The Editor

09

Aug

2012

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

Written by Green Arrow

It is no secret that I am an avid reader and these days, with devices like the kindle, I am able easily to revisit old friends and search out parts that struck a chord with me on first reading and yesterday some news about our "Royal Family" reminded me of something I had read quite a few decades ago.

Brought up on tales of the Knights of the Round Table, etc, it was only a matter of time as a child that I would eventually discover thanks to my parents, both avid readers themselves, the American writer Mark Twain, who is probably most remembered for his excellent Adventures of Tom Sawyer and its sequel, the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Reading about the slavish worship of the sheep people of the United Kingdom towards the parasitic Royals and having had just about enough of my old friend Jim Dowson of Britain Firsts equally slavish adoration of our Traitor Queen, I was reminded of this observation about the British, in Mr Twain's story; A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, in which the hero, Hank Morgan, a 19th century engineer, is transported back in time to the Court of King Arthur in medieval England.

"Well, it was a curious country, and full of interest. And the people! They were the quaintest and simplest and trustingest race; why, they were nothing but rabbits. It was pitiful for a person born in a wholesome free atmosphere to listen to their humble and hearty outpourings of loyalty toward their king and Church and nobility; as if they had any more occasion to love and honor king and Church and noble than a slave has to love and honor the lash, or a dog has to love and honor the stranger that kicks him!

Why, dear me, any kind of royalty, howsoever modified, any kind of aristocracy, howsoever pruned, is rightly an insult; but if you are born and brought up under that sort of arrangement you probably never find it out for yourself, and don't believe it when somebody else tells you.

It is enough to make a body ashamed of his race to think of the sort of froth that has always occupied its thrones without shadow of right or reason, and the seventh-rate people that have always figured as its aristocracies--a company of monarchs and nobles who, as a rule, would have achieved only poverty and obscurity if left, like their betters, to their own exertions.

The most of King Arthur's British nation were slaves, pure and simple, and bore that name, and wore the iron collar on their necks; and the rest were slaves in fact, but without the name; they imagined themselves men and freemen, and called themselves so.

The truth was, the nation as a body was in the world for one object, and one only: to grovel before king and Church and noble; to slave for them, sweat blood for them, starve that they might be fed, work that they might play, drink misery to the dregs that they might be happy, go naked that they might wear silks and jewels, pay taxes that they might be spared from paying them, be familiar all their lives with the degrading language and postures of adulation that they might walk in pride and think themselves the gods of this world.

And for all this, the thanks they got were cuffs and contempt; and so poor-spirited were they that they took even this sort of attention as an honor."

Interesting I thought, considering the novel was written in 1889, Mark Twain's observations with regards to the British, British Royalty, the Catholic Church and the ruling elites are spot on - it is just so disappointing that the British People of today are as gullible as the characters in the year 528, which is the date our hero is transported back to.

I really do recommend that you download this free ebook and read it both for a stunning story and an insight into how a state functions.

Share this post