AUSTRALIAN monarchists are demanding the withdrawal of the official
programme for next month's Sydney Olympics because it contains a
republican attack on the Crown.
It accuses Australians of "weakness" in voting to keep "Queen Elizabeth II, a
foreign monarch", as head of state. The eight-page article is by Robert
Hughes, an Australian writer and ardent republican who lives in New York. It
has prominent billing on the cover of the £6 souvenir programme, which has
just gone on sale at newsagents across Australia and will be bought by people
from all over the world when the games start.
Mr Hughes laments the result of last year's referendum in which 55 per cent of
Australians voted to retain the Queen as head of state. He writes: "Our sense
of identity, I feel, shows moments of folly, weakness and irresoluteness, as
exemplified by our vote to keep Queen Elizabeth II, a foreign monarch, as
head of state, as though no mere Australian was worthy of the office."
Much of the article, entitled An Australian Looks at Australia: Essays and
Observations on the Land I Love, is devoted to the merits of a republic. In a
section called Britain and the Republic, Mr Hughes says that the Union flag
should be dropped from the Australian flag: "Traditional Australian ineptitude
with symbolism has not helped us to imagine a republic. Bumper stickers and
caps proclaiming 'A Resident for President' cannot really compete with
coaches and crowns."
Mr Hughes says that a country's head of state should be a citizen of that
country: "It seems ludicrous to me that anyone should believe that there is not
one person among more than 19 million Australians now alive who is fit to be
the head of state. Yet this, essentially, is the belief of those monarchists who
fear that, without a king or queen, we would have no one to look up to."
He writes, too, of the "expiatory sacrifice" of 61,919 Australians who "died
for British imperial interests" in the First World War and describes the arrival
of American culture as "an escape from the ghastly good taste and censorious
conservatism associated with a monarchist culture". The Australian
Monarchist League, now known as Monarchy 2000, has condemned the
programme as a "disgrace" and is demanding that the Sydney Organising
Committee for the Olympic Games withdraws it.
Philip Benwell, the group's national chairman, said: "Hughes has derided the
Australian public for voting against a republic. We have taken exception to
this not because Hughes has made these comments - it is his right to express
his views - but because the organising committee have used the platform of
the games to incorporate comments which are essentially promoting a
republic.
"We hold that the games should be sacrosanct: they are above politics, above
the monarchy-republic debate. We have not been given an opportunity to
respond - not that we would have wanted to. We would have preferred that
the programme contained no reference to the debate. It is a disgrace that this
has been done. It just brings the whole thing into disrepute."
Monarchy 2000 has written to John Howard, the prime minister, senior
Olympics officials and every Australian MP to express its anger. It is urging its
15,000 supporters to do likewise. Donald Foreman, the British-based head
of the International Monarchist League, took issue with Mr Hughes's claim
about a "foreign" monarch.
He said: "The Queen is not a foreign monarch but a shared monarch and she
is Queen of Australia on the wishes of the Australian people. Does the fact
that Mr Hughes lives in America make him less Australian?" An Australian
government spokesman refused to comment and Buckingham Palace was not
forthcoming.
A Palace spokesman said "This is entirely a matter for the publishers of the
programme and the Australian government." Although the Olympic charter
states that every olympiad must be opened by the head of state, the Queen
has not been invited to do so. The task will be performed by Sir William
Deane, the Governor-General.
The organising committee, which licensed the production of the 170-page
programme to the New York magazine Sports Illustrated, tried to distance
itself from the contents. It said it had not been involved in commissioning or
censoring any articles, although it had been "kept abreast" of the project by
the publishers, Time Life.
Bob Bowden, a committee spokesman, rejected suggestions that Mr
Hughes's article was inappropriate in view of Olympic policy that the event
should not be politicised. He said: "I don't see how it is politicising the games.
It is reflecting an historian's perception and whichever historian you chose you
would have got some political and social value judgments expressed."
He described the anger of the monarchists as "a storm in a teacup". But Mr
Benwell retorted: "It seems pretty poor that they more or less abdicate
responsibility for their official souvenir programme. If they have not even
vetted it, then they deserve to be condemned for that alone."
~*~
Last Tsar to be made a saint(Electronic Telegraph)
By Marcus Warren
AN unworldly man who was blessed with unyielding religious faith, Tsar
Nicholas II faced no ordeal more testing than that of the last days before his
execution by a Bolshevik firing squad in this bleak Urals city.
Confined to their stuffy prison, their belongings pilfered by the guards and
their daughters butts of the soldiers' coarse humour, Nicholas and his wife,
Alexandra, put up with house arrest in Yekaterinburg without complaint.
Trusting as ever, the Tsar appeared to believe his captors when the family
was ordered down into the cellar, supposedly for their own safety one night in
July 1918.
His last words after the death sentence was read out but before the
executioners opened fire were those of disbelief: "What? What?" Now his
courage in those last days is to be recognised by the Orthodox Church, which
is expected to make the Romanovs saints at the opening of its Council of
Bishops tomorrow.
Members of the commission examining whether to canonise the Romanovs
stress that the Tsar qualifies for sainthood not because of his time on the
throne. He was a weak ruler who could not rise to the challenge of ruling a
country at a time of great and violent change. Rather he is to be acclaimed for
his conduct after abdicating and his martyr's death in the Urals.
Some Orthodox believers oppose the imperial family's canonisation for fear
that it will strengthen "fundamentalists" who want the church to lobby for
restoring the monarchy. In the Soviet era, communist ideology demonised him
as "Bloody Nicholas". Now most Russians see him as a disastrous sovereign
but a decent man, but it is not a subject that is exercising many outside the
church.
The virtues displayed by the Romanovs in captivity as described by a member
of the canonisation commission sound like a checklist of traits dooming the
turbulent Russia the Tsar ruled as autocrat to revolution and chaos. Archpriest
Georgy Mitrofanov singled out the Romanov's qualities for special praise
earlier this summer: "Hope in God's help, unwillingness to resist as mere
mortals and readiness to forgive."
Canonisation will be the latest twist in the imperial family's posthumous fate.
Their deaths were ordered by the Bolshevik leadership in Moscow, but the
Soviet Union denied the murder of the Empress and the five children for
years. The area outside the Ipatiev House, the Romanovs' prison and place of
execution, was later renamed the Square of Popular Vengeance.
On the Kremlin's orders, the building was demolished by the local Communist
Party boss, Boris Yeltsin, in 1977. The foundations of a huge church, to be
known as the "Church on the Blood" and finished by 2002, now fill the pit
where the cellar once stood, but a small group of amateur archaeologists are
sifting the site of the garden for relics.
So far the volunteers have found two white china plates with the Tsar's
monogram to add to a tin toy train believed to have belonged to his
haemophiliac son and heir, Alexei, discovered earlier. Alexei Smolin, a history
student supervising the dig, said: "I have been working here for three months
but I feel worn out already. This place has a real aura about it."
Now a construction site surrounded by a high concrete fence, the spot where
the Ipatiev house stood is a place of pilgrimage with a wooden chapel and
several memorial crosses dedicated to the Romanovs. Valentina, who sells
souvenirs inside the tiny chapel, said: "I am convinced they should be made
saints. I often pray to them for help with my family or health and God answers
my prayers."
But even the design of the church being built where the Ipatiev House once
stood has provoked criticism for its gigantic scale, a huge contrast with
original plans to build a modest chapel on the site. When finished, the church
will boast a large crypt with a lifesize replica of the cellar where the Romanovs
were killed, a cinema showing films about their life and a refectory. The
complex may also include a hotel for pilgrims.
~*~
Zara 'holds sex toys party'(Yahoo: Ananova)
Zara Phillips has hosted an Ann Summers sex party on the Princess Royal's Gatcombe estate,
according to reports.
The 19-year-old granddaughter of the Queen bought several items from the company, which sells sex
toys and saucy underwear, the Daily Express says.
She and 25 girlfriends were served smoked salmon and champagne by a waiter dressed only in a PVC
G-string.
Zara, who hit the headlines last year by revealing she had had her tongue pierced, threw the party at
Aston Farm, where her father, Captain Mark Phillips, lives.
A Buckingham Palace spokesman has refused to comment.