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.

Australasia
The Commonwealth of Australia and the Dominion of New Zealand fielded a unified team for two games of the summer Olympics.

Games: 1908, 1912

Gold: 3 medals
Silver: 4 medals
Bronze: 5 medals

Total: 12 medals

Bohemia
The subjects of the Hapsburg empire competed under the flags of three different teams, corresponding to the three most prominent realms: Austria, Hungary, and Bohemia. The first two have teams to this day, while Bohemia was later subsumed into Czechoslovakia and then the Czech Republic.

Games: 1900, 1908, 1912

Gold: 0 medals
Silver: 1 medal
Bronze: 3 medals

Total: 4 medals

British West Indies
The West Indies Federation, more commonly referred to as the British West Indies, existed from 1958 to 1962, and competed at Rome under the name ‘Antilles’.

Games, 1960

Gold: 0 medals
Silver: 0 medals
Bronze: 2 medals

Total: 2 medals
total: 2

Republic of China
Athletes from the Republic of China first competed in the 1932 games. From 1949, mainland China was overwhelmingly under the control of a rebel Communist government, which declared itself the People’s Republic of China. The Nationalist government continued to exist on the Chinese island of Taiwan, and established Taipei as its capital. During the 1960s & 70s more and more countries severed relations with the Republic of China and established them with the PRC. The Republic of China team last competed at the Summer Olympics in 1972 and the Winter Olympics in 1976. In 1979, the International Olympic Committee recognised the ‘Chinese Olympic Committee’ in the People’s Republic of China. From 1984 onwards, however, athletes from the Republic of China competed under the convoluted name of ‘Chinese Taipei’.

Games: 1932, 1936, 1948, 1956, 1960, 1964, 1968, 1972

Gold: 0 medals
Silver: 1 medal
Bronze: 1 medal

Total: 2 medals

German Democratic Republic
Germany fielded unified teams for the 1956, ’60, and ’64 games, but East and West Germany competed separately from the 1968 games onwards until the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) was annexed to the Federal Republic of Germany in 1990. The Bundesrepublik’s team is now the only German Olympic team (Austria excepted).

Games: 1968, 1972, 1976, 1980, 1988

Gold: 153 medals
Silver: 129 medals
Bronze: 127 medals

Total: 409 medals

North Borneo
The British colony of North Borneo put in a single appearance at the 1956 summer games in Melbourne. The little state became part of the independent Federation of Malaysia in 1963.

Games: 1956

Gold: 0 medals
Silver: 0 medals
Bronze: 0 medals

Total: 0 medals

Rhodesia
Rhodesia was a colony within the British Empire but was granted self-government in 1922 when its electorate rejected an offer to unite with the increasingly Afrikaner-dominated Union of South Africa. The country became independent in 1965, a republic in 1970, and became a full democracy in 1979 under the name of Zimbabwe-Rhodesia. The new state was unrecognised, however, and after talks in London it was agreed to revert to its de jure colonial status in preparation for a legal grant of independence, which was achieved in 1980 as Zimbabwe.

Games: 1928, 1960, 1964

Gold: 0 medals
Silver: 0 medals
Bronze: 0 medals

Total: 0 medals

Saarland
The Saar Protectorate was established by French occupying forces in 1946, separating the large coalfields of this industrial region from the joint allied jurisdiction of Occupied Germany. While France offered independence to the Saar, a move supported by the West German chancellor Adenauer, the citizens of the protectorate rejected it in favour of reunification with the Federal Republic, which was accomplished on the first day of 1957.

Games: 1952

Gold: 0 medals
Silver: 0 medals
Bronze: 0 medals

Total: 0 medals

Other Olympic teams disappeared from competition only to reappear again. Serbia competed in 1912 and then not again for another ninety-six years until the 2008 games. 1912 was also the last appearance of Russia (as the Russian Empire) until the ’94 Winter and ’96 Summer games when it returned as the Russian Federation. Other states began to compete under colonial names and adopted new ones upon achieving sovereignty. Zambia became independent on the last day of the 1964 games, but its athletes competed under the name of Northern Rhodesia. The two Germanies were not the only countries to field unified teams: Egypt & Syria did so as the United Arab Republic and all the states of the former Soviet Union (minus the Baltics) competed as ‘the Unified Team’ in the 1992 Summer Olympics.

What, then, will be the next Olympic team to disappear? The Netherlands Antilles first competed in 1952, but the country will be dissolved next month (October 2010). Three of its islands will merge fully into the Netherlands proper as municipalities, while Curaçao and Sint Maarten will become full constituent countries of the Kingdom of the Netherlands (alongside the Netherlands proper and Aruba).

Looking further into the future, the awkward ‘Chinese Taipei’ designation may disappear if the Republic of China is integrated into the People’s Republic of China, which seems likely to happen voluntarily within the next few decades. If so, the area current administered by the ROC will almost certainly become a Special Administrative Region, alongside Hong Kong and Macau. A Taiwan S.A.R. may choose to remain separate for Olympic purposes, as Hong Kong (which first competed as a British Crown Colony in 1952) has done. Little Macau, while it has its own Olympic committee, has not yet competed on its own in the Olympics.

Well, your humble and obedient scribe is retreating to the coast of Maine, whence the defeated loyal men of Berwick fled after suffering defeat at the hands of the wretched Cromwell in the Battle of Dunbar. I am bringing a few friends along, including Mssrs. Trollope, Goethe, Burns, Chesterton, Balzac, von Rezzori, and a Ms. Undset (I am finally more than two-thirds of the way through Kristin Lavransdatter). There may also be a corgi or two. Internet connectivity very sketchy in those parts, though I will see if I can send a pigeon back to Hogarth if any news. (Doubtful it would do any good; the last e-mail I had him send he instinctively translated into dots and dashes — he does remind me of Uncle Otto sometimes).

So I bid you farewell, and you can expect my return in a fortnight’s time, invigorated anew by the salty breeze.

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.

PENTECOST commemorates the descent of the Holy Spirit, often considered the birthday of the Church. Each year, this great feast of the Church is marked by the pilgrimage from the Cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris on the Île de la Cité (above) to Notre-Dame de Chartres in the Orléanais by pilgrims young and old devoted to the traditional form of the Latin rite. The pilgrimage, often a feast of flags and banners, takes three days beginning on the Saturday of Pentecost weekend, continuing through the great feast itself, and arriving in Chartres on Pentecost Monday (which is still a public holiday in France). This year, Cardinal Vingt-Trois, the Archbishop of Paris, graciously led Benediction on the second day of the pilgrimage, and met with and blessed individual pilgrims.

Here are a few photographs Notre-Dame de Chrétienté, Stuart Chessman, and from Joseph Shaw.

THREE YEARS AGO over on the New Criterion‘s blog, Armavirumque, my friend and then-colleague & boss Roger Kimball and I had an interesting exchange on the morality of the bombing of Hiroshima. The debate began when Roger wrote a blog entry citing an opinion piece from Oliver Kamm of the Guardian supporting President Truman’s decision to drop the Bomb. I then responded with a post of my own pointing out that the conservative reaction at the time was one of horror at the moral depravity to which we had descended, and that the it-would-have-been-worse-if-we-didn’t school of thought essentially can be reduced to an ends-justifies-the-means argument. Roger then responded with a post arguing that, well, sometimes the ends do justify the means.

Regardless of one’s thoughts on the Hiroshima bombing, arguing that the ends justifies the means is one of the cornerstones of relativism. Christians believe that we are not allowed to do evil, even if that evil may serve a good cause. It is not simply a matter of choosing something bad over something worse. Evacuating the British Army from Dunkirk, for example, was bad, but leaving it there was worse. Yet, both were morally licit options for Churchill to make, though the prudential evidence supported the former option rather than the latter.

Innocent people inevitably die in most wars, but that cannot excuse the deliberate and intentional targeting of an entire city for destruction by a military force. That so many American Christians still excuse the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is frightening evidence that America has convinced Christians to be Americanised rather than Christianity convincing America to be Christianised.

Political wisdom from The Guardian

by Roger Kimball (August 6, 2007 – 10:18am)

It is not often that I agree with the politics espoused by The Guardian, England’s most left-wing serious newspaper. But an article by Oliver Kamm today in that newspaper wins my wholehearted endorsement. Today, August 6, is the anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. As Mr. Kamm points out, that action, together with its successor at Nagasaki on August 9, ended World War II. It saved hundreds of thousands of American lives and millions of Japanese lives. Were those bombings terrible? You betcha. But as Mr. Kamm notes, if they caused suffering, they saved much greater suffering that would have ensued had the United States invaded Japan. This was understood at the time. But in recent years a revisionist view has grown up, especially on the Left, which faults President Truman for his decision to drop the bombs. “This alternative history,” Mr. Kamm argues. “is devoid of merit.”

New historical research in fact lends powerful support to the traditionalist interpretation of the decision to drop the bomb. This conclusion may surprise Guardian readers. The so-called revisionist interpretation of the bomb made headway from the 1960s to the 1990s. It argued that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were less the concluding acts of the Pacific war than the opening acts of the cold war. Japan was already on the verge of surrender; the decision to drop the bomb was taken primarily to gain diplomatic advantage against the Soviet Union.
Yet there is no evidence that any American diplomat warned a Soviet counterpart in 1945-46 to watch out because America had the bomb. The decision to drop the bomb was founded on the conviction that a blockade and invasion of Japan would cause massive casualties. Estimates derived from intelligence about Japan’s military deployments projected hundreds of thousands of American casualties.

It will be interesting to see what sort of response Mr. Kamm’s article elicits. I predict howls of rage and vituperation. But he is right:

Hiroshima and Nagasaki are often used as a shorthand term for war crimes. That is not how they were judged at the time. Our side did terrible things to avoid a more terrible outcome. The bomb was a deliverance for American troops, for prisoners and slave labourers, for those dying of hunger and maltreatment throughout the Japanese empire – and for Japan itself. One of Japan’s highest wartime officials, Kido Koichi, later testified that in his view the August surrender prevented 20 million Japanese casualties. The destruction of two cities, and the suffering it caused for decades afterwards, cannot but temper our view of the Pacific war. Yet we can conclude with a high degree of probability that abjuring the bomb would have caused greater suffering still.

Read the whole thing here.

What is the essence, the core, of conservative wisdom? One part is that when it comes to the real world, the choices we face are often not between good and bad but between bad and worse. This is particularly true in times of war. A difficult lesson. But crucial for those who wish to do good as well emit good-sounding slogans.

Do the ends really justify the means?

by Andrew Cusack (August 7, 2007 – 11:47am)

By now it seems a ritual: the summer ’silly season’ is annually punctured (albeit only temporarily) by the perennial debate over the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In the previous post, our editor and publisher Roger Kimball agreeingly cites the “political wisdom” of Mr. Oliver Kamm of the Guardian, the house journal of Britain’s liberal establishment.

“New historical research,” writes Mr. Kamm, “in fact lends powerful support to the traditionalist interpretation of the decision to drop the bomb.” Mr. Kamm neglects to enlighten us that by “traditionalist” interpretation, he of course means the standard interpretation of the liberal status quo.

“The so-called revisionist interpretation,” Mr. Kamm informs us, “argued that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were less the concluding acts of the Pacific war than the opening acts of the cold war. Japan was already on the verge of surrender; the decision to drop the bomb was taken primarily to gain diplomatic advantage against the Soviet Union.” Interesting enough? Well, here comes Mr. Kamm’s jaw-dropping insight to debunk the revisionists: “Yet there is no evidence that any American diplomat warned a Soviet counterpart in 1945-46 to watch out because America had the bomb.”

To borrow from the popular speech of our time: well, duh! The concept that American diplomats would officially (or even informally) inform the Soviet Union, one of their formal allies, that a given act of war against the Empire of Japan was also partly a warning to the Communists of American power seems so ridiculous as to be rejected at first sight.

“Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” Kamm continues, “are often used as a shorthand term for war crimes. That is not how they were judged at the time.” That is not how they were judged by whom, Mr. Kamm?

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 “[i]f, 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.

Perhaps Mr. Kamm, in saying that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not judged as war crimes meant to say that that is now how the bombings were judged in Great Britain, but of course this is not the case either. The prominent conservative philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe protested voiciferously in 1956 when Oxford, her place of study and employ, awarded an honorary degree to Harry 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.”

Not all the conservative opposition came from Catholic circles, however. 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, on whom our own Roger Kimball wrote a thoughtful essay, 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 “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.)

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. 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.

Another word about Hiroshima

by Roger Kimball (August 7, 2007 – 4:00pm)

I do not wish to belabor the issue of whether saving millions of lives is a good thing. But since my colleague Andrew Cusack has weighed in on the morality–or was it the theology?–of dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I thought I would add a word or two to my post of yesterday from Paul Fussell, whose classic essay “Thank God for the Atom Bomb” really says all that needs to be said about the subject of whether using those fearsome engines of war was justified.

The future scholar-critic who writes The History of Canting the Twentieth Century will find much to study and interpret the utterances of those who dilate on the special wickedness of the A-bomb-droppers. He will realize that such utterance can perform for the speaker a valuable double function. First it can display the fineness of his moral weave. And second, by implication it can also inform the audience that during the war he was not socially so unfortunate as to find himself down there with the ground forces, where he might have had to compromise the purity and clarity of his moral system by the experience of weighing his own life against someone else’s. Down there, which is where the other people were, is the place where coarse self-interest is the rule. When the young soldier with the wild eyes comes at you, firing, do you shoot him in the foot, hoping he’ll be hurt badly enough to drop or misaim the gun with which he’s going to kill you, or do you shoot. him in the chest ( or, if you’re a prime shot, in the head) and make certain that you and not he will be the survivor of that mortal moment?

It would be not just stupid but would betray a lamentable want of human experience to expect soldiers to be very sensitive humanitarians. The Glenn Grays of this world need to have their attention directed to the testimony of those who know, like, say, Admiral of the Fleet Lord Fisher, who said, “Moderation in war is imbecility,” or Sir Arthur Harris, director of the admittedly wicked aerial-bombing campaign designed, as Churchill put it, to “de-house” the German civilian population}, who observed that “War is immoral,” or our own General W. T. Sherman: “War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it.” Lord Louis Mountbatten, trying to say something sensible about the dropping of the A-bomb, came up only with “War is crazy.” Or rather, it requires choices among craziness’s. “It would seem even more crazy,” he went on, “if we were to have more casualties on our side to save the Japanese. ” One of the unpleasant facts for anyone in the ground armies during the war was that you had to become pro tem a subordinate of the very uncivilian George S. Patton and respond somehow to his unremitting insistence that you embrace his view of things. But in one of his effusions he was right, and his observation tends to suggest the experiential dubiousness of the concept of “just wars. ” “War is not a contest with gloves,” he perceived. “It is resorted to only when laws, which are rules, have failed. ” Soldiers being like that, only the barest decencies should be expected of them. They did not start the war, except in the terrible sense hinted at in Frederic Manning’s observation based on his front-line experience in the Great War: “War is waged by men; not by beasts, or by gods. It is a peculiarly human activity. To call it a crime against mankind is to miss at least half its significance; it is also the punishment of a crime.” Knowing that unflattering truth by experience, soldiers have every motive for wanting a war stopped, by any means.

Andrew seems deeply impressed by Elizabeth Anscombe’s contention that America’s insistence on unconditional surrender was “the root of all evil.” In fact, it was our failure to insist on this in 1918 that was the root not perhaps of all evil but that particularly toxic node that paved the way for World War II and the untold suffering it caused. Do the ends really justify the means? Alas, like so much about the real world, the melancholy–but also the moral–answer is, “Often, yes.”

But then what would Scotland’s top-level domain be? .sl is taken by Sierra Leone, while .sc belongs to the Seychelles, and .st to São Tomé. We might hark back to the Gaelic with .al for Alba, except that it’s already occupied by Albania. Ah! Caledonia! How about .cd? Nope, that belongs to the Congo. Blast. It might be necessary to go to three letters then, which brings us either to .sco or .sct. Neither look all that attractive, though .sco has the advantage of being pronounceable. Actually, .sco is quite imaginable, when spoken: parliament.gov.sco, fifeherald.sco, glenfiddich.sco. It just doesn’t look right. .scot looks better, but the rhyming nature of “dot scot” is irritating to say aloud.

I do wish they’d make .gb available again. I’d much rather be a “gee-bee” than a “yoo-kay”. Great Britain is a natural entity, after all, whereas the United Kingdom is a government construct. Perhaps if the Union is re-negotiated, we might move from .uk to .gb, just as .yu was changed to .cs when Yugoslavia was renamed Serbia & Montenegro. (The two split not long afterwards, and went for .rs and .me).

With four letters, at least .scot is not the longest proposed top-level domain. Some ninny thinks there should be a .quebec — how cumbersome! .qu would be much better, and one can just imagine the Québécois pronouncing it. Other British proposals include .eng for England and .cym for Wales. “Norn Iron” loses out, as .ni belongs to Nicaragua, but .ul or .uls are conceivable for Ulster. Perhaps the Vatican could dole out .sre — Sancta Romana Ecclesia — for ecclesiastical domains.

THE ART SCENE in South Africa is widely varied in both style and quality, and the individual artist who is devoted solely to a single school is almost rare. The works of Cyril Coetzee (born in 1959) vary from quasi-figurative explorations of colour dynamics to multi-layered, almost mythological narrative paintings. His academic research at Rhodes University, located in his Eastern Cape hometown of Grahamstown, explored anthroposophic colour theory, so it’s no surprise part of his further studies were undertaken at the Goetheanum in Dornach, Switzerland (one of the sites covered in Stephen Klimczuk & Gerald Warner of Craigenmaddie’s Secret Places, Hidden Sanctuaries). Coetzee’s corpus also include a number of purely figurative portraits, many of which were commissioned by places of learning in South Africa.

Cyril Coetzee, S. A. G. Anderson
Oil on canvas, 39 in. x 33½ in.
University of the Witwatersrand

Dr. Anderson was Chairman of the Council of the University of Witwatersrand.

Cyril Coetzee, Anton Rupert
Oil on canvas, 37 in. x 31½ in.
University of Pretoria

The Stellenbosch-born Anton Rupert was the most celebrated Afrikaner businessman & entrepreneur, who became a (U.S. dollar) billionaire beginning with an invest of just £10 in 1941. Rupert was a founding member of the World Wildlife Fund (now the World Wide Fund for Nature) and was instrumental in the creation of trans-frontier conservation areas in southern Africa. Here he is depicted in his gown as Chancellor of the University of Pretoria. (His son Johann Rupert is currently the Chancellor of Stellenbosch University, as previously mentioned).

Cyril Coetzee, Mathews Phosa
Oil on canvas, 45 in. x 34½ in.
University of South Africa

Nakedi Mathews Phosa is an attorney and politician who went into exile during the 1980s as an ANC activist. He was one of the first to return in 1990 to begin discussions with the National Party government to come to a new constitutional accommodation. In 1994 he became Premier of the new province of the Eastern Transvaal (which was renamed Mpumalanga the following year) and played an important role in reconciliation efforts between the new ANC government and the Afrikaner community. Phosa serves on the board of the Afrikaanse Handelsinstituut and has published a volume of poetry entitled Deur die oog van ’n naald (“Through the Eye of a Needle”, 1999, re-issued in 2009). He is depicted here in his official gown as Chairman of the Council of the University of South Africa.

Cyril Coetzee, George Bizos
Oil on canvas, 35 in. x 43 in.
Saheti School, Johannesburg

This is not a university portrait, but an academic one all the same. George Bizos was born in Greece in 1928. He was thirteen years old when he helped seven New Zealand soldiers escape the Nazi-occupied Greek mainland by sea, where they were picked up by HMS Kimberley, which dropped him off in Alexandria. He made his way to Johannesburg where the local Greek community helped him to integrate by learning English and Afrikaans, and he began his legal studies at Wits in 1948. Bizos was called to the Johannesburg Bar in 1954 and began a long career in human rights cases. He served on Botswana’s Court of Appeal from 1985 to 1993. In the 1970s, Bizos founded the Saheti School, open to all races but with an education based on Hellenistic principles and with pastoral care provided by the Greek Orthodox Church. The Saheti School commissioned this portrait from Cyril Coetzee, in which George Bizos dons his advocate’s attire.

Cyril Coetzee, Antony Melck
Oil on canvas, 45½ in. x 34½ in.
University of South Africa

Professor Antony Melck’s studies have spanned multiple disciplines. He has studied law at Stellenbosch, economics at Cambridge, music in London (where he was admitted as a Fellow of the Trinity College of Music), and has a doctorate in the economics of education from Stellenbosch. Through the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation he was a visiting professor and fellow at the University of Cologne. He is a former Principal & Vice-Chancellor of the University of South Africa, and currently serves as Advisor to the Rector of the University of Pretoria.

Cyril Coetzee, Self-Portrait
Oil on canvas, 33½ in. x 49 in.
William Humphreys Art Gallery, Kimberley

Of Coetzee’s portraits, my favourite is related neither to a university, nor to a school, but is rather the artist’s own self-portrait. I dislike when portraits have neutral backgrounds, and infinitely prefer them to be set in a place or setting, even if an invented one. The painter’s studio self-portrait has a lot more life in it than the academic portraits above.

FINLAND IS HIGH on my list of places to visit once I am re-situated across the pond, mainly because of the exceptional warmth and charm of the Finns I am blessed enough to call my friends. If the Finns themselves weren’t reason enough to visit the Land of the Midnight Sun, journalist & travel historian Magnus Londen has teamed up with copywriter Joakim Enegren and web operative Ant Simons to compile Come to Finland: Posters & Travel Tales 1851-1965. The art of poster design is one sadly neglected today, when advertising has developed into myriad other more pervasive yet less impressive forms. The book’s closing date, 1965, roughly marks the end of the golden years of poster design. Visitors to the book’s website can order postcards of the posters featured in the book, or copies of the posters themselves, more of which the dedicated poster-hunting authors are continually discovering.

Here are a few posters from the book, which advertise places as varied as the Åland Islands, an autonomous archipelago, and Viipuri, which was annexed by the dastardly Soviets after the Second World War and which is now styled ‘Vyborg’ by the Russians.

Peter Hitchens wades gently into the debate in his latest Mail on Sunday column with these thoughts:

Good luck to Laura Dekker, the 14-year-old Dutch girl who wants to sail round the world on her own. Laura was born on a yacht, had her own boat by the time she was six, and began sailing alone when she was ten. How I envy her. The last time I tried to sail alone, I was clinging to the wreckage within five minutes.

The efforts of the authorities to stop her were obviously motivated by reasonable concern. Imagine what the British state would have done. But children can do so much more than we think they can, and grow with responsibility. Once, this attitude was common. Does anyone now read Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons, in which the children’s father is asked for his permission for the youngest to sail unsupervised, and replies in a telegram ‘If not duffers, won’t drown. Better drowned than duffers’.

In a later book, the wonderful We Didn’t Mean To Go To Sea, the same children unintentionally sail across the North Sea to Holland, when they accidentally slip anchor. They arrive safely, entirely because they have been trusted in the past. Someone should send Laura Dekker a copy.