Audacious is a bold word, but maybe there’s a couple more we could add. The horror of the Brits and the pure stupidity for Saying this to Lemon, or rather the pure entitlement. It shows how blind she is asking a gay, black American to pay for reparations. It would have been awesome if he took out his wallet, and said, “So how much do I owe you?”
But honestly that is how the British succeed, by demanding respect for the last 500 years for the little good they might have done that papers over the vast atrocities they perpetrated. The Prime Minister of India, Mr. Modi, didn’t go and instead renamed a street in India and tore down a statue and put up a new one and calling the previously named street Kingsway a “symbol of slavery.” He was right of course, and maybe understating the case of British occupation of their country. The gaslighting is so severe that most Indians and people don’t every know there were dozens of countries in the area the British turned into “India” by redrawing the map around and through all of them.
What’s worse about her comment though, that shows the complete vast arrogance and atrocity is that they the ruling aristocracy and monarchs were actually paid reparations for slaves they “lost” under the 1833 slave abolition act. It’s not “long ago,” as the British worker/taxpayer was forced to pay back the aristocrats for one and fifty years, just finishing payment in 2015. The British companies under charter from the Monarch flooded the coast of China with opium, then bombed the harbor with their navy when the Chinese tried to clamp down on the drug trade. Then they—the Monarch’s British—demanded reparations from the Chinese for interfering with their drug trade, part of the two “Opium Wars.” When the Chinese rose up to kick them out during the Boxer Rebellion, when the British occupied Hong Kong under a hundred year lease, seizing Chinese territory, the British recruited 8 other western foreign powers to help repress the “savages”. The Audacity of those Chinese peasants try to kick the occupying British out of their own country!
I don’t understand how 53 countries can still be subjected to this monarchy under the commonwealth. The Jamaican president is considering “casting off” the monarchy through a referendum. 14 other neighboring “territories” ave the Audacity to consider self-rule. Can you imagine being in Jamaica, a country more than 90 percent black, all former slaves brought in chains by the British and forced into slavery to make sugar for the Queen’s tea, and now having to ask permission, as grown adults, the new King to consider letting them be free of the crown? How exactly does that go for these grown adults like Prime Minister Holness of Jamaica: “Um, Your Royal Excellency King Charles the Third, um, I was wondering if you could free us from being subjected to your monarchy? You know, because you enslaved us and forced us into work and poverty and destroyed our native language and religions?” “What?” “Excuse me, this is Pamela, Mr. Prime Minister, the King has a headache right now, but it is his position if you are able to get your taxpayers to pay reparations for the loss of our Monarchical sovereignty over you, he will certainly consider curtailing our arrangement —although I don’t know why you would want your so-called freedom. Just make sure you deliver a signed referendum in the next two years and an apology with a proper reparations payment schedule for your freedom or the King might be forced to reconsider any action that releases you from his sovereignty.” “Oh, thank you so much Ms. Fordwich.” Apparently, real slavery is the mental chains that allows such thinking. Or, as that one famous Jamaican sang, “Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery/None but ourselves can free our minds.”
Audacious is a start, but still looking for some stronger adjectives.
