ON THE CORONATION OF KING CHARLES 111 AND COLONIALISM
Ozodi Osuji
I am a man who states the truth as he sees it regardless of what other people think or say about it. In that light, I am obligated to state that I am an anglophile. Please do not ask me why I like things British, all I know is that I have always liked things British and do not deceive myself by professing to hate the English because of their alleged colonialism.
If you asked me about colonialism, I would say to you that it did some good for Africans. Consider Nigeria. I do not exactly know what happened to Nigerians before the nineteenth century. All I know is that Nigerians and other Africans are like other people. All human beings, Europeans and Asians included, are the same regardless of their race. So, I asked myself, where were Africans when other races were sowing the seeds of civilization and greatness.
You do not wake up one day and understand space science and aeronautical engineering, build rockets that travel at the speed of 17, 000 miles per hour and send someone to the moon and soon to Mars. Instead, you gradually work your way to where modern science is, today. What we now call the modern Western world climbed through a ladder, jumped through many hoops. Why didn’t Africa do the same?
We know about ancient Egypt. We know about ancient Sumer. We know about ancient Persia and thereafter ancient Greece.
Greece reached its apogee 2500 years ago when Athens produced Plato, Aristotle, and the various schools of thought, such as sophists, stoics, Epicures. Greek men started looking at phenomena with the yardsticks of pure reason, not belief.
The sun shines above our heads. People in the past saw the sun as a god. Greek rationalists began wondering what the actual sun was (now we know that the sun is a cloud of hydrogen gas, in whose core hot temperature and pressure led to the fusion of hydrogen to helium and release of heat and light).
Like everything else, what goes up tends to go down. Greece fell from its zenith and became the insignificant country it is today.
Rome, after defeating Carthage in the Punic Wars, the 200s BC replaced Greece as the fulcrum of Western civilization. Rome conquered the ancient world (except India and China). It conquered what we now call Western Europe.
Julius Caesar first set foot on the Island that Rome later called its province of Britannia on August 26, 55 BC; however, Rome formally annexed Britain in 43 CE.
Rome Ruled what we now call Italy, Spain, Portugal, France, much of Germany, the lower countries of Belgium, and Britain, and parts of Eastern Europe, such as the former Yugoslavia, Romania, Turkey and, of course, North Africa and the Middle East until about 475 CE when German barbarians finally sacked Rome and looted it.
The Germans who defeated Rome were a bunch of illiterates and did not have the ability to continue the Roman civilization. German tribal men merely took over Western Europe and could not really rule them in a civilized manner.
The German Visigoths took over Spain and Portugal; the German Franks took over Gaul (and renamed it after their name, Franks, France in English); they took over Italy, especially northern Italy, Lombardi. The Angles, Saxons and Jutes, Germanic tribes, sailed across the English Channel and took over Britain, much of England, anyway. The Anglo-Saxons gradually evolved into a different type of rulership in Britain than Rome’s imperial type of governing.
In the 700s Vikings, another German group, in Scandinavia, began their attacks on settled towns in all over Europe. They conquered much of England and settled in much of Northern England (York is still a Viking town till today). The Viking are from today’s Denmark, Sweden, Norway; they took over England, Ireland, Sicily and parts of North Africa, and Northern France (Normandy). In England they replaced the German tribes as the rulers (even though they themselves were also Germans).
The Vikings that settled in Northern France, Normandy, worked out an arrangement with the King of the Franks in Paris and the king appointed their leader one of his Dukes (Duke is German term for war leader who governs a defined area, a duchy).
In the meantime, the Normans learned to speak French and were assimilated into French culture. In 1066 CE the Norman French attacked England and at Hastings, defeated the Germans ruling that emerald island. Thus, the Norman French established their rulership over England. Their leader, William 1, became the king of England, while also trying to be the king of France.
The French Plantagenets rule England till today. In the meantime, the French rulers of England learned to speak the local languages: German, Latin, and whatever was left of Indigenous Celtic language. Four hundred years later, all those languages: Celtic, German, French and Latin mixed to form a new Language, what we now call English language (look up any English word’s etymology and it is one of the four mentioned languages).
The French rooted English monarchy has been around for a thousand years! This morning, we watched a descendent of the French and German aristocrats who conquered England in 1066 crowned the King of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
The British are a creole people; so also, is the French (they are a mix of Celts/Gaul’s, Romans, and Frankish Germans); the Spanish and Portuguese are a mix of Iberian celts, Romans, German Visigoths plus Arabs. Mohammed, 570-632 CE, began Islam in Mecca in today’s Saudi Arabia; upon his death, his followers spread from Mecca and took all North Africa and by 711 CE conquered the Iberian Peninsula and ruled it for seven hundred years; they were kicked out of Spain in the year that Christopher Columbus discovered America, 1492 CE.
With the fall of Rome in 475 CE, German tribal men took over Western Europe. They lacked the ability to continue sophisticated Roman civilization. So, anarchy reigned in Europe.
In the ensuing chaos, the Catholic Church manipulated itself to power in Europe. The Church suppressed Greek-Roman rationalism; the study of Plato, Aristotle Pythagoras, Ptolemy and others went out of the window and Western Europe descended into the dark ages.
Now, folks read the fables of Middle Eastern religions and take them as knowledge. Superstition destroyed Greek-Roman rational civilization. For almost a thousand years, no reason, and certainly, no science came out of Europe.
Through the auspices of Arabs who are now ruling Spain and Southern Italy, Greek rationalism gradually returned into Europe. By the early 1000s Europeans began reading Aristotle, Plato, Cicero, Seneca, Marcus Aureoles, Pliny, the stoic philosophies, and epicureanism; indeed, they brought back Greek and Roman fables to their schools, such as the writings of Homer, Virgil, Ovid, Horace.
Europeans began seeking answers to the questions that existence pose for human beings from a rational perspective rather than from the primitive approaches of religions.
Thomas Aquinas, Erasmus, and others tried to use Greek philosophy to prove that God, in fact, is real and not mere figment of the human imagination, such as imaginary gods like Zeus, Jupiter, Mars Athena, Poseidon and other Greek and Roman gods.
The Renaissance brought a return to using reason in solving social and physical problems.
Marco Polo, an Italian, travelled to China and India in the 1200s; he was astonished at the elevated level of Chinese civilization, science, and technology. The Chinese were already studying astronomy and mapping the heavens; they had discovered gun powder, compass, and the printing press.
(In case you want to know, the European, since Marco Polo, believe that the Chinese are superior to them and fear them; the rise of China has resuscitated that fear, for, as we speak, the Chinese are taking over Europe, technologically! How about Africans? Europeans, beginning with their encounter with Africans do not think that they are intelligent. So, what is it about Africans that those who encounter them do not think that they are smart? Inquiring minds like me want to understand these things!)
Europeans who went to China returned with the advanced technology that the Chinese had. With Chinese gun powder and canons, European war technology changed from bows and arrows to rifles and canons and that led to change from using castles as protection against arrows, hence ended the building of castles all over Europe. Chinese astronomy and the compass improved navigation and helped Europeans come to the Americas.
Johannes Gutenberg rigged up the first printing press, in Europe, Germany, based on the Chinese model in 1436 CE. Books that were hitherto laboriously handwritten are now printed. That meant that more books were available.
Since the Roman Emperor, Constantine (325 CE) forced Europeans to become Christian, the Bible was handwritten, by Monks. A Catholic parish may have one copy of the bible! That meant that the Parish priest told people what the bible teaches and, he, in, turn, was told what the bible teaches by his bishop, cardinal, and pope. Now that many bibles are printed, the rich can buy them, and interpret them as they see fit.
Many people began reading the Bible and no longer relied on the interpretation of it given to them by Catholic priests. If many people read a book, they are bound to have different interpretations of it.
Martin Luther in 1517 interpreted the New Testament part of the Bible to mean that we are saved by faith, and by God’s grace, not by our works. God forgives us if we merely believed in Jesus Christ as his only begotten and anointed son. It does not matter what we did, just believe in Jesus as your Lord and Savior and you are saved!
Other folks, such as John Calvin, did what Martin Luther did, and the Catholic church splintered into many denominations.
The intellectual elements in Europe used Greek and Roman philosophy to come to the belief that we can approach nature through reason and not just believe the nonsense that religions propagate. The renaissance began in Italy but soon spread to France.
The French Enlightenment consists of folks using pure reason to explain phenomena and discarding the fairy tales propagated by religions. Men like Rene Descartes, Voltaire, Jean Jacque Rousseau, Denis Diderot, Auguste Comte, Saint Simon, Prudhomme, Fourie, Emil Durkheim, and others used pure reason to figure out how to organize the human society; instead of saying that God ordained a certain type of society and government, they used reason to try figuring out the ideal society.
In Northern Italy, Nicolo Machiavelli (1532), in his book, The Prince, was already telling the rulers of this world that princes rule by deceiving the people, not by telling them the truth; the masses believe in God, therefore, if you do not believe in God and want to rule the masses, pretend to be a believer in God! You rule the masses by telling them lies about God’s existence.
The French Enlightenment permeated all Western Europe. In England rationalists like Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, David Hume, George Berkeley, Jereme Bentham, John Mill, John Stuart Mill wrote rational philosophies.
In Germany, idealistic philosophers filled the school room with unreadable philosophies (Ludwig Leibnitz, Immanuel Kant, George Hegel, Arthur Schopenhauer, Fredrich Nietzsche, and others).
Reason, that much hated commodity in the USA, even made its brief appearance in folks like William James, William Pierce, and John Dewey (Americans eschew reasoning hence elect such primitives as Donald Trump and Joseph Biden as their president).
Approaching phenomena through reason soon leads to testing out those reasonable theses to see if they can be proved, that is, science was born.
In 1543 Nicolas Copernicus challenged Ptolemy’s idea that the earth is the center of the universe and, instead, posited that the sun is the center of the universe (of our solar system). Johannes Kepler, Galileo Galilei, Christian Huygens and Tycho Brahe used their telescopes to prove that the sun is the center of a nine planets solar system (Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, and myriad asteroids and comets laden with frozen water).
In 1687 Isaac Newton changed the study of nature by writing his magnus opus, Principia Mathematica. He established the three laws of motion, theory of gravitation and the idea that light is composed of corpuscles (particles).
Europe woke up from the slumber that the Catholic Church had lolled it with its religious opium. Francis Bacon established the Scientific method and English men embraced empiricism and blazed the scientific trail.
We are now in the age of science. Physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy, geology are now well-established science, each following the scientific method of only accepting what we all can observe and verify as the actual working of nature and discarding what we cannot verify or falsify as pure bunkum.
In the late nineteenth Century J.J Thompson (1897) discovered electrons and in the early twentieth century, Max Plank (1900) discovered quanta, renamed Photon by Albert Einstein in 1905; Ernest Rutherford discovered the proton in 1911, James Chadwick discovered the neutron in 1932; Neils Bohr established complementarity principle, Werner Heisenbug established the uncertainty principle (1925), Emil Schrodinger (1925) provided equations for quantum mechanics, Louis Broglie (1924) posited that electrons behaved like photons when they go through the double slit experiments; Lise Meitner and Otto Hahn posited that we can split the nuclei of atoms by striking them with neutrons (Marie and Pierre Curie had established that nuclei do decay and transform to other elements; Becquerel had shown that Beta and Alpha particles are produced when nuclei decay; Rontgen observed that when nuclei decay the light emitted by them take pictures of the bones inside people hence discovered X rays).
A new science was born, quantum mechanics. Now we know that matter is made of molecules and elements; each element is a different arrangement of electrons, protons, and neutrons (and later, Murray Gel Mann discovered quarks as units of protons and neutrons).
We learned how space, time and matter are put together. This knowledge drastically changed our world.
We now know that there is no such thing as empty space; where you see space in front of you is a sea of virtual subatomic particles, attacking and annihilating themselves and producing radiation, light.
(I typed these notes on a computer which is based on our knowledge of electrons and quantum mechanics.)
In 1746 the English, via James Watts’ steam engine, began the industrial revolution. Factories came into being and dotted the English landscape. Factories changed the world forever.
England was the first industrialized country, followed by France, Germany, and the USA (Russia and China were industrialized in the twentieth century; Africa is still living in the prerational, preindustrial and prescientific age; Africans are still in the grip of superstitious religions!).
DISCUSSION
Britain, an industrialized country, a country that organized itself along Parliamentary democracy, retains its ancient ruling instrument, the Monarchy. It reduced the Monarchy to a museum piece. It is beautiful to look at but is politically emasculated.
So, I woke up at 2:30 AM (May 6, 2023) and watched the coronation of Charles as the king of England. I loved the pageantry. Such ceremonial affairs are good for the nation, they give the people a sense of being members of one nation. The whole thing was nice to watch.
I love looking at beautiful works of art. I have gone to the great museums of the world (at New York, Washington DC, Paris, Rome, London, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, etc.) just to see great works of art. Art is a beautiful thing; it makes life cheerful.
Reality is not art. Beneath art is the human condition where folks suffer and die. I am tempted to talk about my beloved existentialism, to talk about Sartre, Camus, Jasper, Heidegger, and other existentialists but here is a different occasion.
Now we celebrate looking at London as a great museum of art; I am not here going to worry our little heads by talking about what London and its king represent, the oppression of people all over the world.
My friend, a professor of mathematics, Dr. James Agazie, being the spoiler of beauty that he is, called me as I was mesmerized from watching the Disney fantasy on display on my television and reminded me that the gold in the carriage pulling the king and his wife, Charles and Camila, the diamonds in their crowns were all dug out from the bowels of the earth by suffering humanity.
Okay, Dr Agazie, I know all about that realism, but why cannot you allow me four hours of living in fantasy land, must you always remind me of realism, man’s oppression of man, cannot I be allowed to escape into idealistic, wishful, and magical thinking? Our boy and his gal, Charles and Camilla are mere dressed up toys, I know that, man!
I know that Little England used Machiavellian and brutal force and diplomacy to conquer and rule one fourth of the world, including the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India, much of the Middle East, many countries in Africa, including the thieving capital of the world, Nigeria.
Seriously, how did little England come to rule most of the world? I have hinted at the reasons in this essay; there is a method to my madness; I did not spend three hours writing this stuff for the fun of it; I am teaching the reader something! If you want to succeed like the English know who they are; they are not the silly images of rag dolls (bishops, and Charles dressed like old women, in robes), we saw at Westminster Abbey, today. Watch these devilish tricksters teach Vladimir Putin a bit of a lesson.
The Rulers of Russia Federation have become terrorists threatening to use their latest nuclear weapon, nicknamed Satan, to sink the British island. They are boasting but you do not threaten John Bull’s existence and get away with it.
Look up and note who discovered the nature of the atom, English men, review your chemistry class: Robert Boyle posited the law of gases, , John Dalton returned the idea of atoms from Greece to science, Thomas Young and his double slit experiment showed us the wave quality of light, Isaac New Newton, and mechanics and motion began the industrial revolution, J.J Thompson, and his discovery of the electron, Ernest Rutherford, James Chadwick, Paul Dirac and their descriptions of the inner workings of the atom; Fred Hoyle taught us about nucleosynthesis, how hydrogen fuses to form helium in stars; these folks taught us about the atom hence how to artificially decay it, nuclear fission, and worked it out in Alamogordo, New Mexico, USA, and then the atomic bomb was used at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945.All these scientists were Englishmen!
The Russians are using atomic weapons developed by the British, how it works that they stole from the Anglo Saxon Americans, to threaten the British; the British will soon teach them a thing or two about scientific realism.
John Bull will maneuver to break Russia Federation into, may be, thirty countries, liquidate that empire so that it is reduced to the size of England and France, former great empires.
The USA is the child of John Bull, so, she is useful as a source of barbarian soldiers who fight John Bull’s wars for world domination.
CONCLUSION
I enjoyed watching the coronation of Charles in Westminster Abbey. I was glued (or is riveted a better word, I am not a writer, you know, I am a thinker, a philosopher), to the tube from 2:30 AM to about 6: 30 AM, this morning and finally went back to sleep.
I woke up around 12 Noon and went to the gym. I came back, rested for a while, and decided to write this essay. Three hours later, it was done. Make of it what you like.
Please do not forget to write about it so that you and I can share notes. As for the criticizers of the British empire, those who tell me how that gilded gold on Charles’ carriage and the diamonds on his crown, were stolen from Africa, I say to you, you are singing to the choir. I know all about that sentimental talk.
I put on my cynical hat and ask you: how come your African people were not powerful and did their own stealing from weaker people?
You do not mean to tell us that your people are angels, or do you? Who do you think that you are fooling? Who are Nigerians but 419 Scammers? They have just swindled a drug dealer into their presidency, giving him the key to the piggybank, and when he robs the place clean, they come around and talk the familiar jazz, about how neocolonialism makes Africa poor. No, my friend, you and Africans make you and Africans poor.
Please stop talking neocolonialism for a day and simply enjoy the pageantry of the glory that was Britain. As I said before, I like things British.
Now lob your last stupid weapon at me, call me a self-hating uncle Tom with colonized mentality, and I call you a free mind who so loves Africans that you practically exist to rob your people down and never to develop them.
Give me a break, mister man; you are the self-loving man who robs his people blind and does not roll up his sleeves and work to industrialize and develop his people.
Ozodi osuji
May 6, 2023
Dr Osuji invites you to communicate with him. You can reach him at:
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