Queen

As well as Gorbachev, last week's topic, and she is the figure of the Epilogue, the symbol of an entire epoch, but, apart from their profound age, there are few similarities between these two historical figures, and the differences are many.

Elizabeth the Second her political work has survived. Thanks to her, Britain carried out relatively painlessly one of the biggest transitions in its history. And the most difficult: the transition from the only superpower to (only) one of the important states of the modern world is never easy. Neither emotionally nor politically. She showed that such a path can also be crossed with dignity. The Russians, for example, never managed to make such a transition. Gorbachev was so devotedly hated for even trying.

She played her dance with the epilogue of an empire much more elegantly than the last Soviet leader. It is not only the merit of the culture to which it belongs, but also its skill and dexterity...

So that there is no confusion - I must immediately announce my own reservations (to put it mildly) regarding monarchism.

I believe that a concept that requires you to believe that someone is better (more valuable) than others by the very act of birth must be unacceptable to man. I could never accept that, because there is not a single argument - biological, philosophical, psychological - that would support such a claim. It is a fraud, therefore. Which, in one way or another, has been functioning for ten thousand years. This deception is one of the reasons for political dynamism as we know it: people need to be convinced that someone is "king". Because that someone is king only thanks to the people who believe in it. Therefore, I believe that the monarchy is something that has been overcome but also deeply falsifying.

The British Queen Elizabeth II showed what a monarch could look like in the age of outmoded monarchism. Measured, restrained, thoughtful, politically courageous - these are qualities that you can rarely find in crowned heads throughout history. Most of them were immature and stupid jerks, but when you say "king/queen" you think of Charles the Fifth or Elizabeth the First, and not to the typical offshoots of that "profession".

Decolonization and the Commonwealth concept showed her political vision and lucidity. She was born in an "empire where the sun never sets", and ruled a country that rediscovered its own bureaucratic sluggishness, economic problems, strikes, social and political tensions... But rock, counterculture, new music and sensibility also came. and as strange as it sounds to conservative ears, she had a role in all of this. It should be taken to her credit that she brought the Beatles to the Bakigem Palace Bob Dylan, later they said that the future Nobel laureate gave them a taste of weed just then...

Rightfully so, Prime Minister Liz Truss calls the current era - the second Elizabethan era. It thus evokes the memory of Britain's most brilliant cultural upsurge that took place during the time of its namesake (i Shakespeare, of course).

However, the biggest mystery to Montenegrins was that someone is called "king" without having real power. "What kind of master is that?" That is why the colloquial term "Queen of England" here primarily meant persons of high rank, but without real power. You remember, the president Vujanović they often called it that.

Her ancestors were brought to the English throne from German lands. Hence the change of the dynastic name on the eve of the Great War to the English Windsor, and her husband's German surname Battenberg translated into English Mountbatten. A dynasty of ethnic Germans who fought a major war with Germany twice.

In a time that made ready-made clothing out of almost everything, she was a person who inspired many in such an old-fashioned way.

Because with all my reservations about monarchism, one champion from Titograd who was brought out in 1972 to greet the queen whose motorcade would pass in front of our school, remembers it as a solemn moment. In the era of socialism, seeing any queen was like meeting Snow White, even without the seven dwarfs...