Donning the robes of a judge, as I have done here in
Westarctica, has admittedly taken a bit of getting used to. Not the wearing of
the robe in the literal sense, of course. Those of you who know me will be
aware that I have, in fact, been accustomed to wearing robes of one sort or
another—most usually of the ermine-trimmed variety--over the course of the past
19 years. One knows who one is, however, and one knows one’s own. One can also
become aware that the robe he wears doesn’t quite fit his figure. It is
important to wear your own robe and to be comfortable in it.
Indulge me, if you will, as I take off my judicial gown for a moment to reminisce about my earliest experiences of that inscrutable phenomenon commonly called the “micronation”. We all have our own first experiences of encountering these unorthodox little mini-states and mine occurred just around the turn of the millennium.
I will warn my readers here and now that this issue of "Penumbral Emanations" is not like previous issues at all. It takes a pretty hard left turn, in fact, into micronational esoterica from the distant past and ultimately serves as a very lengthy explanation of why I have made the difficult decision to resign my seat on the high court and, ultimately, to say farewell to Westarctica.
I have already tendered my resignation, effective September 15, to the Prime Minister. His Royal Highness and the Chief Justice have also been notified. This piece will be the final issue of "Penumbral Emanations", as it happens. I hope some of you have enjoyed reading it as much as I have enjoyed writing it.
All that said, here we go...
In the year 2000, I found myself both intrigued and
bewildered by the first little kingdom which I happened to land upon, quite by
accident, while searching the internet for something else entirely. My
discovery proved an irresistible rabbit hole which ultimately led me to the “shores”
of a small kingdom known as the “Kingdom of Morovia.” Much as it caused me to
scratch my head at first, puzzling over what the point of it all might be, I
nevertheless signed-up to become a citizen, found myself drawn in to the
dynamics of the community, and after a while it all somehow began to make sense.
Just as I was starting to acclimate myself to this kingdom
and to enjoy it, an episode occurred which caused the community to falter. The
future of this little realm suddenly became very uncertain, and it began to
bleed participants. Those of us who remained became concerned that the
experience we were so enjoying was about to vanish, and we sought somehow to preserve
it.
Various steps were proposed and put aside, and for a moment we
were relieved when life and activity unexpectedly returned to Morovia. It
returned for only a moment, however. In the end, as it happened, we were not
able to persuade the gentleman who wore the robe and whose intellectual
property Morovia was to provide the community with the attentive leadership it
required to keep the ship of state afloat to the degree to which it had sailed
in the past. Ultimately, we found ourselves fairly shipwrecked.
In 2002, therefore, I built a new ship and christened it “Hanover”. Based largely upon the Morovian experience but with some significant changes, the miniature Kingdom of Hanover was not classified as a simulation as Morovia had been, but instead as an authentic monarchy in miniature.
After donning my own robe and installing myself
as monarch, I invited those left on sinking Morovia to jump ship and climb
aboard my newly-built vessel. Much to my delight, many did, and we managed to
very successfully recreate the Morovian experience aboard our new barque. Many
more folks would join us in the ensuing weeks and months, until Hanover became
quite a thriving community.
The miniature Kingdom of Hanover would become the first of
the six miniature monarchies that I would conceive of, design, launch, and
populate, the most recent being the short-lived Kingdom of Argonne, and the
most well-known, perhaps, being the Kingdom of Scone. The Kingdom of Hanover,
however, of all of them, remains arguably the jewel in the crown. She has
proven herself the most enduring, the most versatile, and the most compelling
of all the experiences which I have designed to date.
For a time, the Kingdom of Hanover and a project I dubbed
“Sconeland” back in 2008 were united together as “The Glennish Kingdoms of
Hanover and Sconeland” or simply the “GK” as we most often called it. When this
union of my two most notable projects began, the fellow who today goes by the moniker
“Emden-Holstein” was reigning over Hanover under the name “King
James II”. More about him later.
In 2014, many months after “King James II” had departed, those of us left running the place decided to split-up Hanover and Sconeland, sending them along their separate ways to become two distinct experiences.
Hanover was (presumably) to remain the Anglo-Germanic experience it was founded as, whereas Sconeland would provide an independent Anglo-Celtic experience as the “Kingdom of Scone.”
The “Celtic” part of that experience never really quite materialized,
as it happened, and Scone became, as some of you know, a rather Downton-esque
Anglophile kingdom with a plummy English accent.
When the GK split into two separate kingdoms, I became the
first King of Scone, and another gentleman took the throne of Hanover as “King
Erik I”.
In 2016, two years after Hanover and Scone parted ways, King Erik of Hanover found himself harassed off his throne by the aforementioned “Rex Emden-Holstein” fellow (aka “King James II”). Emden-Holstein had put forward a fiction that he had been ousted as King of Hanover in an unlawful coup d’etat in 2013.
It must be explained that this mercurial individual had a habit (and continues a habit) of creating false narratives, throwing fits that his false narratives are not being yielded to, and exploding until he gets whatever it is he happens to be demanding at any given time.
Once he gets whatever it is he wants, he then invariably disappears
for years at a time until word reaches him that another of his false narratives
has been challenged. Some readers will be familiar with him and with this
well-established pattern of his.
Emden-Holstein dwells in what I would describe as the
“badlands” of “micronationalism”, an unruly neighborhood where angry
delusionaries spit at each other all day and out from which they occasionally
venture to lash out at those of us who are enjoying ourselves, whenever they
happen to spot one of us doing something constructive. They are like the
proverbial demons who fly out of hell to harass the good people of the world
innocently going about their business.
Poor King Erik of Hanover, quite exasperated by Holstein’s abuse, abdicated the Hanoverian throne on January 22, 2016…but not in favor of Emden-Holstein. King
Erik abdicated, to my surprise, in favor of yours truly, Hanover’s author,
founder, and first king, much to the chagrin of Emden-Holstein.
At that time, I happened to be happily reigning as King of Scone, and the crown of Hanover was not actually a terribly welcome gift. Hanover was nearly unrecognizable at this point, for one thing, and Hanover’s crown was something of a hot potato.
When it landed in my lap, you can guess whose raving
fury aimed itself in my direction. At any rate, there I sat upon two separate
thrones, one upon which I had been seated since 2014, and one upon which I had
not sat since 2003.
It is a strange thing, indeed, to return to a throne after
so many years and to realize that all your successors have become your
predecessors, as well. It is an even stranger experience, still, when you
happen to be the monarch of another kingdom at the time of your unexpected
restoration. Two separate crowns plus two separate thrones plus two separate
kingdoms = one big headache. And that headache’s name was, in my case, “Holstein”.
As Hanover’s king, I decided to placate him and to get him off my back by drawing up a treaty, enacted on February 9, 2016, by which the Kingdom of Hanover was said to be “divided” in half, in a certain abstract sort of way.
According to the terms of the treaty between the King of Hanover (me)
and the King of Emden-Holstein (him), there would now be two kingdoms of
Hanover, one for him and one for me (the things we won’t do for a little peace
and quiet).
One of the two kingdoms of Hanover would bear all the names, styles, and titles of the old Kingdom of Hanover, while the other would instead bear the names, styles, and titles as revised during the time after Hanover was united with my Sconeland project to form the “Glennish Kingdoms”.
It's...yes...I know. Trust me. At any rate...
To my amazement, Holstein was copasetic with those terms,
and so it was that the Kingdom of Hanover was divided along historical lines
into pre-Glennish Hanover and post-Glennish Hanover, the pre-Glennish version
taking the traditional name “Kingdom of Hanover” and the post-Glennish model
re-christened “Kingdom of Glennish Hanover”.
According to the terms of the treaty, Holstein was to
publicly repent of the false narrative that he had been overthrown in a coup,
which he did in a public statement. The two monarchies, furthermore, were to
scrupulously avoid utilizing titles belonging to the culture and heritage of
the other’s “half” of Hanover.
It wasn’t very long at all before Emden-Holstein would
violate the terms of the compact, however. It would take him only three days,
in fact.
When the terms of a treaty are violated, however, the
afflicted party ceases to be under any obligation to live up to his part of the
treaty and the treaty becomes null and void. And so it did become null and
void--several times over, as it happens--first on February 11, 2016 when young Holstein
provocatively dipped into the prohibited Glennish name pool to confer upon his
partner the title “Duke of Vastersconnland” (“West Sconeland”) and later the
title “Duke of Welland” (taken from the Glennish “House of Mountwelland”).
Granted, the "Vastersconnland" title was a second creation of a title earlier created by Emden-Hostein, but by the terms of the treaty that title (created as a taunt in the first place) ought to have been left extinct.
With these violations, the treaty between us was nullified,
and the Crown of “old” Hanover, by default, returned to my personal possession.
Holstein would later go on to further violate the treaty when in 2020 he
publicly reasserted his false narrative that he had been unlawfully overthrown,
and then by claiming the throne of the Kingdom of Scone as his own.
The long and short of it is that the individual claiming to
be King of Hanover has, in fact, forfeited the right to so call himself that,
and I am now prepared to formally take possession of that which, back on 11
February 2017 returned to me for a third time (this time through forfeiture).
Why am I doing this, one might reasonably ask. Why now? Why expose myself to the potential for headache? Why not just let it all go, at this point?
The answer is that Hanover is approaching a milestone in her
history and deserves to find herself in hands that will care for her.
In the year 2022, twenty years shall have passed since I
founded the miniature Kingdom of Hanover. And as the Kingdom of Hanover stands,
now, she is utterly abandoned, depopulated, and being left by the roadside to
rot by the fellow who so furiously and strenuously demanded to possess her.
Emden-Holstein demanded to be the ship’s captain once more, and when he got what he wanted, he ran her into an iceberg and sank her,
leaving her on the ocean floor…and then he vanished once more into the night.
What a terrible waste, and what an ignominious end to such a
significant miniature monarchy.
It is evident that Holstein never had any actual interest in governing Hanover...no interest in curating her history, in attempting to revive her, or in extending her legacy into the future. He wanted only the opportunity to shout "Mine! All mine!" as so often happens with those who covet the creativity of others.
I wonder if he is even conscious of the fact
that Hanover’s 20th approaches. I tend to doubt it.
I, however, have another set of priorities as the founding father of that little realm…as the man who dreamed her up, authored her, designed her, drafted her constitution, launched her, and established her crown, throne, and government. As her creator, I feel bound to rescue the Kingdom of Hanover from oblivion.
The Latin heraldic motto of the Kingdom of Hanover is "NUMQUAM OCCIDIT SOL", which is to say, "The Sun Never Sets", an obvious reference to the phrase "The sun never sets upon the British Empire". In Hanover's case, the motto was meant to underscore her remarkable staying power. My objective is to ensure that the sun never sets upon her in my lifetime.
And so I am reclaiming little Hanover—my intellectual property--with the intention of picking her crown up out of the gutter into which it was so carelessly dropped, polishing it up, and restoring it in time to celebrate Hanover's 20th anniversary next year.
The Hanoverian ship of state and all that she has meant to me and to so many other people over so many years deserves to be lifted up from the murky depths of the bottom of the ocean and made seaworthy once more. Not, perhaps, to sail again full speed ahead, as she once did, but at least to be restored. To me, the restoration and preservation of the Kingdom of Hanover is worth the potential for headache.
For that reason, although I have been among you only a short time, I will have to bid all of you “adieu”, I am afraid, as it is not possible for me to occupy both the Westarctican bench and a foreign throne simultaneously.
It is just as well. In my brief experience as a justice of the
Grand Ducal Court, I have observed that four justices on the bench are,
perhaps, one too many. My colleagues, all of whom have greater training in and
experience of the Westarctican legal system than I, have little need of my
extraneous presence in their conference. The GDC will, in fact, be a more
efficient body without my untutored legal mind throwing a wrench in the works
of that otherwise well-oiled machine.
I cannot adequately express how enriching my year among you
has been, Westarctica. I have learned so much from my time spent in your
company, so to speak, and I am profoundly grateful to all of you for welcoming
me and allowing me to be a part of the fabric of this endlessly fascinating nation.
I am particularly grateful to my colleagues on the bench, in
particular the Chief Justice, for embracing me and for being so patient with me
as I attempted to learn the ropes of the Westarctican judiciary. My thanks also
go out to the Prime Minister, who has been unfailingly helpful to me in my
efforts to navigate the waters of the Westarctican citizenship experience.
Finally and most importantly, I offer my thanks to His Royal Highness The Grand Duke, whose warmth, friendship, and generosity I have ever been able to rely upon in this context or any other. It is my very real hope that our friendly relationship will continue despite this move.
I know that
you, Sir, more than anyone, will understand the motives which I have expressed
as I venture now to rescue and restore my creation. Before I return to the
throne of Hanover once again, permit me to offer Your Royal Highness one last
solemn bow as your devoted and very grateful subject.
As I depart, permit me to encourage each and all of you to study and familiarize yourselves with the constitution and the laws of Westarctica.
As citizens of a small nation, it is more important than you may realize to hold dear the rule of law, to know the law, and to be aware of all the nuances which emanate from the penumbras of the law and the constitution.
The
law is like a thickly-planted forest of trees designed to protect you and to
support the rich leafy canopy of civilization. Beware of any, therefore, who
may come along with an axe or a chainsaw to clear that forest away in the name
of expediency.
Be diligent. Know your law and let it work to your advantage to keep you and Westarctica forever safe and free.
For those of you who may have an interest in following the restoration project of the Kingdom of Hanover in advance of her 20th anniversary next year, I will post a link to a Facebook page created for that purpose HERE.
Please feel free to like us and to follow us.
OF THE GRAND DUCAL COURT OF WESTARCTICA
