The Keane Edge


The Keane Edge by Brendan Patrick Keane

Queen's visit to Ireland, an opportunity to liberate England

Posted on Friday, June 25, 2010 at 01:08 PM

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As is to be expected, everyday Irish people will give queen Elizabeth "Windsor" a tear-soaked welcome when she parades about Ireland in 2011.

The good news is that this inevitable propaganda stunt will happen while Mary MacAleese is still in office. No queen compares to her.

The over-whelming theme of media reports next year in Ireland are going to be about tolerance and how the Irish are hate-free and above all that past nonsense. They'll kowtow and salute the foreign queen familiarly, and blow kisses and comment about how lovely she is.

The last Sax-Coburg queen to visit was the famine queen, Victoria--a well-fed woman with a penchant for black. She excused and mourned on behalf of her landed gentry, the wholesale exportation of Irish produce so that it would cut down the Irish population.

Monarchy thinks of democracy in the way Victoria thought of "her" shamrock people--weeds in "her" garden with a dangerous knack for democracy. Yet monarchy is always love--in appearance. It gives speeches to rival Christ for compassion. Monarchy is the most humble, the most charitable, the least greedy and all around prettiest mask the devil ever wore in human history. And its organic purpose as an expanding feeding clan of rich people and their friends is to convince those without blue blood that they are human animals whose existence is at the grace of the crown.

Peasants find citizenship a burden, or so our modern world seems to reveal. We pretend feudalism is dead, but would do better to carefully examine the modern queen for what she really is and what feudal restoration hopes she represents. The Irish media response to her visit--for England's sake--could be to dissect the machinations of the dynastic powers. No people are more in need of liberation from the British establishment than are the English themselves. Ireland's role in modern history has been to inspire liberation from just that parasitical establishment.

The fictions of British statecraft secure a rigid class system in England whence Ireland bravely sought and won redress.

Chief among the fictions, are the so-called British royals themselves who as part of an old German family have gotten very good at assuming native Welsh romances and other Celtic mystiques for their own. They changed their last name from Sachsen-Coburg-und-Gotha during World War 1 in order to hide their relationship to the German royals of the same name. Similarly, king Edward "Windsor" of England who stepped down in 1936, was unquestionably aligned with Hitler during World War 2, as Prince Harry would be aware.

Humanitarians like Roger Casement hated the pretty faces of empire and exalted human liberation in Ireland and Africa and all the former colonies. 1916 was followed by anti-royalty revolutions all through the 20th century and across the earth. India's flag invokes Ireland's, as the tri-color hailed France. Ireland's cause was invoked by nationalist liberators everywhere, as they dismantled the crown's tax. It's sad that Irish people today are so blandly assimilated into popular Anglo-American media, that they scoff knee-jerkedly at the achievements of Irish freedom--the inspiration for so many other countries.

The Irish media could use the opportunity of the queen's visit in 2011 to revisit Casement's critique of empire. Royalty should be given the going-over: the suspicious circumstances of Diana Spenser's death; the tax drain and hidden costs of supporting a growing dynastic class of insatiable parasites; the dangers of investing all feelings of national identity in their personages; the undemocratic access of Privy Council to state secrets and insider trading in markets regulated for everyone else.

The last country Ireland needs to inspire to overthrow the monarchy, is England herself.

Keep in touch with KeaneEdge articles and up-dates at GaelicGotham.com.


14 comments

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I think she might want to get rid of her poor muslim citizensh ans is looking towards Ireland. I think Mary McAleese a phony from Northern Ireland The English live in the smallest amount of space of any Europeans surrounded by royal estates of approx 40,000 acres. The famine was actually genocide and Ireland is the last occupied country in Europe.
The Irish will 'kowtow and salute the foreign queen familiarly and blow kisses....' What nonsense! The people of Ireland will behave as I confidently expect them to be behave;with dignity and courtesy. All this negative and mischievous anti-British sentiment has no place in 2010. The head of a neighbouring state is visiting Ireland.Why should that be such a big deal!The majority of Irish born and second generation Irish in the UK, and there is more than a mere handful of us here,welcome the visit.And no, we are not forgetting the Irish struggle against British tyranny,nor An Gortha Mor' nor the one million Irishmen who fought and died in the first world war nor the continued division of Ireland,we just live in the present with its not always perfect realities.Get real Brendan.
Well said and true!
Who censoring you? You Irish are pretty thin skinned. I guess if anyone disagrees with you you cry about censorship. Pretty sad.
Hancock accused me of “bizarre” generalization; I replied with a specific example and pointed to further evidence close at hand. Confronted with specifics, Hancock revised his accusation to “stupid comment.” My point, simply: before criticizing the Irish in Ireland, American Gaeilgeoiri such as this blogger might begin their social criticism closer to home. There’s a need for Bklyn Brendan’s appreciable talents in places like Queens & LI. Of course I do not include all Irish Catholic Americans, only some I have dealt with at NY-area events who indulge in pejorative comments about women, feminists, gays, senators who support reproductive freedom, African Americans, Muslims—the list lengthens—but let me not omit those who silence women whose political views, like mine, are not über-conservative. If Hancock could censor me here, I don’t doubt that he would do so, rather than dealing with evidence. Facts are just an annoyance to a closed mind.
MAinc you dont have to go far to see mindless anywhere. My comment wasn't about the seeming obsession with Jew- Arab relations that the IRISH seem to have. It was about a stupid comment made about Irish Catholic America. I dont even know who the hell father Tim is nor do 99.9999 of American Catholics. I think you have enough on your own plates.
Hancock, you do not need to go far to see the mindless Irish-American obsequiousness toward the clergy that I mentioned. Just click on Irish Central's "Father Tim" blog, either his "tu quoque" rant about the Archbishop of Canterbury or his more recent "“Rachel Corrie honors Irish history, while Israel forgets its own” (http://www.irishcentral.com/story/news/father_tim/rachel-corrie-honors-irish-history-while-israel-forgets-its-own-95663789.html), and read the comments left by his readers. Fr. Tim criticizes--rightly enough--the Israeli government's blockade of Gaza. Before he's finished, however, Fr. Tim has equated an Israeli military action with the alleged inhumanity of ALL JEWS--incredible! And he's a Jesuit--supposedly a learned priest. He writes, "But in fortifying themselves against the evil of history, have they also forgotten the good? Tonight, let us pray that the Jewish people,. . . will also see the light of decency and goodness in their history, and in their hearts. We are only secure when we are in harmony with God's Own Will.” Brendan's generalization about Irish attitudes toward the Queen ain't nothing compared to Fr. Tim's generalizing from the actions of a handful of Israeli military officials to the purported evil of all Jews everywhere. It is the classic form of bigotry, and the writers of the comments following Fr. Tim's blog seem oblivious to the slide. If as you say no one is following the Catholic hierarchy anywhere these days, WHY is Fr. Tim writing on Irish Central? He'd do better to enroll in Logic 101.
All the Gaelic Irish are indeed descendants of kings, according to tradition. I should be a descendant of a king of Munster myself, in theory (along with about a million other people). I'm also English, so perhaps a few of his target audience will read this, but only those of us who also have Irish blood and live in America, which is not so many. I don't take it as an attack on England atall, merely on the monarchy, and in principle I agree. The trouble is we're quite fond of the Queen, although it's hard to say exactly why. Maybe it's because she seems like a decent person.
Nobody in America, Irish or not, is marching obediently to the Catholic church. So that mindless generalization, as well as being bizarre is unfounded. It is also ironic coming from countries still fighting 17 century religous wars, and not allowing their royals to marry a Catholic. Do you think the Pope is going to jump out of the wedding cake and seize the throne?
Trust me, The Americans of any ethnicity, aren't followingb the Catholic Church anywhere. I
Liberate England! Tax the queen to commoner.
What a load of insecure anti-British bigotry - do you actually get paid for writing this stuff? The funny thing is that you're not even on the radar of the very people at whom this bile is aimed. Even if you were, they really couldn't care less. I'm even amused at myself for dignifying this with a response....lol.
What do I think about this? It has a few too many sweeping generalizations. The Brits have been modern Ireland's biggest customer; they contributed plenty of pounds sterling to the development of the Celtic Tiger. There are some nice ironies in those economic interactions, and I suspect no Irish person misses them. At this point in time, I would worry more about Irish Americans following the Catholic hierarchy down the mindlessly obedient path of moral obtuseness, discrimination, and bigotry than I'd worry about the native Irish sacrificing any of their historical independence of mind, politics, or spirit to a UK monarch. Aren't all native Irish the descendants of kings?
Nice.
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