In accordance with tradition, knights are appointed to the Order of the Thistle on the feast of Scotland’s patron saint, the Apostle Andrew, but they are not formally installed until the following summer when the Queen is in residence at the Palace of Holyroodhouse. And so this past July, the ‘Thistle Service’ took place at St. Giles’, the High Kirk of Edinburgh, and two new knights were inducted into Scotland’s highest honour and most exalted order of chivalry.

The knights, dames, and officers, dressed in their flowing velvet mantles of green along with their hats and collars, gather across Parliament Square in the Library of the Society of Writers to Her Majesty’s Signet (Scotland’s professional body of solicitors), part of the Parliament House complex that long ago housed the kingdom’s legislature, and is now home to her courts. In Parliament Square itself, the Royal Company of Archers (the Queen’s Body Guard for Scotland) forms a guard of honour and is accompanied by the band of the Royal Regiment of Scotland.

When the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh arrive, the Chancellor of the Thistle and the Dean of the Thistle accompany them to the Signet Library to join the other knights. They then process to St. Giles’ where the Thistle Service takes place. A short reception usually follows back in the Signet Library before the members of the Order retire to the Palace of Holyroodhouse and enjoy a proper luncheon as guests of the Sovereign.

The Most Ancient and Most Noble Order of the Thistle has a long and varied history, though precisely how long is a matter of some dispute. The oldest tradition is that Achaius King of Scots was engaging the Saxon king Aethelstan in battle at Aethelstaneford when the Cross of Saint Andrew appeared in the sky in A.D. 786. After achieving a victory, Achaius founded the Order of the Thistle under the patronage of the saint. Another story posits Achaius as founding the order in 809 in commemoration of an alliance with the Emperor Charlemagne, while another battle-related story has Robert the Bruce re-instituting the order after Bannockburn. James III (1451–1458) certainly adopted the thistle as his personal emblem and may have established the order. Perhaps more likely is that James V, who was a member of the Order of Golden Fleece and France’s Order of St. Michael, created it since Scotland had no order of chivalry along the lines of other kingdoms of the day.

What is certain is that James VII on May 29, 1687 issued letters patent “reviving and restoring the Order of the Thistle to its full glory, lustre and magnificency”. (King James, you will recall, was the man after whom New York is named). The King of Scotland was the Sovereign of the Order, and twelve knights were to be appointed, later expanded to sixteen. Queens were originally excluded unless it was a queen regnant, but George VI made his queen a member in 1937, and in 1987 Elizabeth II allowed women to become regular members of the Order of the Thistle (doing the same for England’s Order of the Garter at the same time). Outside the sixteen-member limit are a small number of extra knights from the ranks of the Royal Family.

Aside from the Sovereign and the knights, there are a number of officers appointed. The Dean of the Thistle is given the style of “The Very Reverend” and from 1886 until 1969 the Dean of the Chapel Royal was given this role, now wisely separate. The Chancellor is usually appointed from among the knights and tends to be one of the more senior members. The Gentleman Usher of the Green Rod is the order’s usher and the office is usually granted to a retired military man with a long record of service. Lord Lyon King of Arms, Scotland’s senior herald, is the King of Arms of the Order of the Thistle. There is also a Secretary of the Order, although Lord Lyon is almost always appointed to this office as well.

When the Order of the Thistle was created (or re-created) in 1687, the King directed that the Abbey Church at Holyrood be converted into a chapel for the order. The classical design of the chapel’s fittings (above) reflected the vogue of the day, but fit poorly with the gothic design of the former Benedictine abbey. James VII was deposed by the Whig coup a year later, however, and rioters sacked the church and destroyed its interior.

In 1911, a new Thistle Chapel (above) was inaugurated at St. Giles’ to the design of the noted Scots architect Robert Lorimer (father to the sculptor Hew and brother to the painter John Henry Lorimer). Each knight has a stall in the chapel, but the armorial banners are hung in the body of the cathedral itself rather than in the chapel. In each stall is a metal plate depicting the arms and name of the knight who occupied the particular stall from the construction of the chapel onwards. (Just outside the chapel are inscribed all the names of the members of the Order up to 1911). The current members vary widely in their origins. The knight with the highest seniority is Andrew Douglas Alexander Thomas Bruce, 11th Earl of Elgin and 15th Earl of Kincardine and a Scottish nobleman of long lineage. The most recent knight appointed is Narendra Babubhai Patel, Baron Patel who, since he was born in Tanganyika to Indian parents, is both the first African Scot and the first Asian Scot to be raised to the Order of the Thistle.

“We have been waiting for this decision for a long time,” Khosi Fhumulani Kutama, the Chairman of the National House of Traditional Leaders told the media. “It is important that people accept it not only for the institution of traditional leadership but for the whole country.”

But the indications so far are that the six monarchies will take the government to court in an attempt to forestall the demotion.

Up to this point, the most significant spate of mediatisation was during the Napoleonic era, when Talleyrand arranged the demotion and reorganisation of conquered German lands.

In 2007, Mr. Murray helped compose Towards a Grand Strategy for an Uncertain World: Renewing Transatlantic Partnership ostensibly written by Gen. Dr. Klaus Naumann (former Bundeswehr Chief of Staff), Gen. Prince John Salikashvili (Georgian prince and former U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff), Field Marshal the Lord Inge (former U.K. Chief of the General Staff), Adm. Jacques Lanxade (former Chief of the French Navy), and Gen. Henk van den Breemen (accomplished organist and former Chief of Staff of the Dutch military).

This interesting document made a number of recommendations, the most intriguing of which is the suggestion that NATO should be prepared to make a pre-emptive nuclear strike… in order to prevent the use of weapons of mass destruction (“WMDs”) such as, er, nuclear weapons. You read that correctly: in order to prevent the use of WMDs, NATO should be prepared to use WMDs. You couldn’t make it up!

THE GAMES OF THE Modern Olympiad are events which are meant to bring the peoples of the world together in peace and harmony and all those good and heartening things, but from the very beginning they have gotten bogged down in the petty particularities of rival nations, which altogether makes them rather more fun and interesting, if perhaps a touch less high-minded. The story of the ancient gathering’s revival in 1896 through the efforts of Pierre Frédy, Baron de Coubertin is well-known. Athletes from at least fourteen countries participated in those first modern games in Athens over a century ago, though the concept of national teams was not introduced until the 1906 games (the Intercalated Games, which have since been de-recognised by the IOC). But since those first games towards the end of the nineteenth century, the fortunes of many lands have waxed and waned, and likewise the spirit of unity amongst various peoples vied with the spirit of distinctiveness. Here, then, are but a small sample of Olympic teams which once vied for gold but which can no longer be found among the Olympic competitors of today.

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.

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.”

Molnar left for the United States, where he earned his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1950. He frequently contributed to the pages of National Review after its foundation by William F. Buckley in 1955, and his periodic writings were often found in Monde et Vie, Commonweal, Modern Age, Triumph, and other journals. From 1957 to 1967 he taught French & World Literature at Brooklyn College before moving on to become Professor of European Intellectual History at Long Island University. In 1969 he was a visiting professor at Potchefstroom University in the Transvaal. In 1983 he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Mendoza in Argentina while he was a guest professor at Yale. After the fall of the Communist regime in Hungary, he taught at the University of Budapest and at the Catholic University (PPKE). In 1995 he was elevated to the Hungarian Academy of Arts.

While his first book, Bernanos: his political thought and prophecy (1960), was well-received, it was Molnar’s second published work that was arguably his best known. The Decline of the Intellectual (1961) was, in Molnar’s own words, “greeted favorably by conservatives, with respectful puzzlement by the left, and was dismissed by the liberal progressives.” Gallimard began discussions to print a French translation as part of its prominent Idées series, before the publisher’s in-house Marxist Dionys Mascolo vetoed it for its treatment of Marxism not as a utopian ideology. The celebrated & notorious Soviet spy Alger Hiss complimented it in a Village Voice review, but Molnar noted that The Decline of the Intellectual‘s harshest criticism came from liberal Catholic circles. “Obviously,” he wrote, “in that moment’s intellectual climate, they would have preferred a breathless outpouring of Teilhardian enthusiasm.”

The book argued, from a deeply conservative European mindset, that the rise of the intelligentsia during the nineteenth century was tied to its capacity as an agent of bourgeois social change. As the intellectual class increasingly shaped the more democratic, more egalitarian (indeed, more bourgeois) world around it, the intelligentsia’s vitality, so tied to its capability to enact social change (Molnar argued), became self-destructive. The “decline” set in as the intelligentsia searched for alternative methods of social redemption in increasingly extreme fashions (such as nationalism, socialism, communism, fascism, &c.) and led to the intellectuals allying themselves with ideology, which is the surest killer of genuine intellectual and philosophical speculation.

The same year Molnar’s The Future of Education was published with a foreword by Russell Kirk, whose study of American conservative thinkers, The Conservative Mind, was admired by Molnar. Among the many works that followed were Utopia, the perennial heresy (1967), The Counter-Revolution (1969), Nationalism in the Space Age (1971), L’éclipse du sacré : discours et réponses in 1986 with Alain Benoist, and the following year The Pagan Temptation refuting Benoist’s neo-paganism, The Church, Pilgrim of Centuries (1990), and in 1996 Archetypes of Thought and Return to Philosophy. From then until his death, the remainder of his new books have been published in his native Hungarian language.

Molnar and his work have become sadly neglected for the very reasons he detailed in his major work: the overwhelming triumph of ideology over the intellectual sphere. While Russell Kirk defined conservatism as the absence of ideology, modern conservatism in America has become almost completely enveloped by ideology, and the Molnar’s deep, traditional way of thinking — influenced by de Maistre and Maurras — is now met more by silence and ignorance than by direct condemnation.

The triumph of ideology (be it on the left or the right) was aided and abetted, Molnar argued, by a culture dominated by media and telecommunications. “Around 1960,” Professor Molnar wrote later in his life, “the power of the media was not yet what it is today.”

Hardly anybody suspected then that the media would soon become more than a new Ceasar, indeed a demiurge creating its own world, the events therein, the prefabricated comments, countercomments—and silence. … The more I saw of universities and campuses, publishers and journals, newspapers and television, the creation of public opinion, of policies and their outcome, the less I believed in the existence of the freedom of expression where this really mattered for the intellectual/professional establishment. For the time being, I saw more of it in Europe, anyway, than in America: over there, institutions still stood guard over certain freedoms and the conflict of ideas was genuine; over here the democratic consensus swept aside those who objected, and banalized their arguments. The difference became minimal in the course of decades.

Needless to say, the world of American conservatism has been silent in responding to the death of Professor Molnar.

Ideology’s enforced forgetfulness aside, Molnar’s native Hungary renewed its appreciation for him just before his death: last year the Sapientia theological college organised the first conference devoted to his works, which was well-attended and much commented-upon in the Hungarian press. Besides his serious corpus of works, Molnar is survived by his wife Ildiko, his son Eric, his stepson Dr. John Nestler, and his seven grandchildren.

Previously: Understanding the Revolution
Elsewhere: Professor Thomas Molnar, In Memoriam

THERE IS ATTENTION to detail and then there is pedantry, and I hope this falls into the former rather than the latter. Among the numerous e-mails which find their way into my electronic postbox are occasional notifications from the Polo Ralph Lauren corporation, a multi-faceted operation involved in the design, sale, and distribution of fairly decent items of clothing. Just one such e-mail received just the other day informed me of Ralph Lauren’s new ‘Modern Field Collection’, yet another judicious tie-in to take advantageous of the patriotic (or vicariously patriotic) impulses of the consumer before, during, and after the 2010 World Cup. As someone who is interested in national and cultural symbolism, most especially heraldry, I was mildly intrigued and clicked through to find a veritable gold mine of discrepancies which I hope the reader will forgive my exposition of.

Argentina is a country (my readers are doubtless aware) I have a certain awareness of and fondness for. The team at Ralph Lauren have invented a curious emblem for Argentina including the familiar Sun of May and the blue and white stripes. But the Sun of May is used as the crest for a heraldic shield, and the blue and white stripes provide the field for a lion, which is not a beast which has any history of representing Argentina. (The puma, on the other hand, is a different story). Why didn’t they just depict the actual Argentine arms of two arms clasping a rod topped with a Phrygian cap on a white and blue background? Not handsome enough for the fashionable folks?

Their Australian design was less questionable. The kangaroo and emu are taken from the Australian coat of arms, as well as the six-pointed Commonwealth Star, and deployed with a shield depicting the Australian flag. It may not be properly heraldic — and why need it be? — but at least all the combined symbols are genuinely Australian.

For Italy they used a rather dull flag-shield which, if boring, at least works in its simplicity. The South African design attempts the same but fails, resulting in a rather clumsy and unattractive design. The Spanish design likewise. Why put the Spanish arms within a shield on a flag background? Why not just depict them on the red, with the name España in a more visible yellow rather than the unfortunate choice of black?

Readers must know of my deep and unending love for Scotland — my favourite land in all the world — but the Scottish design, however, was the most curious.

The double tressure flory-counter-flory surrounding a lion is a familiar, but we do not have the familiar Scottish lion rampant at all. Nay, here we have a distinctly and entirely Hollandic lion, more often called the Batavian lion, raising a sword in one hand and in the other clasping seven arrows representing the United Provinces of the Netherlands. Not Scottish at all! It is handsome, I’ll admit, but entirely foolish.

Given their apparent fondness for the Dutch lion, one is surprised when coming across their design for the Netherlands shirt that they chose a distinctly un-Dutch lion instead of the traditional sword-and-arrows Batavian variety. They don’t even use the proper triumvirate of Dutch red-white-and-blue, but instead a blue field with a red chevron: utterly meaningless and having nothing to do with the country or its traditional representations. At least lions have some history of being a Dutch emblem. France, like Argentina, has never employed the lion, but Ralph Lauren decided to use the lion in its France t-shirt as well. They apparently felt it needed Gallicisation, as they stuck a fleur-de-lys in one paw and a crown on the lion’s head. And why one black leg and a red tale? Clueless.

The Russian design, on the other hand, I approve of entirely. Like for Australia, they use a heraldic design but employ the flag on the shield instead of the usual coat of arms. Given the simplicity of the Russian flag, this design is even more successful than the Australian version. We also must commend the use of the traditional Romanov colours of black and yellow (incidentally, they are also the Hapsburg colours).

The American design is also entirely satisfactory. Everything is in order here: it’s classic, elegant, and entirely appropriate. At least the folks at Polo Ralph Lauren have the decency to look after their own.

Something you don’t see every day: a set of triplets from Pretoria recently completed basic training as part of their enlistment in the South African Army. Dirk van Zyl, Tjaard van Zyl, and Hendrik van Zyl (above, left-to-right) are 20 years old and got their mechanical engineering qualifications before enlisting in the Defence Force.

The three brothers are all part of Foxtrot Company, 3 South African Infantry Battalion based at Kimberley in the Northern Cape; Hendrik in Platoon 1, Tjaard in Platoon 2, and Dirk in Platoon 3.

Large-scale operational deployments of the South African military have been few and far between since the country withdrew from the Angolan conflict and granted Namibia independence. Since then they have mostly consisted of United Nations and African Union peacekeeping operations, as well as other endeavours such as South Africa’s 1998 military intervention in a dynastic dispute in the neighbouring Catholic monarchy of Lesotho. Current defence regulations prevent siblings like the van Zyl brothers from being operationally deployed simultaneously.

This superb lecture to a high-school audience by Alice von Hildebrand, the retired Professor of Philosophy at Hunter College of the City University of New York, was sent to me by an acquaintance at the University of Caen in Normandy (a town I had the pleasure of visiting some years ago).

The speaker is the widow of the famous Prof. Dietrich von Hildebrand, and speaks with a fascinating insight tempered by good humour. I thought I’d just listen to a bit of it but became entranced and couldn’t tear myself away from it.

Mrs. von Hildebrand covers an astonishing variety of subjects but the animating focus of the lecture is the relationship between body and soul, and how that is reflected in the relationship between man and woman.

“It’s a privilege for an elderly person to share her experience with young people,” Mrs. von Hildebrand says. “It’s a very special joy to share with you the gifts I have received.” However privileged the speaker feels, I’ve no doubt it is rather the listeners who are privileged to hear so a woman of such great wisdom speak to them at so young an age.

I know one of the most memorable interactions I ever had was with the Polish freedom fighter and Auschwitz survivor Jozef Garlinski when I was just sixteen years old — the late Mr. Garlinski’s most important lesson continues to exert a profound influence over me, and was one that I have always remembered at the more trying times in life since then.

These students are blessed to receive such an important life lesson.