RIFLE RANGE BOY: Queen

Showing posts with label Queen. Show all posts

Friday, 3 March 2023

This is how international relations work!

The Ipcress File (1965)
Director: Sidney J. Furie

We always think that violence, espionage, eavesdropping, intelligence archiving, military building and sabotage are events that only happened in the past. We have confined them in the fiction row of our bookshelves and assume it does not occur in real life. We give humans way too much credence.

This business of international relations began as early as the time Man picked up a weapon to knock down his neighbour.

Just found out recently, of all the people, the British monarch, Queen Elizabeth I and the Ottoman Empire had a good thing going between the two. After being labelled an outcast by the Roman Catholic Church for the shenanigans of King Henry VIII, there was animosity between England and many European superpowers of that time. The Spanish, Italians, French, Russian and Portuguese were all under the thumb of the Vatican.

The English naturally found friendship in 'the enemy of the enemy'. In the eyes of the Ottoman, the Anglicans (i.e. British) were not idolaters. Unlike the Catholics who found pleasure in worshipping the statues of a caring mother or a man on a crucifix, the Anglican houses of worship were pristinely bare. Beyond all that was business. The British wanted to lay their hands on many Muslim traits like raisins and spices. The Moors from Morocco actually had expansion plans. They had, in their mind, a joint venture with the British, a conquest over the Spanish territories in the Americas. By then, the Spanish armadas were scooping gold by the shiploads from ancient civilisations.

Sir Henry Hyde, after whose family Hyde Park is named, lived during this time. He was a royalist during the English Civil War. He worked as an agent for the Levant Company, which became the precursor to the East India Company. He later became a Consul under the Ottoman administration. At the same time, this man also was a spy for the Venetians. After their classic sea battle in Cyprus, the Venetians had a bone to pick with the Ottomans. Hyde informed the political and military secrets to the Venetians.

Working within the crowd of Cromwell supporters, Hyde was captured while fighting for King Charles II and was executed in the Tower of London.

If you think Aurangzeb's planned murder of his brother, Dara Shikoh, was brutal, King Ashoka was no saint. He had his 99 brothers killed before sitting on the throne.

We all grew up reading and listening to the covert operations on both sides of the Iron Curtain during the Cold War era. Both ideologies, suffering from extreme delusion and cognitive dissonance, thought the other would annihilate each other. Ultimately, they almost ended up sending the whole planet up in a mushroom cloud twice.

It is during this time that this movie is set. In the swinging sixties, with the background of miniskirts, baby doll dresses and bright colours, it is a joy to watch a young Michael Caine doing his suave 'licence to kill' James Bond manoeuvres.

A point to note is that even though the Americans seem to be on the side of the West, they also keep a tight rein on their subordinates. This is just to make sure that they know how the boss is.

We thought spying and honey trappings were only a legacy of the past. Wrong. Even as late as the 21st century, these are ongoing. The US accused the Chinese of using their goodwill to siphon off sensitive state secrets back home, as the US was the innocent party.

It is just how the world works. We don't hold hands and sing Kumbayah.

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Friday, 20 January 2023

What do Rishi Sunak, Freddy Mercury and Mississippi Masala have in common?

https://borderlessjournal.com/2023/01/20/what-do-rishi-sunak-freddy-mercury-mississippi-masala-have-in-common/

Rishi Sunak’s appointment to 10 Downing Street has made people aware of the significant presence of Indians in the African Continent. Indian-African cultural and trade exchanges had been ongoing as early as the 7th century BC. Africans are also mentioned to have significantly influenced India’s history of kingdoms, conquests and wars.

The second wave of Indian migration to Africa happened mainly in the 19th century with British imperialism via the indentured labour system, a dignified name for slavery. It is all semantics. What essentially happened at the end day is a large Indian diaspora in countries like South Africa, Mauritius, Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania and many more. Many of the Indians who made their way there as labourers, over the generations, began to play significant roles in the economy and professional representations in these countries...

https://borderlessjournal.com/2023/01/20/what-do-rishi-sunak-freddy-mercury-mississippi-masala-have-in-common/

This work is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International.

Sunday, 11 September 2022

The Queen is dead, long live the King!

We are often advised to say only the nice things about the recently departed. Somehow, all the ill feelings and the wrong paths crossed are temporarily swept under the proverbial carpet. Everyone, including the ones who tend to benefit from the deceased's passing, is expected to carry a sombre outward appearance - wear a sad face, dress down and avoid merriment.

After the so-called mourning period, it will be pretty much no-holds-barred, I guess.

But now, even before the dead are laid to rest, the wokies are already at it. I am referring to the recent demise of one of the longest reigning monarchs of the once most enormous Empire of the world, where the sun never set. True, she inherited a bounty of loot from the world over. At one time, pirates scaling the Atlantic high seas were free to pilfer gold from Spanish vessels legitimately under the auspices of the British Crown as long as they paid their dues to the monarch.

True, they went out with their imperial stance with a chip on their shoulders and a stiff upper lip to match. And plunder wealth from civilisations that had found peace with their place in the sun, create mayhem to liberate the oppressed and destroy other cultures with their new economic model.

This turn of events is inevitable. Every nation wants to improve life for itself. The designated / king does that for his subject at the expense of a gamut of benefits for himself and those under his umbrage who held his torch. This way of conquest was thought to trickle down the food chain and continues to date.

There were plundering imperialists, and there were cruel plundering imperialists. Some maimed their subjects without caring about their future. In a way, the British made some humane decisions to ease their administration but ended up causing their Empire's own destruction along with other compelling factors. They laid down plans for proper administrative machinery, invested in education for natives to help (and look down on their own cultures) and created an extensive web of transportation networks.

If not for the English, this blog would not be in English or an incomprehensible language that could hardly pass for English. We were lucky that English became the lingua franca of the world, the modern language of communication. Left to our politicians to steer us to the future, we would still be a fumbling fishing village ruled by despots, not that they are not preventing this from happening. An unthinking obedient herd of the population led by their leash to the slaughter is their idea of utopia. If we had been savaged by colonists, we would have been brutalised by our own kind. As the Tamil saying goes, "Whether Rama or Raavan rule, it doesn't matter to me, I don't give a damn!"

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