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| Helena Bonham Carter as Queen of Hearts |
“OFF WITH THEIR HEADS!”
BY
DAVID ARTHUR WALTERS
Queen Liliuokalani had good reason to be more than livid. Thirteen mostly American traitors associated with the sugar industry, following in the footsteps of the 1793 Committee of Public Safety” that provided the Reign of Terror of the French Revolution, had styled themselves as the “Committee of Safety,” and, with American troops standing by, the so-called republicans shoved her ingloriously off the throne in January 1893, declaring forthwith an interim “Provisional Government” pending the organization of a so-called Republic of Hawaii on the Fourth of July 1894, to be headed by Sanford Dole, who had drafted the infamous Declaration.
That ungrateful child of Christian missionaries had been nursed by a native woman after his mother died. Raised on Hawaiian soil, he worked for a law office in Boston for a year. He never attended law school, yet he was appointed to the Supreme Court of the Kingdom of Hawaii by the Queen’s late brother, King Kalakaua, despite the fact that he had a hand in drafting the accursed 1887 “Bayonet” Constitution forced on him, which had rendered him a virtual eunuch of a king and suffered greedy American and European foreigners to help white subjects outvote her beloved native Hawaiians. And the Queen had even appointed him to her Privy Council. But all he and his insidious fellow conspirators really wanted was sovereignty over her people’s land and annexation by the United States; sugar would then be forever duty free and their fortunes secured.
Off with their heads! Hold their severed heads up and let them see for a few seconds their own bodies and the people they have betrayed, and let the people be warned of the truth embedded in the true constitutions of the Kingdom, that the Kingdom belongs to the King and is His.
Well, she did not actually say, as the cruel Queen of Hearts said in Alice in Wonderland, “Off with their heads!” She had said “beheaded,” at least according to a despatch sent to Secretary of State, Walter Q. Gresham of Indiana, a staunch anti-imperialist, by Albert Shelby Willis of Kentucky, the American ambassador assigned by President Grover Cleveland, an ambiguous anti-imperialist, to negotiate a restoration of Her kingdom.
The decapitation issue, by the way, is believed to have been the obstacle to restoration. Of course Mr. Dole was not much interested in being beheaded.
Civilized Americans were professedly so appalled by the thought of headless horsemen that reconciliation was put off until it was made impossible by a report to Congress that seemed to disprove, in contradiction to a previous report, that the United States was innocent of complicity in the overthrow. And that was somehow made clearer during the Spanish-American War in the Pacific, where Pearl Harbor was being eyed as an ideal harbor for hostile takeovers. But never mind: Congress would formally apologize for the illegal 1893 deed in 1993. The people with any quota of native blood left would not be entitled to more than a percent of the land if the Kingdom were restored; they had less than that when the kingdom existed because the haoles had grabbed most of it since fee simple titles were made available to foreigners by the Alien Resident Act of 1850.
The mainland and Honolulu newspapers had a field day with the prospect of beheadings.
“So it appears that Queen Liliuokalani wanted to behead the Provisionals when she was restored to power. This was quite natural. It shows the advance made in Hawaiian civilization that the queen did not also propose to eat her enemies. No wonder Minister Willis concluded to wait for further instructions,” reported the Philadelphia Record.
Fools! Little did the racists know that ancient Hawaiians were not cannibals, as were some of their Polynesian cousins elsewhere in the Pacific. They did dismember some bodies; they might bake the flesh off the bones, calling in expert bone-breakers to finish the funereal task, but they certainly did not eat the meat.
True, some kids reportedly devoured the heart of Captain Cook with relish, but they thought it was a dog, which is tragic because it might have been returned to his wife in England, just as Percy Blythe Shelley’s heart had been plucked from a fire and returned to his wife.
Yes, there are oral histories of cannibals in Hawaii, for example, of a man-eating band led by Ke-ali‘i-ai-kanaka, aka Kalo, “the chief who eats men,” who concealed themselves along a ridge between two gulches so that they could grab and eat passersby.
Mind you, however, that such tales were Tahitian legends adapted to scare Hawaii kids into obeying their parents’ commands to stay away from certain places.
The Pacific Commercial Advertiser and Hawaiian Gazette, ancestors of the Honolulu Advertiser, made political hay out of the leaked dispatches in January 1894.
“The Advertiser has several times referred to the yearning of Mrs. Dominis [the Queen’s married name] to see the heads of her enemies adorning a pole. Now we have the woman's own word for it that that is exactly what she has been watching and waiting for, storing up daily secretions of venom during all these weary months. Willis' despatch to Gresham, Nov. 1893: "My decision would be as the law directs that each person should be beheaded, and their property confiscated to the Government."
Liliuokalani insisted that she had not used the word “beheaded.” She claimed in her celebrated Story of the events that someone had slipped “beheaded” into a secretly taken transcript of what was supposed to be a private conversation between her and Ambassador Willis, and that she had later mistakenly attested to it as accurate after hearing it but without reading it.
“Doubtless, had I held the document in my hand, and had I been permitted to read and examine it, for the eye perceives words that fall unheeded on the ear, I should then have noticed that there was a clause which declared that I was to have my opponents beheaded. That is a form of punishment which has never been used in the Hawaiian Islands, either before or since the coming of foreigners.”
The anglophilic queen of her English-style Kingdom may have prevaricated on this frightful allegation. True, beheading is far less barbarous than the methods of execution that were employed by the ancient Hawaiians. They did not have the metal or technology for making razor-sharp axes, so found it more convenient to tie a prisoner down and club him to death.
Beheading in the islands would have certainly been less barbarous than the purportedly humane lethal injection presently used in the United States if Dr. Guillotine’s instrument for instant death were used. In England, the condemned had to plead for an expert with the sharpest axe.
“Now that Mrs. Dominis is really going to chop our heads off,” reports the editorial, thereby admitting to the complicity of the Honolulu yellow journal in treason, “one begins to regret that she has not imported the 10-ton stamping machine with which the Shah of Persia provided himself for a similar purpose. Nobody wants an un-practiced headsman hacking awkwardly at his throat, even if it would be the brawny blacksmith Wilson. We would suggest that the leaders of the present Government and its supporters as the chief parties in interest start a subscription for the purchase of a guillotine. It will be a good thing to have on hand, whether it is used to slice off Mrs. Dominis' head or those of her enemies.”
The reputation of Mrs. Dominis would not have suffered so badly if she had said something like:
“Yes, I did recommend beheading, and with the guillotine in mind, for it is the most humane method of execution in the world. I am obliged by the law to execute traitors, and I would only do so by the most painless method available, in front of the Government Building, beginning with those who took an oath to uphold the Constitution of the Kingdom, after a guillotine arrives in Honolulu, the prisoners being well treated until that day.”
The Queen was merciful in the end, not only because she loved even the most criminal of her subjects, but because her plan to carry out the lawful executions hindered negotiations for her access to the throne.
David Keanu Sai, PhD, a self-declared agent of the Kingdom of Hawaii, which is metaphysically present in exile in the State of Hawaii, has recently pursued the recognition of the Kingdom’s real existence as well as its fantastic being in international courts, and even went so far as to sue President Obama. His analysis, 1893 Cleveland—Liliuokalani Executive Agreements, argues that a binding agreement with the United States was actually made when the Queen accepted the amnesty terms laid out by the United States.
“On December 18th 1893, Willis was notified by the Queen’s assistant, Joseph Carter, that she was willing to spare their lives, not, however, their property, which, ‘should be confiscated to the Government, and they should not be permitted to remain in the Kingdom.’ But later that day the Queen sent a communication to Willis. She stated, ‘Since I had the interview with you this morning I have given the most careful and conscientious thought as to my duty, and I now of my own free will give my conclusions. I must not feel vengeful to any of my people. If I am restored by the United States I must forget myself and remember only my dear people and my country. I must forgive and forget the past, permitting no proscription or punishment of anyone, but trusting that all will hereafter work together in peace and friend ship for the good and for the glory of our beautiful and once happy land.’”
The annexation papers were not so forgiving as to forgive her. “FORGIVENESS UNDER DURESS,” was the headline over a Gazette editorial:
“The published dispatches of Mr. Willis enable us to trace very clearly the course of his negotiation with the ex-queen. That amiable lady took three positions, like a valiant soldier, retreating no sooner and no further than she had to, holding herself always in readiness to regain the ground which she had lost. At first she demanded the blood of her enemies, and she stubbornly adhered to this position for a month. At the end of that time the piety of J. 0. Carter recommending the matter to her ‘prayerful’ reconsideration, she decided, seeing her throne receding through a mist of prayers, to be contented with the perpetual banishment of the traitors and their children and the confiscation of their property. Whether she prayed again or not we do not know, but Pious Jo still kept at her, and she finally wrote a letter expressing her intention to forgive those who had despitefully used her, and be at peace with all mankind. Such an exhibition of nauseating hypocrisy would have been enough to make Tartuffe himself grow pale.”
No, the misogynists with the republican press had no pity for the humiliated queen. Money and not liberty was really the main issue, so they were unhinged, unable to swing both ways with a story balanced with other facts, that the penalty for treason in the United States was death, that beheading was practiced at the time in France, Germany, Japan, and Sweden, and was still on the books in England although no longer practiced.
“We may be shocked at the bloody thoughts of Liliuokalani, while we marvel at her folly. Yet, from the psychological point of view, her case is a perfectly simple one. She forfeited her throne because she cared more for power than anything else, and she lost the only chance she ever had to regain it, because she had poured all her soul into the one passion of revenge. We may almost pity Mrs. Dominis now. True, she has shown herself to be cruel, revengeful and false, and altogether undeserving of pity. But has she not been sorely punished? Her vices have reacted on herself. Her falsehood cost her a throne; her malevolence cut her off from all hope of regaining it. She has been the victim of her own evil purposes, and the pit which she digged so deep for others she has fallen into.”
Dead is dead, no matter the form of execution. The facts of the illegal overthrow and failed restoration of the Kingdom of Hawaii do not matter one way or another anymore except to give people interested in history a sense of where they are in time and space, which would be a much better place if they would learn the lessons of history and enjoy their variety of cultures instead of destroying each other for identities.
XYX
The lesson this is that it is time we stop manifest destiny using superior technology and money to get our way and start treating everyone in the world equally and fairly.
America First smacks of going backward again.
Ron