Does Anybody Know Why This Carnegie Professor Said This About Queen Elizabeth ( Archived) (39)

There is a time and a place and this is not it. I take it that Prof stands at funerals and yells out crap about the deceased.
The bottom line is an old woman died. She was loved by many as everyones granny. What happened in the past or even currently is beside the point. There are so many real events that took place and so many fake ones, who knows which are which.
The Queen was the figurehead of the country. Not the sole ruler of all. Parliament handles the daily governing. The Queen and now King, can make their ideas known, but they are no longer dictators whom everyone obeys.
Let her go in peace and let her family and whomever wishes to grieve. If someone wants their fifteen minutes of attention, do it later in a month or more. She cant be hurt anymore, only those who loved her.

Seven years after Nigeria won independence from the UK – and 15 years into the reign of Queen Elizabeth II – civil war broke out in the former British colony.

On one side was the Nigerian government, desperate to preserve the multi-ethnic state that had been cobbled together by Britain’s colonial administration. On the other were the Biafra separatists who sought autonomy for Nigeria’s Igbo people, an ethnic minority originally from the country’s south who faced persecution and pogroms in the north. With control over Nigeria’s oil production at stake, former colonial superpowers jostled for influence, not least the UK.

In 1967, Nigeria was still a member of the Commonwealth and Elizabeth had remained its head of state – the “Queen of Nigeria” – until 1963. Intent on maintaining influence and control, the UK government, led by Harold Wilson, funneled vast amounts of arms and munitions toward the Nigerian government.

The war was a humanitarian catastrophe for Nigeria’s 52 million people. A year into the conflict, more than a thousand children were starving to death each day. TV cameras beamed images of their anguish – as well as evidence of further wartime atrocities – all over the world. Wilson responded to the public backlash by misleading parliament about the UK’s involvement, even as he increased the flow of arms, declassified documents revealed in 2020. In the wake of the queen’s death, the Nigerian president, Muhammadu Buhari, who fought on the side of the government, praised the royal family as “a very strong ally even in the midst of our difficult time during the Biafran war; they stood for the indivisibility of the Nigerian state, supported and ensured that we overcame that problem”.

At the time, Uju Anya’s mother had two children under 10 and was pregnant with a third. A native Trinidadian who had called Nigeria home for less than a decade, she just missed catching a ride on the last foreign charter plane airlifting refugees out of the war zone. As soldiers took up British-supplied arms against civilians, razing whole villages and scorching ancestral lands, Anya’s mother fled with her in-laws, taking whatever cover they could find.

“We lost half of our relatives,” says Anya, who was born six years later. “That’s the legacy of this war. It was a genocide, a slaughter, a holocaust.”



I was born in England in 1967, but I was aware throughout my childhood that the Biafran children had starved to death, such was the enormity of the atrocity. I wasn't aware of the cause, however.

You're welcome.

I don't think it's unreasonable that some people aren't grieving for the queen. Personally, I think the 10 days mourning was an opportunity for people to grieve what they needed to grieve for at the end of an era. Anger is a natural part of grief.

I'm not sure how responsible the queen was as an individual, but she did represent the UK system and culture. Certainly by her death, she had next to no official power and the king, or queen is not allowed to meddle in poltics, or social issues.

Her power was being in an advisory/guiding position, but those in power didn't necessarily listen. Rumour has it she was pretty furious with Margeret Thatcher for her cruelty.

Society evolved quite a bit during her reign, almost to the point where we're considering that people of colour and women might be people. I'm not sure how much blame, or credit should be attributed to the queen personally, but I do wonder whether having a woman as head of state, whether her mere presence on coins, notes, stamps and cereal packets had an impact on evolving women's rights. Bear in mind, equal suffrage for women was only achieved two years before she was born and she became queen at the age of 25.

Certainly, no society benefits from inequality and there's a three tier class system even within Buckingham Palace. I'd be quite happy to have an open discussion about how best to move forward, including an apology to those who have suffered due to British colonialism. It's not much of an ask.

We can't change our future unless we understand our history that has shaped who we are today. It's like expecting a heroine user to bally well stop that nonsense without addressing the underlying issues which lead to the habit.

You're right, we need radical change to our systems that are based upon hierarchy, inequality, empty rhetoric and lies.

We could maybe start by not lying to ourselves about our and our society's failings.

What I have found as a second generation immigrant with a slightly brown daughter is that saying we embrace 'others' is not enough. We have to understand how to include everyone into our communties and that involves listening, even when we don't like what we hear.