This Day In History - 2 June: The Queen, Witches, Vandals & Sadists

Photo: Queen Elizabeth II At Her Coronation, 1957

455: Geiseric, King of the Vandals, began a two week sack of Rome. The damage wrought by Geiseric's people saw the name of the Vandals enter the common tongue as a word to describe people who cause wanton destruction.

1098 – First Crusade: The first Siege of Antioch ends as Crusader forces take the city. The First Crusade was called by the Pope in response to, one, Islam's massive wars of conquest waged against Christendom for 400 years, and two, the decision of the Fatimid Caliph in 1009 to destroy the holiest Church in Christendom, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. The First Crusade ended three years later with the capture of Jerusalem.

1692 – Bridget Bishop is the first person to go to trial in the Salem witch trials in Salem, Massachusetts. She is found guilty and hung several days later. She was the first of nineteen who would be hung for witchcraft. Five others died in captivity and one was crushed to death.

1763 – Pontiac's Rebellion begins at what is now Mackinaw City, Michigan. Chippewas Indians captured Fort Michilimackinac by diverting the garrison's attention with a game of lacrosse, then chasing a ball into the fort. Once inside, they began a slaughter of most of the British inhabitants of the fort.

1774 – The Quartering Act, one of a series of laws known collectively as the Intolerable Acts and adopted in the wake of the Boston Tea Party, was enacted, allowing a governor in colonial America to house British soldiers in uninhabited houses, outhouses, barns, or other buildings if suitable quarters were not provided.

1793 – Jean-Paul Marat recites the names of 29 people to the French National Convention. Almost all of these people are guillotined, followed by 17,000 more over the course of the next year during the Reign of Terror - an appropriate event to commemorate the birth of modern socialism. Marat was famously murdered in his bathtub by a royalist woman.

1835 – P. T. Barnum and his circus start their first tour of the United States. As he most famously said, there is a sucker born every minute.

1924 – U.S. President Calvin Coolidge signs the Indian Citizenship Act into law, granting citizenship to all Native Americans born within the territorial limits of the United States.

1925 – Lou Gehrig starts at first base for the New York Yankees, beginning a streak of 2,130 consecutive games played, topped only by the Orioles' Cal Ripken, Jr. in 1995. Exactly 16 years to the day, in 1941, Gehrig passes away from Amyotropic lateral sclerosis (ALS).

1946 – Today is the birth of the Italian Republic. In a referendum, Italians decide to turn Italy from a monarchy into a Republic. After this referendum the king of Italy Umberto II di Savoia is exiled.

1953 – Elizabeth II, is crowned queen of England in a ceremony televised from Westminster Abbey, London.

1967 – Protests in West Berlin turn into riots, during which Benno Ohnesorg is killed by a police officer. His death became a rallying cry for German's leftists and contributed greatly to their radicalization. Within the past week, it has come to light that the officer who killed Ohnesorg was actually an East German agent.

1979 – Pope John Paul II visits his native Poland, becoming the first Pope to visit a Communist country. John Paul II is credited with being one of the keys to the downfall of communism in Eastern Europe.

1997 – Timothy McVeigh is convicted on 15 counts of murder and conspiracy for the 1995 terrorist bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.

2004 – Question - On this day in 2004, he began his 74-game winning streak on the syndicated game show Jeopardy? Answer - who is Ken Jennings.

Births

926 – Murakami, the 62nd Emperor of Japan (d. 967)

1535 – Pope Leo XI was born in Italy. He would eventually be voted Pope, but only served in the position for a month before dying.

1740 – Marquis de Sade, French author whose extreme sexual proclivities gave us the word, sadism, for a person who gets sexually excited by inflicting pain on others.

1835 – Pope Pius X. He ascended to the papacy in 1903, during a period when socialism and science were posing new challenges to the Church. Pius opposed the theological school of thought known as modernism, which claimed that Catholic dogma itself should be modernized and blended with nineteenth century philosophies.

1840 – Thomas Hardy, English writer (d. 1928)


Deaths

1716 – Ogata Korin, Japanese painter (b. 1658)

1806 – William Tate, English painter (b. 1747)

1990 – Rex Harrison, English actor (b. 1908)

2005 – Melita Norwood, British spy (b. 1912)


Holidays and observances

Today is the Festa della Repubblica (Republic Day), in Italy, and the Feast of Saint Elmo

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Tis the Season

It is completely fitting that, as the 4th of July should approach, there should be the whiff of rebellion in the air against the tyranny of Britain's government. The British have seen their historic rights degraded over the past century. And over the past decade, Britain's Labour government has gone far to deconstructing the anglo-saxon society built over a millenia. Further, the government now acts to transfer the sovereign power of the country - invested in the first instance with the electorate - to a foreign power who exerts rule and taxation on the people of Britain without their say. The Queen, who in her coronation oath swore, as did a millenia of monarchs before her, to uphold the rights and laws of the people of Britain, has failed her oath and acquiesced to the trampling of British freedoms and democracy.

This all has the good folk at that fine blog, Brits At Their Best, contemplating thoughts Samuel Adams would find familiar. Brits At Their Best are reviewing the historical grounds for ridding the kingdom of monarchs who betrayed their oath and are applying the grounds to the situation of today. Given the recent success of the BNP in the Henley by-election, it would seem that many of their countrymen would concur. The progenitors of modern Britain proved quite willing to fight dearly for their rights when pushed too far. There is no reason to suspect that their blood has been diluted in the current generation.

A P.S. to my friends across the pond: Some acts of civil disobedience to galvanize the public and to really get the process started may be advisable. Dressing up as Indians and tossing about 40 tons of tea into the Boston Harbor did it for us on this side of the pond. If you would like to do something similar, we would be happy to donate the Indian costumes.

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UK's Continued March Towards The EU

As I pointed out two weeks ago, Britain only had three chances to stay out of the EU - the vote in the House of Lords, the Irish Referendum, and the court case challenging Labour's refusal to grant a referendum to the people of Britain. As an aside, voting in the Tories would be utterly useless - Tory leader (term used loosely) David Cameron has already shrugged his shoulders and announced that he would treat Labour's acts as a fait accompli. Since I wrote that post, The House of Lords, gerrymandered by Labour PM Tony Blair near a decade ago, rolled over for Labour. Ireland voted against ratification of the Treaty of Lisbon / EU Constitution, but the EU is doing all it can to ignore its own laws and go ahead with the Treaty anyway. And today, the court case by Stuart Wheeler predicated on enforcing Labour's promise in their 2005 election plank to put any EU Constitution to a vote of the people, has failed at the lower court.
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This from the Telegraph:

A High court ruling removed the last obstacle to Britain's ratification of the European Union's treaty despite Labour's manifesto for a public vote.

Mr Brown has been under intense pressure to declare the treaty dead after Irish voters rejected it in a referendum earlier this month.

Mr Wheeler's case had forced the Prime Minister to delay the formal ratification of the treaty until the court's ruling.

At the heart of the case was the question of whether a political party's election manifesto was legally enforceable and whether the public have a "legitimate expectation" to see measures pledged during an election campaign enacted.

Rabinder Singh QC, appearing for Mr Wheeler, 73, said at a recent two-day hearing: "The Government promised a referendum and should keep its promise."

At stake were the fundamental principles "of good administration, fair play and straight dealing with the public," he said.

However, Jonathan Sumption QC, appearing for the Office of the Prime Minister, told the judges: "This case is politics dressed up as law."

. . . Ruth Lea, Director of the Global Vision think-tank, said: "Today's ruling by the High Court is extremely dispiriting especially as many European politicians have made it quite clear that the Lisbon Treaty is the Constitutional Treaty in all but name.

"Under these circumstances, the British people are surely entitled to their referendum on the Treaty as the Irish people did. All our polling shows an overwhelming majority in favour of a referendum."

Read the entire article. You can find the Court's decision here. According to the Court, Mr. Wheeler did not establish to the Court's satisfaction that the original EU Constitution and the new Lisbon Treaty are essentially identical documents and that, as a matter of policy, the Court would not enforce a campaign promise.

As to the argument that Wheeler's case that this was nothing more than politics dressed up as the law, what does that attorney think the law is if not politics "dressed up" with the police power of the state? This was really a case of whether politicians can be held to their political promises, which I happen to think is the weakest of arguments that could have been brought in this matter. As a policy matter, I do not think that appropriate for a court to decide for that as, carried to its logical extreme, it has the potential for havoc as circumstances or minds may validly change. That said, this particular promise was on a matter that goes to the heart of democracy in Britain and, as such, is I think a special case. Further, Courts in Britain, just as in the U.S., seem wholly unable to stay out of making inappropriate policy decisions of late, so we shall see.

The EU Referendum proclaims itself "disappointed but not surprised." They note that Mr. Wheeler's chances on appeal are, at best, slim.

The approval process for the EU is going forward with the Queen apparently having already given her assent. At Brits At Their Best, they have posted an open letter to the Queen noting that she has violated her Coronation Oath to defend the laws of Britain and withdrawing their fealty to the Crown. The fight is hardly over, and the Irish No vote has at least exposed how the EU's ruthless determination to put its plans in place wholly irrespective of democracy or law - something that will surely come back to haunt them. And perhaps the Irish vote may yet prove decisive.

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