Monarchisten in der ,,Großen Republik"

Im diesjährigen Sommer bildete die kleine Universitätsstadt Durham im amerikanischen Bundesstaat New Hampshire die Kulisse für eine historische Versammlung. Auf dem schönen, pinienbestandenen Campus, kaum sechs Meilen vom Atlantik entfernt, tagte vom 15. bis 17. Juli 1983 die Erste Monarchistische Studienkonferenz. Noch niemals zuvor hatte es in der westlichen Hemisphäre ein derartiges Treffen von Monarchisten gegeben.

Flagge des Russischen Reiches

An drei heißen amerikanischen Mittsommertagen hörten 150 Teilnehmer in Durham Vorlesungen, wohnten einem Symposion bei, sahen drei Filme, durchwanderten drei Ausstellungen, genossen ein königliches Bankett im eleganten Neuengland Centre Restaurant und besuchten einen Gottesdienst. Die Konferenz stellte ihren Teilnehmern ein zweifaches Thema. Es war eine Feier für zweitausend Jahre Monarchie, die ihren Ausgangspunkt bei der Regierung von Kaiser Augustus sieht, der die Monarchie im alten Rom wieder herstellte (wenngleich in anderer Form). Es war aber auch die Erinnerung an den Märtyrertod Zar Nikolaus' II. und anderer Mitglieder der kaiserlichen Familie Rußlands, den sie durch die Hand kommunistischer Republikaner im Juli 1918 während der russischen Revolution erlitten.

Diese Themen wurden erörtert in den Referaten von Professor Richard V. Desrosiers von der Universität New Hampshire; Prinz Alexis Scherbatow, ehemals Professor an der Fairleigh-Dickenson-Universität; Professor Hereward Senior von der McGill Universität Montreal; Professor James B. Graves, Mitherausgeber von ,,The Review of the News" und ,,American Opinion" sowie James McLellen von der Universität Boston. Zusätzlich berichteten Dr. Pirouz Mojahed-Zadeh, London, über die ,,Iranische Monarchie heute", und Dr. Sara Keith, Toronto, über die ,,Literarisch-monarchistische Komponente der Arthurssage".

Prinz Alexis Scherbatow

Das Symposion über Religion und Monarchie war besetzt mit Vertretern verschiedener Glaubensgruppen, die aus ihrem Glauben heraus die Monarchie betrachteten. Dem schloß sich ein Film über die Krönung Königin Elisabeths II. an, ein aktuelles Beispiel für eine der Sichtweisen. Ein weiterer Film war eine ausgezeichnete Dokumentation über Zar Nikolaus II. sowie eine Diaschau über die Hochzeit von Großfürstin Maria, Tochter Großfürst Wladimirs von Rußland. Das vielleicht bewegendste und beeindruckendste Zeugnis der Konferenz bot Yuri Bogolepow mit einem Vortrag über ,,Das Wachstum des Bewußtseins für das monarchische Erbe hinter dem Eisernen Vorhang". Yuri Bogolepow war zwei Jahre vor seiner Promotion vom Moskauer Institut für Fremdsprachen ausgeschlossen worden und hatte die Sowjetunion 1976 verlassen. Seither lebt er in Kanada.
Prof. Hereward Senior und der Archidiakon

Organisatoren der Ersten Monarchistischen Studienkonferenz waren der Kaiserlich-Russische Unionsorden, die Constantian Society aus den USA und die Monarchist League aus Kanada. Unter den Teilnehmern waren jedoch auch iranische und hawaiische Monarchisten neben Russen, Amerikanern und Kanadiern. Eine andere Gruppe waren Jugoslawen, die jedoch im letzten Moment aus persönlichen Gründen von einer Teilnahme abgehalten wurden. Die Iraner, die aus London angereist waren, waren gleichzeitig die offiziellen Vertreter der Monarchist Press Association aus dem Vereinigten Königreich. Einzelne Kongreßbesucher reisten aus Kalifornien, Spanien und Australien an. Grußbotschaften hatten monarchistische Gruppen aus Brasilien, Europa sowie verschiedene Souveräne gesandt.

Die Konferenz erzielte ein außerordentliches Echo in den amerikanische Medien. Die Nachrichtenagentur Associated Press und der Christian Science Monitor hatten Vertreter geschickt und Artikel erschienen außerdem im Boston Globe, Washington Post, Philadelphia Inquirer, Portsmouth Herald, New Hampshire Magazine. Später wurden Artikel in der (in Paris erscheinenden) International Herald Tribüne veröffentlicht. Außerdem informierten Die Stimme Amerikas, Radio Freies Europa und Radio Liberty ihre Hörer. Ohne Zweifel war dies einer der größten Erfolge des Kongresses. Der augenscheinlichste Fehlschlag — in Anbetracht der zu geringen Vorbereitungszeit — war die fehlende Teilnahme anderer bekannter monarchistischer Gruppen in Amerika, wie zum Beispiel der Mexikaner, Bulgaren, Griechen, Albaner usw.

Archimandrit Grabbe

Sinn der Konferenz war es — im Gegensatz zu anderen Treffen — nicht, eine Reihe von eindrucksvollen Resolutionen zu verabschieden. Vielmehr sollte Gelegenheit geboten werden, daß sich Monarchisten verschiedenster Traditionen treffen könnten, um Ansichten auszutauschen, ihre Unterschiede und ihre Übereinstimmungen kennenzulernen. Dies, so wurde im voraus gedacht, würde zu einer engeren Zusammenarbeit zwischen den Gruppen in der Zukunft führen.

Die Idee zu einer solchen Konferenz hatte ihre Ursache in einem Artikel über ,,Amerikas royalistischen Untergrund" von T. John Jamieson, Chicago, der im ,,American Spectator" im Frühjahr 1982 veröffentlicht worden war. Dieser Bericht war von einer größeren US-Zeitung, dem San Francisco Examiner, in ihrer Ausgabe zum 4. Juli (dem sogenannten Unabhängigkeitstag, der Übersetzer) angegriffen worden. Russische Leser dieser Kritik nahmen mit der Constantian Society Kontakt auf und reisten nach Toronto, um mit der Monarchist League zu sprechen.

Ein Bankett. Die Dame trägt den Kaiserlich-russische Orden der Heiligen Anna, mit Schwertern.

Ergebnis war die Erste Monarchistische Studienkonferenz, die in der kurzen Zeit von Februar bis Juni 1983 vorbereitet wurde. Einen großen Anteil am Erfolg gebührt Peter N. Koltypin vom Kaiserlich-Russichen Unionsorden, der mit Energie, Entschiedenheit und Geschick die Organisation übernommen hatte. Die Konferenz schied mit dem einmütigen Wunsch der Teilnehmer, nächstes Jahr in Toronto, Kanada, wieder zusammenzutreffen.

———Arthur Bousfield


[From Erbe und Auftrag, journal of "Tradition und Leben" e.V., Arbeitsgemeinschaft zur Förderung des monarchischen Gedankens, Vol. 16, no. 5, Sept.-Oct. 1983, pp 66-7.]

The Year of the Monarchist (1983)

by T. John Jamieson

From THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR October 1983, Vol. 16, No. 10, pp. 40-41. Copyright 1983 The Alternative Educational Foundation.

So far, 1983 has been a very good year to be a monarchist. Queen Elizabeth II drew such an enthusiastic response from Californians during her spring tour of the Pacific coast that one suspects they wouldn't mind having the woman Betty Ford naively called "the real queen" as their queen. Then the new High (and dry) Tory journal The Salisbury Review carried an article by Prof. David Levy, "The Real and the Royal," which faulted British conservatives for their cowardly "defensive royalism" and called for something like an ideological commitment to monarchy. On July 4th, American orchestras, having retired to their outdoor summer havens, played "Wellington's Victory" and the "1812 Overture" because they are noisy pieces, without reflecting that these compositions glorify the triumph of monarchy and include rousing renditions of "God Save the King" and "God Save the Czar" respectively. And in New Hampshire, the state whose revolutionary motto is "Live free or die," over one hundred men and women professing the royal principle as the key to preserving a free Christian civilization met for a "Study Conference on Monarchy."

Officials at the University of New Hampshire must have thought that the conference to be held on its Durham campus would amount only to a dry essay in antiquarianism—a seminar on the two-thousandth anniversary of the Emperor Augustus's ludi saeculares, a mere series of lectures on the historical, theological, and literary aspects of the obviously outmoded institution of monarchy. But when the Constantian Society, the Order of Russian Imperial Union, and the Monarchist League of Canada actually showed up with the double-headed eagle standard and the Union Jack in hand, ready to snap to attention for the royal anthems, and when the speakers began reading congratulatory messages from reigning sovereigns, cited statistics on the prevalence of monarchy in the present, and described the growth of monarchist sentiment behind the Iron Curtain, journalists covering the event were shocked. "These people are serious," they had to admit.

The conference began on Bastille Day and concluded on the anniversary of the murder of Nicholas II at Ekaterinburg; "in my end is my beginning." Prince Alexis Scherbatow, a history professor at Fairleigh Dickinson whose grandmother was lady-in-waiting to Empress Alexandra, gave the controversial keynote address on "Nicholas II as a Man of Strong Will." Dr. Hereward Senior, an authority on Loyalists during the American Revolution who teaches at McGill, spoke on the impracticability of "instant democracy." Movies were shown of the coronations of Elizabeth II in 1952 and of Nicholas II in 1896; a slide show on the wedding of the daughter of HIH Grand Duke Wladimir of Russia to a Hohenzollern prince in Madrid in 1976 provided glimpses of Louis Ferdinand of Prussia, Leka of Albania, the late Umberto of Italy, Juan Carlos of Spain, and his cousin Alfonso, the Duke of Anjou, Head of the House of Bourbon, rightful King of France. Tables were covered with monarchist publications and memorabilia. A memorial service was held for the Russian Imperial Martyrs. Some Russians stayed up late with a young neo-Czarist survivor of Brezhnev's camps who played the guitar and sang songs of the underground.

Attendees included authentic American Tories, Torontonians and Montrealers, Russian émigrés from the West coast, Australia, and Argentina, Iranian exiles from London, and a lone Spaniard: nobles and peasants, lawyers and librarians, Anglican and Orthodox priests, an archimandrite with his silver-headed staff. On the whole, these monarchists were resolute, intelligent, informed, articulate, and hopelessly sane. They were usually realistic about the odds they face in the age of democratic demagogy and the Marxist myth; only occasionally did they indulge in wishful thinking. Belief in the inevitability of vindication by historians, if not by history, is hardly quixotic. They nevertheless hoped for restorations. Anyway, the Canadians have a monarchy to conserve, and they are well familiar with their opposition. The Russians know they have a country to liberate before the Czar can be restored; they know there will be opportunity for neither if the West grows complacent about the evil of Soviet tyranny. The adherents of the several dynasties in the world know that theirs is a common cause against the peculiar superstitions of modernity.

There were only a few suspicious persons. Some alienated, deculturated Americans have adopted Czarism and Russian Orthodoxy as their heritage; they are sincere though anomalous. A white Canadian episcopus vagans wearing leis made of nuts and fruit seeds advocated a constitutional amendment to make the Kawananakoas the hereditary governors of Hawaii; this demagogue monopolized the press and was universally regarded as a nuisance. With the presidents of two nobility associations present, there were no phony titles.

A panel on "Religion and Monarchy" attempted to treat the relations of throne and altar from different denominational perspectives. Dr. Senior and the Rev. Peter Hannan, a Canadian priest prominent in the fight against the ordination of women, presented the Anglican view: "no bishops, no king." The Orthodox got little sympathy for their opinion that Russian caesaropapalism was preferrable to Roman papalocaesarism. Inadvertently no Catholic spokesman had been appointed to call both sides Erastian and describe the Maistrean vision of the Pope as arbiter of international order. Even though the parties divided on these sectarian issues, all could agree that the monarch is the living symbol of personal responsibility before God and that therefore monarchy stands for the divinely willed order of civilization against the secular millenium of gnostic ideologies such as Communism. This was the genius of the conference. Whatever these monarchists came to learn, they really came to stand together and tell the world, "We do not believe that man can save himself through a political faith."

The Russian grand duke, great-grandson of Alexander II and imperial heir, had been expected to attend but unfortunately cancelled at the last minute. Born in Finland in the year of the Russian Revolution, HIH Wladimir lives in Brittany and is a man of imposing mien. His many official statements have contained much wisdom. He has never stopped calling the West back to its senses and away from its persistently wishful thinking about the nature of Soviet Communism. Russia and the USSR are not the same, he says; Russia is a nation that the USSR has been trying to abolish during all sixty-six years of his life. It was a Czar who abolished serfdom; the USSR has designed an empire of slavery for the world. Under Nicholas II, eighty percent of the land was owned by the men who farmed it; today the farmers themselves are owned by a dictatorship.

The conference was not a one-time affair; the new-found solidarity was too pleasurable for that. Next year the monarchists will convene in Toronto on Victoria Day for a conference which will be even bigger and better—now that the organizers have shown that it can be done. As the ancient MacDonald motto has it, "Dh'ain-deoin co theireadh e"— Gainsay who dare.

AMERICA'S ROYALIST UNDERGROUND (1982)

By T. John Jamieson

From The American Spectator July 1982, Vol. 15, No. 7, pp. 27-29. Copyright 1982, The Alternative Educational Foundation.

Cited in The San Francisco Examiner, July 4, 1982, page B8 ("A 'royal' Fourth of July") and in The Baltimore Sun, July 5, 1982, page B4 ("A peak at 'Royalist Underground' in America...")


The principal feast of the American civil religion is upon us. True patriots will roast hot dogs and risk dismemberment from the use of firecrackers; even cynical leftists who, during Vietnam, refused to stand for the national anthem at high school assemblies will play Frisbee and light up a joint. Local demagogues will invoke the ghosts of Washington and Jefferson and modestly concede that, in their case at least, "democracy works." A few men and women of intellect and imagination, though inwardly dissenting, will outwardly conform to custom in order not to give offense to relatives, or else they will cultivate their gardens alone. These are Tories, adherents of the politics of throne and altar, feeling no less American and no less patriots for knowing what the civil war of 1775-81 was really about. For them, July is the cruelest month: After Independence Day comes Bastille Day, and then the anniversary of the Czar's murder, to say nothing of the July monarchy.

In their frustration with the current constitutional arrangement, which most of them regard as a necessary evil, these American royalists have created an international historical cult which embraces all forms of the lost cause of legitimism and which champions every dynasty. Some have reconciled themselves to the Whig constitution of 1787, but give free rein to their fantasy outside the national border. Among these are Russell Kirk and Frederick Wilhelmsen. Kirk, who has characterized himself as a Bohemian Tory, advocates the politics of prescription, and, like his mentor T.S. Eliot, believes that nations which have a king should continue to have one. Wilhelmsen, the great Thomist of the University of Dallas, actively involved himself in the movement for the Spanish restoration— except that his candidate was not Juan Carlos, but Francisco Javier of Bourbon-Parma, the Carlist claimant; for his pains, the American professor was dubbed by the old pretender in 1975 a Knight of the Grand Cross of the Proscribed Legitimacy. Dr. Sir Frederick Wilhelmsen continues to lead Carlists, both in Spain and Latin America, whose political aims have not yet been reached.

Most American royalists are Anglophile Jacobites; some, with varying degrees of seriousness, advocate an American throne and would unwrite 1776 altogether. They live vicariously through the study of British and Canadian politics. Mr. Daniel MacGregor of Chicago is the American correspondent of Monarchy Canada, the well-produced magazine of the Monarchist League of Canada. Mr. Jay Stribling of El Paso helped found while in college a Society of St. Charles the Martyr which publicly deplored the regicide as the foundation of twentieth-century totalitarianism and issued buttons bearing the legend, "RESTORE THE MONARCHY." Anglican Catholics, those Non-Jurors of the present, who refuse to swear by the do-it-yourself liturgy and the bisexual priesthood of modern Episcopalianism, have a habit of naming their parishes after such royal saints as Charles and Edward the Confessor and Margaret of Scotland. Somewhere along the way they seem to have heard that James I once said, "No bishops, no king." Since there are bishops (and the Anglican Catholics breed them prodigiously), they infer, there must be a king somewhere. And there used to be a Reverend Wiebe in San Francisco, allegedly Episcopalian, who established a Monarchist League of America whose manifesto advocated the installation of a king in America by A.D. 2000, preferably a cadet of the House of Windsor. Gordon Haff of The Dartmouth Review recently came out of the regalia closet; and elder literary statesman Austin Warren would like to be ruled by a native dynasty either of Jameses or Adamses.

I once knew a protégé of Russell Kirk, a fellow American, who while studying at St. Andrew's University in Scotland became head of the local chapter of the Monarchist League—the international organization, that is, founded by the Marquess of Bristol. I have corresponded with a lady political science professor who is writing a book on the Kaiser and describes herself as a frondeuse, and also with an attorney of Irish descent who is a knight of the Royal Yugoslavian Order of St. John. The American monarchist is not simply an eccentric; he or she is a sophisticated, complex intellectual being whose faculty of moral imagination is extraordinarily well developed and requires more room in which to play than democracy provides. You will no doubt ask, how did the American monarchist get this way?

A literary education may be to blame; Plato, Cicero, and Shakespeare are very hard on democracy, and influenced the Founding Fathers against majoritarian rule as much as the mob politics of 17th- and 18th-century England. For the aesthetically inclined, the world's greatest period of artistic production, the Baroque, chiefly exalts the politics of throne and altar; I found myself thoroughly propagandized recently, at an exhibition of 18th-century Neapolitan art, by an "Allegory of the Origin of the Arms of Bourbon," which showed an enormous azure cartouche borne among the clouds by an angelic host, with one seraph affixing three gold fleurs-de-lys thereto. On a pragmatic basis, one might simply realize that the Reagan victory of 1980 cannot vindicate the democratic system if 51 percent of the electorate believe in flying saucers. Granted, one cannot fool all the people all the time, but what is the consolation in that? Born of such influences and realizations is a conviction at once philosophical, religious, practical, and sentimental in nature.

The American monarchist finds no outlet for this conviction in the real world of affairs; but he would tell you that this sense of participatory void is only the democratic habit of mind, for democracy requires an unwholesome degree of politicization in its citizenry. Nevertheless,, what can he do? He reads Oliver Wiswell and studies genealogical charts; he attends the annual lectures of Dr. Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, who castigates America for ruining Europe with its postwar reconstruction plans based on the Divine Right of Majorities. He spurns the great unwashed and cultivates the valiantly unreconstructed—exiles and emigres. Many of these are proud aristocrats who have preserved their lofty pretensions against all odds; they continue to profess the royal principle. I know of an Austro-Franco-Bavarian baron of sixty-four quarters living in California who is a blanc des blancs of French Royalism. An Italian-American friend of mine whose people have been gentlemen for the last eight centuries recently received the title of count from his personal fons honorum, the exiled King Umberto II. This man is also a Mayflower descendant.

Among the various nationalities which have sought refuge on our shores while preserving the "unreconstructed" stance and looking toward eventual restoration and repatriation, the most organized and visible are the Russians. The Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia, which has annually held a solemn memorial for Nicholas II on the anniversary of his assassination at Ekaterinburg, has at last canonized him. The Order of Russian Imperial Union, whose president is Mr. Peter Koltypin of Connecticut, hails H.I.H. Grand Duke Wladimir Romanov as Czar; the autocratic Wladimir has even graced its assemblies with his presence. The Order maintains a fund to finance anti-Communist propaganda in the USSR. In New York City may be found the All-Russian Monarchist Front which engages in similar activity. The Hoover Institution at Stanford is reputedly another Czarist center. Any attempt to dismiss the Czarism of the exiles must take into account the fact that, in Russia herself, discontent under the Communist tyranny is crystallizing as a powerful nostalgia for the nineteenth century in general, and for the Czar in particular. There is an emerging cult of the royal martyr.

Many more hidden pockets of American royalism exist than can here be exposed. I suspect that the "patriotic" societies harbor a few monarchists, for I have known several penitent sons of the Revolution; and the aristocratic Cincinnati, composed of descendants of George Washington's officers, though they are devoutly anti-Hanoverian, have Louis XVI for their patron. Any Roman Catholic infallibilist is on principle an adherent of an ecclesiastical monarchy; and the Kennedys, their shabbiness notwithstanding, have filled the psychological vacuum that would otherwise be filled by a royal dynasty. But, by etymology, Tory originally meant an Irish papist.

The premier American royalist organization is the Constantian Society, whose name is derived from the Latin word for constancy, founded twelve years ago by Randall J. Dicks, a Pittsburgh attorney. It publishes The Constantian, has approximately 400 members, and takes for its mission the education of the public on monarchy. Its literature says that "monarchy is an intelligible and honest form of government, and it is our belief that it is better suited and able to serve the common good under future conditions than any other.''

The Whig Burke called the adherents of divine right "exploded fanatics of slavery;" even the Tory Johnson conceded that "a high Tory makes government unintelligible—it is lost in the clouds." But that is the worst that can be said of monarchism. Far worse things may be. said of decadent democracies sinking under the combined weight of demagogy, bureaucracy, and judicial usurpation. Whatever may be said for the relevance of monarchy to universal human nature, the relevance of democracy to most national characters and historical contexts is very little. Yet America confers legitimacy on the world's rulers in terms of its own civil religion in the same self-righteous manner as the Popes once crowned the royal majesties of Europe. In fact, we literally crowned the Communist regime in Hungary in 1978 by yielding the nine-hundred-year-old Crown of St. Stephen to Kadar; it had been kept since World War II in protective custody at Fort Knox, awaiting happier days for Hungary. Its rightful owner, of course, is not Kadar, but rather Archduke Otto von Hapsburg, who today is a representative for Bavaria in the new European Parliament.

Czar Simeon II of the Bulgarians continues to press his claim, and King Michael of Rumania has recently announced his readiness to return to the throne if he is called. With the rise of unrest in these captive nations where the memory of royal rule is still fresh, can American foreign policy refuse to address the potential for restoration? In Greece the king is still talked of. Following the example of Spain, Portugal may be the next European nation to return to monarchy. As the Reagan Administration belabors the distinction between "authoritarian" and "totalitarian" regimes, and as commentators mull over the moral compromise in supporting Fascist dictatorships, the self-defeating futility of seeking to appease Marxist juntas, and the infeasibility of setting up democracies in backward nations, why is there no discussion of monarchy? A worthwhile project for the American monarchist is to raise the historical consciousness of American foreign policy to the level of recognizing foreign monarchies as a valid possibility. He must work to establish three essential facts:

First, all monarchies are constitutional monarchies; and under every constitution sovereignty ultimately rests somewhere. So long as the royal hand is able to intervene in moments of crisis, the specific machinery of administration is not all that important. Our own form of elective monarchy exists in perpetual crisis: Its sovereign dies every four years without issue.

Second, popular elections have no relevance to the issue of restoration or continuation of monarchy, since elections divide people, and the most stable regimes are imposed from above or from outside. The Allies insisted on an election in Italy after World War II, which Umberto would have won if it had been conducted fairly; yet by exposing the royal principle to discussion, the potential hold of the king over his government was thoroughly eroded. Renewing the social contract is not optional: Let those skeptics who say that every tenet of belief must always be open to discussion retire to the philosophy classroom and impose on the world no longer.

Third, new monarchies can be fostered in the same way that the old once were. When a national hero, a liberator, or a patriarch has the support to establish a dynasty, who are the Americans that they should stop him? Such was the father of the late Shah of Iran; and our own George Washington nearly had the crown thrust upon him.

If America could redeem Eastern Europe from its Communist slave-masters through royal restoration, it would be an act of historical penance. Meanwhile, the flame of hereditary legitimacy, the secular form of the apostolic succession, continues to burn, tended by patriots, priests, and professors, who privately confess their belief in the sacramental nature of power.

No, the American monarchist is not Independence Day's Scrooge, yet to the democrats he repeats the ancient curse: "May you have an equal in your house."