Wishing Elizabeth II to Die with Excruciating Pain is Ignorant and Immoral

Queen Elizabeth II of the British Empire passed away on September 8th, 2022, ending an era for the United Kingdom and for the world, since she was THE idiosyncratic Queen to everyone born after the second World War. To my surprise, a lot of people seem to carry extreme hate towards the Queen; vile hatred; and a tweet by a Professor at Carnegie Mellon University shocked me deeply.

Uju Anya, a Linguistics Professor, tweeted on the Queen’s day of death, that “I heard the chief monarch of a thieving raping genocidal empire is finally dying. May her pain be excruciating.” After being attacked for such hateful remark, she doubled down, and tweeted: “That wretched woman and her bloodthirsty throne have fucked generations of my ancestors on both sides of the family, and she supervised a government that sponsored the genocide my parents and siblings survived. May she die in agony.”

Mind you, these words came from a college professor, the one responsible of educating the next generation of students. A college professor should know better than that. It is understandable to some extent that her hatred has historical backgrounds and is aimed at the British Empire entirely, but it is extremely ignorant for someone with that level of education to be such imprudent with her words.

I don’t claim to be better educated than Uju. I am simply a recent graduate that majored in Political Science that reads history and news for pleasure. From a historical standpoint, I do understand her ideology. The monarchy of the British Empire did indeed colonize, massacre, and enslaved a better half of Africa. The colonization, massacre, and enslavement enriched the empire greatly, but it destroyed Africa and those living on that continent.

But, was Queen Elizabeth II the one that caused all those pains?

This is simply a question of chronology. Was she involved in colonizing much of the world? Did she order the massacre of Uju’s ancestors?

The answer to all of these questions is no. She does not have the power to do any of these things as the monarch of a Constitutional Monarchy. It would seem like that Uju and people like her are harboring resentment towards the wrong monarch. The only power that the Queen has, is to wave at people in her chariot.

This misplaced anger can be considered idiotic because putting it anywhere else would be equally idiotic. For example, my family is from China, and during WWII, Imperial Japan massacred too many Chinese civilians. Should I hate all the people in the Japanese government with a burning passion? The same goes with how China during Tang Dynasty wiped out an entire clan of Huns; should people with lineage to the Huns resent all subsequent Chinese governments?

The word “ancestor” from Uju’s rant on twitter is precisely what makes her comments seem uneducated. It was Queen Elizabeth’s “Ancestors” that ordered the massacre of Uju’s “Ancestors”. While I understand her frustration with the British monarchy still being present, no one in their right mind would agree that the monarchy is nothing but a symbol in the year 2022. It has no legislative power, and it cannot do anything without a democratic government that governs the entirety of the United Kingdom.

The amount of ignorance that comes from Uju can be amounted to right wing pundits saying that she would never have become a professor in America were there no colonization. Both statements are extremely insensitive and ignorant; but people would know to selectively acquire information from a right-wing pundit; a college professor, on the other hand, should simply know better. Uju is only asking for an old lady to die with excruciating pain. Thinking that somehow her dying with excruciating pain would hurt the entire institution of historical colonization, is uneducated at best.

On that day, I lost an Instagram friend that does music. She posted more or less the same thing on her Instagram story saying that whoever mourns for her should think about the damage that the throne did to the majority of the world. Since I am Chinese and she claims to be Chinese because her mom is Chinese, it is expected that one knows to not speak ill of the dead, especially on the day of the death. After I called her out for her insensitivity and naivety, she simply replied that “did I ask for your opinion lol”. Never mind the fact that when she posts stuff on the internet, she is making her beliefs public and is thus inviting comments or criticism; there is no point in debating someone whose only historical education and moral education stops at a 6th grade level. I would assume that most other people who are cheering for the Queen to die has a similar line of reasoning and response to criticism.

If the only thing we can do as global citizens is to rage at whoever has wronged us in the past, then we will never have a future. We would dwell in the past and blame someone who has no control of what happens in the past as the puppet of his/her ancestor, and so on. Anyone with any intellectual capacity at all would see the death of Queen Elizabeth II as the death of a national symbol; nothing more, nothing less.

It is understandable that people who have been hurt by Hitler would stab him a thousand times to try to get even, but is there any logical line of reasoning to try to hurt anyone who he is related to for something they have never done and would have disagreed?

What’s the point of meaningless gesturing when all we can do is reconciliate and move on as a whole? Maybe this is my homework for people like Uju Anya.