What is an anti-monarchist republican (with a small “r’), to make of the “fairy tale” wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton? Growing up as a minority in the poor East End of London, where the two streams of right-wing patriotism and left-wing politics constantly intertwined, it was never easy to decide how to interpret each situation. But, one thing was clear, most Jews were very skeptical of the Monarchy. It was “them” and “us” and “they” were very remote from “us.” What seemed like revolutionary ideas there, where one was in a small minority, once in the USA seemed perfectly normal. Seen from the perspective of the US, the monarchy looked out-moded, antiquated and ripe for removal. Why, I wondered, was there not a British Republican Party, whose main aim was to rid Britain of this ridiculous and costly Monarchy, with all its aristocratic hangers-on and attendant social stratification?
The hoop-la about this Royal Wedding gives one an answer, the Monarchy with all its strappings of luxury and excess is a highly popular form of entertainment. A middle-class commoner marrying into the Royal family is a persistant dream of a large proportion of the female population of Britain. How can you even consider destroying such an ingrained and historic part of British culture, even though most monarchies have long since been removed elsewhere? Consider France, Russia, Hungary, Romania, China and so on. But, what distinguished the Brits from the rest is that the Royals there were more adaptable, like the Dutch and Scandinavian monarchies, they became constitutional monarchs, they followed the will of the people as expressed thru Parliament, not vice versa. While the French and the Russian royals basically said to the starving masses “let them eat cake,” in Britain they produced a King with a stammer who spoke for and upheld British values of decency and courage.
There were two kinds of anti-monarchist movements, the revolutionary and the bourgeois. The revolutionary sought to destroy the monarchy absolutely (as in France and Russia). But, the bourgeois sought to replace them constitutionally, by electing a President, who is perhaps treated like a king. The squalid murder of the Romanovs in a forest near Ekaterinborg in 1917 was an example of the former, the replacement of George III as King of America was of the second type.
When I was a young student I went to a play, I forget where and when, but it stuck in my mind, about a group of Russian revolutionaries who are about to assassinate the Russian Tsar. But, the main assassin returns not having carried out his deed, because in the carriage with the Tsar were his children, and this man, a revolutionary Jew, could not bring himself to throw a bomb at the children. Of course, his comrades were aghast, because now they would all be captured, tortured and killed, but nevertheless the assassin stands firm, it was not his ideal to murder innocent children. What a dilemma? Better to let them live and watch their entertaining antics on the telly. So now I am a theoretical British republican, passive and yet convinced.
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