Thread by @mxmovement

#thread 🧵 The British Monarchy’s neo-colonial control over the Arab world: as promised we delve into the the realm of foreign policy where revolutionary overthrow of Britain’s colonial proxies is a real and ever-present danger.

Following the taxonomy deployed by legendary Ghanaian revolutionary, Kwame Nkrumah, the Arab states can be divided into 2 camps: those which are under the effective control of the former colonial powers and their allies (which he termed ‘neocolonial’), and those which are not.

State such as Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, and the UAE, all of them creations of the British empire and to this day still controlled by the ruling families handpicked by Britain at the height of empire.

The consolidation and reinforcement of the relationships between Britain and these families, and the shoring up of their power, is a core part of the role of the British royal family, and much of their time is taken up with hosting and visiting these families.

This esp important at times when their rule is under threat, providing an expression of solidarity at the highest level, an assurance that the Brit state will stand shoulder-to-shoulder w whatever repression is deemed necessary to hold onto power.

Whilst this symbolic royal solidarity is offered to leaders of Britain’s neocolonial proxy states the world over, it is the relationships with the ruling families of the Arab world specifically that are considered to be paramount.

It is essential to appreciate the fundamental importance of Arabia both to the neocolonial system – the channelling of wealth generated in the global South to the western states – in general, and to British economic and political power in particular.

Brit neo-colonial exploitation of the Arab world rests on: 1, ensuring that the ruling families of the Gulf states continue to direct their Sovereign Wealth Funds to invest in the US and Britain, and 2, more fundamentally, ensuring that those families are not overthrown.

How is an Arab ruler to know the next time he feels the need to crush an emerging dissident movement, whether to expect a shower of hellfire missiles for his troubles, or a hearty slap on the back? This is when a red carpet at Windsor Palace can be very reassuring.

It is no coincidence that the most frenetic hosting of high level state visits seems to occur at precisely those moments when Gulf autocracies are facing the most resistance from their own people.

Bahrain, home to the most important British & US naval bases in the region, is a case in point. The al-Khalifas, the ruling clan in Bahrain for the past 200yrs, originally from Iraq, but were expelled by the Ottomans due to disruption to trade caused by their frequent banditry.

Only gaining ‘independence’ from Britain in 1971, the dir-general of its state security was a Brit – Ian Henderson, former colonial official in Kenya – until 1998. Like the other Gulf states, their military and security apparatuses remain utterly dependent on US & Brit support.

Yet the al-Khalifas’ position has been permanently unstable, due to both their obvious role as a facilitator of subordination to foreign domination and their persecution of the majority Shia population. A major workers’ revolt was crushed by the British in 1965.

1979: particular anxiety in Britain that the Iran Revolution would extend to the Gulf states. Within weeks of the Shah’s departure, the Queen was on her first official tour of the region in a clear expression of British solidarity with the Gulf rulers against their ppl.

1984: a “glittering banquet” by the Lord Mayor of the City of London in honour of the Emir of Bahrain, w the Duke & Duchess of Kent on the Queen’s behalf; whilst Prince Charles and his wife visited Bahrain two years later to attend a banquet in the Emir’s royal palace in Manama.

Here they presented the Emir with the Order of St Michael and St George, the highest honour that can be bestowed for services to British imperialism, neatly symbolised by its insignia of a white child standing on the head of a prostrate Black man.

1952, as the ousting of the Brit-imposed King Farouk by Nasser in Egypt ignited republican sentiment across the region, King Faisal of Iraq was invited to Balmoral,the Queen’s estate in Scotland to say Britain would stand shoulder to shoulder against these revolutionary currents.

2007: Saudi criminal justice was under unprecedented international scrutiny following the sentencing of 2 gangrape victims to imprisonment and 90 lashes the previous year, Brit approval for the regime was signalled by the King Abdullah’s invitation to a state banquet w the queen.

“Contacts between our 2 families have been regular and close,” noted the queen in her speech welcoming the king, adding that “Many British ppl have benefited from Saudi hospitality over the yrs as traders, experts and advisors,” ref to Brit military officers, arms, oil men etc.

As the ‘Arab Spring’ began to get under way in late 2010 – and with it, Britain’s twofold policy of using the protests as cover to launch wars against the region’s republican states (socialist Libya and Syria) whilst drowning in blood the peninsula’s anti-monarchical movements.

During the Arab Sting the Al Thanis of Qatar at Windsor castle in October 2010; the Queen in Abu Dhabi the following month; the Emir of Kuwait at Windsor castle in November 2012 and of the Emirates the following year, to name just the visits made by the Queen herself.

It should be made clear, is that the British royals are somehow sullying themselves by association with these Arab ‘dictators.’ This is all-too-often the implicit line of the British colonial left when, for example, it protests such visits as those outlined above.

The real crime of the al-Khalifas, the al-Thanis and the Al-Sauds is their willingness to prostitute themselves and their countrymen to the diktat of the genocidal British state, to do the dirty work of empire.

As for the Brit royal family, they are no diff from their counterparts in the Gulf: artificial creations of colonialism, made up of reactionary feudal remnants on life support whose role is the suppression of democratic freedoms wherever the masses threaten property relations.

We have been and continue to be committed to the workers and peasants of the Arab nations to overthrow neocolonialism and its agents and client states in the region toward unity of the oppressed and socialism. [thread ends] #NotMyKing