Royal Babylon

The Criminal Record of the British Monarchy
An investigative poem
by
       Heathcote Williams

 “The comfort of the rich depends upon an abundant supply of the poor.”
Voltaire

In 1840, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon the first self-declared anarchist, defined anarchy in ‘What Is Property’, as “the absence of a master, of a sovereign”.

In the year of the Queen’s Jubilee tourists peered as usual
Through the railings of Buckingham Palace,
But her fairy-tale was fading; the fairy queen’s wings were being clipped
By the Sex Pistols putting monarchy in their sights.

“God save the queen,” they sang, “it’s a fascist regime.”
And the song’s hook-line became a new anthem;
Disturbing to clutches of flag-wavers lining the streets
And horrifying to Middle England and the Daily Mail.

The Sex Pistols proclaimed, “She ain’t no human being,”
And their subversive posters for the record
Placed the band’s salacious name right across the Queen’s lips
And they masked her eyes with two spidery swastikas.

Jamie Reid ‘Swastika eyes,’ 1977

“This was the image that Jamie Reid originally designed for the Sex Pistols. You can’t see it too clearly here, but he queen’s eyes have swastika pupils. Pointing out the royal family’s previous Nazi connections was deemed too risky by the record company and the image was dropped in favour of the now iconic safety-pin but minus the swastikas image.”
‘Beyonthecounterculture’/http://www.nudemagazine.co.uk/shop_art_reidswastikaeyes.htmd

They sang, “I don’t believe illusions ‘cos too much is real”.
They accessorized the Queen’s nose with safety pins
Like a voodoo doll, and covered her face with cutout letters
As if presenting the world with a kidnapper’s note.

Jamie Reid

‘Oooh no,’ people would say, ‘you can’t have a go at the Queen,’
‘Sucking their breath in to indicate caution,
Oooh no, not the Queen, the Queen’s above politics you see.’
‘They can’t answer back, can they, so it’s not fair.’

Then they’d earnestly claim, ‘It’s in the constitution, isn’t it?’
Forgetting that Britain’s never had such a document –
For the Brits, despite their inordinate pride in their own history,
Often reveal they know less about it than anyone.

The country survives despite its own past not because of it.
Its infantile wish for a benign parent above politics
Persuades it to ignore unpleasant facts, such as the sovereign’s endorsing
The nastiest political act of all, namely killing.

To be continued…

For just as with Emperors and Czars, the ‘magic’ is manufactured:
Royal figures with a high profile due to saturation publicity
Are people pretending to be state symbols and often go mad
In the same way zoo animals can die from being stared at.

Monarchy’s like a stale petri dish spawning celebrity clones
Who con the enfeebled into letting themselves be governed
By a vainglorious killer cabal endowed with whims of steel,
Whose history often shows them to be mad as hatters.

The present heir has famously said he’d wish to be reincarnated
As one of his mistress’s sanitary products
Much as George III shook hands with a tree in Windsor Great Park
Thinking he was speaking to the King of Prussia;

Princess Alexandria of Bavaria said she’d swallowed a grand piano
As a child and believed this until she died;
King Ludwig II of Bavaria would swear day was night and night was day
Citing a moon he’d had painted on the ceiling as proof.

Prince Otto, his younger brother, decided that the only way
To keep his sanity while Ludwig was reigning
Was to shoot a peasant a day, so he shot them in the garden
Then would wonder why his garden was overgrown.

Catherine the Great locked up her hairdresser for over three years
To stop him spreading the news she had dandruff;
Prince Philip of Calabria was infatuated by pairs of gloves
Wearing up to sixteen pairs of silk ones at once.

King Charles VI of France was convinced he was made of glass
And he’d refused to travel by carriage
In case the wheels’ vibrations caused his body to shatter
Into millions of transparent splinters.

King Henry Christophe of Northern Haiti
Liked forcing his royal guards
To prove their loyalty by marching them off cliff-tops
While Henry executed those who refused.

Queen Juana of Spain went insane when her husband Philip died
And she wouldn’t allow him to be buried;
But had his coffin accompany her wherever she travelled
Caressing his mummified flesh at mealtimes.

King Ferdinand II of Sicily would only allow his face
To be used on his mail service’s postal stamps
On condition no franking mark was placed on his image
And all envelopes were handled with gloves.[26]
[26]Much of the historical detail in this list derives from ‘Twelve Mad Monarchs, First 10’ which appeared, uncredited, in Time Out November 1998, then was later amended and re-titled, ‘And they wonder why we hate them’ and republished on the website ‘Ma’am, the Movement against the Monarchy’

As if inhabiting this same ballpark, the Queen’s referred to “dark forces
At work in this country, of which we know nothing” –
And similarly the doomed Diana thought, rightly or wrongly,
That assorted agents of darkness were trying to kill her:

“This particular phase in my life is the most dangerous –
“My husband is planning ‘an accident’ in my car,
“Brake failure and serious head injury in order,” she’d write,
“To make the path clear for him to marry…”

oil painting: Stella Vine, ‘Hi Paul can you come over,’ 2004

As the royal brood mare she felt trapped and betrayed
Describing herself as a POW or Prisoner of Wales;
Disgusted by her loveless marriage she’d repeatedly throw up
Revolted by the husband who’d rejected her.

She produced an heir, as required, then a probable love-child
To restore her shattered self-esteem
Then she was tape-recorded, abused and rejected some more,
Whereupon she went off the rails or was pushed.

Though her paranoia’s unproven, rumor’s wings can still flap
For those who rile the powerful, as she did, are at risk;
Thus Mike Mansfield QC points to Diana’s crash as conveniently ending
Her opposition to the peddling of landmines.[27]
[27] i) Laura Harding, PA, ‘Diana death ‘linked to arms trade’ says QC,’ The Independent, 31 May 2010;

ii) “Princess Diana died after attempts to frighten her into dumping Dodi al Fayed and ending her anti-establishment activities went horribly wrong, a leading lawyer has claimed. Michael Mansfield claimed he was sure Diana’s ‘killers’ had no intention of ending her life in a Paris tunnel in August 1997 and simply wanted to scare her.
But he claimed the operation to torpedo her relationship with Dodi, and silence her planned criticism of the British government over foreign arms sales, backfired spectacularly.” London: MAIL FOREIGN SERVICE
.‘Princess Diana ‘was killed after plan to frighten her went wrong’’, Daily Mail, 12th March 2010

But, from unending rumors of conspiracy with undemocratic forces
To the queen’s being a twelve foot lizard,
These fables reveal the mental imbalance of those force-fed
A remorseless diet of royal pap by an idle media.

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_CnEmNrAmIUY/Sw_6y-FWcCI/AAAAAAAAAZo/FalYfaIbTus/s1600/Lizard+Queen.jpg

Yet true or false, paranoid suspicions are a predictable byproduct
Of a plutocratic cult, still ring-fenced by force of arms –
A left-over from an Empire in which murder was a commonplace
But whose embers retain their powers of destruction…

Notably when Trinidad became a Dominion in 1962
A UK court was retained for its appeals,
Namely the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council,
And the Queen herself signs off the court’s business.

Though Britain would shortly abolish capital punishment
Trinidad’s government maintained the practice
And the anomaly meant that the Queen approved death warrants
Referred to her from this Judicial Committee.

Thus it’s the case in the Caribbean, where Elizabeth is Queen:
In Belize; the Bahamas; Barbados; St Lucia, and Jamaica;
And in St Vincent and the Grenadines; St Christopher and Nevis –
That a royal pen wields terminal power on Death Row.

Thus, as a direct result, on 16 May 1975 in Royal Gaol, Port of Spain,
The prison superintendent arrived at a cell door at dawn
And he handed Michael de Freitas, the prisoner waiting inside,
The dismissal of his last appeal, signed ‘Elizabeth R’.

Michael was hooded then led to the gallows under armed guard
And, while there’s no death penalty in her own country,
Michael was hanged by the neck by royal command until Michael X,
Also known as Abdul Malik, was pronounced dead.

Years before, Michael had said that the monarchy would last longer
If Her Majesty were to have a black baby;
The British press were appalled, as they assumed his flip remark
Meant that Michael was offering his services as a stud.

On death row Michael fell to wondering if “My cheekin’ ‘er caught me up”
Then he’d say with a with a fatalistic grin,
“So now I’m in a cell in her Royal Gaol, and now it’s her powerful Royal noose,
“That sends me to her Kingdom Come. Can you dig it?”[28]
[28]As relayed to the author by John Michell, recounting a conversation with Michael that took place on Death Row, Royal Gaol, Trinidad, in May 1975; cf also William Levy and John Michell (edd.) ‘Souvenir Programme for the Official Lynching of Michael Abdul Malik with poems, stories, sayings by the condemned,’ Cambridge: 1973

In his cage a lightbulb would burn throughout the night.
“We hear the flying of the trap,” Michael told visitors;
And he’d indicate the death chamber just a few feet away,
Then he’d whisper, “We can hear it distinctly.”

He’d also hear a Lord Kitchener calypso coming through
The Death Row radio’s macabre crackle:
“When the judge accep’ the verdict, he let the hammer bang.
Malik, he say nothing, But Queen say, ‘One to hang.’’”[29]
[29]There was a fevered atmosphere in Trinidad at the time. Some local commentators portrayed Michael –in his role as fugitive firebrand and quondam UK Black Power leader with high profile friends , such as John Lennon – and Dick Gregory as a political threat to Trinidad’s mild mannered and scholarly Prime Minister, Eric Williams. The gruesome events in Michael’s Arima commune and his trial reports prompted various songs, such as this one, all very much like those which appeared in the Newgate Calendar (subtitled The Malefactors’ Bloody Register) in the 18^th and 19^thCenturies, and in the chapbooks devoted to the careers of Jonathan Wild , Dick Turpin and Moll Cutpurse sold to the Tyburn crowds who’d gathered to watch their executions at what was then a public spectacle
‘One to hang’ a soca calypso, was written by Aldwyn Roberts (18 April 1922 – 11 February 2000), better known as Lord Kitchener or ‘Kitch’, and recorded on Ice Records, Barbados (no date).

For in the words of Lord Diplock, the senior presiding judge,
“Their Lordships will humbly advise Her Majesty
That the appeal should be dismissed…” His death warrant
Had been signed by the Queen on the 14th May,’’75 [30]
[30]^{“…they [the Law Lords] delivered their judgment, and had it signed by the Queen, two days later her instructions were conveyed to the Governor General in a record-breaking two weeks, on 14th May, a Wednesday.” John L. Williams, Michael X: A Life in Black & White, London: Century (p 270)}

And when what the monarch had thinkingly, or unthinkingly, signed
Had been conveyed to the Governor General,
Michael would say to his wife, Desiree, “Better go home.”
“This is no place for you, pretty girl.”[31]
[31]Geoffrey Robertson, The Justice Game, 1998 (cited in John L. Williams op cit. p 271)

photo: Central Press/Getty Images, 4 Feb 1970

In a manuscript smuggled out of Death Row Michael described
How on a Wednesday “the voices of all the prisoners
“Would acquire a higher pitch” for those in the cells lived in dread
Of an impending message from the Governor General.

Each week Death Row’s inhabitants were prepared for execution
Which fell on a Friday: “You are weighed,” Michael wrote,
“The trap of the gallows is greased. All await that dreaded word,
‘Greetings’ if your time has arrived.”

“Then – if it has –from the office at the far end of the corridor
“Come some officials, they’ll stand in front of your cell
“And they’ll salute you with this word from the Governor General:
“‘Greetings.’ Everyone waits for that terrible word.

“Most times hymns are sung. I pray. I hope someone, somewhere
“Will listen… for in all Holy Books it is written
“That justice should be tempered with mercy wherever possible.”
But there was no mercy for Michael, just a white hood.

“If there is anyone in Trinidad who should get glory
For my coming, Abdul Malik is that person…”
Muhammad Ali had said of Michael X, who’d invited him
“To see the conditions his people were living in.[32]
[32]Derek Humphrey & David Tindall, False Messiah, London: Hart-Davis. MacGibbbon, 1977, cited in John L. Williams, op. cit, p.205

Then Allen Ginsberg wrote of “a new awareness that we were
“All on the same boat of Change”
And of being “armed to create Eden or Hell’s fiery gardens
“On our little ball rolling through the solar system”.

Ginsberg added that Michael “was part of that communal effort
“To work out our local destiny.
“I pray with him that Mercy be the last judge of the world
“And not our own cruel confused hearts.

“And in this context and the context of his karmic nobility
“I here plead for his life. Om Ah Hum.”
But with a pen-stroke the Queen showed she preferred Betjeman
To the poems of Allen Ginsberg or Muhammad Ali[33]
[33]From the papers of the American Committee to Save Michael X, founded by Dan Richter, cf John L Williams, op cit p 261

Kate Millett protested, “It’s the hideous combination of racism
And sexism that permits these kind of trials to happen”
Predictably an appeal to the great-great-grand-daughter
Of Queen Victoria, –
Legendary for her stiff-necked views

Such as “Women’s rights are a mad, wicked folly” – were ignored,
And all pleas to Buckingham Palace went unanswered,
Indicating that the Head of the Anglican Church and the Defender of the Faith
Favours a more Old Testament view of religion.

Thus rather than Christ’s revolutionary message of forgiveness
Her Governor’s ‘Greetings’ brought revenge:
Michael was hanged, then drawn – meaning he was left to swing –
It being the Royal Gaol’s colonial tradition.

In London those who felt British hypocrisy had overreached itself
Wrote Michael’s name on the walls of Buckingham Palace:
‘MICHAEL X’, repeated six times, was followed by ‘MICHAEL ABDUL MALIK’
But instead of an ‘X’ they added graveyard crosses.[34]
[34] It’s not the issue here, but regarding Michael’s guilt a recent biography, John L Williams, Michael X: A Life in Black & White, London: Century, 2008, pp 236-7 reveals that Greville Plugge, the twin brother of Gale Benson with whose murder Michael was charged, “told friends that he suspected that Michael was not the killer.” According to a house guest, Trina Simmonds, who was staying at the Trinidad commune, which Michael had established on his leaving England with financial help from John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Gale Benson’s relationship with her boyfriend, Hakim Jamal had broken down because of Gale’s infidelity, and “Hakim and Gale had been arguing the night before her death.” However the main suspect, Hakim Jamal, was never interviewed by the Trinidad police. “Hakim was asked to return to Trinidad [from Boston] to give a witness statement but unsurprisingly, he never did so. So the most obvious suspect for Gale’s murder was never brought to trial.” “The Trinidad police […} seemed strangely uninterested in charging Hakim with Gale’s murder, even as an accessory […] All Trinidad simply assumed that he [Michael] was guilty. As a result Michael found it hard to find adequate representation.”

On the 6th July 1999, twenty-five years after Michael’s death
The same royal custom persists with nine executions in four days:
Trinidad’s Prison Commissioner, Cipriani Baptiste, told the press
That the Royal Gaol’s gallows had been freshly “oiled”.

The condemned, Joel Ramsingh, Stephen Eversley and Bhagwandeen Singh
Had once more been pricked by the royal Parker,
As had Dole Chadee; Joey Ramiah and Ramkhelawan Singh;
Clive Thomas; and Robin Gopaul and Russel Sankerali.

“No human life, no matter how wretched, is without worth,”
Said Sister Theresa DeAlva, a Catholic nun
Campaigning outside Royal Gaol against this mass execution,
“The men are still human beings, children of God.”

The executions would take place despite appeals from Amnesty International
And from three Nobel Peace Prize winners, including Bishop Tutu;
It was as if the Parker pen’s owner, always ‘above politics’, felt empowered
To strike through all pleas from the great and the good.

But given that it’s Her Majesty’s courts, Her Majesty’s prison service,
Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary,
Her Majesty’s Armed Forces; Her Majesty’s government, and taxes and subjects
Being quite so inordinately majestic could go to your head.

The well-worn pretence that the royal family’s ‘above politics’
And must therefore be beyond criticism,
Is constantly disproved, such as when the third in line to the throne
Directs US F15 jets to drop 500 lb bombs –

http://www.holymoly.com/sites/default/files/princeharry.jpg

Prince Harry was sent to an Afghan warzone as political propaganda,
And with the complicity of a prostrate press
Who agreed to enforce a news blackout till the MoD had fully exploited him–
To glamorize their country’s war and attract recruits.[35]
[35] Prince Harry ‘directs his first bomb attack’, London: Daily Telegraph, 28 Feb 2008

http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2010/10/19/article-1321792-0BAB37E9000005DC-646_468x286.jpg

Harry’s bombs land on an area of Afghanistan in February, 2008
And as ‘Joint Terminal Attack Controller’
Harry slaughters 34 Afghanis by using what’s nicknamed ‘Kill TV’.
He’s then thought to have boasted of it in Boujis nightclub. [36]
[36http://bp2.blogger.com/_J3TsuLwgS94/R8mkOgnlfuI/AAAAAAAAAlY/eH1NPiaErNg/s1600-h/Harry+Kills+30.jpg
David Williams, ‘The moment Harry directed his first bomb attack on Terry Taliban for 'Kill TV'’ London: Daily Mail, 29 February 2008

Codenamed ‘Widow Six Seven’ Harry studies a regional map;
Pokes a finger at where the enemy’s likely to be;
Then he instructs US aircrews to blast ‘Terry Taliban’ to smithereens
As if Afghan tribes-people were merely Norfolk pheasants.

This sequence of illustrations show Harry’s planning an attack with the aid of what his fellow soldiers refer to ‘Kill TV’. Consequent explosions result in a remote controlled massacre. The photographs appeared in the Daily Mail, 29 February 2008

Again, if royalty was really above politics the Queen wouldn’t ask
(As she recently did with a testy expression),
“Why” – she being so rich – “no one foresaw the downturn in the economy…?”
For it concerned her to be a fraction less wealthy.[37]
[37]Heather Stewart, economics editor, ‘This is how we let the credit crunch happen, Ma’am’, London The Observer, 26 July 2009

credit punch by Miss Brendalina Badchild/flickr Dec 1, 2008

Compare all this to the royal reaction to the Pan Am disaster at Lockerbie
When two hundred and fifty nine were killed –
It was described as “The largest mass murder on British soil”
And it was taken for granted the sovereign would visit.

But though the royal family happily use Scotland as its playground,
As a base from which to decimate its wildlife,
Yet their jammed moral compass insisted their schedule was full
And so regretfully they’d give Lockerbie a miss.

Although Edinburgh was Scotland’s capital city,
Its Duke pleaded a prior engagement in Japan;
Then the Queen and Prince Charles also made their excuses
Though it was agreed Andrew might fit in an hour.

The exploding Boeing airliner had gouged out a crater
In Lockerbie’s Sherwood Crescent
Killing eleven residents with the plane’s falling parts
And injuring others with its impact explosions.

Andrew deigned briefly to appear at someone’s bedside
Though only managing the dispiriting observation
That “This kind of thing was bound to happen sooner or later”
And adding, for no reason, “It’s worse for the Americans.”

Andrew’s family may be sealed off within their billionaire bubbles
But such a studied reluctance to comfort the afflicted
Must inevitably tempt providence, if not the Greek Furies,
Always happiest when afflicting the comfortable.

“God save the Queen,” the Sex Pistols spat venomously
“Our figurehead is not what she seems,”
“God save your mad parade,” ran their incendiary song
“God save the queen; a fascist regime…!”

Edward VIII would visit Nazi Germany in 1937 to meet Adolf Hitler
And later he’d voice admiration for his policies –
The quondam King concluded, “It would be a tragic thing for the world
If [Adolf] Hitler were overthrown”.[38]
[38] December 1940 – In an interview with an American journalist, for the US magazine Libeerty, Edward states, “It would be a tragic thing for the world if Hitler were overthrown.”cited in Kitty Kelly, op cit. p. 22
http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/episode/britain-s-nazi-king-4586/timeline#ixzz1Ixm4MXKF

http://able2know.org/topic/134215-1

Following his elder brother’s taking his honeymoon in the Third Reich
His successor, George VI, was also keen on appeasement:
And he even sent a royal escort to congratulate Chamberlain on his flight back
After his being deceived by Hitler at Munich.

Then when George VI thought the Empire was threatened by refugee Jews,
King George VI blithely said he was “glad to think
That steps are being taken to prevent these people leaving
Their country of origin.” His directive simply meant they’d die –[39]
[39]Avraham Reiss, ‘King George VI Tightened the Noose Around German Jewry’s
Neck’ Jewish Chronicle, October 18, 2010

Since, following George’s concern, the King’s Secretary, Halifax,
Would telegraph the British Embassy in Berlin,
And Halifax asked them to encourage the German government
“To check the unauthorized emigration of Jews.”[40]
[40]“In the spring of 1939 George VI instructed his private secretary to write to Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax. Having learnt that ‘a number of Jewish refugees from different countries were surreptitiously getting into Palestine’, the King was ‘glad to think that steps are being taken to prevent these people leaving their country of origin.’ Halifax’s office telegraphed Britain’s ambassador in Berlin asking him to encourage the German government ‘to check the unauthorized emigration’ of Jews.” Ben Summerskill, “MPs Want Quick Release of Queen Mother’s Papers,” The Observer, Sunday 14 April 2002

So when it came to anti-Semitism King George VI
May not have stuttered at all
And even as late as 1970 his elder brother was telling interviewers:
“I never thought Hitler was such a bad chap.”

Edward’s cousin, Prince Philip, had four sisters married to Nazis
Yet was considered an eligible suitor for Princess Elizabeth
Despite his family, in Philip’s own words, being “inhibited about the Jews.” [41]
And despite Philip’s featuring at Nazi funerals [42]
[41] As told by Philip to Deutsche Press Agentur in August 1988; he reiterated his desire to be a catalyst for mass genocide in the foreword to his book If I Were an Animal, Robin Clark Ltd., 1986.released in 1986. In July 1983, Philip chastised aid workers and charities for helping to treat malaria victims in Sri Lanka.
[42] Funeral procession in Darmstadt on 19 November 1937 after the airplane crash that killed seven members of the Hesse-Darmstadt family. Leading the procession is the heir,
Prince Ludwig von Hessen Darmstadt. The second row consists of, from left to right, Prince ‘Friedel’ Hohenlohe, Prince Christoph von Hessen (in an SS uniform), Prince Philip current duke of Edinburgh), and Prince Berthold von Baden. Lord Louis Mountbatten follows in a peaked naval cap in the row behind. Note that members of the crowd make the Nazi salute.
Jonathan Petropoulos, The Royals and the Reich: The Princes von Hessen in Nazi Germany, OUP, 2006, p. 95

Photo: Prince Philip aged 16 at the 1937 funeral of his elder sister Cecile, flanked by relatives in SS and Brownshirt uniforms. http://dottal.org/images/philip_Nazi_funeral.jpg

In a family photograph Philip’s youngest sister, Sophia,
Is seen opposite Hitler at Goering’s wedding
Where every conceivable expression of racist excess
Would doubtless have been common currency.[43]

[43] Jonathan Petropoulos, The Royals and the Reich: The Princes von Hessen in Nazi Germany, OUP, 2006, p.???

Prince Philip’s sister opposite Adolf Hitler at the wedding of Herman and Emmy Goering

Philip’s brother-in-law, Prince Christophe von Hessen,
Served both in the SS and the Luftwaffe
He was even suspected of having bombed Buckingham Palace
In the hope of assassinating George and reinstating Edward. [44]

[44] Jonathan Petropoulos, Royals and the Reich: The Princes von Hessen in Nazi Germany, OUP, 2003, p

For in July 1940 while the exiled Edward was in Lisbon,
The German ambassador had consorted with the former King –
He then informed Berlin, “The Duke believes that continued heavy bombing
Would make England ready for peace.”

Thus an embittered Edward was urging the bombing of his own people –
And with his wife, who’d had von Ribbentrop as a lover,
And with his aide, Fruity Metcalfe, a Mosleyite Blackshirt,
They’d treacherously plot his return as a royal Nazi puppet.

After the war, Edward’s collusion proved embarrassing
And so the Queen’s cousin, Sir Anthony Blunt,
An ex-Soviet spy, later in charge of the Queen’s pictures,
Was asked to track down incriminating documents.

Blunt was sent to the Schloss Friedrichshof in Kronberg
To rescue Edward’s Nazi correspondence –
Then, thanks to Blunt’s helpfully concealing evidence of royal treason,
Blunt’s own brand of treason was granted immunity. [45]
[45]

Predictably, given his fascist flavoring, Philip’s no stranger to genocide:
“In the event that I am reincarnated,” Philip has said,
“I would like to return as a deadly virus” – thinking his high-handed cull
Would, in his words, “solve overpopulation,”

Such thoughts reflect a frequent hobbyhorse of the rich
Who morbidly dwell on threats from the poor
Though the poor’s footprint is minimal compared with their own
Yet they’re targeted by plutocratic eugenicists.

Philip shares such eliminationist views with Henry
Kissinger
The US war criminal (honored by the Queen):
Kissinger says “depopulation should be the highest priority
“Of U.S. foreign policy towards the Third World.’ [46]
[46] National Security Council (NSC) Memo 200, dated April 24, 1974, and titled “Implications of world wide population growth for U.S. security and overseas interests,” states: “Dr. Henry Kissinger proposed in his memorandum to the NSC that ‘depopulation should be the highest priority of U.S. foreign policy towards the Third World.’
He quoted reasons of national security, and because “(t)he U.S. economy will require large and increasing amounts of minerals from abroad, especially from less-developed countries … Wherever a lessening of population can increase the prospects for such stability, population policy becomes relevant to resources, supplies and to the economic interests of U.S.”

Predictably neither the Queen’s Consort nor Kissinger,
Propose culling groups of arms dealers or militarists –
For their Fourth Reich of the über-rich has it in for the Third World
While plutocrats are encouraged to breed as they please.

“He’s bad tempered, ill-educated and probably won’t be faithful,”
Was reputedly the verdict of George VI
On Prince Philip whom George VI’s wife would refer to
As ‘the Hun’, singling him out for especial loathing.

Prince Philip, who was at first known as Battenberg,
Later anglicized to Mountbatten,
In fact shared the original name Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderberg-Glucksberg-Beck
After the family’s alma mater, a Prussian principality.

But on advice, all these mouthfuls were downsized to the name ‘Windsor’
Lifted from an English town and an English family –
A ruse to deflect prejudice against intrusive Prussian princelings
With a passion for large families and dead animals.

Yet anglicizing an irksome past proves only a cosmetic ploy –
As in the case of Princess Michael of Kent, formerly Reibnitz –
An SS officer’s daughter who was heard bawling at African Americans
In a New York restaurant, “You need to go back to the colonies.” [47]

[47] Baron Gunther von Reibnitz, the father of Princess Michael of Kent, was a party member and an honorary member of the SS

Likewise the Queen’s sister Princess Margaret – who was so royal
That she’d sometimes answer the ‘phone
With the matchless phrase, “This is royalty speaking”
As if expecting a long-distance curtsey –

Huffily walked out of the film ‘Schindler’s List’
Because she thought it was “anti-German” –
It was “a tedious film about Jews”, she told her butler
And strongly advised him to give it a miss.

The Princess’s views on any races or condition of men
That differed from her own were distasteful:
She told Chicago’s mayor the Irish were “pigs, all pigs”
And as for India, she hated “those little brown people”.

Despite Margaret’s being the patron of a children’s charity
For the mentally handicapped –
The Princess rounded on one of its units’ staff, saying
“I don’t want to meet any daft children.”

Princess Margaret would parrot the views of the Queen Mother,
An unabashed supporter of white rule;
When grandaughter Margaret referred to the Rhodesian majority
As either “blackamoors” or else “nig nogs.[49]
[49]

At the time it was thought the Pistols’ accusations of fascism
Were outrageous, and totally off target
Yet fascism, defined as corporate elitism plus violence,
Can shape-shift and adopt user-friendly disguises.

http://cache.daylife.com/imageserve/00E97i10URegI/439x.jpg

“Prince Charles,” ran a headline, “was last night accused
Of driving his tenant farmers towards suicide
With a £2.3 million pound rent demand as foot-and-mouth
Swept his Duchy of Cornwall estate..” [50]
[50]

A corporate empire of 240 farms gives him a vast income.
Of over four million pounds a year -
His feudal rents are due for payment on Lady Day, March 29^th
And then again on Michaelmas, September 29^th.

Recently this particular income has shot up by eleven per cent
Thus transforming the Prince’s tenants into near-serfs –
With his Duchy’s management charging rack rents for village halls
Which the Duchy demolishes if the locals can’t pay.

Prince Charles was warned at the height of the foot and mouth epidemic
That the exorbitant rents which he was charging
For wide-ranging swathes of his unearned landholdings
Was in danger of driving tenants to despair.

Noel Cartwright, of South West Tenant Farmers’ Association
Spelled it out in clear terms for Charles’ benefit,
“The risk of suicide among farmers is a major worry
“This could push our members over the edge. [51]
[51] Andrew Buckwell, Royal Correspondent, ‘The Final Straw, Charles’ rent demand could push farmers over edge, “PRINCE Charles was last night accused of driving his tenant farmers towards suicide with a pounds 2.3million rent demand as foot- and-mouth swept his Duchy of Cornwall estate. The warning came as the Prince’s office insisted it was “business as usual” on his estate, despite the deepening national crisis.” London: Sunday Mirror, Mar 11, 2001

But there are none so deaf as those who won’t listen
(Albeit that some are born with capacious ears) –
Farmers lost their stock but it was still business as usual
For the Duchy of Cornwall’s organic cupidity.

With two farmers a week committing suicide in the rural crisis,
Publicly, the Prince wrung his hands in anguish –
Though his tenants were quick to distrust his crocodile tears,
“The Duchy is sympathetic as long as you pay the rent.” [52]
[52] “If you lose all your stock and are feeling pretty down, a rent demand is the last thing you want to see.” Andy [Bradford] who has worked his farm since 1969, said: “The Duchy is sympathetic as long as you pay the rent.” Andrew Buckwell, ‘The Final Straw; Charles’ rent demand could push farmers over edge,’ Sunday Mirror, Mar 11, 2001

With a low-minded cunning the Duchy’s land agents are all on contracts
Each one of which is performance-related –
So Prince Charles’ rent collectors are given a financial incentive
To see the money in Charles’ bank account on time.

In other words, royal money-grubbing is built into the system
And should tenants be unable to furnish their landlord
With the funds to pay his servants to squeeze out his toothpaste,
Then both they and their families face cruel eviction:

Shoveled off into a caravan or a windy tent in a hedgerow
Upon the signature of this spendthrift heir to the throne,
With his three chauffeurs; twenty-five butlers; dressers and chefs
And his white leather lavatory-seat for traveling.

photo: colln.: Tony Allen

When the head of the family or, as the Duke calls it, ‘the Firm’,
Describes shooting as “an intelligent leisure activity” for a child;
Or when his grandson, Prince William inspecting Trident submarine crews,
Applauds those carrying nuclear payloads as “heroes”, [53]
[53] Richard Palmer, Royal Correspondent, ‘Prince William, the dashing officer, honours our Trident heroes: Prince William saluted the sailors responsible for maintaining Trident at a naval base.’ London: Daily Express, October 29,2010

When the head of the family or, as the Duke calls it, ‘the Firm’,
Describes shooting as “an intelligent leisure activity” for a child;
Or when his grandson, Prince William inspecting Trident submarine crews,
Applauds those carrying nuclear payloads as “heroes”s”, [53]
[53]Richard Palmer, Royal Correspondent, ‘Prince William, the dashing officer, honours our Trident heroes: Prince William saluted the sailors responsible for maintaining Trident at a naval base.’ London: Daily Express, October 29,2010

slowdazzle1/flickr

Then the Royal Family’s dominant message can be decoded
As the defense of the Firm’s assets through armed force,
Rather than to love your neighbor in communities free of division
Or to set examples of fair dealing and goodwill.

But instead of which they devalue their own ‘family values’
With the spoilt rivalries of the over-privileged:
On her visiting Malta a diplomat asked Princess Elizabeth
After her sister Princess Margaret’s health.

The unmarried Margaret had recently visited the island
On a trip paid for by her older sister,
Now, uncomfortably overweight and taking amphetamines
Blue pills to “hold down the poundage” –

But spitefully keen to undermine her younger sister’s popularity
The future queen said unregally,
“I haven’t the faintest idea. The little bitch hasn’t written to me yet, or thanked me.”
Betryaing her nature, or that of her pills.[54]
[54]As witnessed by Roland Flamini, diplomatic correspondent of Time Magazine, cf Roland Flamini, ‘Sovereign: Elizabeth II and the Windsor Dynasty’, New York: Bantam Doubleday Dell, 1991, the remarks were omitted from his book but reprised in conversation with Kitty Kelly, op. cit p. 92-3

Long-suffering retainers of such ‘royals’ are paid pitifully
Then abandoned when they’re of no use
Or if they flout royal etiquette, as did the Queen’s Nanny Crawfie
Who’d unwisely describe life in the royal nursery.

Nanny Crawfie disclosed the fact that Her Majesty
Had an Obsessive Compulsive Disorder
And had to arrange all her clothes in a special order
Ceawfie was dropped from their Christmas list and cast out.

Year after year old retainers have waited by windows
Hoping their former employers would visit
And each Christmas, Nanny Crawfie waited expectantly
As her Queen swept past her en route to Balmoral.

Royal Christmases celebrate both killing and consumption:
By shooting birds and continuous meals –
For all their nods to the memory of a ascetic Jewish pacifist
And their platitudes commemorating his birth.

Lunch is over when the head of the Church,
Her Majesty, the Monarch, proclaims:
That ‘It’s nearly three. Time to watch me on TV’
And then all adjourn for her broadcast.

In which bland Christmas clichés are trotted out
There’s a nod to Britain’s profitable war machine.
Though Christian peace must require it be dismantled
The armed services are sanctimoniously blessed.

The royal family dutifully watch their matriarch
While they anticipate the Boxing Day shoot
Some bet on who amongst will shoot the most birds –
The most number of nature’s freest spirits.

Christmas paper crowns are worn by killing machines:
As Lennon sang, “There’s room at the top…
But first you must learn how to smile as you kill,
If you want to be like the folks on the hill.”

And the folks on the hill are rich beyond avarice
And they give their consent to any war going:
Illegal, dishonest wars fought for ignominious profit –
No royal figurehead ever says its wars are a lie.

Photo: Brendon Thorne/Getty Images

Instead the ‘Firm’ is over indulged with media oxygen
Leading to the looniest distortions of common sense
In which, for example, one in ten primary school children in 2010
Believed the Queen had invented the telephone.[55]
[55] “One in 10 children thinks the Queen invented the telephone, a survey of children’s science knowledge suggests”. BBC, 13 March 2010. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/8565258.stm

“The Sovereign can do no wrong and no laws can be brought against her”.
According to Lord Halsbury in ‘The Laws of England’
But a democratic monarchy is an oxymoron, and as regards transparency
The royal drawbridge is invariably pulled up –

Royal trivia gets saturation coverage: in April 2011
The BBC’s lead story was the fact that William
“Won’t wear a ring. His father does, but his grandfather doesn’t”
This royal fetishism is passed off as news.

In the US, 74 people earn the same as the bottom 19 million
Thanks to which their society makes no sense;
And royalty too bears this same economic mark of Cain
It makes claims on society through its irrelevant wealth –

The royals run a Wonderland caucus race where the ignoble get prizes:
Such as a knighthood, for example, for Norman Schwarzkopf,
The US general, who said Iraq’s dead “weren’t worth counting”
And another knighthood for Kissinger, a criminal –

Who swaggeringly proclaimed power was an aphrodisiac
After he’d carpet-bombed Cambodia.
“Why should we flagellate ourselves” the dissembling Sir Henry likes to ask,
“For what the Cambodians did to each other?”

“I want every Iraqi soldier bleeding from every orifice.”
General Schwarzkopf would sadistically announce
After which the Queen gave this ghoul her greatest honour
Following his genocidal bloodletting in US wars.

Other pillars of the American state join in the queue for rewards –
Royalty-mongering spectres of the US machine:
Caspar Weinberger of the Iran-Contra drugs for arms affair
And Brent Scowcroft, Kissinger’s gofer – are now Knights of the British Empire.

“For services to law enforcement” J Edgar Hoover, the head of the FBI,
Who had half of the Black Panther party murdered,
And who phone-tapped Martin Luther King for ten years
Is pleased to find himself similarly ennobled.

As is Alan Greenspan, the financier who endorsed toxic derivatives
To create a housing bubble making the rich even richer;
An economic war criminal who fetishized market forces
– Sir Alan Greenspan’s now a Knight of the British Empire.

The fact that each US President’s record, without exception,
Would earn them seats in the dock at Nuremburg [56]
Or at the International Criminal Court on genocide charges
Doesn’t prevent the Royal Family from honoring them
[56] Noam Chomsky, “If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged.” Lecture delivered, 1990. This contention sometimes provokes the response, ‘what about Jimmy Carter?’ as if he was exempt. His defenders overlook Carter’s determination, in collaboration with his secretary of State, Brezinski to “give the Soviet Union its very own Vietnam.’ By arming the Mujahedeen in Afghanistan and encouraging them to kill Russians with US supplied Stinger missiles.

For by an ironic twist each President morphs into George III
Against whom their forbears fought:
They declare wars on a whim, they’re tyrannical plutocrats
And they imprison their own people without trial.

But the US has been infatuated with a monarchist mindset
From the US republic’s very earliest days:
A crawling John Adams proposed they give their first President
The fatuous title of “His Exalted High Mightiness”.

So two Presidents are made knights of the Queen’s crooked table:
George H.W. Bush senior and Ronald Reagan –
Both guilty of war crimes in Nicaragua and El Salvador
And misguidedly bombing Iraq and then Libya.

Next comes Colin Powell who presented some talcum powder to the UN
Claiming it was anthrax and thus a pretext for war: [57]
Now Sir Colin is a knight – the man who covered up the My Lai massacre –
The man who torched Vietnamese villages with his Zippo lighter. [58]

[57]“It was the information that we had. We provided it. If that information is inaccurate, fine.” US Secretary of State Colin Powell comments on the statement by IAEA Director General Mohamed El Baradei that the US had supplied forged documents claiming Iraq was attempting to acquire uranium. March 9, 2003.

[58] In My American Journey, Powell recounted his reaction when he spotted his first dead Viet Cong. “He lay on his back, gazing up at us with sightless eyes,” Powell wrote. “I felt nothing, certainly not sympathy. I had seen too much death and suffering on our side to care anything about what happened on theirs.”
While success against the armed enemy was rare, Powell’s ARVN unit punished the civilian population systematically. As the soldiers marched through mountainous jungle, they destroyed the food and the homes of the region’s Montagnards, who were suspected of sympathizing with the Viet Cong. Old women would cry hysterically as their ancestral homes and worldly possessions were consumed by fire. For nearly six months, Powell and his ARVN unit slogged through the jungles, searching for Viet Cong and destroying villages.”

“We burned down the thatched huts,” Powell confessed,
“Starting the blaze with Ronson and Zippo lighters.
“Why were we torching houses and destroying crops?
“Ho Chi Minh had said his ‘people were like the sea

“In which guerrillas swam’. … We tried to solve the problem
“By making the whole sea uninhabitable.
“In the hard logic of war, what difference did it make if you shot
“Your enemy or starved him to death?”[59]
[59] Colin Powell, My American Journey

Sir Colin Powell, supervisor of turkey shoots as Iraqi soldiers
Tried to retreat from Basra and were fried,
Betrayed Dr King’s nonviolence, preferring the craven acceptance
Of a bauble from Great Britain’s Queen.

Another royal investiture was held for the US General Tommy Franks
Who oversaw the looting of hospitals in Baghdad
And whose forces thought it fun to fire on Iraqi ambulances –
Sir Tommy now joins these sorry knights of a twisted table –

Where Kissinger is a ‘Knight Commander Of the Most Distinguished Order
Of St. Michael and of St. George’,
Though Sir Henry is neither angelic nor has he killed any dragons
But has only napalmed peasant farmers in fields.

 

And should anyone be inclined to study Kissinger’s nobility any further,
He is so inured to genocide that he once advised Nixon,
“If they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union
“It is not an American concern”. [60]
[60] http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/11/us/politics/11nixon.h
Yet they’re singled out by the monarch for aggrandizement
These characters who’ve remained unchanged
Since the time of the Roman historian, Tacitus, who said,
“They plunder, they slaughter, and they steal:

“This they falsely name Empire,” Tacitus wrote on Rome’s expansionist wars,
Adding, “and where they make a wasteland,
“They call it peace.” His verdict is just as applicable
To creatures from the same swamp millennia later.