Fond of beer in swarthy nooks,
but happiest among his books.

Change happens very quickly these days, and it has always interested me that people born in the same year as me are (more or less) the youngest ones to remember life without the Internet. The younger siblings of friends have no experience, in particular, of being computer literate while not having the Internet. We, on the other hand, recall the tiny Macintosh “Classic” as well as the older machines with the green type on a black background from computer class in school. Computers were for typing things up, or else for games, and computer games were never of much interest in our household. Who could be bothered sitting in front of a monitor when you could have a waterfight with the neighboring kids? (The exception, for me, was SimCity 2000, in which you could be Robert Moses, Albert Speer, and a disastrous hurricane rolled into one.)

Then, of course, came the wonderful World Wide Web. You could send emails, though for the life of me I can’t remember sending any in the first years of our family getting Internet access. When first introduced to yahoo.com, I instantly dismissed it, for I was convinced that nothing of any import could be known by the name of “Yahoo.” Still, we kids couldn’t get enough of the Internet. I was primarily a news & history junkie, seeking to learn of events in far-off lands that I had spent hours discovering in encyclopediae and while pouring over giant maps laid out on the dining-room table or the living-room floor. Every National Geographic that arrived having the red text in the yellow margin that indicated a map was enclosed was received like a gift from the heavens and added to my collection—which included the Canadian provinces, the Soviet Union, Indonesia, the British Isles (when still called so), and of course the precious World Map. Most memorable was when, just a short while after the fall of the Iron Curtain, National Geographic released a map of “The New Europe” with a dozen new countries added and borders changed.

While books were essential during our childhood, the Internet, however, remained a mere sideshow, a curious novelty for occasional use. Then—gradually, sometime, somehow—it became an indispensable part of existence. Essays at school were completed with the help of Internet research, the great quest to decide where to go to college would have been impossible without all those .edu & .ac.uk websites wooing prospective undergraduates, and then the year I started university was marked by the advent of something called Wikipedia.

I found, contrary to the expectations of some, that the Internet did not compete with my love of books, but rather complemented it. One could “google” second-hand bookshops in New York, London, and Edinburgh and then pay them a visit. There, ancient tomes and beautiful editions could be found and, judiciously, purchased. And while reading those tomes, various ideas and inspirations would spring to mind which would cause one to place down the book to the left and turn to the laptop on the right and find out more about any given subject. If Paddy Leigh Fermour mentions a castle in Bohemia or Hungary, you have but to type out the correct spelling, click a button, and reams of up-to-date information about it are at your fingertips. And of course there is purchasing old books online, and thereby expanding one’s library: a particular joy.

But during my university years, spent between home in New York and uni in Scotland, my library was rent in twain. The age of manservants and transatlantic ocean liners having passed, I could not bring my entire collection of books wherever I went, but frequent travel between the two homes of my collection lessened the impact of not having “that” book immediately at hand.

The problem now is that I find myself in South Africa, separated from both my precious library (now consolidated in New York) and the Internet. This part of the world is a strange mix between Palo Alto and Lubumbashi, and the level of Internet connectivity is very poor. Here in Stellenbosch, luxurious vineyards dot the landscape, and lazy cafés sit under the shade of the oak-lined streets, but most Internet service providers charge for use by megabyte downloaded. To those of us accustomed to the easy broadband access of most of the northern hemisphere, it is the galling equivalent of being handed a reed and a wet clay tablet and being asked to send an email in cuneiform (or “stuur ‘n e-pos in spykersrif” as it would be in Afrikaans). I am ostensibly a student here, but even our university—which sent the first African satellite into space—charges its students for the Internet per megabyte used. I looked into getting the Internet installed at home—a flat in an old whitewashed Dutch house in the middle of town—but the widely recommended snowball.co.za is prohibitively expensive for a poverty-stricken young amateur scholar such as yours truly.

Luckily there is a little café just around the corner that only charges R17 for an hour’s wireless Internet, no megabyte limit, peer-to-peer software and mass media downloading prohibited (fair enough). Cheap as chips, but then only during their working hours, and completely ill-suited to my Internet-browsing sentiment. Gone the quick check-of-the-email at the very dawn of day. Gone the ability to google some ancient German dynasty that surfaced amidst a late night’s readings. Needless to say andrewcusack.com—my Internet repository of miscellaneous and somewhat unrelated information—has fallen by the wayside as well. I can purchase an hour’s cheap Internet, but an hour is not what I want. A rushed feeling pervades an hour’s purchased Internet. I want five minutes here, ten minutes there, two minutes elsewhere, and every now and then an hour or two for some knee-deep research.

So should any ambitious techies of Silicon Valley be readers of Taki’s Magazine, set your sights on South Africa. There is a fortune to be made if someone can make good Internet as cheap and accessible as back in the States, but be warned: it might take a good deal more cunning to get things done on African time.

The Kirchners deride the farmers as “oligarchs” and claim that the exorbitant tax on one of Argentina’s most successful commercial sectors will be redistributed to the poor. Of course, it would be irresponsible to simply take from the haves and give to the have-nots; the money raised would only go to the deserving poor, namely those who happen to support the Kirchner regime. Along the way, every cog in the machine will take his fair share, with a respectable amount left over to fatten the calves (metaphorically speaking) of the Kirchnerite street operators who quite openly buy votes during election time and pay union members to show up at pro-government rallies in between.

“Thanks to the high prices of agricultural exports,” the New York Times reported in 2006, “estancieros are leading the country out of the worst economic crisis in its history.” Well, thanks to a global food shortage, those prices have only increased since 2006, and the Kirchners smelled a buck to be had. Why, the couple reckoned, should the farmers lead the entire country out of poverty when only part of the country bothered to vote for Mrs. K in the presidential election? The farmers, on the other hand, failed to see any reason why they should foot the bill for K & Mrs. K, so they took to the streets and highways protesting the unfair levy. Country went to town, told it a thing or two, and indeed much of town agreed.

This worried the Kirchners, who began to see the possibility of things going pear-shaped. “Maybe we should talk,” said Madam President, “Take no prisoners!” said the First Gentleman, the good-cop/bad-cop redolent of a second-rate TV drama. Finally, a course of action was decided: pass the buck — refer the tax to Congress, where the Kirchners have a comfortable majority in each chamber, and let them take the blame.

On July 5th, the Chamber of Deputies put its stamp of approval on the export tax — albeit with a majority smaller than expected — and the matter passed to the Honorable Senate of the Argentine Nation (to give its official title). Composed of 72 senators, a bloc of 37 members is needed to form a majority and the Kirchner-led Front for Victory has 42 senators of its own, not including a few more senators from provincial electoral alliances that, for local reasons, back the Ks but are not formal members of the Front.

The final countdown

The Senate was packed for the vote on July 16th. This was a make-or-break moment in the Country-versus-Kirchners dispute and while the government have a Senate majority, everyone kept an eye open just in case. The senators wrangled for seventeen hours straight, and the debate dragged on into the early hours of the 17th. This was no worry for Argentines — the “early to bed, early to rise” proverb is unheard of and unthinkable in Argentina. Finally, it came to a vote. With 37 needed to pass, and 42 senators in the Frente camp, the division on the vote was 36 to 36, dead-even.

Like many other American republics, Argentina’s constitution is modeled on that of the United States and so the Vice President of the country — Kirchner loyalist and ex-Radical party member Julio Cobos — is also the President of the Senate, who only votes in the event of a tie. Faced with this massive responsibility of breaking a tie on an issue of great import to the well-being of the nation, Cobos tried to take a note from the Kirchner playbook and pass the buck. He called for a second division, just to make sure. Again, the senators voted, and again, 36 for, 36 against. There was no escaping it: Cobos would have to decide.

Very well, it was down to him. It was four o’clock in the morning, and competing crowds of farm supporters and their pro-government opponents gathered outside to await the decision. Sweating profusely, Cobos spoke with torturous slowness on the gravity of the situation. “I think today is the most difficult day of my life,” he pronounced, as the senators shifted awkwardly in their chairs, waiting for the final word. “They tell me I must go along with the government for institutional reasons, but my heart tells me otherwise,” he said. Nervously holding on to the microphone, the Vice President paused between groups of words and breathed heavily for many seconds as the country hung on each word he pronounced. “May history judge me. … (pause) vote … my vote is not positive, it is against.”

Outside, the farmers and all the supporters of the Country cause burst into joyful elation and enthusiastically broke into the national anthem: “Hear, o mortals, the sacred cry: ¡Libertad, libertad, libertad!” Among the Kirchnerites, meanwhile, there was much renting of garments and gnashing of teeth, compounded by the mental calculations that they might actually have to lower themselves to what the countryside (and most of the town) do: work for a living.

Surveying the damage

The Kirchners have not done well for themselves in this battle. Cristina’s popularity soared at 58% when she succeeded her husband as president. A poll by the Spanish newspaper El País found that her approval rating is now at an unprecedented 23%. Her first year in office isn’t even finished and she has sunk to Bush-levels in the polls. In a Westminster-style system, the government’s failure to secure a victory in such an important vote would lead to its downfall and a new election, but unless Mrs. K decides to resign, Argentina is stuck with her for three more years before her term expires.

Cristina Kirchner would do well to note that Argentina’s last female president, Isabel Peron, was overthrown in a coup (and is currently under arrest in Spain for collusion in the disappearance of a political activist). Political intervention by the military is unthinkable today, but presidential careers aren’t only finished by military coup or the completion of a term. Between December 2001 and May 2003 — just a year and a half — Argentina went through no less than six presidents. Cautious Argentines fear that a resignation on the part of Mrs. Kirchner would only strengthen the country’s reputation for instability, but nor is Argentina’s reputation bolstered by the four-month national crisis the Kirchners provoked.

The opposition — Socialists, Radicals, anti-K Peronists, Christian-democrats, conservatives, and market liberals — will only be encouraged by the farm victory, and in the coming months opportunists currently in the Kirchner camp may take advantage of Cristina’s unpopularity to defect. Those who would count on her resignation will likely be disappointed. The histories of both Nestór and Cristina Kirchner show that they will cling to power to the bitter end, no matter what negative impact that has on Argentina. For now, it is enough to do as the farmers have done and celebrate… while preparing for the next battle with Argentina’s Bill & Hillary.

It was just supposed to be a trading club, a mere economic arrangement. “Sign up, join in, let’s trade and we’ll all be rich as lords”. Then it was decided there should be greater political aspects of international cooperation. After that, instead of international cooperation, a supranational entity. The final dream of the Euro-loons such as Giscard d’Estaing was a single centralized state.

This metamorphosis can be seen in the changing terminology of the united Europe. It began as the European Coal and Steel Community. Then the name was changed to the European Economic Community. Then to the European Community, still denoting that this was more of an assemblage than a single entity. But then it was changed to the European Union, beginning to show its true colors. And finally, the leaders of the convention drawing up the proposed European Constitution ardently desired to create the United States of Europe. The “United States of Europe” was only abandoned due to the refusal of the British government to go along with it, and even then, the refusal of Blair & Co. was more out of a realistic perception that it would be nigh impossible to sell “the United States of Europe” to the British people than out of any real lack of sympathy with the project.

So we are left with the statists’ dream of a centralized European state. What the great villains Bonaparte and Hitler merely dreamed of is coming very close to fruition thanks to the efforts of neither a conquering general nor an army but instead a horde of bureaucrats riding the Brussels gravy train to eternal glory.

Of course, as Paul Belien as pointed out, it is all too fitting that Brussels is the capital of the Eurostate. It is already the capital of Belgium: a country which was simply invented ex nihilo in 1830, just as the United States of Europe is being invented today. The Eurofederalists have even admitted that Belgium is an ideal example for Europe: Stat Belgium, stat Europa they have proclaimed (”As Belgium does, so does Europe”). The tale spun by the federalists is that Belgium is a model because it is a single state consisting of two separate national communities — the French Walloons and the Dutch Flemings (as well as a third very small German community) — which has existed successfully in peace and harmony for over a century and a half. A worthy model, n’est-ce pas?

A closer look is quite revealing. So what if Belgium didn’t exist before 1830? Poland’s a real country, isn’t it?, and it couldn’t be found on any map for over a century. Ah, but Poland is a nation and a culture, and organic community of peoples. Belgium is under no circumstances a natural organic entity. It did not erupt from below but was devised by fiat from above. And as for two separate national communities living together as one in peace and harmony, the history is quite different from the myth. In reality, the history of Belgium has been one of the Walloon minority ruling the Flemish majority through a combination of oppression, bribery, and divide-and-rule.

Still, why has it lasted since 1830? A shared Catholic faith is probably a significant factor in the maintenance of unity for many of those hundred-and-thirty years. But as Belgian Catholicism waned after the war, cohabitation by faith was replaced with cohabitation by bribery. Belgium became one great big spoils system. Everything was not only in duplicate but in duplicate and then triplicate. For everything there must be a Flemish and a Walloon version, but then within the Flemish and Walloon versions there must be three further divisions: one for Christians, one for Liberals, and one for Socialists. Nothing could be accomplished (or undone) if any one element was opposed.

Part of the spoils system is Belgium’s multiplicity of parliaments. In a shocking waste of public money, there is a national parliament, a parliament for the region of Flanders, a parliament for the Flemish people, a parliament for the region of Wallonia, a parliament for the Walloon people, a parliament for the mixed-language Brussels region, and a parliament for the German-speaking community. That’s seven parliaments already! And we haven’t even mentioned that both Flanders and Wallonia are divided into further provinces, each with their own parliament. It’s surprising that after members of parliaments plus their aides and staffs alone there are any Belgians left to do anything else.

The spoils system, however, is beginning to crack. The culprit? People. Flemings just can’t stop being Flemings and Walloons just can’t stop being Walloons. The French-speaking Walloons are more like the French, and thus more content to sit back and rely on the state. The Dutch-speaking Walloons are more like the Dutch, and are a bit more market-oriented and entrepreneurial. The Flemings are beginning to realize that the massive spoils system, which involves a bloated public sector and a welfare state, has been a drag on the economy. Maybe if we made a few cuts here and there and lowered taxes a little, we could encourage business and be a little more prosperous? Perhaps, but any change to the system requires the unanimous agreement of all the elements involved. No matter what the Flemings want, the Walloons have a veto (and, to be fair, vice versa).

Politically speaking, each internal element had a party. There are the Flemish Christian-democrats, the Flemish liberals, the Flemish socialists, the Walloon Christian-democrats (now renamed “Humanist-democrats”), the Walloon liberals, and the Walloon socialists. All these parties were and are ardent supporters of the spoils system, so freedom-minded Flemings had little choice but to vote for the outsider Vlaams Blok (“Flemish Bloc”) which the mainstream parties considered beyond the pale. With the continued refusal of the six “mainstream” parties to deal with the concerns of Flemish voters, the Vlaams Blok became the largest political party in Belgium. Suddenly, the spoils system seemed under threat, but the “mainstream” parties found an easy way out: they simply banned the Vlaams Blok.

What does it tell us when a government outlaws the largest political party in its domain? At the very least it suggests the government and the people are out of step; to those who believe in democracy it is heresy. Yet as the Belgian idea of democracy was exposed as a farce, few words of complaint were uttered in the European and American press over the affair. And so it must be worrying that The Powers That Be intend to reshape Europe while openly extolling that farce as a model.

We must also recall that the convention drafting the failed European constitution ardently rejected even so much as a mere mention of the importance of the Christian heritage of Europe, while the European Parliament refused to allow Rocco Buttiglione to take up his position on the European Commission because, horror of horrors, he actually professes Christian beliefs.

So what are we left with? A country — no less than the model of European unity, we are told — which outlaws its largest political party. A parliament which refuses to allow practicing Catholics to hold positions of high authority. A constitution intent on unifying a continent while refusing to so much as mention the only unifying feature of that continent, namely Christianity. Rather murky circumstances, wouldn’t you say?

But, just as they threw a spanner in the works of the Belgian spoils system, there is one hope: the people. As much as planners plan and plotters plot, the human element is incredibly difficult to predict and even more difficult to control. The people of Ireland were the only ones in all of Europe who were given a chance to vote on the Treaty of Lisbon — a rehashed version of the failed Constitution which had been rejected in the French and Dutch referenda — and the Irish people rejected it resoundingly. The jig is, increasingly, up: the people and the politicos are not on the same page. So while the rulers may continue to rule, we should keep an eye out to see how long and how much the obedient are willing to obey.

The main character, a nurse, witnesses a traumatic partisan attack in which a number of civilians, including the young boy who lived next door, are helplessly killed. Moving to London, she visits an old doctor friend of hers who is part of the resistance and who is secretly treating a wounded partisan. The nurse does her best to help the wounded man, but tells the doctor she is appalled at his support for the partisans given their cruelty to civilians. “The appalling thing about fascism,” he answers her rebuke, “is that you’ve got to use fascist methods to get rid of it.”

That, my friends, is the old lie. To defeat the evil enemy, we must become evil like him. Lucifer himself could not have thought up a better recruiting slogan for the armies of darkness. But, owing to our fallen nature, it is often all to convincing to we poor, fickle human beings. So while the begining and origins of the Second World War seem to be the flavor of the month here at Taki’s Magazine, I thought I might revisit a relevant point concerning the end of that war: the atomic assaults on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. (A confession: most of what I’ve written below is simply re-hashed from a post I originally wrote a year or so ago at Armavirumque, the New Criterion’s blog, but it seems relevant to the discussion).

It is interesting, though not surprising, to me that most of the objection to our barbaric destruction of those two cities came from the men and women of the Right. It was only two days after the bombing of Hiroshima that the Republican former President Herbert Hoover wrote to a friend that “the use of the atomic bomb, with its indiscriminate killing of women and children, revolts my soul.” Leo Maley and Uday Mohan pick up on this over at the History News Network:

Days later, David Lawrence, the conservative owner and editor of U.S. News (now U.S. News & World Report), argued that Japan’s surrender had been inevitable without the atomic bomb. He added that justifications of “military necessity” will “never erase from our minds the simple truth that we, of all civilized nations . . . did not hesitate to employ the most destructive weapon of all times indiscriminately against men, women and children.”

Just weeks after Japan’s surrender, an article published in the conservative magazine Human Events contended that America’s atomic destruction of Hiroshima might be morally “more shameful” and “more degrading” than Japan’s “indefensible and infamous act of aggression” at Pearl Harbor.

Such scathing criticism on the part of leading American conservatives continued well after 1945. A 1947 editorial in the Chicago Tribune, at the time a leading conservative voice, claimed that President Truman and his advisers were guilty of “crimes against humanity” for “the utterly unnecessary killing of uncounted Japanese.”

In 1948, Henry Luce, the conservative owner of Time, Life, and Fortune, stated that “if, instead of our doctrine of ’unconditional surrender,’ we had all along made our conditions clear, I have little doubt that the war with Japan would have ended soon without the bomb explosion which so jarred the Christian conscience.” A steady drumbeat of conservative criticism continued throughout the 1950s. A 1958 editorial in William F. Buckley, Jr.’s National Review took former President Truman to task for his then-current explanation of why he had decided to drop an atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima. The editors asked the question that “ought to haunt Harry Truman: ’Was it really necessary?’” Could a demonstration of the bomb and an ultimatum have ended the war? The editors challenged Truman to provide a satisfactory answer. Six weeks later the magazine published an article harshly critical of Truman’s atomic bomb decision.

Two years later, David Lawrence informed his magazine’s readers that it was “not too late to confess our guilt and to ask God and all the world to forgive our error” of having used atomic weapons against civilians. As a 1959 National Review article matter-of-factly stated: “The indefensibility of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima is becoming a part of the national conservative creed.”

Meanwhile, George S. Schuyler, another prominent conservative (and later on a contributor to National Review) wrote in his Pittsburgh Courier column of August 14, 1945 that:

Not satisfied with being able to kill people by the thousand, we have now achieved the supreme triumph of being able to slaughter whole cities at a time. In this connection it is interesting to note that there is no longer any pretense that only military installations are targets. Skimming through in the skies over Hiroshima, one of our bombing planes dropped the fearsome atomic bomb to murder 200,000 or Japanese mothers, fathers and children indiscriminately. It seems that just yesterday we were bemoaning German barbarism in bombing Warsaw, Rotterdam, London and other industrial centers, and citing as evidence of the Japanese savagery the slaughter of a few thousand innocents in Shanghai.

In Great Britain, the prominent conservative philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe protested voiciferously in 1956 when Oxford, her place of study and employ, awarded an honorary degree to President Harry S. Truman.

Anscombe, of course, was a convert to Catholicism and it is naturally from Catholic conservatives that much ire is stoked in reaction to the destruction of the two cities. Bishop Fulton Sheen, the popular television personality, called it “our national sin” while Fr. James Gillis, a Paulist priest who was the editor of the Catholic World and a leading figure in the circles of the American Right, called it “the most powerful blow ever delivered against Christian civilization and the moral law.”

The conservative opposition came not just from Catholic circles, but from the military as well. Military historian Maj. Gen. J.F.C. Fuller wrote:

Though to save life is laudable, it in no way justifies the employment of means which run counter to every precept of humanity and the customs of war. Should it do so, then, on the pretext of shortening a war and of saving lives, every imaginable atrocity can be justified.

Admiral William D. Leahey, meanwhile, asserted:

the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. . . . My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make wars in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.

The splendid Richard Weaver (of Ideas Have Consequences fame) saw the bombings as “inimical to the foundations on which civilization is built” and attacked

the spectacle of young boys fresh out of Kansas and Texas turning nonmilitary Dresden into a holocaust . . . pulverizing ancient shrines like Monte Cassino and Nuremberg, and bringing atomic annihilation to Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Yet, as Anscombe wrote, “it was the insistence on unconditional surrender that was the root of all evil.” The allied insistence on avoiding any negotiations to bring a quicker end to the war undoubtedly cost many American lives, not to mention thousands upon thousands of non-combatants who were killed in the mean time. It was a perennial discouragement for those German officers attempting to overthrow Hitler, and it was a continual encouragement to the Japanese to fight on to the bloody end, lest they risk seeing their sacred emperor hanged outside his palace by American, British, and Soviet judges. (The continual attempts to justify the atomic bombing of these cities beg the question: would our current enemies—the “global terror” against which we currently wage “war”—therefore be justified in employing a dirty bomb or even a regular nuclear device against New York or Los Angeles? I think not.)

Imagine how many lives might have been saved by announcing to the Japanese our guarantee that, firstly, we would not harm the person of the Emperor nor, secondly, deprive him of his throne—two courses of action we indeed took after Japan’s surrender anyhow. But no, when you’re a Big Boy like the U.S. of A. anything less than unconditional surrender is unthinkable, we have our pride to think of, and its not as if the Japanese were really human anyway.

The great (and much-neglected) conservative thinker Thomas Molnar once said that the Revolution would be complete when both the United States and the Catholic Church were won over to the revolutionary principle (the “non serviam”, if you will). Those who saw the Iron Curtain divide Europe and then the fall of the Berlin Wall forty years later have now lived to see the ideology of worldwide revolution preached from the White House. Those who wait to see it preached from the Vatican shouldn’t hold their breath.

Under the British constitution, a bill only becomes a law when it has received the assent of all three components of the British Parliament: the Commons, the Lords, and the Crown. The last time the Crown withheld consent was in 1708 when Queen Anne refused to sign the Scottish Militia Bill. Since that time, it has been an unspoken convention that should the Crown object to a piece of legislation, it should privately inform its ministers before the legislation is voted upon in order for it to be withdrawn, thus preventing the scandal of the Crown and the Commons appearing to be in disagreement. Despite this convention, however, the Crown still has the right to withhold consent, but merely neglects to exercise that right.

While the Crown has faded to near-irrelevance in the everyday workings of the British government, this was certainly not always the case, and the Crown has intervened in politics several times since Queen Anne’s refusal of assent in 1708. What follows are but a few twentieth-century examples.

In 1925, William Mackenzie King was Prime Minister of Canada with 99 Liberal MPs to the Conservative opposition’s 116. He was able to do this by forming a minority government with the support of the 24 MPs of the Progressive Party. A year later, Liberal MPs were implicated in a bribery scandal and so the Progressives having withdrawn their support for the minority government. As parliament debated a motion to censure the MPs involved, the Prime Minister asked Lord Byng, the Governor-General of Canada (and thus the direct representative of the Crown), to dissolve parliament and call a general election.

Lord Byng did not want it to appear that the Crown was allowing parliament to be dissolved in order to prevent the censure of government MPs and so used the royal prerogative and refused to call an election. The Conservatives, as the largest party in parliament (Lord Byng argued), should have a chance at forming a government instead. The Governor-General invited Arthur Meighen, leader of the Conservatives, to form a government instead, and Meighen agreed. This, in turn, infuriated not only the Liberals but also the Progressives, throwing the middle-man back into the Liberal camp. Meighen put his government up to a vote of confidence, lost it by one vote, and so resigned and asked the Governor-General to dissolve parliament and call an election, which Lord Byng duly did.

“I have to await the verdict of history to prove my having adopted a wrong course,” Lord Byng wrote, “and this I do with an easy conscience that, right or wrong, I have acted in the interests of Canada and implicated no one else in my decision.”

In 1931, when the Labour Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald submitted his resignation to the King, George V took the unprecedented step of asking MacDonald to form a national government with the support of Conservatives and Liberal Members of Parliament. MacDonald lasted as Prime Minister until 1935, but Great Britain would not be governed by a single-party government again until 1945.

More recently, the Crown controversially intervened in Australian politics in 1975. Gough Whitlam’s Labor government commanded a majority in the House of Representatives but the opposition coalition of the Liberals and the National Country Party held sway in the Senate. It is traditional in Westminster-style systems that if a money supply bill fails to pass, the government falls with it. The Senate refused to vote on the annual Budget, in hopes of provoking Whitlam into calling a new election. Whitlam stubbornly refused, and the impasse grew as the weeks passed and, with no budget approved, it looked like the government of Australia would not be able to meet its financial obligations for the year.

Finally, the Governor-General of Australia, Sir John Kerr, used the royal prerogative to dismiss Whitlam as Prime Minister, asked the opposition leader Malcolm Fraser to take the job. Fraser formed a caretaker government solely to pass the appropriations bill then immediately called a new election which his own Liberal/National Country coalition won handily.

Such royal interventions, however, are not limited to the English-speaking world. Belgium’s King Baudouin I, a Charismatic Catholic and friend of Francisco Franco, famously refused to give assent to a bill liberalizing the kingdom’s abortion laws. The Prime Minister, Wilfred Martens, simply had the King declared temporarily unable to reign and the Government signed the Bill in place of the King (as is provided in the Belgian Constitution). Two days later, the Government declared the King able to reign once more, and all was back to normal (except for the unborn children killed thereafter, of course).

One of the great benefits of a monarchy is this: that the Crown act as a source of authority, free from democratic accountability, who is capable of blocking any egregious acts which the government of the day may attempt. The HFE Bill is the perfect example of a bill the Crown ought to reject, for the benefit of all the kingdom, most especially the unborn. Yet we can reasonably assume that Elizabeth II will grant her assent to this travesty of law nonetheless, as the current occupant of the throne has (ironically) so thoroughly and woefully imbibed the democratic spirit that she knows not how to fulfill her purpose and duty as Queen. (It is important to note that in neither the King-Byng affair nor the Whitlam-Kerr affair was the Governor General acting on the orders of the actual person who was the Crown at the time, but rather on their dutiful instinct as the local incarnation thereof). It is disappointing to those who are unflinching in their attempts to defend the British Monarchy that the British Monarchy insists on participating in, and sometimes urging on, the very sort of wickedness which we look to the Crown to protect us from. Alas, so far we have looked in vain.

Quebec has undergone an identity crisis concurrent with its latest wave of immigration, most of these immigrants hailing from Africa and the Middle East. Whereas there is no dominant ethnic group or ethnic-based identity in English-speaking Canada (descendants of Britons comprising 34% of the population), in Quebec 77% of the population are ethnic French-Canadians. Of those Quebecois whose primary language is French, 71.7% claim that their society is “overly tolerant” with regard to immigration (a figure that drops to 35.2% for those whose primary language is not French).

The specially-commissioned Bouchard-Taylor report makes a number of recommendations of how to better integrate the newer immigrants, and repeatedly calls for the removal of the crucifix from parliament as well as an end to all public prayers at government functions.

Happily, the National Assembly of Quebec has unanimously passed a resolution stating that the crucifix will stay where it is. The motion was proposed by the Premier of Quebec, Mr. Jean Charest, and Mr. Charest’s Liberals were joined by the official opposition, the Action democratique de Quebec, and the separatist Parti Quebecois.

“We cannot erase our history,” Premier Charest said. “The crucifix is about 350 years of history in Quebec that none of us are ever going to erase, and of a very strong presence, in particular of the Catholic Church. And that’s our reality. And those who come to Quebec are joining a society where that history is now something that is part of our story.”

The Bouchard-Taylor report, however, draws some altogether different conclusions. “Catholicism has left an indelible mark on Québec’s history,” the report concedes. “Traces of it are all around us. Under the principle of the neutrality of the State, religious displays linked to the functioning of public institutions should be abandoned. Thus, we do not believe that the crucifix in the National Assembly and the prayers that precede municipal council meetings have their place in a secular State. In both instances, public institutions are associated with a single religious affiliation rather than addressing themselves to all citizens.”

“That being the case,” the report continues, mixing common sense with liberal cant, “it would be absurd to want to extend this rule of neutrality to all historic signs that no longer fulfil an obvious religious function, e.g. the cross on Mont-Royal or the crosses on old buildings converted to secular uses. The same is true of Québec toponymy, which is largely inspired by the calendar of the saints. Quebecers’ common sense will surely prevail in this respect.”

(Rather absurdly, the Societé Saint-Jean-Baptiste de Montréal, a cultural nationalist group named after the province’s patron, St. John the Baptist, has stated in response to the report that it wholly supports the concept of a secular Quebec and that prayer has no place in civic forums.)

It would be more heartening if the National Assembly’s refusal to remove the crucifix were evidence of a renewed commitment to keep Christianity as the governing principle of Quebec society, but sadly Our Lord has been reduced to a cultural relic of great importance. However, the mere fact that it is being left alone, despite many challenges, gives us hope. So does the surprising success of Quebec’s ADQ party, which came from almost nowhere to within a few breaths of actually forming the government at the last provincial election.

Should the ADQistes capture the premiership at the next election they will have succeeded in bringing moderate conservative government to one of the New World’s most secularized bailiwicks. Conservatives, having once written off the province entirely, should definitely keep Quebec on our list of “ones to watch”.

This may seem like something of a contradiction, but Scottish voters are just trying to make the best of a tricky situation. Labour have proved unpopular both for national reasons (the war in Iraq particularly and Tony Blair in general) and for local reasons (Scottish Labour’s mismanagement during ten years in power at Holyrood and the presumption the Labour clique have that they are Scotland’s natural rulers and how dare anyone think otherwise). Of the five parties in the Scottish Parliament, the Nationalists are the only purely Scottish party — with Labour, the Conservatives, the Liberal Democrats, and the Greens all having either superior (or in the Greens’ case, co-equal) bodies in London. The best way of kicking out Labour was to vote SNP, and enough Scots thought it was worthwhile this time around.

The fact that the Nationalists are a broad-based party has proved a great advantage. Beyond the central issue of their proposal to make Scotland independent, the SNP’s policies are, roughly-speaking, pro-business center-left. At the same time, their student federation is officially socialist, and they receive a fair amount of conservative support because conservatives tend to of a somewhat nationalist strain — and because the Scottish Conservatives give the appearance that they are more than comfortable to simply sit in Holyrood, collect their parliamentary salaries, and twiddle their thumbs. The Conservatives have always been a London-centric party anyhow, and under David Cameron it has become even more clear that it is a rural conservative party which exists in the hope of placing respectable metropolitan liberals in power. Faced with the choice of three liberal parties — the SNP, the Lib Dems, and the Conservatives — and pseudo-socialist Labour, Scots have made a sensible decision by choosing the liberal party which cares most for Scotland: the Nationalists.

But what, again, of this divergence: a party in government for which independence is its foremost purpose and a people who still seem content on (in some shape or form) maintaining the Union? Some in the opposition parties have seen an opportunity in this contradiction and have called for a referendum on independence to be held now; independence would almost (but only almost) certainly be defeated. Wendy Alexander, the Scottish Labour leader, surprisingly lent her support this idea before being forced by her superiors in London to issue a “clarification” opposing the idea. Those who support the continued union between Scotland and England, Wales & Northern Ireland would be wise to push for a referendum at the nearest moment and pull the rug from beneath the independence lobby.

But is the Union worth preserving? Ought conservative Scots to support the continuation of the Union or a move to independence? A unionist conservative might claim that by our very nature as conservatives we ought to support the status-quo and be wary of such far-reaching radical ideas such as ending three centuries of union. To which, of course, the nationalist conservative replies by asking why Scotland should be ruled by a London-based government intent on social and cultural revolution and the overthrow of all tradition. To which the unionist conservative replies that an independent Scottish government is just as likely to be the enemy of all that is good and holy as the London government. And so on and so forth.

What is simply true is that those right-thinking Scots who condescend to involve themselves in politics are currently divided between two political parties — the Scottish Nationalists and the Scottish Conservatives — and that this hampers the cause of tradition, order, and liberty in Scotland.

What, then, should be done? The Scottish Conservative party is an inherently flawed vehicle for the advancement of conservatism in Scotland. The party itself only dates to 1965; before then there was a loose association of unionist elected officials who ran under various banners — Liberal Unionist, Scottish Unionist, Progressive, Independent, National Liberal, etc. It was only in that year that the Scottish Unionist Association decided to become the Scottish Conservative & Unionist Party, the official Scottish branch of the (traditionally English) Conservative & Unionist party. The fortunes of the Scottish Conservatives have gone downhill ever since, and there is a very strong cultural bias (sometimes even hatred) of “the Tories” in general that hurts the Scottish party.

There are two main options at hand. The first is that the Scottish Conservatives completely divorce themselves from the English & Welsh party, undergo a complete “re-branding” and transformation. The Conservative name will have to be dumped and there must be a clear indication that the party’s officials are willing to put Scotland’s interest first and foremost both at Westminster and in Holyrood. The disadvantage is that any new identity will still be tarred with the Tory brush and be denigrated as English lackeys.

The second option is for the party simply to be dissolved and for unionist conservatives to join their nationalist conservative confrères in the Scottish Nationalist Party to form a united bloc of sensible people in the party. The disadvantage of this option is that the center-left leadership of the SNP will have an obvious advantage in being able to shut out any former Tories from party positions. The anti-Tory cultural bias is so strong that expulsion may even be considered.

Still, if the SNP wants to be both the party of the Scottish people and the party of Scottish government it would be wise to fulfill two tasks: wooing Scottish Conservatives and reacting to the electorate’s reticence towards full independence. Despite the SNP having 47 seats in Holyrood to the Conservatives’ 17, the Scottish Conservatives are believed to have a larger membership than the Nationalists. Feet on the ground are one of the more important factors in winning elections, and the end of the Scottish Conservative Party could shift a great number of party activists into the SNP camp. On the second point, polls show the Scots voting down independence but being nonetheless dissatisfied with the state of the Union. Rather than the current process of revisiting which powers are “reserved” (kept in London) and which are “devolved” (decided at Holyrood) every few years, it might be better to seek a new concept of union altogether, with the preponderance of governmental power shifted from Whitehall to Belfast, Edinburgh, Cardiff, and English MPs voting on English affairs at Westminster (though some have suggested creating a new English parliament).

The danger here is that any significant reappraisal of the constitutional framework of the Union at this moment might result in any or all of the following: 1) even more power for the government; 2) a step towards the total dissolution of the Union; 3) republican moves towards the abolition of the monarchy. Unionist conservatives ought to oppose all three and nationalist conservatives should at least join in opposing further centralization and the abolition of the Crown, both of which would result in removing any checks on the power of Britain’s political class.

Indeed, perhaps that is the cause around which conservatives of all stripes should unite: opposition to the political class which has seized control of almost all the major institutions of public life in Great Britain and which guards its power jealously. The current political class, which replaced a more multifaceted Establishment (consisting of the commercial class, aristocrats, bishops, do-gooding campaigners, skillful parliamentarians, trade unionists, and the British officer corps) consists almost wholly of boring people who are carbon copies of one another. The fact that no political party currently opposes this political class and its consensus is likely the reason why Britons are so apathetic and unlikely to vote in elections. Peter Hitchens has suggested the first thing that must happen for this situation to change is for the Conservative Party to self-destruct and cease to exist. There are still in Britain today many deeply-conservative people who nonetheless vote Labour (or Lib Dem or SNP) because they feel culturally obliged to, or because they have inherited the bias against the Conservatives. Hitchens posits that the existence of the Conservative Party and the cultural hatred of it are the only factors which keep Labour going as a single party. If the Conservatives collapse, then Labour is soon to follow it (in this hypothesis) and once these two deep-seated “brands” are destroyed, there is finally the possibility of a truly conservative political force emerging; union-wide, not just in Scotland.

First, how did we get where we are? The tripple whammy of depression, world war, and cold war changed the United States indelibly. With little regard for the Constitution, our government had been re-engineered to be on a permanent war footing. While the wars shifted, the footing remained nonetheless. The first war was Roosevelt’s battle against the Great Depression, which was an utter failure. The second was the World War, in which we managed to defeat not only our enemies Germany and Japan but also our ally, Great Britain, plunging her into debt and ordering her to dismantle her empire. The third war was the Cold War against our former ally the Soviet Union.

With the collapse of the Soviet sphere, the United States government was uncertain which of the many paths ahead it should choose. Simply calming down and letting America (and the world) get on with its own business may seem like the obvious answer to ordinary Joe Bloggs, but that was probably not even considered by our overlords in Washington (the mentality there by now forbids even entertaining the idea of being an ordinary country with ordinary problems). The 1993 World Trade Center bombing was a not-terribly-subtle hint that fundamentalist Islam was willing to step up and have a go at us, but Clinton-era Washington didn’t seem terribly interested in the fight, thinking the Islamists were an irritating fly that required nothing more than the occasional swat of the hand to make go away again.

So having won the Cold War and finding itself with nothing better to do, America decided it’d have a go at the Cold War all over again. And what a breeze it was! With an amusingly (for Americans) or embarrassingly (for Russians) drunkard at the helm of the Russian ship of state, it was just too easy to expand NATO willy-nilly, stick a few Western bases on Russia’s doorstep, and persuade a few countries to stray from the traditionally Russian sphere of influence.

But the combination of the stabilization of Russia under Putin and the second, successful attack against the World Trade Center changed Washington’s little walk in the park. September 11th required an immediate and large-scale military response against the Taliban in Afghanistan, but was later coupled with the somewhat opportunistic adventure in enforcing universal (i.e. American) values in Iraq. (An interesting question is whether or not the U.S. would still be in dire straits had Washington only invaded Afghanistan and not Iraq as well.)

Billions of dollars later, confidence in the American dollar has taken a big hit, the price of oil has skyrocketed (ditto wheat and therefore food), and BearStearns came close to levelling the intricate house of cards known as Wall Street. The immediate effect of Russia’s stabilization (taking our economic woes into account as well) has been the humiliating defeat of Washington’s plans for the continued expansion of NATO, the Cold War hangover that just refused to go away.

So that is, roughly, where we find ourselves now. What of the future? It seems plain to me that China and the U.S. will draw nearer and nearer. China has purchased America’s debt (remember America controlled Great Britain’s debt in 1945) and the two countries have become economically interdependent. 1918-1945 saw the shift of political power from Whitehall to Washington and economic power from the City of London to Wall Street. Are we slowly witnessing a similar shift, from Washington to Beijing and from New York to Shanghai?

China has been yearning to transform its maritime force into a blue-water navy capable of projecting Chinese power. But the ultimately necessary component of a powerful navy is an aircraft carrier and China, despite having purchased the never-completed Soviet carrier Varyag (ostensibly for “turning into a casino”), China does not yet have an operating aircraft carrier. (A quick question: which countries currently maintain aircraft carriers? The U.S., U.K., Russia, France, Spain, Italy, India, Brazil, and Thailand.)

Perhaps China will be content to control the U.S. behind the scenes and use it as its proxy military force. Or perhaps China will offer to cancel America’s debt for a pair of carriers. (We do have eleven supercarriers, after all. Eleven.)

An increasing closeness between the waxing People’s Republic of China and the waning United States might cause distinct discomfort in the capitals of Japan and South Korea. Something for someone who knows more about Asia than I to ponder.

Iran seems to be the big winner in the Middle East today. Iraq has been handed to it on a platter unintentionally by the bumbling, bumptious United States (who have also been courteous enough to fight Iran’s other major enemies, al-Qaeda and the Taliban). While Iran may seem to be in the ascendant, the fact nonetheless remains that it is Shia while the rest of the Muslim world is Sunni, and this will ultimately prevent it from ever being the Number One Nation in Islam.

The recent dramatic cuts to the Royal Navy can be interpreted as an invitation for Argentina to bide its time and wait for the right moment to seize the Falklands once more. Outsiders may think this prediction farcical, but they underestimate the level of Argentine nationalism. I was quite surprised during the brief part of my schooling spent in Argentina to discover that a great majority of Argentines still think the Falklands are theirs by right. Our geography textbooks even had farcical little maps depicting “los Malvinas” with all the main features denominated with invented Spanish names. (Port Stanley is boringly rechristened “Puerto Argentino”, while the humble Pebble Island is given the much more grand and royal name of “Isla Borbón”).

It would be convenient for whatever government succeeds New Labour to simply claim that the Blair/Brown cuts were so extensive as to be “irreversible”, an Argentine seizure can be presented as a fait accompli, and London could very well wash its hands of the Falklands while offering all the Falklanders a plane ticket to Heathrow should they want one. However, for Argentina to seize the archipelago again would require strengthening its armed forces, and strengthening the Argentine Armed Forces in effect means creating an alternative power source to the civilian government. Only an unpopular government would consider invading the Falklands, and an unpopular government would be unwise to strengthen the military, given that they might take advantage of such an opportunity to turn out an unpopular government and thereby increase their own popularity. Still, were the right factors (or rather the wrong factors) in place, it is a distinct possibility.

The big question, however, is what will happen to Europe. There seem far too many possibilities to consider today, so I am afraid I must leave them for another day or another blogger.