Radio: I Discuss the Coronation, the Tories’ Suppression of Peaceful Protest and Criminalization of Refugees, Plus the Latest on Guantánamo, With Chris Cook on Gorilla Radio
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For many years, I’ve been honored to be regularly invited to discuss my ongoing work on Guantánamo, as well as many other political concerns of mine, on Gorilla Radio, run by Chris Cook in Victoria, Canada, which is “dedicated to social justice, the environment, community, and providing a forum for people and issues not covered in the corporate media.”
Chris’s latest show is here (or here as an MP3), and our interview took place in the second half of the hour-long program, after an interview with whistleblowing activist Ashley Gjøvik, following the publication of her article “Whistleblowers Are the Conscience of Society, Yet Suffer Gravely For Trying to Hold the Rich and Powerful Accountable For Their Sins,” published by Covert Action Magazine.
I’ve also embedded the show below:
The trigger for Chris’s interview with me was the Coronation, last Saturday, of King Charles III, which I covered in a post as part of my ongoing photo-journalism project ‘The State of London’, and also recorded a song about, entitled, “You’re Not My King,” also embedded below:
Ten Days of Bloated Pageantry and Ritual Overkill: By All Means Pay Your Respects to the Queen, But It’s Time for the Monarchy to Go
Please support my work as a reader-funded investigative journalist, commentator and activist. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.
In 2022, when it’s often difficult to get people to pay attention to anything for more than a few minutes, when the country faces an economic crisis unprecedented in our lifetimes, and the spectre of total environmental collapse looms ever closer, it seems to be extraordinarily anachronistic for the British establishment to insist that there must a ten-day period of national mourning following the death of Queen Elizabeth II last Thursday, at the age of 96, after 70 years on the throne.
Obviously, some sort of period of mourning is appropriate for a monarch who was so popular (the most recent polling, in June, showed that 81% of the British people held a positive opinion of her, with only 12% seeing her negatively), but I have to ask whether it is really appropriate for ten days to be given over to obscure rituals and ostentatious pageantry designed not only to honour the Queen, but also to seamlessly endorse the succession of her eldest son, Prince Charles, and, by extension, to prop up, in an unquestioning manner, the entire edifice of the monarchy, and what it represents: the preservation of a largely old, almost entirely white British establishment involving aristocrats, the military, politicians, international trade (and especially the arms trade), and the UK’s ongoing colonial and post-colonial aspirations.
Operation London Bridge
According to the British establishment, the answer to the question, “Is this ten-day period of mourning appropriate?” is a resounding yes, although I suspect that few of Her Majesty’s subjects are aware that extraordinary detailed plans for the aftermath of her death — spelling out every step of the ten-day period with regard to the media, the funeral, and the transition to her successor, her eldest son, Prince Charles — were first conceived in the 1960s, and “refined in detail at the turn of the century”, as Sam Bright explained in a detailed article for the Guardian in 2017.
Who's still at Guantánamo?
