“Despite my inclinations to the contrary, I have racial sensitivities. I am Latin. I regard the civilised barbarian in the North with an inherited sense of mistrust. Today [the United States] has become a colossal society, and has adopted the goal of imposing its industry, its commerce, and its imperialism. Each citizen of the Union is a kind of stockholder… [upholding] an ideal of material perfection above moral perfection, and equating civilisation with the triumph of industry and commerce. We, by contrast, descendants of the Latins and educated by the Greeks, regard that person as most civilised who is most morally perfect. … I am proud to say I am bored with railroads and factory chimneys.” – Belisario Montero

ONE OF THE best aspects of Catholicism is the affirmation (for lack of a better word) of absolutely everything that is good throughout the world. All the peoples of the earth, each with their particular genius, eventually descend from the same parents. This gives one, I hope, a certain sympathy towards every nation and every people, and an anticipation that each one will eventually grow into the full flower of a Christian order appropriate to their particular characteristics and personality. Christianity is not oppressive and conformist in its universalism but instead all-embracing.

There is much to be admired in the sentiments expressed by Belisario Montero, an Argentine diplomat, in the comments cited above. To put them in context, they were made after the final collapse of the Spanish Empire following the Spanish-American War of 1898. Argentina, as you already know, is a place that excites me. In her is found so much of the idea of Europe, varyingly perfected and perverted, accidentally demolished in an attempt to save it and then put back together again not precisely as it was before. Marx “travelled” to Buenos Aires, but so did Maurras (and perhaps the Frenchman was more influential). For a time, photographs of Mussolini cut from the illustrated magazines were plastered onto the walls of aspirational working-class porteños trying to keep up with the latest European fad, and the military elite and social aristocracy combined to oppose the vulgar and destructive forces of liberal democracy and unbridled capitalism. Almost every coup in the nation’s history was received with a sigh of relief, especially (and ironically) the coups getting rid of whomever the previous welcome coup put in charge. Argentina has a long history of terrible success and beautiful failure. Perón himself is the very embodiment of this.

Of course, unlike Don Belisario, I am not a Latin. (more…)

Here’s just a handful more photos of Graaff-Reinet from the blog of Angelika Wohlrab, a South African tour guide, author, and photographer. Above is another Cape Dutch gem, the Urquhart House with its splendid plasterwork design in the gable. (more…)

The Gem of the Karoo

IF YOU HEAD OUT from Cape Town making for the Valley of Desolation, you take the main road to Johannesburg, breaking ranks at the town of Beaufort-West in the Great Karoo, where you head eastwards on the R61. That road eventually joins up with the N9 (famous for its “Uniondale Ghost”) and, before you reach the Valley, takes you to the pleasant little town of Graaff-Reinet. The town was founded in 1786, making it the fourth-oldest in South Africa, after Cape Town — the “mother city” — Stellenbosch, and Swellendam. Graaff-Reinet was named in deference to the Dutch governor of the day, Cornelis Jacob van de Graeff, and his wife whose maiden name was Reynet, but the burghers earned an early reputation for rebelliousness, proclaiming their own independent republic in 1795, with further uprisings in 1799 and 1801. While now situated in the Xhosa-dominated Eastern Cape, Graaff-Reinet is predominantly Afrikaans.

The town, which rests on a bend in the Sunday’s River, has a host of architectural delights, of which my favourite is the Reinet House (below). It was built in 1812 as a parsonage for the Dutch Reformed minister, and was later part of the teacher training college until it fell vacant and was restored as a museum after the Second World War, being opened in 1956 by the Rt. Hon. E.G. Jansen, the Governor-General of the day.

(more…)

Accepting differences, not erasing them, is the path to civic harmony

DISCORDIA GERANT ALII, tu felix Namibia reconciliant! Peace and reconciliation are amongst the noblest of earthly aims, but the deluded establishment that rules most of what used to be called the Western world often seem convinced that peace among peoples can only be achieved by erasing the differences between them. Yet it is precisely those differences — the unique characteristics of tribe, clan, and platoon that separate us from some and unite us with others — that make us who we are: human beings, created by God in time and place and circumstance. Without them, we are rootless citizens of nowhere, easily abused and manipulated by the powerful. (How flimsy is even the thickest oak when its roots have been severed). It is the acknowledgement of differences, rather than the erasing of them, that leads to true respect and understanding between and among peoples. While the racial grievance industry thrives in America and Europe, an entirely different attitude exists in happy Namibia. (more…)

Vanuit die blog van die “vryskut visuelejoernalis” Charles Apple, ons kry hierdie grafiek van sprekers van die twaalf offisiele tale van Suid-Afrika. Dit is die werk van die grafiese kunstenaar Rudi Louw van Naspers. Dié grafiek het in Die Burger verskyn. (O, Die Burger! Ek mis jou!). Afrikaans is nie eerste in nommers nie — Zoeloe is bo-op, Xhosa is volgende — maar die taal is eerste in ons harte. (Awww…) (more…)

Another broadsheet bites the dust

ONE OF THE most prominent newspapers in the Netherlands, NRC Handelsblad, switched from broadsheet to tabloid size this week. The newspaper claims it is returning to the ancestral format of its predeccesors, the Algemeen Handelsblad, the Amsterdam newspaper founded in 1828, as well as the Rotterdam Courant, founded in 1844. Those two papers merged in 1970 to form NRC Handelsblad, which is the seventh in circulation among the national newspapers of the Netherlands.

The evening newspaper has gained experience in tabloid-size printing since 2006 when it launched its morning compact edition, nrc.next, aimed at young, highly educated readers. Nrc.next has a Monday-Friday circulation of over 300,000, while NRC hovers around 240,000 on weekdays and 270,000 on Saturdays.

(more…)

Der Speigel speaks with 88-year-old Ewald von Kleist

Ewald von Kleist is the last surviving member of the circle of Wehrmacht officers who participated in the July 20, 1944 plot to kill Hitler and overthrow the Nazi state. Der Spiegel has translated its interview with him into English, and all four pages feature interesting insights from this brave old man.

And if you read German (I don’t), you might be interested in this article on China & Carl Schmitt.

Canada boasts one of the most imposing parliamentary complexes in the world, presiding from a lordly bluff in the federal capital of Ottawa. While I think the city could do with an overall Hausmannisation, the government of the Confederation is undertaking significant efforts to renovate the buildings on Parliament Hill.

While the House of Commons chamber is renovated, the dominion’s lower house will meet in a new temporary chamber (above) constructed in the inner court of the West Block, one of a pair of high Victorian Gothic structures that flank the main parliament building. The restoration will take five to seven years, after which the temporary chamber will be converted into parliamentary committee rooms.

IT WAS THE NIGHT of 10 May 1941. For nine solid months the Luftwaffe had thrown everything it had at the people of London, as Hitler hoped to bomb the English into despair and surrender. By early May, the Nazis realised the campaign had failed, and resources had to be directed elsewhere. The Blitz had to end, but on its final night, it hit one of its most precious targets. Twelve German bombs hit the Palace of Westminster that night, with an incendiary striking a direct hit at the House of Commons. The locus of Britain’s parliamentary democracy was consumed by flame and completely destroyed. (more…)

…and sundry other occurences

Outside of Rome, you don’t run into cardinals all that often, but last Saturday I caught sight of one of the most popular clerics in the Catholic Church: Australia’s Cardinal Pell. The occasion was the Cardinal’s reception into the Sacred Military Constantinian Order of St George, which took place in the Little Oratory. His Royal Highness the Duke of Noto presided over the investiture, and if you squint your eyes enough you can make out a profile shot of Young Cusack in the background of the photo of the Duke (below). In addition to the Cardinal Archbishop of Sydney’s being made a Bailiff Grand Cross of Justice, six others were invested as members of the Constantinian Order, including His Excellency Don Antonio da Silva Coelho, the Ambassador of the Order of Malta to the Republic of Peru. For more info, see the Order’s notice on the event. (more…)

The photographs of “Manni” Sayn-Wittgenstein-Sayn

IT’S A CRACKING photo; the sort of thing guaranteed to irk the puritanical and bring a smile to the good-humoured. The thirteen-year-old Yvonne Sayn-Wittgenstein-Sayn takes a swig from a bottle while her brother Alexander, just twelve, sits with a half-smoked cigarette. Taken aboard the yacht of Bartholomé March off Majorca in 1955, the photographer was Marianne “Manni” Sayn-Wittgenstein-Sayn — the mother of Yvonne and Alexander — who’s known by her photographic soubriquet of “Mamarazza”. (more…)

ANOTHER unbuilt project: this time a plan for completing the South Kensington Museum (or the Victoria & Albert as it’s now called) in the part of London which has become known as ‘Albertopolis’. The museum grew incrementally from its first foundation as the Museum of Manufactures after Prince Albert’s Great Exhibition of 1851. The first design for the museum at its current site was by Gottfried Semper, but the plan was rejected as being too expensive. And so over the years the facilities grew incrementally and according to to haphazard plans. In the 1890s, eight architects were invited to submit proposals for a grand scheme completing the site under a unified architectural plan.

The judges cited this plan, by John Belcher, as the most original of the eight submissions. It’s a splendid composition in high Edwardian neo-baroque. The duality of the main domes is a particular confident touch, and harks back to Greenwich. Belcher’s baroque conception was not just an external factor: his interiors featured vast, sweeping spaces that would have been impressively monumental and reflecting the power and influence of the British Empire at its presumed cultural zenith.

“Although unsuccesful in the competition,” writes Iain Boyd Whyte of Edinburgh University, “this project attracted considerable praise in the professional journals for the plasticity of the main street facade and for its grand, Michelangelesque domes.” While the judges appreciated Belcher’s design, they worried about the cost of its execution, and awarded first prize to Aston Webb instead. His scheme was inaugurated in 1899 by the Queen-Empress, who renamed the institution ‘the Victoria & Albert Museum’ simultaneously.

I wonder if Belcher’s design would have gone better with the neighbouring Brompton Oratory, or if the Oratory benefits from having the V&A in a differing, brick-based style.

THIS MONTH IT’S already three years since the death of dear Dempsey Heiner, who went to his eternal reward on 16 January 2008. Demspey was a real gem of a man: a scholar and a gentleman, capable of relaying brilliant insights easily and who, at least once, exhibited his skill in the art of the gentlest intellectual rebuke of a presumptuous young intellectual fellow-Catholic (i.e.: yours truly), backed up with a remembered citation of François Mauriac.

Dennis Clinton Graham Heiner was born in New York in 1927 to Robert Graham Heiner and Frances Eliot Cassidy, friends and fellow-travellers of Margaret Sanger, the notorious racial eugenicist & founder of Planned Parenthood. Dempsey’s parents enrolled him at St. Bernard’s, where he was in the same year as George Plimpton, the founder of the Paris Review and twentieth-century embodiment of the gilded amateur. Plimpton (who died in 2003) described Dempsey as “the brightest boy in the class, a genius” and remarked that since leaving school he remained something of an enigma. (more…)

One of the things I like about Cape Town is its continual ability to surprise by throwing up surprisingly handsome buildings in unexpected places. To be honest, there is a great deal of mediocre architecture in the city, though I’d argue Cape Town’s mediocre architecture is better and more humane than, say, New York’s or London’s. But if you keep your eyes open to the world around you as you potter about the Cape, you can stumble across some happy little structures. This little building in Rondebosch is one such example. It sits on Rouwkoop Road, the street which takes its name from the old house that is no more. The N.G. Kerk Rondebosch is just down St Andrews Road one way, and St. Michael’s Catholic Church is just down Rouwkoop Road the other way. (more…)

An Argentine-South African Naval Encounter

The South African Ship Drakensberg sailed into Buenos Aires last month as part of the sea phase of ATLASUR VIII, a naval exercise involving ships from Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, and South Africa. Mr Tony Leon, former Leader of the Opposition and currently South African Ambassador to Argentina, was picked up by the ship-borne Oryx helicopter and landed on Drakensberg to observe the sail into Buenos Aires’s harbour. Mr Leon served in the SAN aboard President Pretorius in 1976. (more…)

One CMG and three MBEs show links between Britain and South Africa

Despite breaking its constitutional links with the Crown over fifty years ago (c.f. here), South Africa continues to enjoy close social, economic, and cultural ties with Great Britain, a fact borne out in the recent New Year’s Honours list. Of the numerous individuals awarded for their public service, four from this year’s list show the relationship between these two countries. Most prominent is Fleur Olive Lourens de Villiers (above), who has been named a Companion of the Most Distinguished Order of St. Michael and St. George. Ms. de Villiers, a graduate of Pretoria & Harvard, is Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies. From 1960 onwards, she has been a theatre critic, economics correspondent, leader writer, columnist, political correspondent, newspaper editor, and travelling correspondent around the world, in addition to working with the De Beers Group and Anglo-American. She was one of the four contributors to the Institute of Economic Affairs’ 1986 study Apartheid: Capitalism or Socialism? which examined the role of the state and its race policy in the South African economy. (more…)

HOW MANY COUNTRIES have you been to? As for myself, not many, perhaps a dozen, although I’ll concede that that dozen is spread over four continents. I know people who have been to two or three times as many countries as I have, particularly if they’ve travelled through the Continent, where you can notch up several in a single day. My travel plans tend to be those of saturation rather than spread: I visit places and start relationships with them and then keep coming back.

And how do you decide that you’ve “been” to a country? There are various methods of determination. (more…)

The first-ever Nuestra Señora de Cristiandad Pilgrimage to Luján

SMALL SEEDS, IF well-planted and tended to, flower into much larger growths. On a Friday morning last month, just four pilgrims set out from the town of Rawson in the Buenos Aires province of Argentina, but by the time they reached their destination — a Latin Mass in the Marian basilica of Luján — their numbers swelled to nearly a hundred. The pilgrimage of November 5th, 6th, and 7th, under the patronage of ‘Our Lady of Christendom’ (Nuestra Señora de Cristiandad) was inspired by the traditional Paris-Chartres pilgrimage every Pentecost weekend. The organisers hope that, like the Chartres pilgrimage, this trek to Luján will become an annual recurring event.

“Renewing Christendom in Argentina” was the theme of this year’s pilgrimage, which “seeks to promote the rich tradition of the Roman Catholic Church for our times” the organisers announced in a press release after its completion.

“This new 100-kilometre pilgrimage was an act of reparation and praise to God, imploring the salvation of souls through the renewal of Christian culture and the rediscovering of the bi-millennial tradition of the Church.” (more…)

NESTLED IN the Overberg, the little town of Napier owes its existence to a dispute between two neighbours. In the earlier part of the nineteenth century, as the little farm villages of the Cape became more firmly settled, the Dutch Reformed synod had to choose which towns were deserving of their own church. In 1833, the congregation in Swellendam decided to build a church further south to meet the needs of its members there, but couldn’t decide between two locations. Michiel van Breda wanted the church sited on his farm, Langefontein, while Pieter Voltelyn van der Byl wanted it built on his property, Klipdrift. Neither van Breda nor van der Byl would give way, so churches were built in both places, the town of Bredasdorp growing around van Breda’s church and the town of Napier founded around van der Byl’s church. (more…)

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