The twentieth century was the most democratic in human history. It was also the bloodiest, and these two factors are inextricably linked. For it is the rise of mass democracy during the nineteenth century and into the twentieth that led to wars not between sovereigns, but between entire peoples which, even in the darkest depths of stalemate (as during the First World War) leaders dared not sue for peace, because a propagandized electorate would not accept negotiations with an enemy it had been told was sub-human.

In many ways, the period from the defeat of Napoleon to the First World War was the last (or rather, pray, merely the latest) golden age of Western civilization. Great leaps were made in art, science, technology, and learning, while at the same time (with some notable exceptions) the all-important traditional forms were maintained. But steaming beneath this last breath of the Old World, was the rise of large-scale mass democracy.

In Great Britain, France, Spain, Italy, and the nascent Germany, electorates which had started out limited and aimed at the upper and upper-middle classes, those with a stake in society, gradually but continually expanded to include the merchant, smallkeepers, and eventually working classes. (Though every European country denied women suffrage until into the twentieth century). The growth of the electorate weakened the power of both the king and the aristocracy and changed the composition of the ruling classes. In order to maintain its domination, the political class, spanning both “left” and “right”, had to take mass culture into greater consideration, in order to manipulate the masses and thus control increasingly democratic political structures.

It was not always so. In the age of monarchs, king warred against king. Armies went to war because their commander, the king, told them to, or because they were, often handsomely, paid to, and this was largely enough in a more rigidly hierarchical age. One king defeated another, terms were decided upon, perhaps a province or some other bit of territory was handed to the victor, and peace was restored.

A superb rendition of this is Velazquez’s painting “The Surrender of Breda”, painted 1634-35, depicting an event that took place ten years earlier. Nassau, the Dutch commander, hands his sword to Spinola, the Spanish general who has just reconquered the city for King Philip IV. Spinola leans towards Nassau and places a gentle reassuring arm on the defeated general’s shoulder. The scene is a splendid composition of recently-warring parties now at peace. The Dutch on the left are obviously not very enthusiastic about the situation, but try to hold themselves well. The victorious Spaniards on the right, meanwhile, are content with their victory, spurn any triumphalism, and treat the surrendered with grace and dignity.

While no doubt “The Surrender of Breda” is not a strictly accurate portrayal of the handover — it is not a photograph, after all — it gives an insight into civilised people’s idea of war and peace, of victory and defeat; And, by all historical accounts, the Spaniards did treat defeated Breda with grace and dignity.

The increase of popular power in the time between the Surrender of Breda and the First World War meant that war now had to be “sold” to the masses in order to ensure their support and prevent domestic unrest. Reasons for war that may have been convincing enough for the upper echelons may not have been convincing enough for the masses to whom they had partly abdicated their authority. The simple war of A versus B was replaced with the of a war between Good and Evil. The result of this demagogic shift in concept was for humanity to be restricted to our own side and the enemy to be downgraded to subhuman status.

The unprecented forcible conscription of the First World War meant that all British subjects (in England, Wales, and Scotland, but, pragmatically, not Ireland) were liable to fight and die. America’s introduction of conscription during the Civil War fifty years before had produced spontaneous open rebellion on the streets of New York, with class tensions exacerbated by the legal provision allowing the wealthy to buy their way out of the obligation to serve. (The mob took out its anger not only on the upper class but on blacks as well, destroying a home caring for black orphans).

1910s Great Britain, meanwhile, was more careful than 1860s America in crafting an efficient propaganda machine to stir up a bigoted hatred of Germany and Germans in order to deflect any large-scale resistance to conscription. The British and Americans denied the enemy their rightful status as human beings with ultimate co-equal status. Mass meetings were held decrying the menacing Hun and posters frequently depicted the Germans as subhuman ape-like monsters. The British propaganda had the unintended effect of coming back to hit the establishment. The Royal Family, after all, were almost entirely German themselves, their dynastic name was the decidedly un-English Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, and many of the extended relations of the Royal Family held numerous German titles as well.

George V responded by issuing a proclamation declaring that the dynasty should be from then on known as the House of Windsor instead. In a most ungentlemanly act, the Government required all German titles and styles held by members of the Royal Family or other Britons to be relinquished, and for authentic German surnames to be replaced by made-up English-sounding equivalents. His Serene Highness Prince Louis of Battenberg found himself reduced to the Rt. Hon. Sir Louis Mountbatten on July 14 1917, though three days later the King compensated him by re-enobling him as the Marquess of Milford Haven. The titles of family members who fought for their native Germany were deprived by a special Act of Parliament, and the flags and armorial plates of German Knights of the Garter were removed from St. George’s Chapel at Windsor.

The very apotheosis of this dehumanization, however, was during the Second World War. The Nazis (partly inspired by American eugenicists) attempted to create a science of determining which men were humans and which were subhuman. Millions of not only the conquered but even their own German citizens were helplessly slaughtered in consequence, while the citizens of London and other cities were forced to brave the Blitz. The Anglo-American response was scarcely any better. The RAF Bomber Command employed scientists to determine how best to inflict harm upon the enemy populace, not the enemy armies. The result was the firebombing of large urban centers, including purely residential districts, with the directed aim of creating firestorms powerful enough to suck the air from basement raid shelters, thus suffocating innocent women and children in their only protected place.

The Soviets, meanwhile, massacred 21,768 Polish citizens in the forest of Katyn. These, admittedly, were military prisoners of war, but they were particularly aimed at the extermination of the Polish elite. According to Polish law, every university graduate became a reserve officer in the military. Among those murdered at Katyn were 20 professors, 300 doctors, over a hundred writers and journalists, and several hundred teachers, lawyers, and engineers. Half of the officer corps of Poland were massacred in a single day.

Not a single pretence of the special nature of civilians was upheld by the Nazi, Soviet, British, and American forces. Furthermore, the defeated were brought to trial for violating laws which did not exist when the acts were commited. Ex post facto law is an abomination unthinkable in Anglo-American jurisprudence but nonetheless employed at the Nuremburg tribunals.

Germans were prosecuted, by an Allied panel which included Soviets, for invading Poland, despite the Soviet Union having invaded Poland simultaneously in accords with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Admiral Erich Raeder was charged with waging unrestricted submarine warfare (indeed a barbaric thing) but the charge was dropped when his attorneys submitted an affadavit from Admiral Chester Nimitz of the U.S. Navy admitting that the Allies had waged unrestricted submarine warfare themselves.

The Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, Harlan Fiske Stone, didn’t mind that retribution was exacted upon the Nazis but derided the trials as a “high-grade lynching party” and claimed the idea that the Nuremburg trials were a proper court according to common law was a “sanctimonious fraud”.

The Nuremburg court presaged the indictment and trial of Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic for war crimes. Milosevic was originally indicted for crimes allegedly committed during the Kosovo War, but charges were later added alleging crimes during the Bosnian War. (The entirely separate International Court of Justice, on the other hand, absolved Serbia of responsibility for genocide during the Bosnian war). When the case against Milosevic finally came to trial, it was a complete farce. Witness statements extracted under torture were admitted as legitimate testimony (the judge dismissed the method of interrogation as “irrelevant”, in contravention of the court’s own rules). Milosevic, conducting his own defense, pointed to documents presented to the court by the prosecution as evidence which directly contradicted the prosecution’s own charges.

While in America a “speedy” trial is a right enshrined in the Constitution, no such protections existed in the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. The prosecution took two full years to present the case against Milosevic, and the defendant died before the trial was anywhere near its conclusion. Furthermore, the 1999 NATO war against Serbia (in which civilians, and indeed even journalists, were considered legitimate targets by NATO) easily qualifies as an “aggressive war” under the terms by which the Allies had charged the Nazis at Nuremburg fifty years earlier.

Like the Nazis, Slobodan Milosevic was widely, and correctly, identified as an evil man. But because even an evil man is just that — a man — the dignity of his humanity must be respected, and justice must not be blithely replaced by a spirit of vengeance. Acts of injustice committed against the evil, the defeated, or the merely unpopular, undermine the very concept of justice itself and constitute an assault on the dignity of man which international tribunals and the human rights establishment purport to protect.

The very foundation of the dignity of man is the Incarnation of Christ. God so loved Man that He sent His only Son to be born of Mary, an actual human being, and to take up, in full, an actual human nature — Jesus Christ was every bit a human being as any saint or sinner, including Slobodan Milosevic. Christ’s condescension to our humanity elevates our fallen nature with an intrinsic dignity that must not be violated. Christ’s love and our love of Him is the very foundation of our defense of the unborn, the sick, the poor, the hungry, the imprisoned, the oppressed, and the forgotten. Just as it is important that we try and judge the guilty, or fight to defend our homes, it is even more important that we recognize the humanity of the guilty and the enemy and respect their human dignity, lest we fall victim of becoming the guilty ourselves.

The International Herald Tribune has unceremoniously dumped its unique 142-year-old nameplate logo, affectionately known as the “dingbat”. The graphic made its first appearance in the New York Tribune on April 10, 1866. The Tribune later merged with the New York Herald to become the New York Herald Tribune. The Herald had previously founded a separate European edition based in Paris. While the New York newspaper died in 1967, its weekly New York supplement survives as New York magazine and the Paris edition became the International Herald Tribune, jointly owned by the Whitney family and the New York Times. The Whitneys sold their stake to the Washington Post, which in turn ran the paper in alliance with the Times until 2002, when the New York Times Company became the sole proprietor of the IHT.

The Paris-based newspaper’s executive editor Michael Oreskes said he hoped that dropping the dingbat would make the front page “cleaner, more modern, more streamlined”. Vanessa Whittall, the Herald Tribune’s communications manager, meanwhile said “by removing the traditional ‘dingbat’ graphic between Herald and Tribune we have created a more contemporary and concise presentation that is consistent with our digital platforms.”

The New York Times Company has been beset with problems in recent years, with both profits and circulation falling; one Manhattan outlet reported seeing an 80% drop in sales of the Sunday New York Times. Shareholders have claimed that the general downturn for newspapers has only been exacerbated by Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr.’s poor management. The decline of the Times has been mirrored in the IHT, which it now markets as its international edition.

Under the Times’s control, the IHT has been seen to become more of a newspaper for Americans abroad than an American newspaper for an international audience. The blogger of “Think!: The blog for readers of the International Herald Tribune” questioned the prominence the paper devotes to American stories: “How a piece about baseball in the Netherlands (where I lived for three years) got more play directly next to an article about a cyclone in Burma that has killed around 100,000 people is a little hard to follow.”

The decision to remove the dingbat certainly has its critics. Juan Antonio Giner, the founder of a media consulting group and blogger at Innovationsinnewspapers said the move was “not a big revolution or a smart strategic decision for a dying newspaper”. Mr. Giner compared the management’s decision to “play with such a traditional, magnificent, beautiful, well-done logo” as “like moving the chairs on a sinking Titanic”.

The original dingbat, above, with the most recent incarnation below.

In “The Paper: The Life and Death of The New York Herald Tribune”, the definitive history of the deceased journal, Richard Kluger described the dingbat:

“in the middle of the crudely drawn tableau is a clock reading twelve minutes past six - no one knows why (conceivably it was the moment of Horace Greeley’s birth); to the left, Father Time sits in brooding contemplation of antiquity, represented by the ruin of a Greek temple, a man and his ox plowing, a caravan of six camels passing before two pyramids, and an hourglass; to the right, a sort of Americanized Joan of Arc, arms outstretched beneath a backwards-billowing Old Glory, welcomes modernity in the form of a chugging railroad train, factories with smoking chimneys, an updated plow, and an industrial cogwheel (over which the incautious heroine is about to trip); atop the clock, ready to take off into the boundless American future, is an eagle - all for no extra cost.”

“It was a baroque snapshot of time arrested,” Mr. Kluger continued, “an allegorical hieroglyph of the newspaper’s function to render history on the run”.

The deputy managing editor Robert Marino said of the dingbat, “I’m kind of sorry to see it go, but that’s progress.” Many of the Herald Tribune’s readers will remain unconvinced.

The German poet Peter Handke has proposed that March 24 be set aside as a special day of shame to mark the beginning of NATO’s aggression against Serbia on that day in 1999. Handke has won widespread praise for his recent collection of poems entitled “Die Morawische Nacht”, which will soon be published in an English translation under the title of “Samara”.

Writing in the Rheinischer Merkur, Handke said that the commencement of the war should be remembered annually as “the new European national day” with a strongly-worded condemnation of NATO’s aggressive violation of Serbia’s sovereignty and targeting of civilians. “March 24, 1999, when NATO launched its illegal war against Yugoslavia,” wrote Handke, “will be remembered by righteous minds . . . as a relapse of the hereditary German sin, not under the banner of National Socialism, but something just as hellish.”

NATO deliberately targeted civilians during its 1999 war against Serbia, which was unilaterally launched without UN approval and without sufficient grounds under international law. The 1999 war has been criticised as a deliberate attack on the sovereignty of nations and as a precursor to the ongoing Anglo-American war in Iraq.

The parliament of Quebec have unanimously rejected a proposal to remove the Crucifix from above the speaker’s chair in the National Assembly of the province. The recent Bouchard-Taylor report on the accomodation of immigrants in Quebec suggested the removal of the Crucifix multiple times in its pages.

“The crucifix is about 350 years of history in Quebec that none of us are ever going to erase, and of the strong presence in particular of the Catholic Church,” Mr. Jean Charest, the Prime Minister of Quebec, told the National Assembly. “Those who come to Quebec,” he continued, “are joining a society where that history is now something that is part of our story”.

As soon as the report was released, the Prime Minister proposed a motion to maintain the Crucifix, and the motion received the support of his own Liberal Party as well as the opposition Action democratique de Quebec and the separatist Parti Quebecois, all three parties in parliament.

The Crucifix was first placed above the Speaker’s Chair during the government of Maurice Duplessis in the 1930’s.

The man of letters needs, of course, a place in which to withdraw from his various dalliances in the social realm and to concentrate on the dominion of learning; a private place in which to enjoy a book, broadsheet or other periodical, or perhaps to brood in a comfortable chair with a dram of scotch and some sound music. The ladyfolk, needless to say, have no place in such a bailiwick, not even to clean, for the wise gentleman knows that a study which accumulates in dust likewise accumulates in a certain intangible value. After all, what man of letters does not relish in removing his 1928 Burns & Oates edition of Martyrs of the Upper Volta from the shelves, blowing the dust from the cover, and charging inwards to read of some blessed soul who met his end in a steamy cauldron?

What, then, could throw such an arcadian bliss into disarray quite as much as the sudden appearance of Kaiser Wilhelm himself?

A Hapsburg? You may as well have invited! A Bourbon? Well, fair enough, they have been known to lose their heads. But a Hohenzollern? You’ve got your work cut out for you.

Once considered the seminal work on dealing with Spontaneous Hohenzollern Appearances (or ‘SHA’), Dr. Leo von Fulbreck’s Treatise on the Treatment of Hohenzollernitosicity (to use the old, politically-incorrect term for SHA), has since been discredited, perhaps unjustly due to the Sparticist leanings of the Thuringian professor. The 1919 U.S. War Department guide War Department Field Guide 24-R: Recommended Courses of Action in Event of Hohenzollern Situation (and its appendix 24-R(II) dealing with the Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen branch) perpetuated the essence of von Fulbreck’s theories shorn of their ideological slant. The Second-World-War-era Your Enemy: the Sudden Hun-henzollern released by the British Department of Information, however, is generally considered unreliable. Combing through all this mess, I have endeavoured to deliver, as part of my contribution to learning, the most well-researched, as well as concise, recommended course of action regarding the spontaneous appearence of Hohenzollerns in one’s study:

1. Give the man a stern, intense, but unprovocative stare (as exemplified in above illustration) and he will eventually be moved to tears, mourning the loss of Tanganyika.
2. Simultaneously ring the bell (or, if one’s home is electrically-equipped, press the buzzer) and ask one of your staff to contact the Doorn Home for the Dethroned and Bewildered, informing them that one of their patients is on the loose.
3. Offer a stiff drink and wait for the men from the Doorn Home to arrive.

With any luck that should suffice, and unfortunate mishaps will be avoided.