Selected Quotes from, “The Monarchy: A Critique of Britain’s Favorite Fetish” By Christopher Hitchens, published 1990

“The symbiosis between the sacred and the profane and the noble and the vulgar is an embarrassing sign of underdevelopment.  As an homage to antiquity and tradition it is a cringe-making failure.  As an exercise in bread and circuses it is a flop.  As the invisible cement to a system of supposedly well-ordered and historically-evolved democracy, it looks more and more like the smirk on the corpse.”

“The British monarchy inculcates unthinking credulity and servility.  It forms a heavy layer on the general encrustation of our unreformed political institutions.  It is the gilded peg from which our unlovely system of social distinction and hierarchy depends.  It is an obstacle to the objective public discussion of our own history.  It tribalises politics.  It entrenches the absurdity of the hereditary principle.  It contributes to what sometimes looks like an enfeeblement of the national intelligence, drawing from our press and even from some of our poets the sort of degrading and abnegating propaganda that would arouse contempt if displayed in Zaire or Romania.  It is, in short, neither dignified nor efficient.”

“What are the objections of this critique?  They are all formulated in terms of some or all of the following:

1.      The Royal Family provides continuity and stability.

2.      The Royal Family provides glamour and pageantry.

3.      The Royal Family does not interfere in politics, but lends tone to it.

4.      The Royal Family is preferable to the caprices of presidential government.

5.      The Royal Family is a guarantee of the national ‘identity’.

If we take these in order, we find a thicket of tautology and contradiction.  Argument (1) is congruent with arguments (2) and (5) but is in flat opposition to arguments (3) and (4).”

“There is a slightly sinister resemblance between the vicarious and redemptive duties that we heap upon the emblem and the person of monarchy, and the fanatical trust that is placed in clerical or religious or shamanistic salvation in ‘other’ cultures.  Most developed societies found out the essential way to handle politics and religion a long time ago.  Seeing what happened when a compromise between the two was not adopted, they went for the obvious solution.  Keep them apart.  Humans should not worship other humans at all, but if they must do so it is better that the worshipped ones do not occupy any positions of political power.”

“…the element of fantasy and magic is as primitive as it is authentic, and there are good reasons why it should not come from the state.  When orchestrated and distributed in that way, it leads to disappointment and rancor, and can lead to the enthronement of sillier or nastier idols.”

“Is this an argument for abolition?  Of course it is.  But not for an abolition by fiat: for yet another political change that would come as a surprise to the passively governed.  It is an invitation to think—are you serious when you say that you cannot imagine life without it?  Do you prefer invented tradition, sanitized history, prettified literature, state-sponsored superstition and media-dominated pulses of cheering and jeering?  A people that began to think as citizens rather than subjects might transcend underdevelopment on their own.  Inalienable human right is unique in that it needs no superhuman guarantee; no ‘fount’ except itself.  Only servility requires the realm (suggestive word) of illusion.  Illusions, of course, cannot be abolished.  But they can and must be outgrown.”