Dispatches from the Island of Serfs in the 21st Century

Aditya Iyer
5 min readMay 6, 2023

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The fawning obsequious praise and protection of King Charles III is but yet another pitiful attempt by the British state and its hangers-on to pretend they have some prestige.

Prince Charles at the Palace of Westminster. Photo Credit: © House of Lords 2022 / Photography by Annabel Moeller via Wikimedia Commons

The money magically disappears when the people need it. It is never there to feed their children, to help the peasantry heat their homes, or to pay the revolting working masses an appropriate wage.

This is a nation where schoolteachers are having to use their own money purchase pencils for their pupils, many of whom can look forward to lessons conducting under the baleful rictus-grin of the new King — foisted upon the same struggling schools at the bargain price of £8 million.

But the vast funds of the public exchequer of this particular nation I am writing to you from do exist when it comes to smoothing out any issues the already rich might have.

I come to you live from the United Kingdom; a backwards island whose state and elites are fulfilling their fantasies this weekend by roleplaying petty feudal lords wholeheartedly supporting the coronation of King Charles III.

For the majority of the civilised world, the pageantry that accompanies the world’s most successful family of benefit scroungers seems, at best, perplexing. But Britain is currently in the throws of monarchical madness; and every apparatus of the state and the media is focusing their attention on a descendent of enslavers and colonisers essentially playing dress-up at the expense of the public.

This Charles was not the one that was beheaded. And neither is he the other one whose claim to historical fame was formally beginning the Transatlantic Slave Trade.

This Charles is merely their beneficiary; a sausage-fingered septuagenarian whose vast personal wealth has not made him shy about wringing out money from his vassals to pay for a party to put on a fancy hat.

More then £100 million of public money will be spent on Chuckles’ ceremony at a time when most people are struggling to make ends meet. We think anyway; for the royal family has sealed their wills from public scrutiny to ensure the peasants do not realise the full extent of how much they are getting screwed over by.

There are good investigations, such as the recent series by The Guardian (which stands alone amongst British mainstream media by insisting it actually speak truth to power rather than following the lead of the BBC and becoming fearful courtiers to the Windsors) into the murky finances of Charles III and his sprawling estate.

From the rapid increase of energy bills, to the overall miasma of the cost-of-living crisis, the figures taken for an inbred descendent of an enslaver to play dress-up is rage-inducing.

Or, at least, it would be were this a sane nation. But alas, I report to you from the United Kingdom; an island devoid of sense and reason, populated by seasoning-averse folks who all aspire to be serfs in the 21st Century.

There has been a veritable glut of oleaginous hagiographies about the supposed “importance” of Chuckles and the monarchy as a whole trotted out by state and by the media.

The state mechanism has swiftly acted to disabuse any lingering notions that Britain is a democracy. Threatening letters have been sent to “anti-monarchists”; emergency powers to suppress protests have been passed by the Tory government, and the Metropolitan Police, which is both institutionally racist and seemingly exclusively staffed by sexual assaulters, astonishingly announced it would not “tolerate” any protests.

It is not the place of the attack dogs of the state to “tolerate” protest, the fundamental building block of a true democracy. But again, gentle reader, this is not a true democracy.

This is England; whose Bank’s chief economist tells the commoners they “need to accept being poorer”; whose energy barons gurgle delightedly at record profits even as they send thugs to old peoples’ domicles to forcibly install pre-paid meters; and whose sallow faced political dregs rubbed their hands gleefully as they lined their mates’ pockets during a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic with PPE contracts.

This is a sick country which delights in promoting inequality and abuses of power; a nation of foodbanks told by a contemptuous elite to stop grumbling about being hungry and swear allegiance to a king so disinterested in the wellbeing of his “subjects” that future generations would be charitable to attribute apochryphal sayings about cake to him.

“We will not blame him for the crimes of his ancestors if he relinquishes the royal rights of his ancestors; but as long as he claims their rights, by virtue of descent, then, by virtue of descent, he must shoulder the responsibility for their crimes.” — James Connolly

For the British Monarchy is indeed a symbol. It is a symbol of colonial violence and of enslavers. In addition to his genealogical heritage and origins of his fortune, Chuckles’ has chosen St Edward’s Crown for his dress-up; the same crown given to Charles II as a thank-you present for issuing the royal charter officially beginning the slave trade. The filth of enslavement will literally be upon his brow today; the ermine sullied with tears, the stolen jewels dulled by blood.

It is no surprise that the elites and traditional media have latched onto to Charles in such a manner. His coronation is the last drop of prestige they can milk out of the dried teat of their confected and hoary vision of Britain’s imperial past.

It is the last dying gasp of a pathetic nation that has never recovered from its Empire breaking its shackles, and whose elites continue to deploy racist legislation and rhetoric to mask the deep structural inequalities that plague pretty much everyone else equally.

As the Irish republican James Connolly so adroitly put it during George V’s 1910 state visit to Ireland, “Let the capitalist and landlord class flock to exalt him; he is theirs; in him they see embodied the idea of caste and class; they glorify him and exalt his importance that they might familiarise the public mind with the conception of political inequality, knowing well that a people mentally poisoned by the adulation of royalty can never attain to that spirit of self-reliant democracy necessary for the attainment of social freedom.”

But the charade is failing. Contrary to their beliefs, and that of Chuckles and his cartel of weirdos, the vast majority of people in the United Kingdom are not interested in playing out feudal fantasies (according to a recent poll, more than 70% of Britons under the age of 50 are indifferent to the coronation).

The mask has cracked, and the glue that holds the royal jewels together has been revealed to be nothing but cheap paste.

Today, Britain has been taken hostage and forced to celebrate the crowning of a king. One can only hope that the full benefits of democracy finally reaches the heathens of this benighted island sometime this century, and they dispense with strange customs antithetical to the very idea of equality.

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Aditya Iyer

Freelance journalist and writer. Interests: history (pre- and post-colonial), culture, and immigration. Also strives to befriend small animals.