Quote and Comment on Monarchy

Today I came across a grand absurdity in the form of a quote by one Harold Nicolson, a British politician and journalist. He died in 1968, but not before writing a couple of books on (get this) the value and benefits of MONARCHY!! I do not know which of his books contained the following quote, but found his defense of monarchy to be a dutiful upholding of the lie of that institution and of all the injustices it has dealt over the centuries. I post it here to demonstrate the sugar-poison that was served. This is the quote in three paragraphs:

“The advantages of a hereditary Monarchy are self-evident. Without some such method of prescriptive, immediate and automatic succession, an interregnum intervenes, rival claimants arise, continuity is interrupted and the magic lost. Even when Parliament had secured control of taxation and therefore of government; even when the menace of dynastic conflicts had receded in to the coloured past; even when kingship had ceased to be transcendental and had become one of many alternative institutional forms; the principle of hereditary Monarchy continued to furnish the State with certain specific and inimitable advantages.

“Apart from the imponderable, but deeply important, sentiments and affections which congregate around an ancient and legitimate Royal Family, a hereditary Monarch acquires sovereignty by processes which are wholly different from those by which a dictator seizes, or a President is granted, the headship of the State. The King personifies both the past history and the present identity of the Nation as a whole. Consecrated as he is to the service of his peoples, he possesses a religious sanction and is regarded as someone set apart from ordinary mortals. In an epoch of change, he remains the symbol of continuity; in a phase of disintegration, the element of cohesion; in times of mutability, the emblem of permanence. Governments come and go, politicians rise and fall: the Crown is always there. A legitimate Monarch moreover has no need to justify his existence, since he is there by natural right. He is not impelled as usurpers and dictators are impelled, either to mesmerise his people by a succession of dramatic triumphs, or to secure their acquiescence by internal terrorism or by the invention of external dangers. The appeal of hereditary Monarchy is to stability rather than to change, to continuity rather than to experiment, to custom rather than to novelty, to safety rather than to adventure.

“The Monarch, above all, is neutral. Whatever may be his personal prejudices or affections, he is bound to remain detached from all political parties and to preserve in his own person the equilibrium of the realm. An elected President – whether, as under some constitutions, he be no more than a representative functionary, or whether, as under other constitutions, he be the chief executive – can never inspire the same sense of absolute neutrality. However impartial he may strive to become, he must always remain the prisoner of his own partisan past; he is accompanied by friends and supporters whom he may seek to reward, or faced by former antagonists who will regard him with distrust. He cannot, to an equal extent, serve as the fly-wheel of the State.”

So that is his vile conclusion. I wonder what minds were influenced by his polished rhetoric, his persuasive push to uphold something tyrannical as something beneficial to the people of the world, something ultra-spiritual and devoted to the people. He even labels it as “NEUTRAL!!” Can you imagine that. I did not read his books but ask myself if any might include just some of the atrocities monarchies throughout time have perpetuated on the people of earth. He makes the whole thing out to seem like we just can’t live without the guiding monarchical hand. This is nothing but the holding up of the edict of The Divine Right of Kings. Sickening. False. Predatory. And destined to be dissolved.