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Do-Nothing Queen Dead, Now Loathsome Globalist King…

Thoughts on the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee: Sixty Years a Rubber Stamp

Sean Gabb

05/29/2012

[See also Monarchy, Nation-States, And The Failed Reign of “Elizabeth The Useless”]

Those of us who pay attention to such things will have noticed a difference between the BBC coverage of the Golden Jubilee in 2002 and of the present Diamond Jubilee. Ten years ago, the coverage was adequate, though reluctant and even a little stiff. This time, it has been gushing and completely uncritical. There are various possible reasons for my observation. The first is that I was mistaken then and am mistaken now. I do not think this is the case, but feel obliged to mention it. The second is that Golden Jubilees are rare events, and Diamond Jubilees very rare events, and that extreme rarity justifies a setting aside of republican scruples. The third is that the BBC was taken by surprise in 2002 by the scale of public enthusiasm, and does not wish to be caught out again. The fourth is that, while not particularly conservative on main issues, we do now have a Conservative Government, and this is headed by a cousin of Her Majesty. There may be many other reasons.

However, I believe the chief reason to be that the new British ruling class has finally realised what ought always to have been obvious. This is that, so far from being the last vestige of an old order, dominated by hereditary landlords and legitimised by ideologies of duty and governmental restraint, the Monarchy is an ideal fig leaf for the coalition of corporate interests and cultural leftists and unaccountable bureaucracies that is our present ruling class. The motto for Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee was “Sixty Years a Queen.” The motto now might as well be “Sixty Years a Rubber Stamp.” If, during the six decades of her reign, England has been transformed from a great and powerful nation and the classic home of civil liberty into a sinister laughing stock, the ultimate responsibility for all that has gone wrong lies with Elizabeth II.

Now, I can – as Enoch Powell once said – almost hear the chorus of disapproval. How dare I speak so disrespectfully of our Most Gracious Sovereign Lady? Do I not realise that, under our Constitution, Her Majesty reigns, but the politicians rule? How, in all conscience, can I shift blame for what has happened from the traitors who actively worked for our destruction – Harold Wilson, Edward Heath, Tony Blair, and the others – to a woman without executive function who has always devoted herself to our welfare? The answer is that, if she never projected the theft of our ancestral rights, it was her duty to resist that theft, and to resist without regard for the outcome – and it was in her power to resist without bringing on her head any of the penalties threatened or used against her subjects. But she did not resist. At no time in the past sixty years, has she raised a finger in public, or, it is probably the case, in private, to slow the destruction of an order of things she swore in the name of God to protect.

Let me explain the true functions of the English Monarchy. Many foreigners have looked at all the bowing and kissing and walking backwards, and thought England was some kind of divine right despotism. Others have looked at the assurances of Walter Bagehot, and believed that England was, to all intents and purposes, as much a republic as modern France or Germany. Anyone who believes either of these things is wrong.

The function of the Monarchy is to express and to sustain our national identity and all that stands with it. The Monarchy reminds us that our nation is not some recent arrival in the world, and that the threads of continuity between ourselves and our distant forebears have not been broken. England and its Monarchy exist today, and five hundred years ago, and a thousand years ago, and one thousand five hundred years ago. And, as we go further back, they vanish together, with no sense that they ever began at all, into the forests of Northern Europe. And with the fact of immemorial antiquity goes the idea of indefinite future continuation. Any Englishman who studies his national history finds himself uniquely in a conversation across many centuries. What an English writer said in 1688, or in 1776, or in 1832, is not alien to us now, and still has some relevance to our understanding of what kind of people we are.

Her Majesty has discharged her expressing function. However, since all this needs, at the most basic level, is for her to occupy the right place in her family tree and know how to smile and wave, she deserves as much praise as I might claim for having two legs. If, like the Emperor of Japan, she never said or did anything in public, she would still express our national identity. The problem is that she has done nothing to sustain that identity in any meaningful sense.

By law, the Queen is our head of state, and Supreme Governor of the Church of England, and Commander in Chief of all the armed forces. She appoints all the bishops and judges, and all the ministers and civil servants. She declares war, and all treaties are signed on her behalf. She cannot make new laws by her own authority and impose taxes. To do either of these, she needs the consent of Parliament. On the other hand, she can also veto any parliamentary bill she dislikes – and her veto cannot be overriden by any weighted majority vote of Parliament. These are the theoretical powers of an English Monarch. Except where limited by seventeenth century agreements like the Petition of Right and the Bill of Rights, she has the same legal powers as Henry VIII.

During the past three centuries, though, the convention first emerged and then hardened, that all these powers should be exercised in practice by a Prime Minister who is leader of the majority party in the House of Commons. He may be called First Minister of the Crown. He may have to explain himself every week to the Monarch. Where things like Royal Weddings and Jubilees are concerned, he mostly keeps out of sight. But, as leader of the majority party in the House of Commons, the Prime Minister draws his real legitimacy from the people. No Monarch has dismissed a Prime Minister, or tried to keep one in office, since the 1830s. No Monarch has rejected a parliamentary bill since 1708.

Because it is unwritten, and because its various conventions are in continual flux, the English Constitution can be rather opaque. It is, however, based on an implied contract between people and Monarch. This is that, in public, we regard whoever wears the Crown as the Lord’s Anointed. In return, the Monarch acts on the advice of a Prime Minister, who is accountable to us.

But, like any other agreement in a common law country, this implied contract is limited by considerations of reasonableness. It ceases to apply when politics become a cartel of tyrants and traitors. Once the politicians make themselves, as a class, irremovable, and once they begin to abolish the rights of the people, it is the duty of the Monarch to step in and rebalance the Constitution. It is then that she must resume her legal powers and exercise them of her own motion.

The need for this duty to be performed has been apparent since at least 1972, when we were lied into the European Union. The Conservatives did not fight the 1970 general election on any promise that they would take us in. When they did take us in, and when Labour kept us in, we were told that it was nothing more than a trade agreement. It turned out very soon to be a device for the politicians to exercise unaccountable power. The Queen should have acted then. Indeed, she should have acted – if not in the extreme sense, of standing forth as a royal dictator – before 1972. She should have resisted the Offensive Weapons Bill and the Firearms Bill, that effectively abolished our right to keep and bear arms for defence. She should have resisted the Bills that abolished most civil juries and that allowed majority verdicts in criminal trials. She should have resisted the numerous private agreements that made our country into an American satrapy. She should have insisted, every time she met her Prime Minister, on keeping the spirit of our old Constitution. There have been many times since 1972 when she should have acted.

At all times, she could have acted – all the way to sacking the Government and dissolving Parliament – without provoking riots in the street. So far as I can tell, she has acted only twice in my lifetime to force changes of policy. In 1979, she bullied Margaret Thatcher to go back on her election promise not to hand Rhodesia over to a bunch of black Marxists. In 1987, she bullied Margaret Thatcher again to give in to calls for sanctions against South Africa.

And that was it. She is somewhere on record as having said that she regards herself more as Head of the Commonwealth than as Queen of England. Certainly, she has never paid any regard to the rights of her English subjects.

The Queen has not sustained our national identity. It is actually worse than this. By expressing that identity, she has allowed many people to overlook the structures of absolute and unaccountable power that have grown up during her reign. She has fronted a revolution to dispossess us of our country and of our rights within it. How many of the people who turn out on Jubilee Day, with their union flags and street parties, will fully realise that the forms they are celebrating now contain an alien and utterly malign substance?

This does not, in itself, justify a republic. Doubtless, if a Government of National Recovery ever found itself opposed by the Monarch, it might be necessary to consider some change. Such a government would have only one chance to save the country, and nothing could be allowed to stand in its way. But this should only be an extreme last resort.

Symbolic functions aside, the practical advantage of having a monarchy is that the head of state is chosen by the accident of birth and not by some corrupted system of election; and that such a head of state is likely to take a longer term, more proprietorial, interest in the country than someone who has lied his way into an opportunity to make five lifetimes of income in four years. We got Elizabeth II by a most unhappy accident of birth. But we may be luckier next time. Sooner or later, the luck of the draw may give us a Patriot King.

As for Her Present Majesty, she may be remembered in the history books as Elizabeth the Useless. Even so, she is our Queen, and has been that for a very long time. I suppose this should count for something come Jubilee Day.

Dr. Sean Gabb [Email him] is a writer, academic, broadcaster and Director of the Libertarian Alliance in England. His monograph Cultural Revolution, Culture War: How Conservatives Lost England, and How to Get It Back is downloadable for free here; hard copies can be purchased here, along with his recent novel The Churchill Memorandum and other works. For his account of the Property and Freedom Society’s 2008 conference in Bodrum, Turkey, click here. For his address to the 2009 PFS conference, “What is the Ruling Class?”, click here; for videos of the other presentations, click here.

From V Dare [defunct].

Jezre’eli ‘Supreme Court’ Endorses Confessions by Torture

Attorney Feldman: Supreme Court ruling authorizes confession by torture

Since the July 2015 arson attack on the Dawabshe family’s house in Kfar Duma, Honenu has assisted many Jews accused of involvement with the crime. For a selection of posts describing Honenu Attorneys’ representation of defendants and GSS interrogees, click here. To familiarize our readers with the case, Honenu has gathered – click here – various articles and short videos on the subject.

Thursday, September 1, 2022, 17:05

Attorney Avigdor Feldman represented Amiram Ben Uliel in his appeal to the Supreme Court regarding his conviction in the Kfar Duma case. The conviction was based solely on a confession extracted from Ben Uliel after he was tortured while under interrogation by the GSS, and therefore Attorney Feldman sharply criticized the court ruling, which rejected the appeal. See below a video demonstrating one of the GSS torture methods.

Attorney Feldman (translation by Honenu): “The ruling that the Supreme Court handed down today has given authorization to torture as an acceptable means for obtaining a confession. The facts are simple: Amiram Ben Uliel was arrested, and with his arrest, an order was issued prohibiting him from meeting with an attorney. Ben Uliel maintained his right to silence for 17 days, and two days later the order would expire. The heads of the GSS ran to [now former] Attorney General [Yehuda] Weinstein and received tacit approval to implement physical acts that can only be called torture. However, in the clean language of the GSS and the court, they are called ‘special means.’ In fact, they are not special at all, but rather well-known torture methods used by authorities responsible for ‘state security’ in countries in which citizens live in fear, exposed to brutal interrogations and to courts that do not fulfill their role of protecting fundamental rights.”

Attorney Feldman further emphasized that, according to law, the GSS has no authority to torture interrogatees: “The GSS does not have the authority to break the spirit of an individual by means of a series of painful, prolonged, and repeated actions, which are forbidden to be mentioned, even though they are nothing new. They have been customary in religious rites for hundreds of years for the purpose of revealing witches and as means of interrogation that cause former senior members of a regime to admit to treason. Beyond the pain caused by the torture, which dissipates, the main function is to shatter the illusion that a man is in control of his fate, that there is a separation between a man’s face and the hand of the interrogator that painfully slaps it, the illusion that also in a security interrogation, the interrogatee retains his humanity. The Supreme Court in the case of the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel ruled that the GSS does not have the authority to implement actions whose goal is to break the spirit [of an interrogatee] and to cause him to confess to the charges against him. Today, this law was erased from Israeli jurisprudence.”

Additionally, Attorney Feldman stated that “the special means that were reviewed in the case of the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel were much more moderate than those that were applied to Amiram Ben Uliel. With the encouragement, or at least the tacit approval, of the Attorney General, the GSS crossed every limit tolerable in a democratic society in order to extract a confession from Ben Uliel. In their defense, they submitted a detailed listing of the torture methods used on Ben Uliel for examination. On unclear grounds of concerns for state security, it is forbidden to publicize the listing. For the first time, I saw an organized listing of torture methods – how long each method was employed on the body of the interrogatee, how many times each procedure was repeated, and the various auxiliary aids that were designed to produce visceral pain. When I studied the document, which I was forbidden to copy or keep in my office, my hair stood on end. I understood that it was prepared by a brain trust of doctors, interrogators, psychologists, and apparently lawmakers, who used the tested and primitive methods whose purpose was to shatter the feeling of self of the interrogatee, to abandon him to the mercy of his interrogators.

“The torture did its job, and Ben Uliel confessed to the charges against him while being tortured and immediately afterward. The [Central] District Court in its great mercy invalidated the confessions extracted during torture and immediately afterward. However, the court authorized the admissibility of the confessions extracted by a GSS interrogator 36 hours after the torture had been completed, at the stage when Ben Uliel was two days away from the expiration of the ban on meeting with an attorney,” stated Attorney Feldman.

Additionally, Ben Uliel’s attorney noted that the effect of the torture had not abated within such a short time and left trauma for years. “The Supreme Court upheld the ruling of the [Central] District Court that 36 hours nullified the results of the torture and that Ben Uliel had returned to his full intellectual and emotional strength. [They agreed with the lower court that] this time, he confessed out of his own free will, and [not because of] the memory of the torture and the fact that the GSS interrogators hinted to him more than once that if he strayed from his confession that was given soon after the torture and invalidated, the interrogation would continue, the torture would resume, and he would find himself beaten again, hurt, and helpless against the GSS interrogators. The fanciful hypothesis that the effects of torture are erased from one’s consciousness within 36 hours is baseless. People who have undergone torture at various levels of severity, including those applied to Ben Uliel, report prolonged trauma that is liable to continue for many years and in many cases leads to the suicide of interrogatees who do not succeed in overcoming the feeling of futility and helplessness that the torture leaves on their psyches.”

Attorney Feldman, who for years has led the struggle against torture in Israel, stated, “With one swipe of a hand, the ruling negated all of the achievements of case law and of the protection given to the legal rights of an interrogatee, and abandoned GSS interrogatees to an unacceptable torture regime that is contrary to the UN Convention Against Torture, which defines torture as an act by which pain or extreme suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally caused to an individual for the purpose of extracting from him or from a third party, information or a confession. The UN Convention Against Torture obligates every signatory country to use effective means, legislative, administrative, legal, or other, to prevent abusive acts in every area under their judicial authority.

“After this ruling by the Supreme Court, Israel can pride itself on being among the few democratic and undemocratic countries, and possibly the only, that reveals that torture is an acceptable interrogation tool; it is acceptable to the GSS. And Israel can pride itself that the Supreme Court approves torture that led to a confession 36 hours later. The International Court of War Crimes defines torture as a crime against humanity. Accomplices to crime are likely to be the Attorney General who tacitly agreed to torture, professionals expert in the human body and psyche who created the recipe of torture, which on one hand extracted a confession, and on the other did not kill or seriously injure the interrogatee, the torturers themselves, and last but first in the order of responsibility, the courts that are willing to accept confessions that are the products of torture. We hope that the unacceptable ruling that stands in complete opposition to international norms, that left the Supreme Court today, will be canceled in another hearing, which we will request soon,” concluded Attorney Feldman.

Continue reading…

From Honenu, here.

US Government Profligacy Knows No Bounds

When Penitentiary Lifers Got Free Stuff From Joe Biden

By 

David Stockman’s Contra Corner

September 5, 2022

President Joe Biden’s Internal Revenue Service (IRS) gave a huge number of prison inmates at least $1.3 billion in COVID-19 stimulus checks, the Washington Free Beacon reported.

There are more than 1.1 million incarcerated individuals who took in the stimulus money, according to IRS data provided to the Free Beacon, as part of Biden’s $1.4 trillion American Rescue Plan. Those incarcerated who received the stimulus money includes roughly 163,000 people serving life sentences without parole, the IRS told Republican Nebraska Rep. Don Bacon in a letter obtained by the outlet.

Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton had raised concerns in 2021 about the fact that under the plan prisoners would receive money, slamming the idea that someone like Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the 2013 Boston Marathon bomber, would get $1,400. Tsarnaev ended up raking in $1,400 in connection to the plan, the Boston Herald reported in January 2022.

The point here is not simply that inmates and lifers got $1,400 in free stuff from Uncle Sam, but that Washington’s fiscal culture has gotten so lax that no one even bothered to append an inmate exclusion to Joe Biden’s $1.4 trillion boondoggle.

Nor is this a unique case of fiscal profligacy. Even setting aside the $400-$600 billion cost of Joe Biden’s student debt cancellation plan, the fact remains that every single one of the 43 million student borrowers has received a huge windfall from the payments moratoriums initiated in the spring of 2020. And that includes millionaires and billionaires.

With the latest four-month extension, student loan payments will have been paused seven times during the last 33 months. The nominal budget cost of these pauses since the beginning of the pandemic, therefore, will end up totaling $155 billion.

From the students point of view, however, the forgiveness is even more fulsome, owing to the inflation-caused erosion of principal during the last three years. In the case of average student debt owed by recent medical school and law school graduates, for instance, the effective forgiveness amounts to $68,000 and $41,500 respectively.

But here’s the thing. All of this largesse was justified by the alleged alleviation of harms from the pandemic, but in the case of most student borrowers under the age of 50 years, the harms were minimal.

That’s evident from the data on the ultimate harm—death. In this context, the normal annual mortality rate from poisonings and suicides is 67 per 100,000 population for age cohorts between 30-50 years. That’s 2.6X the 25 per 100,000 “with Covid” deaths reported by the CDC for the same age cohort during the first year of the pandemic.

Indeed, the profligacy seems to know no bounds. As the good folks at the Committee for a Responsible Budget (sic!) have pointed out, the $500 billion reduction in the $1.6 trillion outstanding level of Federal student debt from Joe Biden’s debt forgiveness plan will be replaced in a jiffy.

That’s because new borrowing would continue to accrue at at least the previous pace. In reality, it would likely accrue faster due to moral hazard from debt cancellation and the new IDR program (income driven repayment).

Continue reading…

From LRC, here.