Ali Velshi is among the few on cable schooling his listeners on the monarchy. He did not mince his words, talking about the stench of colonialism.
Ali Velshi schools and colonialism.
Recently, Ali Velshi had to put British historian Andrew Roberts in his place. The historian took offense to Velshi’s commentary about the queen, where he said, “She also represented an institution that had a long and ugly history of brutal colonialism, violent theft, and slavery. For many centuries, the British robbed other nations of their wealth and power and exploited their people. Even as Queen Elizabeth’s reign largely marked the beginning of the post-colonial era, the horrors that her long line of ancestors inflicted upon many generations of people across the globe continue to be the source of pain.”
After that segment, Velshi decided to lay it all out. He gave a history of British colonization. He pointed out that the first Elizabethan era ended when Queen Elizabeth I died in 1603, referred to as the Golden Age. But Golden Age for who? Ali appropriately ties Elizabeth to the sins of the British monarchy.
“Elizabeth I heavily encouraged privateering, granting charters or trading and exploration rights to private companies, which paved the way for an intercontinental empire,” Velshi pointed out. “It was she who gave Walter Raleigh permission to set up a small colony on Roanoke Island, Britain’s first foray into the colonization of America. Now centuries later, the second Elizabethan era has just ended, with the death of Queen Elizabeth II’s reign invites easy comparison. And they are tethered by their unique positions in the timeline of British colonialism, the beginning and the beginning of the end. In the 1920s, the British empire was at its zenith ruling and controlling the natural resources and economic output of around a quarter of the world’s entire population.”
He then enumerated the savagery done in the name of the monarchy.
“Colonization, British or otherwise, was economic exploitation, violence, and racism,” Velshi said. “Decolonization, virtually never initiated by the British, was often a bloody and deadly fight for independence. Example after example, the US Revolutionary War, the concentration camps during the Boer wars in South Africa, the massacre of hundreds of Sikh worshippers in Amritsar, India, in under 10 minutes, by the way in 1919, the death of between 20 000 and 100 000 people in the Mao Mao uprising in my birthplace of Kenya in the 1950s, the opium wars with China and lesser-known atrocities like civilian torture in Cyprus, the continued mess that is Israel and Palestine today. All of it is the legacy of British colonialism.”
Velshi closes with a statement making it clear that being upset, disgusted, and outright pissed at the media for the ad nauseam coverage of the queen’s death with little context that includes the inhumanity of her monarchy is justified.
“If you’re having mixed feelings about the mourning of the queen and the institution she represented for so many decades,” Velshi said. “That’s valid, and you’re not alone.”
Thank you, Ali Velshi. Your factual perspective has been missing from the coverage.