The Australian Monarchist League is complaining about the “historical accuracy” of The Crown and calls for a boycott.
The Australian Monarchist League, whose mission statement is to, “[lead] all Australians in a movement to protect our constitutional monarchy and thus ensuring the stability, the checks and the balances it brings to our nation,” just called for a boycott of Netflix’s The Crown because they said the series, “seems willing to blur the lines between historical accuracy and crude sensationalism.” The AML also accused Netflix of misleading viewers by failing to warn that the series is not “wholly true.”
Netflix has added a disclaimer to the trailer for Season 5 that says the show is a, “fictional dramatisation” and “inspired by real events.”
The Australian Monarchist League’s chairman, Philip Benwell, attempted to signal to “monarchists and right-minded people” to boycott both the show and Netflix if “falsehoods and inaccuracies” were not more strongly acknowledged.
Benwell continued, saying, “It is one thing to create a clearly fictitious narrative such as Robin Hood, but quite another to purposefully build a series including falsehoods and inaccuracies about people still living.”
He said the disclaimer on the trailer was “inadequate”.
“Many people who watch historical series do so believing them to be a true depiction of events and a sort of semi-documentary, which undeniably many are,” he said. “These unsuspecting people, unaware of the true situation, will undoubtedly take the falsehoods and inaccuracies contained in The Crown to be genuine.”
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“It is also disgraceful that Netflix is airing their new series two months after the death of the Queen and just over six months from the coronation of the King about whom the series contains falsehoods.”
The league’s cries for respect come despite the Monarchy’s role in imperialist endeavors and cultural looting over hundreds of years in dozens of countries, including Australia.
Benwell said: “Even before Sir John issued a statement saying that that fictitious conversation was ‘a barrel-load of malicious nonsense’, it is fundamentally clear that Prince Charles would never have spoken about the Queen abdicating because he of all people knew that because of the oath her majesty swore at her coronation, she would never abdicate as the commitment she gave was for life.”
