Vicky the Dealer and Me - Salem-News.Com

(NANAIMO, Vancouver Island) - I hate being Scottish. We're the lowest of the low, the scum of the earth, the most wretched, servile, miserable, pathetic trash that was ever shat into civilization. Some people hate the English, but I don't. They're just wankers. We, on the other hand, are colonized by wankers. We can't even pick a decent culture to be colonized by. We are ruled by effete arseholes. It's a shite state of affairs and all the fresh air in the world will not make any fucking difference.

I was prepared to curse her today and all she stood for, but I never can stay pissed off at anyone for very long: even a long dead monarch who despised her own kids yet who people still grovel to, and whose alleged descendent, Charlie Windsor, is inflicting his inbred, moronic drolleries on us even now with his latest state visit to poor, sad Canada.

Besides, Victoria Day was always a fun time for me as a kid: no school, for starters, and fireworks all that night. Ted Fardo and I would horde our dimes for weeks prior to the holiday and splurge them on a mess of firecrackers that were unleashed as twilight fell over the prairies, and aimed at unsuspecting girls from our explosives-stuffed bike handles that functioned as perfect mini bazookas. None of the official displays that lit up the Winnipeg nighttime could hold a candle to our frenzied assault on the neighborhood kids, for it was our own doing.

On those days, Queen Victoria was rarely ever mentioned, except by some relative who’d fought in some war, and usually in deferential terms. Later, as an unemployed man in Hamilton’s grimy north end, whenever I’d stroll by the bit of local grass calling itself a park I’d notice an imposing statue of her, emblazoned with the bullshit inscription, “Victoria: A Devoted Regent and Mother”. But it might have added, “And the most shot-at British monarch in history”.

Seven times, actually: the first in 1839, when Edward Oxford took a pot shot at Vicky while she was perambulating through Hyde Park in an open carriage; then followed by other near-assassinations in 1842 (twice), 1849, 1850, 1872 and 1882.

Why did so many Britons hate Queen Victoria? Maybe it was because of all of her drug dealing.

By the 1840’s, well into Vicky’s reign, about a third of the revenue of her British Empire came directly from the Opium trade in China. Britain went to war twice with China to force opium on to its addicted and beleaguered populace, and Victoria compelled China to hand over cities, including Hong Kong, and pay millions of pounds to “compensate” her and “the crown” whenever the locals cut into her profit margin by destroying the drug in desperation.

Queen Vicky wasn’t the only culprit, of course. Vast fortunes were made all over England and America from the opium trade, including by most of the political and financial elite families of the United States: old “skull and bones” clans named Lord, Whitney, Taft, Jay, Bundy, Harriman, Weyerhaeuser, Pinchot, Rockefeller, Goodyear, Sloane, Stimson, Phelps, Perkins, Pillsbury, Kellogg, Vanderbilt, and of course, Bush.

Just like today, drug dealing was just good business, and it founded and sustains a lot of the modern day corporate, religious and academic empires – as well as the CIA. Big Pharma is the biggest political lobby in Washington, DC, and even funds the major theological seminaries where all the clergy are trained. Drugs make the world economy go around; and as every ruler knows, there’s nothing handier than an addicted and dependent populace.

So perhaps Vicky’s “subjects” were shooting at her so much for some other reason.

I like to think it was because she was screwing her Scottish man servant, that highland stud named John Brown. Och aye! Her nickname around Windsor Palace, where John Boy took up residence after Prince Albert knocked off, was “The Honorable Mrs. Brown”. Crowds used to boo and heckle the two of them whenever they rode out together bound for their latest roll in the heather. But that’s what comes from too much opium, I guess. You just sort of lose track of reality.

So here it is, the hallowed eve of Victoria Day, in the year 2012, and tonight the local Nanaimo, British Columbia newspapers are celebrating “Empire Day”, where various twits got to dress up like Victoria and Albert (but not John Brown, of course) and hold their silly annual parade over the graves of all the aboriginal people who were disposed of, like the Chinese, to make way for superior Anglo-Saxon Christian sensibilities.

A Canadian clergyman, Kevin Annett has for nearly twenty years led the movement to bring to light and prosecute atrocities in Christian “Indian residential schools”, and win justice for survivors. Expelled in 1995 from his former United Church of Canada for exposing murders in that church’s Indian residential schools, and persecuted and blacklisted for his efforts, Kevin is now an award-winning film maker, author, social activist and public lecturer who works with victims of church violence and genocide all over the world. In 2009, he helped to establish the five-nation International Tribunal into Crimes of Church and State, which is seeking to indict church and government leaders for crimes against humanity.

As a result of Kevin’s tireless efforts on behalf of native people, the Canadian government was forced to issue a public “apology” and reparations program concerning Indian residential schools, in July of 2008. In giving him the name Eagle Strong Voice in 2007, Anishinabe elder Louis Daniels declared, “Kevin Annett is doing what few of his people have done, and that is to speak about the crimes they committed against many of our nations and their children. He has earned a place forever in our hearts and history. He is a brave and prophetic man. I ask everyone to welcome him and heed his voice.” And scholar Noam Chomsky wrote in 2006, “Kevin Annett is more deserving of the Nobel Peace Prize than many of those who have received it.”