poll shows Canadians do not care for monarchy

Royal jubilee tours’ stop in Canada not welcome

The latest Angus Reid poll confirms that 51 per cent of respondents are in favour of abolishing the monarchy in the generations to come, while 24 per cent of respondents are unsure. Files from news agencies report the following:

The rest of the wasteful and farcical tour

Royal jubilee tours’ stop in Canada not welcome

Heritage Canada announced that during the visit of Prince Charles and Camilla to Ottawa on May 18, Charles will be invested as an Extraordinary Commander of the Order of Military Merit by the Governor General, lay a wreath at the National War Memorial, then meet with the Ukrainian Canadian Congress.

Reports of a sanitized “royal tour”

Royal jubilee tours’ stop in Canada not welcome

Bronze statue of Shanawdithit, believed to be the last of the Beothuk, stands at Boyd’s Cove on Newfoundland’s northeast coast.

Charles and Camilla arrived in St. John’s, Newfoundland on May 17 with an official welcome by the Prime Minister and Governor General and inspection of a guard of honour, a prayer in Inuktitut, Innu drumming and Mi’kmaq music, and visit to the place called “Government House.” It is called “Government House” even though it is the residence of the Lt. Governor of Newfoundland and Labrador who represents the British Crown – a constant reminder that Canada’s institutions pay obeyance to a foreign monarch. There a ceremony in memory of Indigenous victims and survivors of residential schools was held. Then a meeting with Campaign for Wool Canada and a visit to Quidi Vidi, a former fishing village, artisans and a brewery. They then left for Ottawa.

High time Canadians renounced the monarchy!

The heir to the English throne Prince Charles and his wife Camilla Parker Bowles are visiting Canada from May 17 to 19. They are called “working Royals.” These are members of the British Royal Family who live off the wealth produced by the British working people and Crown holdings, and on this basis are paid to represent the Royal Family. The Trudeau government’s ministry called Heritage Canada announced that they are visiting three cities — St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador, Ottawa and Yellowknife, Northwest Territories. It is all part of a ” platinum jubilee tour” to mark the current monarch’s 70 years on the English throne. The so-called working members of the British royal family have been dispatched to visit the 14 Commonwealth “realms” — former British colonies that retain the British monarch as their official head of state. These “Platinum Jubilee” tours have so far taken different members of the House of Windsor to six Caribbean countries, Australia and Papua New Guinea, and now, the Prince of Wales and Duchess of Cornwall have arrived in Canada.

Unwelcome guests stalk the Caribbean

The website of the Caribbean Organisation for Peoples Empowerment on April 27, 2022, carried this article by A T Freeman headed: It’s time to end these demeaning ”royal visits”

Protesters in St Vincent and Grenadines at the arrival of The Earl and the Countess of Wessex. Photo: Kenton X Chance/I-Witness News

Once again the people of the Caribbean are being subjected to another “visit” from members of Britain’s royal family. This current visit sees the British queen’s youngest son Edward and his wife Sophie’s visit to St Vincent and the Grenadines, St Lucia and Antigua and Barbuda after they postponed the Grenada leg of their trip. It follows on closely from the visit of the queen’s grandson William and his wife, Katherine, to Belize, Jamaica and the Bahamas in March.

In the News: The Royal Consort

Barbados sheds imperial monarchy

Countries around the world are re-examining their post-colonial identity after Barbados moved to remove the English queen as the head of state. The island has said that it is planning to become a republic as it moves to withdraw from the Commonwealth and “leave its colonial past behind”.Most of the population of Barbados have ancestors who were victims of colonial slavery. It is estimated that between 1627 to 1807, some 387,000 Africans were shipped to the island against their will by English slave traders.

The Queen’s Speech – Eva Dance

We are not in this together, because the authorities in command have for thirty years unleashed a vicious anti-social agenda on society. The motto of the ruling classes today is: All for One. That’s it.

For only the fifth time in her 68 years as “Queen of the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland” and “Head of State of the entire British Commonwealth of Nations”, on Sunday, April 5, Elizabeth II gave a special address “to the nation and to her subjects”. The monarch has now cancelled the artillery salute on the occasion of her birthday for the first ever time as “inappropriate.” 

The media and pundits, including those employed by CBC and CTV,  lauded the speech to the skies saying that, even though it was less than five minutes long, its “We’re all in this together” message was very sincere and heartfelt and brought tears to their eyes.

This Day. 400th Anniversary of US slavery

Four hundred years ago, a Portuguese ship named the São João Bautista traveled across the Atlantic Ocean carrying a load of captive Africans from Angola, in southwestern Africa, to the “New World.” Seized by two English pirate ships, the captive Africans ended up in the British colony of Virginia, founded just 12 years earlier, the first permanent English settlement in North America established by the Virginia Company of London in 1671. Only twenty survived the journey. Jamestown, Virginia soon became one of the main areas for the arrival of enslaved Africans. The sale of the 20 Africans to the owners of tobacco fields began the Atlantic slave trade on which the United States was built.

A million extinctions eclipsed by one royal grandbaby

As many as 1 million of the estimated 8 million plant and animal species on Earth are at risk of extinction — many of them within decades — according to the scientists and researchers behind a new UN report. The assessment by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services is the most comprehensive review to date of the damage humans are causing to biodiversity. The group’s chair, Robert Watson, says:

Prince William in Israel: The British royal family’s ‘complicated history’ with Nazi Germany

Prince William is following in the footsteps of his father and grandfather and visiting the East Jerusalem tomb of his great-grandmother, a personal touch to the promotion of British collusion with Zionist Israel.  But while Princess Alice may have sheltered a Jewish family during the war, three of her daughters were married to prominent Nazis | DIANA KRAFT in Haaretz

For your information: British royal wedding II

Front page of The Sun newspaper on January 13, 2005 shows a photograph of Britain’s Prince Harry wearing a red and black swastika armband and an army shirt with Nazi regalia at a friend’s fancy dress party, which he attended on January 8, 2005 – two weeks before Queen Elizabeth was due to lead Britain’s holocaust memorial events. He later apologized.

Once again, the media has been carrying wall-to-wall coverage fawning over yet another royal wedding held on May 19 of the Victoria Day weekend formerly celebrated by imperial decree of 1904 throughout the British Empire as Imperial Day to honour Queen Victoria’s birthday. Every hook is being used to catch one’s attention: a “Canadian connection”; a multimillionaire “American princess”; the war pilot and Invictus Games of “wounded warriors”; a dysfunctional family; “expectations” of the new African-American member of “the family”; the royal bling, etc. 

Canada 150: Activities in Halifax call for rededication of Cornwallis Genocide Park

Activists hold 600-strong rally in Halifax on July 15, 2017 as the statue of Cornwallis is covered with black cloth.

(July 15) – TML Weekly applauds the people of Nova Scotia who organized the “Removing Cornwallis” Activities in Halifax this July 15. One of their demands is to rename the Cornwallis Genocide Park to the Halifax Peace and Freedom Park.

The dodgy ‘Duke of Cornwall’ and his dirty dealings

Renewed focus on the “Duke of Cornwall” and his so-called “human rights” – Following a British Supreme Court ruling that the correspondence of the Prince of Wales to government must be released, the Kernow branch of the Celtic League assert that the activities of his estate in Cornwall should also come under focus, and they want people to get involved. MICHAEL CHAPPELL*

Monstrous hypocrisy: Duke Charles and the greening of Cornwall

Incensed to read a recent article in the Independent newspaper – ‘Prince warns of planet in crisis’ Independent The News Matrix: Thursday 26 February 2015 – the people of Cornwall responded in kind.

Duke Charles of Cornwall – not to forget Prince of Wales and Duke of Rothesay; Prince and High Steward of Scotland and Lord of the Isles; Admiral in the Royal Canadian Navy, General in the Canadian Army and General in the Royal Canadian Air Force*; and Extra Knight of the Most Ancient and Most Noble Order of the Thistle – is reported to have addressed the Royal Society in London on Feb. 25 warning that global warming is “already causing ecosystem collapse, loss of habitation, poverty, starvation, migration and conflict.” The prince declared: “Actions which are good for the planet are also good for human health.”

Inside the decade of scandal entangling Prince Andrew

How a telephone call set off a cascade of FBI investigations, secret plea deals and lawsuits from Palm Beach, Florida, to Buckingham Palace as questions resurface over whether the disgraced financier used his wealth and power to elude justice

The monarch-in-parliament and the use of the royal prerogative

The Use of the Royal Prerogative

Royal assent, royal consent – The beneficiaries of the Royal Prerogative

The archaic character of the Westminster parliamentary system has been further exposed by the publication on January 15, 2013 of a previously confidential Whitehall pamphlet entitled “Queen’s or Prince’s Consent,” publically indicating for the first time the extent to which senior royals are asked to give their consent to legislation. The 23-page document, now available on the Cabinet Office website, details situations where this Royal Consent is required and gives various examples where it has been sought.

INCO willingly helped Nazi German aggression

Supplier of nickel to the Third Reich, propagandist against the Third Reich

By Tony Seed with Albert Noden

On November 21, 2014 the Harper government joined the United States and Ukraine as the only three countries voting against the annual United Nations anti-Nazi resolution, initiated in 2005. Proposed by Russia, the resolution condemns attempts to glorify Nazi ideology and to deny German Nazi war crimes, including the Holocaust. Harper is actually following in the footsteps of his predecessors, as we document further in this post.

On the eve of the Second World War, during the height of the collusion between Britain and Nazi Germany known as appeasement for a war against the Soviet Union, King George VI and Queen Elizabeth made a 44-day state visit in 1939 to Canada. The prime minister, William Lyon Mackenzie King, had himself met with Hitler and other top Nazi leaders in Berlin in 1937 and expressed his frank admiration for the leader of the Third Reich and its fascist program.

Scottish independence: ‘We are not amused.’

Steve Bell in The Guardian, 16 Sep 2014

15 September 2014: The British Queen Elizabeth II warned voters to “think very carefully about the future” before the Scottish independence referendum. House of Windsor soft-speak for “don’t dare vote Yes.” The Windsor family has holiday homes at Balmoral Castle, Aberdeenshire and Holyrood Palace, Edinburgh. The royal injunction issued as part of the fear-mongering “Better Together” campaign reminds us that the fiction that the “constitutional monarch has no power” and that the Queen of England is just a “titular head of state” and not involved in politics – a romantic institution of another supposedly “shared” British institution that is not of much relevance – is a fraud.

Reality check: The Windsor family’s Nazi king of England

Hitler, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor in October 1937. Joseph Goebbels wrote of the former King Edward VIII: “It’s a shame he is no longer king. With him we would have entered into an alliance.”

The great times they could have had

By PAUL FOOT

Wallis: Secret Lives of the Duchess of Windsor by Charles Higham

Sidgwick, 419 pp, £17.95, June 1988, ISBN 0 283 99627 7

The Secret File of the Duke of Windsor by Michael Bloch

Bantam, 326 pp, £14.95, August 1988, ISBN 0 593 01667 X

Original source: London Review of Books, Vol. 10 No. 16 · 15 September 1988, pages 12-13 | 3450 words

A GREAT MANY BOOKS and articles have been published recently about the possibility that a former head of MI5 was the agent of a foreign power. Could there be anything more horrible, more unthinkable? Well, yes, according to Charles Higham’s extraordinary biography, there could. He suggests that not long ago the most dangerous agent of a foreign power was the King; and the second most dangerous was the King’s lover. Both were sympathetic to, and possibly active agents for, Mussolini and Hitler at a time when the British Government was about to declare war on Italy and Germany.

Obscene wealth of Charles Windsor

The feudal Windsor monarchy has held on to its feudal aristocratic privileges with the full support of the British state. The Windsors deny every citizen the right to be recognised by the state as equal with every other citizen. They take tens of millions every year from the pockets of the people. They interfere in the government of that country and have powers in the Canadian state as sovereigns. The sychophantic fawning of the media over the current Canadian tour of Charles Windsor and the worshipping of the Windsors is nothing less than the degradation of democracy and sovereignty.

Reality check: Windsor family – the admirers of fascism

Charles Windsor, the heir to the British throne, told an individual at the Canadian Immigration Museum in Halifax on Monday May 19th that, “Putin is doing just about the same as Hitler,” ostensibly relating to the accession of Crimea to Russia in March. The venue was a meeting with World War II veterans organized by the Harper government. His press entourage was quick to sensationalize the seeming “private” comment.