Why Do the Heirs of Mass Shooters Get a Platinum Celebration?
I ignored the 70th anniversary celebration of Queen Elizabeth’s IIs reign. Being of Indian heritage, I’ve never venerated the royals because their wealth derives from exploiting India, the African continent, and pre-Columbian Americas.
During the past week, I could not stomach the “images on Stonehenge,” “Buckingham Palace concert” and of course, the Queen’s balcony appearance where she “looked down on her subjects.”
Previously, whenever the media has hyped up the royals, I point to an article detailing a British-engineered series of famines that cost 10 Indian million lives. This saga resulted from farmers having to pay 50 percent of their earnings to the British Crown, leaving just a fraction of their crops for themselves. The article displays a graphic photograph of starving people. <https://yourstory.com/2014/08/bengal-famine-genocide/amp?fbclid=IwAR3AlegnjkeHZ23ZkFg97udX9uU7eMfCEIhdv7xQGb9zeOWr_FmCu6563mI>
But today, I’ll highlight another historic tragedy that has repeated itself in Buffalo, Uvalde, Tulsa, and other U.S. cities in the past month. In this 1919 massacre, the murder-leader reported to the Queen’s grandfather, King George V.
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Picture if you will, 20,000 people enjoying spring at a park. More specifically, these families are celebrating the festival Baisakhi at the Jallianwala Bagh park in Amritsar, Punjab on April 13, 1919. Most participants are simply having fun: eating, dancing, singing, gossiping, and living their best lives. Of course, like any holiday gathering, a few discuss politics. <https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/apr/12/britain-amritsar-massacre-centenary-1919-india>
“We Indians gave the British our men as soldiers to win the war (World War I),” one attendee says. “So, we expected to get dominion to rule ourselves. Come on! Australia, New Zealand, and Canada got their independence. And two years ago, the Balfour declaration promised Jews a homeland in Palestine. When is it our turn?”
Sadly, the celebrants remain unaware that the British war cabinet secretly declared India unfit to rule itself until the year 2419 (as in 500 years)!
Back at Jallianwala Bagh, the conversation continues.
“Instead of freedom, the British imposed ‘na dalil, na vakil, na appeal,’ (no argument, no lawyer, no appeal), another attendant says. “We can be searched and arrested without a warrant and thrown into detention without trial. Why are they swindling us? They’re tyrants.”
Note: This is an imagined conversation.
While civilly engaged in civic discussion, a few blocks away, General Reginald Dyer marches his troops toward the six-acre open area where people are jubilating. (I used “jubilating” on purpose). Then, within 30 seconds of entering the park, Dyer orders his troops to shoot at the crowd. Following orders, they indiscriminatingly open fire for 10 continuous minutes. An upwards of 2,000 people get killed, according to Indian accounts, including mothers, grandparents, and newborn babies. More than 1,500 people contract injuries.
The depiction of the massacre, which appeared in the 1982 film “Gandhi,” still haunts me. I vividly remember a mother trying to escape with her baby, only to be shot down into a well, with the baby crying at its rim.
According to author Mihir Bose, Dyer had intended use machine guns, but the armored cars carrying them struggled to squeeze through the narrow road leading to the park. Worse, the soldiers would have killed more people had they not run out of ammunition.
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Dyer would be the envy of recent mass shooters Salvador Ramos, Payton Gendron, Kyle Rittenhouse, and Dylan Roof, just to name a few. At the same time, Dyer himself would envy the weapons these modern shooters have at their disposal. Like Rittenhouse, Dyer faced little reprimand. In Bose’s 2019 article in The Guardian, Dyer did not receive any criminal charges. In fact, the British deemed Dyer a hero and the savior of the Empire.
And “save” he did, as the monarch thrives 102 years after the Amritsar massacre. No doubt, most of the empire now has shriveled. Yet, you could have fooled me with all the carousing this past week.
A modern royal fan may lament, “Well, Queen Elizabeth II did not order the troops to fire in Amritsar. Nor was she even born then.”
Yes, but why are you rejoicing 70 years of a role that inherited that very empire Dyer preserved? This is the same empire that downplayed, at best, the massacring of 20,000 innocent men, women, and children at a festival.
Interestingly, Queen Elizabeth II did have a connection with the Amritsar massacre. In 1997, she visited the site during a trip to India. While there, she signed the “visitor log,” but did not apologize. More ludicrous, the Queen’s husband, Prince Philip, had the gall to argue about semantics. He complained that Indians had “doctored” history by stating 2,000 people died, which the prince claimed as “wrong.” Though the prince was born three years after the massacre, he deemed himself as an expert since he served with Dyer’s son in the Navy.
A century after the Amritsar massacre, we cannot turn back time. Apologies and memorials give some concession to those who sacrificed their lives on that day. But there is something you, the reader, can do.
If your eyes and ears are feasting on the platinum jubilee, I plead with you to contemplate what are you celebrating. What exactly are you revering? What does your reverence accomplish?
I’m encouraged by Hafsa Khalil’s CNN article, “‘I couldn’t care less.’ What some young Britons think of the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee.” < https://www.cnn.com/2022/06/04/uk/jubilee-young-britons-gbr-cmd-intl/index.html>
The piece cites a survey stating that only 31 percent of modern British youth, 18- to 24-year-olds, want the monarchy to continue. With the stepping back of the Duchess and Duke of Sussex and Meghan Markle’s exposure of the royalty’s systemic racism, I am encouraged that the monarch’s days are numbered.
In my view, reverence keeps the royalty alive. Once reverence wanes, the royalty will topple like dominos. Then, the smallest flicker of sunlight will set on the British Empire, which will fade to black.
If I see any more media mentions of the jubilee, I will turn in the other direction and remember those who died in that empire-endorsed mass shooting on that tragic spring day in 1919.
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