HIS MAJESTY THE KING OF SWEDEN HANDED OVER THE 2010 POLAR MUSIC PRIZES

Icelandic rock star Bjork and Italian composer Ennio Morricone have received the 2010 Polar Music Prize from Sweden's King Carl XVI Gustaf. The musicians accepted their awards at a glitzy ceremony in Stockholm Concert Hall last Monday. Each award is worth 1 million kronor ($136,000).

Bjork said she was honored to receive the prize and that it tickled her vanity to be mentioned together with previous laureates such as rock band Pink Floyd and singer Joni Mitchell.

The Polar Music Prize is typically shared each year by a pop artist and a classical musician. It was founded by the manager of Sweden's legendary pop group ABBA, Stig Anderson, in 1989. Crown Princess Victoria and Prince Daniel attended the awards ceremony as well.

Arguments for the Kingdom of Serbia (10)

28 March 2010

INTERVIEW WITH Mr MATIJA BEĆKOVIĆ, MEMBER OF THE CROWN COUNCIL OF SERBIA

Some say the idea of monarchy has not yet been presented in a proper way to the Serbs, while others consider it to be outdated. Is there any blame on the side of the Crown Council for either of that?

Serbia had been a kingdom for „only“ eight centuries, which obviously wasn’t enough for the idea of monarchy to be properly presented and rooted more deeply. With the republic, however, it is the other way round. And it is no wonder, when we know that the kingdom was founded by Nemanja and Saint Sava, and the republic was founded by Josip Broz Tito. Tito is Stefan Nemanja of the Republic of Serbia. When Serbia became a kingdom, it was one of the most important dates in her history, and many studies have been written about it. None have been written about how it ceased to be a kingdom and lost her crown, as if it never had anything, or lost anything. And Serbia didn’t lose just the crown, it lost her head as well.

Today’s Serbia is a perfect example of what a country that had never been a republic looks like trying to be one. It is a republic which celebrates and praises only what was achieved while it was a kingdom. The biggest problem is that we have our own dynasty. If only the Duchess of Cornwall, if not Prince Charles himself, or Prince Albert of Monaco, or at least Carla Bruni or David Copperfield were pretenders to the Serbian throne, the nation would pull itself together overnight!

Kingdom of Morocco and EU deepen bilateral cooperation

HM King Mohammed VI has sent a message to the EU-Morocco Summit held on March 7 in Granada, Spain. In his message the King reaffirms his country’s pro-European commitment and advocates moving towards „an exceptional association“. The sovereign is pleased about the advanced Statute agreed on with the EU but says that it is necessary to move towards an exceptional association „of legal, institutional and contractual scope“.“That prototype for increasing closeness between the two parties would further be positively reflected on a regional scale,“ the Moroccan King pointed out.

In his message he reaffirms his country’s wish to make progress with reforms inspired by its association with the EU and mentions the fields in which the social economic and human relationship can be developed. With regard to the economy he refers to the possibilities offered by renewable sources of energy and advocates close cooperation.

His Majesty did not omit to mention „that it augurs well that the EU-Morocco Summit, the first of its kind, is being held in the historic city of Granada, a symbol and witness of the historical cultural and human symbtegrity.”

Morocco-EU Summit which was held in Granada (south of Spain) is the first Summit of the EU with a non-member country following the Lisbon treaty’s approval. Morocco also is the first first Arab country to get an Advanced Statute within the framework of the Euro-Mediterranean partnership and the new European Neighborhood Policy.

HRH Crown Prince Alexander on "One on One"

CONTINUITY AND NO ARGUMENT

Interview of HRH Crown Prince Alexander of Serbia with Riz Khan
for One on One,
2 January 2010

Is there something that you see as a specific benefit that the country would get from restoring monarchy?

Absolutely! I think you have a cutting out a person who would be a member of a political party, a president of a political party and replacing him with a person who’s neutral, not a member of any party, not a president of a party and a meeting point and a point of continuity. This is no disrespect to a current president – who may be become a prime minister – we’d have the same politicians as we have now, but we’d have minus one. So, they’d have continuity and no argument.

What do you feel was the biggest risk trying to go home before 2001?

Games, incredible games of the intelligence service. Inventions, the media were state controlled; there was a small independent media who were working very hard, they were beaten up by the state, and the state media would invent all sort of stories that I never did or my family never did, and in fact, it worked against them, eventually. But it was very annoying, I must admit.

Read the transcript at
CONTINUITY AND NO ARGUMENT

2,000 MEMBERS ON FACEBOOK!

Ladies and gentlemen,
brothers and sisters,
dear friends,

Our Facebook group now has over 2,000 members! Thank you very much for supporting us and please do keep promoting constitutional parliamentary monarchy as a superior form of government.

With faith in God, for King and country!

Gavrilo Došen
Chairman of The Monarchist Initiative

Democracy or monarchy?

Dr Hans-Herman Hoppe is an Austrian school economist and libertarian/anarcho-capitalist philosopher, Distinguished Fellow with the Ludwig von Mises Institute, founder and president of The Property and Freedom Society, and editor-at-large of the Journal of Libertarian Studies. He taught economics at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and at John Hopkins University in Bologna.

Lew Rockwell: Dr. Hoppe, tell us a little bit about democracy and monarchy?

Hans-Hermann Hoppe: The first point that needs to be made is that states, whether monarchical or democratic, are not firms. They do not produce anything that is sold in the market and receive payment for the goods that are produced, but they live off taxes which are course of payment made to them. So, I will neither advocate monarchies, nor am I advocate of democracies, but if one has to choose between two evils, monarchical state and democratic state, then monarchies have certain advantages. The reason is that kings were generally perceived by the public for what they are, that is, privileged individuals who could tax their subjects, and because everybody knew „I cannot become a king“, there was resistance against attempts on the part of kings to increase taxes into increased exploitation of their subjects.

Under democracy, the illusion rises that we all rule ourselves, even though it should be perfectly clear, of course, that also under a democracy there exist rulers and people who are ruled, but, because of the fact that everybody can potentially become a public employee, the illusion of „we rule ourselves“ arises, and this then leads to reduction of the resistance that existed vis-à-vis kings when it came to attempt of increasing tax revenue.

But there is an even more important disadvantage of democracy as compared to monarchy. One can imagine a king to be person who regards a country as his private property and the people living in his country as his tenants who pay some sort of rent to the king. On the other hand, if we have democratic politicians, they do not own the country as a king does, they are temporary caretakers of the country for four years, eight years and so forth, and the role of an owner versus a role of a caretaker is very, very different. One can imagine, for instance, that I make somebody owner of the house, so that he can sell the house in the market, that he can determine who will be his successor, who will be his heir, and, on the other hand, I give a house, the same kind, to somebody and make him for four years the caretaker of this house. That is, he can not sell the house, he can not determine who will be the heir, but he can make as much income out of using the house for a temporary period of time. And this will imply that temporary caretaker will use up the capital value embodied in the country in as fast time as possible, because, after all, he does not have to bear the cost of capital consumption, after all, the house is not his. Whereas a king, being the owner of the house, has a longer-term perspective, he will not want to use up the value embodied in the house as quickly as possible, after all, that would be reflected in a lower price of the house or of the country, and it would be reflected, of course, in the lower value of property being passed on to the next generation. So, a king has a long-run perspective, wants to preserve, and possibly, enhance the value of the country, whereas a democratic politician has a short-run orientation and wants to maximize his income as quickly as possible at the expense of losses in capital value.

Lew Rockwell: One of the points that you made in your book, Democracy: God that failed, that most impressed me, was the difference in wars waged under monarchs and under democracies, that there’s a reason why monarchical wars tended to be, what Mises described as “soldiers of wars”, whereas the democratic wars involved mass murders of civilians on a scale, of course, never before seen in human history.

Hans-Hermann Hoppe: And that began with something to do with the fact that monarchs considered countries as their property, and the reason for going to war, were typically, property disputes. Do I own this castle or somebody else owns this castle? Do I own this province or does somebody else? The objective was always limited, whereas democratic wars tend to be ideological wars. You want to liberate a country, you want to convert them to a different ideology and it is difficult to determine when you have actually achieved this goal. The only sure way to determine it is to kill the entire population of the country that you tried to invade or occupy, whereas a monarch, of course, would never have this interest, after all, he wants to add a certain province, a certain town, a certain castle to his own private estate, and wants to cause as little damage as possible. So, for monarchs, it was easy to begin a war, but it was always also very easy to determine when the objective had been reached, and the war came to an end. There was never any ideological motivation why different kings went to war against each other, whereas under democracies, in civil or religious wars, it is a clash of civilizations, a clash of value systems, and that makes it almost impossible to ever come to an end in wars and, in addition, kings’ wars were considered to be king’s by the public. Kings had to rely, by and large, on volunteers fighting their wars, whereas under democracies the entire country goes to war and all the resources of the entire country than can be dedicated to the war, and typically, with democracy, came also the draft. In the US nowadays we do not have a draft, but the typical situation for democracies is of course, that we do have a draft, people can be drawn into a war and forced into a war with the argument that “now you have a stake in the war, under democracy, now that you have a stake in the state, you must also fight the wars of the state", whereas under monarchy people did not have a stake in the state, it was considered to be the king’s affair, the public was entirely different entity from the state, and because of that their involvement in the war was very limited.

Lew Rockwell: The late Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, whom we both had the honor of knowing, used to point out that one of the things he liked about monarchical government was that there was much less nationalism, which is a feature of the 20th century and the 21st century, and that nobody thought there was anything wrong with, say, a German nobleman going into the employ of the Tsarina of Russia, nor people fighting on various sides were considered „traitors“. Of course, with the rise of democracy, we had the rise of this belligerent and unfortunate philosophy of nationalism.

Hans-Hermann Hoppe: The high aristocracy is, so to speak, the most international group of people. Almost all high noblemen are intermarried, interrelated with noblemen in other countries. The German Kaiser was related to the British rulers and to the Russian rulers, Kuehnelt-Leddihn even pointed out that all ruling houses in Europe were also related in some indirect way to Muhammad, through Islamic countries, and because those were family feuds, so to speak, feeling of nationalism was something impossible for them to arise, because they themselves were the most international class of people around, so nationalistic feelings were entirely strange and unusual for a class such as that.

DEMOCRACY: THE GOD THAT FAILED

Princesses open Museum “M” in Leuven

HRH Princess Mathilde of Belgium and HRH Princess Maxima of the Netherlands, officially opened the new Museum M last Sunday, the renovated city museum of Leuven, one of the oldest cities in the Low Countries, which hosts one of the oldest universities of Europe. The Princesses took the time to talk to the people who had turned up to greet them. As usual when they are together, they seemed to have a lot of fun while cutting the ribbon to declare the museum opened.

The museum currently hosts a collection of the Flemish Primitive artist Rogier Van der Weyden, one of the most important painters of the Medieval Low Countries.