THIS MORNING, one country disappeared, two more were born, a fourth was expanded, and all are part of a single kingdom. The Netherlands Antilles, the collective islands of the Dutch West Indies which since 1954 has formed a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, was dissolved. Two of the islands in the archipelago, Curaçao and Sint Maarten, have become full constituent countries of the Kingdom (alongside Aruba, which was separated from the Antilles in 1986, and the Netherlands proper), while the islands of Bonaire, Sint Eustatius, and Saba (the ‘B.E.S.’ islands) have been merged into the Netherlands proper as special municipalities.
The government of North Holland has invited the B.E.S. islands to join the province, but this has not yet been agreed to. With a combined population of just 17,000, Bonaire, Sint Eustatius, and Saba do not have enough inhabitants to justify forming a single province of their own — the province with the lowest population at the moment is Flevoland at 356,000. North Holland’s offer may be turned down if it entails the complication of the three island-municipalities becoming part of the European Union. Currently all the islands of the Netherlands Antilles are outside the E.U., but all their citizens are E.U. citizens by virtue of being Dutch citizens. (more…)
I REMEMBER, shortly after President Mbeki’s resignation, conversing with a friend of mine, an Afrikaner vrou more advanced in years & experience than I. In response to my expression of ‘good riddance’ to an administration marked mostly by a detached aloofness and a willingness to abuse the prosecutorial system, this creature of the soil replied calmly, “Ah, but we will learn to miss Mr. Mbeki.” And, while I trust the instincts of Mr. Zuma more than the education of Mr. Mbeki, listening to the 1996 speech in which the latter commended the Constitution Bill to the National Assembly I can at least concede readily the eloquence of the former president.
The excerpt above was produced by South African Tourism, and ably displays the beauty of the country — “the hills and the valleys, the mountains and the glades, the rivers, the deserts, the trees, the flowers, the seas, and the ever changing seasons” as Mr. Mbeki put it — and its people: the riders on Noordhoek strand, the Dutch Reformed predikant, the proud Coloured fisherman, the Xhosa women with their pipes, a Zionist baptism on the shore, the Durban party girls driving down the boulevard. South Africa is a country that sells itself; when it’s bloody, it’s bloody, but when it’s beautiful, it’s beautiful.
The Harvard Law School professor & criminal appellant attorney Alan Dershowitz has defended Pope Benedict XVI while speaking to a television news programme in Australia. Dershowitz travelled to the continent to take part in a debate with the lawyer & activist Geoffrey Robinson QC who has waged a campaign to have the Pope tried under international law as culpable for the abuse of children by Catholic priests.
Robinson (a dual citizen of Australia and Great Britain) is well-known in legal and intellectual circles, where he has defended the use of kangaroo courts to try and convict alleged perpetrators of great crimes: his 2005 book The Tyrannicide Brief defended John Cooke, the solicitor general who prosecuted Charles I of England for treason. The Australian academic has also defended the practice of more powerful nations waging war against smaller ones to prevent the latter from committing crimes against humanity, and has argued in favour of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Dershowitz told the Australina Broadcasting Corporarion’s Tony Jones that Robertson’s attempt to have Pope Benedict tried before under international law was “wrong”.
International law deals with war crimes, it deals with systematic efforts by governments to do what happened, for example, in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, in Darfur and Cambodia. This is not in any way related to that. … This is not a crime against humanity, this is a series of crimes by individual priests and others throughout the world and failures by institutions to come to grips with it quickly enough.
Prof. Dershowitz said he thought Benedict has “probably done more to protect young children since becoming Pope than any previous Pope”. (more…)
Among the most well-known works of modern Scottish design, besides the ‘Clootie Dumpling’ of the Scottish National Party, there is the logo of the Royal Bank of Scotland: the Daisy Wheel. Now one of the most well-known financial brands in the world, the Royal Bank of Scotland was founded in Edinburgh in 1727, thirty-two years after its rival, the Bank of Scotland. (The Bank of Scotland, as it happens, was founded by an Englishman, John Holland — just as the Bank of England was founded by a Scot, Sir William Paterson).
The Scottish Parliament had declared in 1689 that King James VII had, by his absence, forfeited the throne, and handed the Crown to his Dutch rival William of Orange, who had already seized the throne in England. The House of Hanover succeeded to the throne of the new United Kingdom which had been created in 1707, but the Bank of Scotland was suspected of harbouring Jacobite sympathies. The London government was keen to help out Scottish merchants loyal to the Hanoverians and so, in 1727, King George granted a royal charter to the new Royal Bank of Scotland. (more…)
If you can possibly ignore its blood-soaked foundation and its disregard for the freedom of the Church, one can appreciate that the French Republic does republicanism with a dash of pizzazz, as evidenced by the late Philippe Séguin’s official robes as President of the Cour des comptes. Of course, most of this panache it inherited from its intermittent monarchic and (even more so) imperial past. It also inherited from Louis XIV an ever-present spirit of centralisation — the Republic frowns upon the principle of subsidiarity.
Monsieur Séguin was a decent sort. (more…)
THE EAST NEUK of Fife is one of my favourite little corners of the globe, in what is definitely my favourite country in the world. Here are a set of almost unspoilt little fishing villages with a quite localised architectural style that makes them instantly recognisable. The name of this little regionlet signifies its location as the east ‘nook’ of the Kingdom of Fife, that juts out into the North Sea.
Those concerned for this part of the world might be interested in signing up for the East Neuk of Fife Preservation Society, which has completed admirable work all over the East Neuk, and is currently considering the restoration of the gatehouse of Pittenweem Priory.
The papal visit began in Scotland, and the smaller setting (Scotland has just five million people, fewer than London alone) proved a wiser starting point of the pontiff’s trip to Great Britain. “Would the first day have been the success it was if it had taken place in England?” asked William Oddie. “Would the papal chemistry have worked so soon in London, that vast and engulfing megalopolis, if the reception by Her Majesty had taken place in the impersonal splendours of Buckingham palace rather than in that ancient architectural wonder Holyrood house (whose very stones are a testimony to its Catholic origins) and if the Popemobile ride through the streets afterwards had been down the Mall?”
Damian Thompson has argued that the papal visit has proved a triumph for Benedict and a humiliation for the secular-humanist crowd. The Daily Telegraph blogs editor and Catholic Herald editor-in-chief says that the Pope’s natural shyness has worked to his advantage, while the former Spectator editor Dominic Lawson argued in the Independent that Benedict’s unpolitical nature gives him a popular appeal.
The volume and biliousness of the media’s campaign against Benedict XVI has actually backfired and turned the lukewarm into pope-welcomers (like Kate Hoey MP, reports Christina Odone). Another blogger reported the influence a television programme produced by the gay activist and sometime paedophilia sympathiser Peter Tatchell that was broadcast just before the Pope’s arrival:
‘Are you going tomorrow?’ I asked. ‘Yes, I am,’ she replied. ‘I wasn’t going to at first, because it’s a long day, but when I saw that rubbish last night on the telly, I changed my mind. I’m don’t care if I die there; I’m going.’
Meanwhile Mark Dowd, another homosexual, was determined to be even-handed in his documentary “Benedict: Trials of a Pope”, and his broadcast was well-received. The filmmaker wrote in the Catholic Herald “when you have to make a one-hour programme on one of the most clever and gifted people on the planet you have to look behind the headlines and the angry rants on the blogosphere. In short, you have to do justice to the man as best as you can.”
Hilary White had a chat with barrister and Catholic Union chairman Jamie Bogle, who argued that the visit has taken the wind out of the sails of Benedict’s enemies.
“Jamie also pointed out that the protesters were having a bit of fun with the numbers,” Hilary writes. “A friend in Vancouver said that 25,000 turned out for the demonstration. The National Secular Society said it was ‘between 10 and 12,000’. But Jamie told me he had spoken with some of the cops present, and they said it was no more than 2,000.”
Atheist Brendan O’Neill reported being disturbed by the anti-papal demonstrators, reporting that there is “a sharp authoritarian edge” to the radical pope-haters. “Things turned ugly outside Downing Street when Terry Sanderson of the National Secular Society branded the pope an ‘enemy of the state’, giving rise to the cacophonous chant: ‘GO HOME POPE, GO HOME POPE.’ It was like a scene from 1984. I have been on many a radical demo that has challenged the branding of some group or individual as ‘enemies of the state’; but this is the first radical demo I’ve been on where the protesters themselves demanded the silencing and even expulsion from Britain of someone they decreed to be an ‘enemy of the state’. Even one-time ‘enemies of the state’ – the so-called queers and the old left – were using that criminalising phrase, that piece of political demonology, to chastise the pope. It was the world turned utterly upside down.”read more
Also: The campaigners against the pope’s visit have more in common with the fanatical Inquisitors of old than with Enlightened liberal humanists, says Frank Furedi.
File this one under “things we always knew and are glad someone agrees”: the dissident conservative fortnightly The American Conservative presents a symposium of articles about getting the USA back on the rails. William Lind attempts to destroy the myth of public-transport-hating conservatives while attacking the rampant subsidisation of federal highways. Former Milwaukee mayor John Norquist says the Right shouldn’t surrender the cities to the Left. Glen Bottoms does the numbers on the return to rail and tries to figure out how much it will cost. Finally, John Robert Smith argues that there’s still some life in America’s Main Streets. Christopher Leinberger discusses how private development can fund public infrastructure. read more
St. Thomas Aquinas, the “Dumb Ox”, stated that “all should take some share in the government: for this form of constitution ensures peace among the people, commends itself to all, and is most enduring”. Aelianus muses on a Thomistic view of government, explores the pros and cons of monarchy, aristocracy, democracy, and ponders the political position of the family in society. read more
Swedish was historically the language of Finland’s nobility and intelligentsia, as well as of the country’s ethnic Swedish minority — Finland’s first president and greatest hero, Field Marshal Mannerheim, could barely even speak Finnish. But while the Scandinavian land is still officially bilingual in education and government, the 5.5% of the population who are Swedish-Finns is increasingly viewed as “the world’s most pampered minority”. read more
Amid the warnings of doom and gloom ahead for the Italian economy, one province has almost full employment and a healthy economy, not to mention a governor who has ruled for over twenty years. “We are living in the promised land,” — Südtirol. read more
A London-based graphic designer has created a series of maps depicting Europe according to the national stereotypes in the minds of various peoples. Yanko Tsvetkov, a Bulgarian living in Great Britain, created the first one in 2009 in the midst of the energy dispute between Russia and the Ukraine. Russia was labelled “Paranoid Oil Empire”, the Ukraine “Gas Stealers”, and the E.U. as “Union of Subsidized Farmers”. Switzerland was simply “Bank”.
“I created the first one in 2009 because at that time there was an energy crisis in Europe,” Mr. Tsvetkov said. “I just created it to amuse my friends but when I put it up on my website so many people liked it that I decided to really focus on the project of mapping the stereotypes based on different places in Europe. I was surprised by the reaction because I never really expected it to take off like this.” (more…)
What are the best ways of following the Pope’s visit to Great Britain? The official website is offering a live webcast of all events, with highlights from the day interspersed between events. The Daily Telegraph is live-blogging the papal events each day, with frequent updates; today can be found here. The Catholic Herald is also live-blogging the Papal Visit, and updates on today’s events can be found here.
Check catholicherald.co.uk and telegraph.co.uk for more throughout the visit.
President Zuma yesterday paid a ‘goodwill visit’ to the whites-only Afrikaner enclave of Orania in the Northern Cape. The trip was prompted when Pres. Zuma received word that the town’s founded Prof. Carel Boshoff IV, was in poor health. Orania was founded in 1990, some months after whites voted to dismantle apartheid, as a place where Afrikaner self-reliance could be practiced and cultural heritage preserved. The town has pioneered various agricultural and ecological projects, and in 2004 started its own local currency, the Ora, which is equal to ten rand. (more…)
In his latest column for the Mail on Sunday, the commentator and Orwell Prize winner Peter Hitchens shares his thoughts on the Blitz — the Luftwaffe’s bombing campaign over London that commenced sixty years ago this month. His comments have special relevance given the previous posts on andrewcusack.com regarding the immorality of the Hiroshima & Nagasaki bombings, and likewise of the intentional and deliberate targeting of civilian non-combatants. (more…)
WELL, NOT THAT deep, really. The Mauritshuis museum in the Hague recently unveiled its plans to expand underground and across the street into a neighbouring building. The square-footage of the museum will double after the completion of the new project, which will include a new entrance, exhibition hall, café, and lecture theatre. The entrance to the museum, currently accessed from the side street, will return to the front of the Mauritshuis but underground rather than through the main doorway on the ground floor.
The building was originally constructed between 1636 and 1641 for Johan Maurits, Prince of Nassau-Siegen next to the Binnenhof palace. At the time, Prince Johan Maurits (a cousin of the stadtholder Frederik Henrik, Prince of Orange) was governor of the New Holland, the Dutch colony in Brazil. In 1820, the palace was purchased by the government to house the Royal Cabinet of Paintings. The Mauritshuis art museum was separated from the state by being transformed into a private foundation which enjoys the use of the building and the art collection on long-loan from the government. (more…)
Over at afrikaans.be, Anton Raath posts a verbal snapshot of Stellenbosch in 1819 from ‘The Cyclopædia: or universal dictionary of arts, sciences, and literature’:
STELLENBOSCH, in Geography, a small town of Southern Africa, near the Cape of Good Hope. It consists of three long straight streets, running parallel to each other, and several cross streets intercepting these at right angles. The houses are all spacious, and substantially built, though only thatched with straw.
Each street resembles an avenue, since, on both sides before the houses, are large sturdy oaks, which are almost as old as the place itself, which was built at the beginning of the former century, though it was wholly burnt down in 1710. In December, 1803, a similar accident happened, when the number of houses left standing was about 80. The church was built in 1722, and though not equal in size to the churches of Roodezant and Paarl, it is no way inferior to them in point of architecture.
The number of inhabitants at Stellenbosch, including slaves and Hottentots, is estimated at 1000. Every person in this town carries on, with his trade, some portion of agriculture and horticulture; and as there are none who can be called actually poor, who labour for hire, they are obliged to have slaves, who do not pay the expence of keeping them.
Strangers, who in their long voyages make any stay at the Cape, never fail to visit Stellenbosch; and people of property at the Cape Town also, in the fine season of the year, often make parties of pleasure to this fertile spot. Hence houses are fitted up here for the accommodation and entertainment of strangers.
“Hoe meer dinge verander…” Mnr Raath comments.
In accordance with tradition, knights are appointed to the Order of the Thistle on the feast of Scotland’s patron saint, the Apostle Andrew, but they are not formally installed until the following summer when the Queen is in residence at the Palace of Holyroodhouse. And so this past July, the ‘Thistle Service’ took place at St. Giles’, the High Kirk of Edinburgh, and two new knights were inducted into Scotland’s highest honour and most exalted order of chivalry.
The knights, dames, and officers, dressed in their flowing velvet mantles of green along with their hats and collars, gather across Parliament Square in the Library of the Society of Writers to Her Majesty’s Signet (Scotland’s professional body of solicitors), part of the Parliament House complex that long ago housed the kingdom’s legislature, and is now home to her courts. In Parliament Square itself, the Royal Company of Archers (the Queen’s Body Guard for Scotland) forms a guard of honour and is accompanied by the band of the Royal Regiment of Scotland. (more…)
Six of South Africa’s thirteen monarchies are to be mediatised, the country’s president announced in July. A report by the Commission on Traditional Leadership Disputes and Claims of the South African government concluded that the six dynasties had been raised from chiefdoms to monarchies by the apartheid government for purely political reasons and suggested that their government funding and recognition be ended. President Zuma said the aim of the move was to correct “the wrongs of the past” but that no one was being accused of collaboration with the apartheid authorities. The six incumbent rulers will retain their styles and dignities while their successors will revert to the rank of princely chiefs.
“We have been waiting for this decision for a long time,” Khosi Fhumulani Kutama, the Chairman of the National House of Traditional Leaders told the media. “It is important that people accept it not only for the institution of traditional leadership but for the whole country.”
But the indications so far are that the six monarchies will take the government to court in an attempt to forestall the demotion.
Up to this point, the most significant spate of mediatisation was during the Napoleonic era, when Talleyrand arranged the demotion and reorganisation of conquered German lands.
The slightly camp Old Etonian atheist neo-con Douglas Murray got himself into a bit of trouble recently when he and Baroness Deech unleashed a splenetic rant against Scotland and the Scots on BBC Radio 4. As head of the HFEA, Baroness Deech presided over the deaths of an untold number of humans in the embryonic stage of development, but it turns out that Mr. Murray (who is Scottish-born, curiously) has advocated hypothetical wholesale slaughter.
In 2007, Mr. Murray helped compose Towards a Grand Strategy for an Uncertain World: Renewing Transatlantic Partnership ostensibly written by Gen. Dr. Klaus Naumann (former Bundeswehr Chief of Staff), Gen. Prince John Salikashvili (Georgian prince and former U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff), Field Marshal the Lord Inge (former U.K. Chief of the General Staff), Adm. Jacques Lanxade (former Chief of the French Navy), and Gen. Henk van den Breemen (accomplished organist and former Chief of Staff of the Dutch military).
This interesting document made a number of recommendations, the most intriguing of which is the suggestion that NATO should be prepared to make a pre-emptive nuclear strike… in order to prevent the use of weapons of mass destruction (“WMDs”) such as, er, nuclear weapons. You read that correctly: in order to prevent the use of WMDs, NATO should be prepared to use WMDs. You couldn’t make it up!
THE GAMES OF THE Modern Olympiad are events which are meant to bring the peoples of the world together in peace and harmony and all those good and heartening things, but from the very beginning they have gotten bogged down in the petty particularities of rival nations, which altogether makes them rather more fun and interesting, if perhaps a touch less high-minded. The story of the ancient gathering’s revival in 1896 through the efforts of Pierre Frédy, Baron de Coubertin is well-known. Athletes from at least fourteen countries participated in those first modern games in Athens over a century ago, though the concept of national teams was not introduced until the 1906 games (the Intercalated Games, which have since been de-recognised by the IOC). But since those first games towards the end of the nineteenth century, the fortunes of many lands have waxed and waned, and likewise the spirit of unity amongst various peoples vied with the spirit of distinctiveness. Here, then, are but a small sample of Olympic teams which once vied for gold but which can no longer be found among the Olympic competitors of today. (more…)
VISITORS TO CAPE TOWN may be surprised that, given the beauty and multiplicity of animals in the vicinity, the ‘Mother City’ has no zoo. There is actually a popular zoo at Tygerberg, twenty-four miles from Cape Town and less than ten miles from Stellenbosch, which is the only zoo in the province. But centuries ago — around 1700 — a ‘menagerie’ was founded in the Company’s Gardens in Cape Town which survived for over a hundred years.
François Valentijn, in his visit of 1714, noted the menagerie boasted a pair of ‘rheen’ or ‘rheebokken’ (probably kudu), a black rhinoceros, an eland, a ‘rossen bok’ (possibly a hartebeest), a hippopotamus, two lions, and a zebra. In the 1770s, the Swede Anders Sparrman noted the presence of many springbok, a warthog, some ostriches, and even a cassowary. The selection varied widely through the years, and given Cape Town’s status as ‘The Tavern of the Seas’ central to the European route to the Indies and the Far East, the zoo included not only African beasts but also some (like the Papuan cassowary) brought from the Orient.
In 1777, the notorious rake William Hickey ventured to extoll it as “the finest menagerie in the world, in which are collected the most extraordinary animals and birds of every quarter of the globe”. Less than fifteen years later, however, Lt. George Tobin of the Royal Navy described it as “a menagerie of some extent. It was but poorly supplied, there being but a few ostriches and some different kinds of deer.” Decades later, in February 1825, a traveller noted the menagerie in the pages of the Montly Magazine of London:
At the end of the Grand Walk, which is nearly three-quarters of a mile long, is the Company’s Menagerie, which is worth seeing, on account of a good-natured old lion, supposed to be the largest ever taken into captivity, and a tiger of immense size and power; there are several other specimens of African animals: but those are infinitely the largest of their species I ever saw—we have nothing that comes near them in England.
A spiritually inclined passer-through, the Rev. Henry Martyn, Chaplain to the Honourable East India Company, stated in 1832 that the “lion and a lioness, amongst the beasts, and the ostrich, led my thoughts very strongly to admire and glorify the power of the great Creator.” It was around that time that Sir Benjamin d’Urban, Governor of the Cape, granted land next to the menagerie for the erection of a building for the South African College, the germ of what would become the University of Cape Town. This was the beginning of what is now called the Hiddingh campus of UCT, the institution’s first home which continues alongside the main campus built on the Rhodes estate on the slopes of Devil’s Peak. The menagerie was shut in 1838 and the first building of the proto-UCT went up the next year in an exotic Egyptian Revival style.
The lion gates, however, are from earlier. They were built in 1805, probably by Thibault, with the lions & lionesses sculpted by the architect’s frequent collaborator Anton Anreith, also responsible for the magnificent pulpit in the Groote Kerk. The lionesses on the UCT side are original but the lions on the other side, curiously, were removed in 1873. In 1958 they were restored when Ivan Mitford-Barberton — arguably South Africa’s greatest sculptor after Anreith — created new beasts for the old perches. The gates are still there if you walk up the Government Avenue that bisects the Company’s Gardens, beautiful in the eye of this beholder in their immaculate, white, classical elegance.