By Andrew Klein
I remember that as a teenager we had to sing ‘God save the Queen’. This was done at school, in cinemas and public events. Often this was linked to stories of horrific battles and wars. I was told that it was a good thing to fight for ‘Queen and country’. I really did believe as a child that somehow it was the job of young men to save the Queen and once that was done, whoever was left would save the country. It always involved saving virtuous people from complete bastards. I once asked if the Queen had been involved with less savage projects, building farms or housing estates. Apparently not, she was our Sovereign a very abstract concept that meant that ‘God had anointed’ her and placed her over me to rule me.
I looked up what ‘anointed’ meant and found that involved senior clergy and holy oil. The process of anointed was not included in the films of the coronation. Turned out that the staff had forgotten the recipe for that oil and that new supplies had to be made in a hurry.
Here I was, 12 years old and discovering that my Queen was my ruler by right of birth and a concoction of manmade oils applied by men wearing flowing dresses and that she was attributed with all kinds of magic, least of all the ability to motivate large numbers of young men much like me to go forth and kill large numbers of men just like me and of course the people of her ‘dominion’ and selectively anyone who seriously annoyed her. There were cenotaphs (empty tombs) all over the countryside attesting to what appeared to be divine will.
By the time I was 19, the dream had worn off, in the reality of life it seemed that our Sovereign had little interest in the wellbeing of ordinary folk and that pomp and circumstance, catering for tourists and occasionally foreign wars summed up her imagined role. As a figure head she became more and more irrelevant. Killing foreigners seemed to be more of a state function designed to protect assets and investments, resources. Moral high ground was always found or created to justify what in hindsight was state sanctioned murder. Of course, wars and created chaos are ways of advancing a state’s plans, that is the sad reality.
I met, on my journey through life, many who were once the enemies of my Sovereign and when times were good, we became friends. It’s funny how you can wake up, feel the rising sun and see the blue skies above and then, in an instant, you find your mind’s eye looking at a cenotaph. If we had all been honest at the start, accepting of the fact that there was no more holy oil that created rulers and that all of this was in essence an arrangement by mutual consent, maybe we could have built farms and houses instead of cenotaphs.
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