The priceless racism of the Duke of Edinburgh

Prince Philip to European aristocracy is what Donald Trump is to American liberal democracy: an embarrassment - the men who flaunt the ugly truth from under the thin veneer of their bourgeois etiquette.

…. The Duke of Edinburgh has done the world an extraordinary service by being who he is, by staging generous servings of his bigoted disposition and he is retiring happily with having catalogued all or at least most of his priceless inventory for posterity to read and learn….

"You are a woman, aren't you?" (in Kenya after accepting a small gift from a local woman).

"If you stay here much longer you'll all be slitty-eyed" (to a group of British students during a royal visit to China).

"You can't have been here that long, you haven't got pot belly" (to a Briton he met in Hungary).

"Aren't most of you descended from pirates?" (to a wealthy islander in the Cayman Islands).

"How do you keep the natives off the booze long enough to pass the test" (to a Scottish driving instructor).

"It looks as if it was put in by an Indian" (referring to an old-fashioned fuse box in a factory near Edinburgh)….

… The Prince is the repository of all the colonial past and all the class privileges of the present. His racist remarks should not be whitewashed or camouflaged. They need to be properly, accurately, and verbatim catalogued in the British Library and made available to future generations of scholars and critical thinkers, anthropologists of the racist foregrounding of European imperialism for careful and close analysis. They are the insignia of an entire semiology of colonial racism in full-blown aristocratic diction. From the rampant racism now dominant in Israel to pernicious xenophobia evident in Trump's America, it's all there: rooted in these unhinged expletives in polite, aristocratic British English.

…… The kind of racism Prince Philip exudes is reminiscent of the very spirit of British and other European imperialism at its height. This is the way the British thought when they ruled India, the French when they ruled Algeria, the Italians when they conquered Libya, the Belgians when they owned Congo. 

…. To be tolerant today means we are convinced by the superiority of our own beliefs but out of the generosity of our spirit and goodness of our heart and the superiority of our civilisation we put up with you, for we have no choice. Both the superiority of belief and the virtue of tolerance are thus attributed to the tolerant culture rather than denied to the barbarity thus tolerated.

Until such time that we reach a point when we do not "tolerate" each other but in fact see the truth and the beauty of the world from each other's perspective, Prince Philip, bless his splendidly racist soul, exposes the hypocrisy of liberal "tolerance". 

There is a beautiful barbarity of truth to Prince Philip's racism, exposing the ugly hypocrisy at the very foundation of "Western civilisation".

full article on aljazeera