JUAN GONZALEZ: Hundreds of thousands of
people filled the streets of London today hoping to get a glimpse of the
royal wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton.
Up to two billion
people around the world are believed to have watched the festivities, a
story which has dominated TV news for weeks. Eight thousand journalists
are covering the event.
British police launched a massive security operation around the event.
The Guardian newspaper reports Scotland Yard raided five apartments in
London on Thursday, preemptively arresting 14 people.
Some of those
arrested were reportedly involved in the large street protests on March
26th against budget cuts in Britain.
AMY GOODMAN: Controversy has also arisen this week over the royal
wedding guest list. Syrian ambassador Sami Khiyami was disinvited amidst
reports of Syria’s brutal crackdown on peaceful protesters.
But the
former head of Bahrain’s National Security Agency is in attendance
despite allegations he oversaw the torturing of prisoners with electric
shocks. Sheikh Khalifa Bin Ali al-Khalifa is the current Bahraini
ambassador to Britain.
Human rights groups have also criticized the
royal family for inviting representatives from,
-
Saudi Arabia
-
Belarus
-
Burma
-
Morocco
-
Equatorial Guinea
-
Swaziland
-
Zimbabwe
Joining us here in New York is a British journalist who has openly
criticized the wedding hoopla.
Johann Hari is a columnist at The
Independent of London. One of his most recent columns is titled "This
Royal Frenzy Should Embarrass Us All." He’s also the presenter of the
Johann Hari podcast.
Johann, welcome to Democracy Now!
JOHANN HARI: It’s great to be with you, Amy.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, talk about your country. Talk about this royal
wedding, all the attention. And most importantly, let’s discuss empire.
JOHANN HARI: Well, I’m here as a refugee from the royal wedding, in New
York, so - although it seems you can’t escape it anywhere. But, you know,
nobody objects to two people who love each other getting married. You
know, that’s a nice thing. It’s nice for anyone to see it. You know, got
no problem with that.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, depending on their sexual orientation, some countries
do.
JOHANN HARI: Well, that’s a good point, but the - indeed, Elton John was
there, and he wouldn’t be allowed to get married. He’s not allowed to
get married in Britain.
But the thing we really object to is the institution of monarchy and the
fact this has turned into the celebration of the idea that my country’s
head of state is selected not by voting but by squelching out of a
particular aristocratic womb in a particular golden palace, which
doesn’t seem to me to be a very sensible way to select these things. And
it causes very serious problems.
For all the other flaws of the American
political system, your head of state grew up on food stamps. My head of
state grew up on the postage stamps.
You know, you can tell your kids in
most democracies,
"If you work really hard, if you appeal to enough
people, you can grow up to be the symbol of our country."
The fact that
the symbol of our country is selected solely through the most snobbish
criteria of all, bloodlines, who their parent was, has a disfiguring
effect on the whole of British society. It creates a kind of snobbery
that emanates out and emanates down.
When you’re a British kid, you grow
up seeing that people instinctively bow and grovel before someone, just
because they happen to have been born in a palace.
And I think that does
have a deforming effect.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And to what degree - by the reports that we see, the sense
is that all of the British public is enthralled with the event. But
what’s the reality in terms of public opinion within Britain?
JOHANN HARI: No, that’s not true. Most British people will have any
excuse to get very drunk and have a party, and were glad for a public
holiday. But no, most people are benignly indifferent. They’ll watch it
on the television for 10 minutes and get on with something else.
Around 20 percent of the British people, which is a disappointingly low
figure, but it’s still a lot, believe that we should be a republic. The
figures - the polling suggests that it’s going to be much higher when the
current queen passes away.
When you get to that point, you have
considerably higher figures for having a republic and people wanting a
say in who should be our next head of state.
AMY GOODMAN: Talk about the movement against royalty in Britain.
JOHANN HARI: Well, we have to deal with some really weird arguments,
republicans.
So, for example, the monarchists always say,
"Oh, it’s
really good for tourism."
Actually, of the top 20 tourist attractions in
Britain, only one of them, number 17, is related to the royal family:
Windsor Castle. Ten points ahead of it is Windsor Legoland. So using
that logic, we should have a Lego man as our head of state instead of
these people.
You know, then they say,
"Oh, the monarchy is a great defender of
democracy," which, in itself, seems logically absurd.
You know, let’s
not democratically elect our head of state in order to preserve
democracy.
It’s also, for people who talk a lot about British history,
incredibly historically illiterate. The last British monarch but one,
Edward VIII, literally conspired with Adolf Hitler to run Britain as a
Nazi colony. He urged the Nazis to bomb Britain more during the Second
World War.
So the idea that heredity throws up people who defend
democracy is bizarre.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And this issue of empire that rarely gets talked about,
that the Queen was not only the Queen of England, but also of the
commonwealth of nations of the British Commonwealth that all came out of
the colonial empire?
JOHANN HARI: Well, Britain is a country that really hasn’t come to terms
with its imperial past, if you compare it to a lot of other places like
Germany and the awareness they have of the crimes that were committed
there. Most British people, for example, just don’t know about, for
example, the famines that happened in India in the 1870s and 1890s that
were caused by the British.
There was a natural crop failure, and Lord
Lytton, who was the British governor, ordered that the grain be forcibly
requisitioned and shipped to London. Twenty-nine million people died in
those famines. You know, if you look at these - he banned the idea of
relief efforts; he said it would make the Indians weak.
The very good
and honorable British people - and there were some in India - who tried to
feed the poor were punished and imprisoned and deported.
You know,
instead, he built labor camps for the starving Indians, where the
calorie - the daily calorie count was lower than at Buchenwald at the
height of the Nazi atrocities. You know, who knows about that? You know,
there’s a fantastic book called Late Victorian Holocausts by Mike Davis
that really details them.
But instead, pro-imperial historians, this guy called Andrew Roberts,
who was invited to the White House under President
Bush, gave a great
speech - big defender of the behavior of the British Empire and apologist
for the
Amritsar massacre, where they openly massacred, you know,
peaceful protesters.
But that’s all we really hear about the Empire.
AMY GOODMAN: Let’s talk about Kenya for a minute.
JOHANN HARI: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: The British government is facing a lawsuit over the
repression of the Kenyan struggle for independence against colonial
rule.
A group of veterans of Kenya’s resistance movement have filed a
suit in British court seeking compensation for human rights abuses
during the
Mau Mau rebellion of 1952 and 1960. More than 100,000 Kenyans
are believed to have been killed in the British crackdown.
Gitu wa
Kahengeri is a Mau Mau veteran and spokesperson for the case.
GITU WA KAHENGERI: The colonial regime in Kenya at that time had robbed
all our lands, had broken almost every human right against us, and we
were living at that time in our country like slaves. And therefore, we
rose up and say we must see that Kenya recovers its freedom and native
land.
AMY GOODMAN: Johann Hari, talk about Kenya and its relation to the
current U.S. president.
JOHANN HARI: Well, these are ghosts that are really returning at
the moment in the form of this case.
The British invaded Kenya in the 1880s
because they wanted more land, and they seized the most fertile land in
Kenya. They banned the local people from growing their cash crops, like
coffee, and began to commit terrible atrocities against the people there
in order to steal their land.
Eventually, in the 1950s, there was a mass
uprising against this. And the British reacted by forcibly removing all
of the Kikuyu, all the people who lived in that area, all the
population. Anyone who objected was moved into a massive concentration
camp network. They were detained there. There was mass torture, pouring
boiling wax into people’s ears, raping people with bottles.
This has all been extensively documented.
One of the people who was detained in those camps was
Barack Obama’s
grandfather, who was basically broken in those camps, never recovered.
And -
AMY GOODMAN: What was his involvement in the resistance?
JOHANN HARI: Well, they basically swept up all the Kikuyu men, as far as
we know.
His family claimed that he didn’t do anything. Of course, it
would have been perfectly legitimate to resist violent imperial
occupation of your country. But as far as we know, he didn’t do
anything. They were just mass punishing any man of that age. It was a
huge crackdown.
And, you know, a lot of these lessons of British imperialism, the places
that continue now, there’s a great irony. The British Empire was the
first place to aerially bombard Pakistan in 1924. President Obama is now
aerially bombarding Pakistan.
You know, this guy whose grandfather was
put in British concentration camps is now following the script that was
laid out by British imperialism.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And, of course, the
British role in Asia, as well, in the
Opium War, in the colonization of Hong Kong for so long, until only
recently, until only about a decade ago - the role there?
JOHANN HARI: The stand-up comedian Chris Addison, the British stand-up
comedian, said one of the great things about being British is you can
look at every part of the world and say,
"Yeah, we screwed that one up."
But it’s worth remembering, there were always great British people who
were anti-imperialist, who argued against this.
At every stage, there
were people who said,
"This is an atrocity, and we shouldn’t be doing
this," just like, you know, Democracy Now! is part of the great American
tradition of resisting the crimes of the American state.
There have
always been British people who fought back and argued against this and
sided with the peoples in those countries.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, let’s talk about today. The guest list for the royal
wedding includes not only dignitaries and celebrities, but also
practitioners of torture and other human rights violations.
One invited
guest, Sheikh Khalifa Bin Ali al-Khalifa, is the current Bahraini
ambassador to London and the former head of Bahrain’s National Security
Agency, an agency that’s accused of electric shocks and beatings.
Bahrain has in recent months been wracked by protest. Its government has
been accused of unleashing a violent crackdown on political dissenters.
Bahrain’s Crown Prince was also originally invited to attend the wedding
but declined.
Yesterday, we reached Nabeel Rajab of the Center for Human Rights in
Bahrain for comment. This is what he had to say.
Sorry, we don’t have that clip. But can you talk about the Bahraini
guest?
JOHANN HARI: Well, at a time when our governments claim they’re bombing
Libya to protect the Libyan population and because they’re opposed to
human rights abuses, some of the worst human rights abusers in the world
have been invited to be fawned over in London today.
You know, you had
the Saudi royal family, who horsewhip women if they have the temerity to
sit behind the wheel of a car, who horsewhip the victims of rape. You
know, you had the King of Swaziland, who murders trade unionists,
murders democrats, murders dissidents. You know, you had, as you
mentioned, Bahraini torturers.
You know, and it’s worth seeing the contrast between Libya and Bahrain.
The British Foreign Secretary William Hague, our equivalent to
Hillary
Clinton, said - admitted in an interview recently that a motive for the
bombing of Libya was to lower the price of oil. Contrast that with
Bahrain. You know, Bahrain is a place where the oil flows just - you know,
just past Bahrain. It’s where the American bases are.
The contrast is
very clear: if you’re essential to our oil supplies, we’ll fawn over
you; if you mess with our oil supplies, if you’re disobedient in
supplying your oil, you get what happens in Libya.
AMY GOODMAN: Let’s try to go to that clip of Nabeel Rajab of the Center
for Human Rights in Bahrain.
NABEEL RAJAB: Disappointing to see the invitation for the wedding is
being extended to our ambassador to London, especially taking into
consideration his bloody role as the head of the national security
apparatus, which is responsible for gross human rights violations since
he was in power.
Unfortunately, this has not been taken into
consideration by the people who invited him. I think this is a sad
message to the people of Bahrain and to the victims of torture. I myself
was attacked by the forces that belonged to the same institution. I was
attacked severely, and I was admitted to hospital.
And I was
approximately two weeks in hospital getting treated for my - the problem I
had because of the attack, which I still have the same problem ’til now.
AMY GOODMAN: That was Nabeel Rajab of the Center for Human Rights in
Bahrain. Johann Hari?
JOHANN HARI: It’s worth bearing in mind what’s actually happened in
Bahrain. We’ve heard a lot about the heroic uprising in Tahrir Square.
There was a similar uprising in Bahrain in a place called Pearl Square.
The Bahraini government have physically demolished Pearl Square. They’ve
knocked the whole thing down, so demonstrators can’t even gather.
Massive repression of the Shia population there, who are a majority
being viciously suppressed by a Sunni dictatorship. You know?
And what
do we do? We welcome them, and we fawn over them. It shows that our
language about, you know, respect to human rights is tragically
deceptive.
JUAN GONZALEZ: I want to go back to the wedding for a second.
What is
this costing? Who’s paying for it? And also, what does the maintenance
of the royal family cost the English public every year?
JOHANN HARI: Sorry, when you said you wanted to go back to the wedding,
I suddenly had an image of you in a large hat, a large furry hat, which
is delightful.
The wedding is costing about $100 million. They claim it’s being paid
for by the royal family’s budget, by their private wealth. And you say,
well, where do you think they got their money from? They haven’t been
out, you know, doing anything productive lately.
Overall, the official figure is the royal family costs about $260
million a year. Actually, that’s a deceptive figure, because there’s
loads of things that aren’t included. So, for example, whenever the
royal family go and visit a foreign country, they charge their clothes
bill to the local embassy, for example. So it costs a lot of money, at a
time when Britain is going through really extreme austerity.
You know, Charles Windsor, the heir to the throne, has over 60 personal
staff. He has someone who puts his toothpaste on his toothbrush every
morning. He’s never done that. You know, we’re talking about real
opulence. He has three personal chauffeurs.
What do they do when they
need to transport him? Cut him into three pieces, you know?
AMY GOODMAN: And talk about the significance of them choosing Cambridge,
that that’s now who they represent, the new couple, Kate Middleton and
Prince William.
JOHANN HARI: Well, I think it’s just part of a broader - I mean,
you know, Cambridge is just one part of Britain. So I don’t think
there’s a great deal of symbolism in that. But, you know, there’s been
this attempt to present Kate Middleton as, you know, infusing a kind of
working-class ethic into the Windsor family.
It’s worth bearing in mind, she went to one
of the most expensive schools in Britain and has never had a job. It’s a
very revealing sign of the snobbery that somehow someone like that is
treated as if they’re some kind of Dickensian street urchin. Just
because somewhere down the line someone in her family was a coal miner
generations ago -
AMY GOODMAN: I think she worked after college, though.
JOHANN HARI: Well, she only worked for six months. She’s never had a
paid job.
AMY GOODMAN: So, the attention - I mean, you couldn’t turn on a news
program today to watch news.
JOHANN HARI: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: Everyone, starting early, early in the morning - this in the
United States - is showing right now the wedding and all that is
happening, live since something like 4:00 this morning.
JOHANN HARI: It’s absolutely bizarre. It’s bizarre. And I don’t
understand why Americans are so into this. I mean, I understand it’s
part of a celebrity culture. Charlie Sheen goes crazy. Kate and William
get married. It’s part of that frenzy. I don’t think it suggests some
kind of latent monarchical sympathies here in America - or I hope not,
anyway.
You know, I mean, I don’t think - is the coverage so much greater
than, say, Chelsea Clinton’s wedding? I suppose it is, but I think it’s
part of the same phenomenon of just kind of empty celebrity sugar.
AMY GOODMAN: The biggest moment now, as we are broadcasting, is the
first kiss that is being broadcast.
JOHANN HARI: You know, it’s very nice, but my idea was, look, if
we’re going to spend $100 million on this, we have to spend a comparable
amount of money distributing anti-nausea tablets across the world on the
people who can’t bear to see all this. You know -
AMY GOODMAN: And the interest in Britain?
JOHANN HARI: - it’s not like I begrudge a young couple kissing each other.
It’s nice, you know, but - God. You know, I’m not going to get this when I
get married. You know, I’m not going to get all this attention. And nor
is anyone else in Britain. You know, it’s not a sensible way to do this.
AMY GOODMAN: The interest in Britain?
JOHANN HARI: You know, there’s some - there’s a small minority who are
really passionately monarchist.
There’s a broader majority who don’t
really think about these issues except once every five years, and then,
you know, they smile on the idea of people getting married. And then
there’s about 20 percent who don’t. Although interestingly, the polling
suggests that big majorities want William to succeed the current queen,
rather than his father Charles.
OK, I say to people,
"So, what you want
to do is you want to skip the hereditary principle and choose our head
of state."
That’s fine. That’s called democracy. If he wants to run in
an election,
I’ve got no problem with that.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, I think, as soon as we finish this interview, we
will pass the anti-nausea pills around.
AMY GOODMAN: But I want to ask -
JOHANN HARI: I may vomit live on air now if you keep showing those
clips.
AMY GOODMAN: We last talked to you about the whole issue of the Uncut
movement.
JOHANN HARI: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: Explain that and what’s happening right now, as we look at
the images of the royal wedding and the amount of money that has been
spent. Talk about what’s happening in Britain.
JOHANN HARI: There’s a similar thing going on here in the U.S.
Democracy Now! viewers will know General Electric, one of the biggest
corporations in America, not only paid no taxes last year, but was given
$3 billion by the exchequer, which means that everyone watching this who
pays taxes, whether a fireman or a teacher or a cab driver, their money
was taken and given to GE and its shareholders, who already have more
money than they could ever possibly spend. Similar protests were going
on in Britain.
Companies like Vodafone, one of our biggest
cell phone companies, a man called Philip Green, the sixth richest man
in Britain, paid no tax. So -
AMY GOODMAN: Vodafone, which complied with the Egyptian despot -
JOHANN HARI: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: - Mubarak in shutting down the entire system of Egypt during
the protests.
JOHANN HARI: There’s a whole catalog of horror about
Vodafone. We
could do a whole show about them. But the -
AMY GOODMAN: And they own something like 45 percent of Verizon Wireless
in the United States.
JOHANN HARI: Yeah. And their tax bill was effectively canceled by the
last government.
They were refusing to pay their taxes for years and
- by
the current British government, sorry, Conservative government, who then
immediately took them on a taxpayer-funded trip of India to promote
their business.
A lot of people in Britain were watching this, ordinary citizens, like
I’m sure a lot of your ordinary citizens are watching this and just
being horrified but feeling powerless.
And they said,
"You know what?"
A
group of ordinary people - they were teachers and doctors, firefighters.
They said,
"Why don’t we just go to our local Vodafone store one day and
shut it down? Why don’t we just hold up signs saying, 'You want to
operate on our streets? Pay our taxes.'"
They went and they did it one
Saturday - it got a little bit of media attention - about a hundred people.
But then something really interesting happened. Three days later, in a
completely different city quite far away from London, also in Britain,
another group of people went and shut down their Vodafone store. They
were so enraged by it. Then another group of people did it. And it
spread.
Within a few weeks, in almost every city in Britain, including
some of the most conservative parts of Britain, Vodafone stores were
shut down. The UK Uncut movement became a huge thing. It’s really
captured the public imagination.
And it’s shown the lie that we need this austerity.
Even if you bought
the idea that we need cuts - in fact, we need a Keynesian stimulus - but
even if you bought that, 120 billion pounds every year is being avoided
and evaded by the richest people in Britain, a huge amount of any saving
that has to be made. They’re the people who caused this crisis. They’re
the people who can most afford to pay. And they’re the people who should
pay.
There’s been a brilliant, bright imitation group here in the United
States called US Uncut, that people can find.
They’re doing the same
thing here. Bank of America, they physically shut down lots of their
branches, saying,
"You can’t do this to us."
It’s ordinary citizens
acting in their own self-defense, saying,
"You can’t just take our
money. We won’t allow this to happen. You can’t do this to us anymore."
JUAN GONZALEZ: I have one last question, and on a completely different
topic, since we rarely get you on the show here live.
You’ve been
writing a lot about Libya and your concerns about the international
campaign now, the bombing campaign in support of the rebels against
Gaddafi. Could you talk - tell us - give us a summary of your concerns about
this?
JOHANN HARI: Well, Colonel Gaddafi is an absolutely disgusting dictator,
and no one should be in any doubt about that.
But my concern is, the
motives of our governments very plainly are not humanitarian. Indeed
they’re very plainly to do with oil. And although there may be a
temporary - there very clearly is a temporary overlap between the wishes
of the rebels, who are overwhelming good people, and the whims of the
American imperial power, the British imperial power, French imperial
power.
That overlap will be very brief. And when there is a divergence
between those interests, the American and British governments will be
very strongly in favor of repressing the will of the Libyan people. If
the Libyan people can free themselves, one of the most basic things we
know is they will want to control their oil supply, and that means they
will be immediately punished and turned on.
So, there will be an attempt to - I think what’s happened is, for the
first time in 60 years, the area that has the largest pot of oil in the
world has begun to show some independence. It’s begun to break free. And
I think this is - what this is in reality, tragically, is a way of
reasserting Western - raw Western power in the middle of a chaotic
situation.
They don’t want to allow the oil supply to run out of
control. If they were really interested in human rights, they would not
be allying with the worst human rights abusers in the whole region - the
Saudi Arabian tyranny - who, you know, as we were saying, don’t even allow
women to drive, horsewhip rape victims.
You know, if they’re your best
friends, your claims to be defending human rights are preposterous.
AMY GOODMAN: Johann Hari, I want to thank you very much for being with
us, British journalist who writes a twice weekly column for The
Independent newspaper, and he’s the presenter of the Johann Hari
podcast.
This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. And
as this broadcast took place, the couple that got married today, Kate
and William, the kiss happened, and then there was a military flyover - to
seal it, I suppose.
JOHANN HARI: Right, undermining all the points we just made.
