Patriots for Themselves

...Nor did Leopold help the Belgian resistance covertly...

...Churchill was obliged by President Truman to omit the provisions of the Quebec Agreement on nuclear weapons research, and the need for continuing secrecy forbade any mention of "Operation Enigma" and the successful Allied efforts to break enemy codes...

...These maneuvers deceived few people...

...Leopold II achieved the remarkable feat of being even worse than his father...

...He points out that Belgian leaders, including the Saxe-Coburgs, far from reconsidering the country's constitutional and political arrangements in the light of recent troubles, are in a missionary mood...

...Baudoin I proved more pious than his red-hot and blue-blooded relatives but no more successful at making Belgium a less divided nation or one more popular with its own citizens...

...He had taken a right royal risk...

...He had the lifetime British pension which he had invested well...

...Like their teachers, the bureaucratic rulers of the EU intend to create a new polity irrespective of the wishes of the nations inside it...

...As Mr...

...Hitler, Mussolini, and Roosevelt were dead...

...Belgium has the highest percentage of social beneficiaries in the world—more people live on social benefits than work for a living...

...66 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 2005 Indeed the impression that emerges from this fascinating book is that Churchill was a historian of great passion, insight, romantic and almost poetic gifts, huge industry and remarkable power, but also an operator of considerable ruthlessness...

...He amassed a vast fortune by misusing government funds for his private interests...

...Good-looking, aristocratic, greedy, shrewd, and a second son, Leopold saw that the quickest way to wealth and position would be to marry both...

...But this wavering was less treacherous than the behavior of Albert's son, Leopold III, who stayed in Belgium in 1940 rather than leaving for Britain like the Dutch and Norwegian monarchs...

...If there is a scalier royal family than the Belgian branch of the Saxe-Coburgs, the news has yet to reach Debretts...

...French-speaking Catholic rebels in the southern Netherlands rose up against the Protestant House of Orange in an attempt to unite their provinces with France...

...They believe that Belgium—with its multiculturalism, welfarism, cross-subsidization, and undemocratic political structures—is and should be the model for a future united Europe...

...Members of his family accounted for a very high proportion of the rest...

...They employed extra-legal repression to crush or frustrate resistance from either Walloon or Flemish national movements...

...London could not al-low Paris to extend its territory so far up the English Channel...

...He dealt with opposition supporters of the NOVEMBER 2005 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 67 B O O K S I N R E V I E W House of Orange by having the military attack them and burn their homes...

...Multi-ethnic polities can pros-per by developing a common culture and common national identity...

...Will this extraordinary non-nation prove to be the model for a united Europe...

...Belgium was an artificial construction built for the convenience of greater powers...

...But the facts NOVEMBER 2005 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 69 B O O K S I N R E V I E W are massively on his side...

...And now some of the same results are beginning to appear...

...So, at the age of 40, Leopold had achieved all he desired—"King, Cawdor, Glamis, and all...

...On the other hand, he often exaggerates his foresight and judgment, and is unfair to his critics, enemies, and opponents, and sometimes to his friends and colleagues, like the long-suffering Anthony Eden...

...One year later, however, events justified him...

...For the moment, however, it solved the crisis...

...Churchill was also lucky in that, during the seven years it took him to write and publish the work, he had virtually no competition...

...In the 1970s they pushed through a form of federalism that was consciously designed to entrench existing "Belgicist" political parties in power more or less permanently and to prevent even very large democratic majorities from dismantling the present multicultural state...

...Charlotte was very suitable indeed...

...And in pursuit of these aims and their family interests, they repeatedly intervened in secret (following the first Leopold's shrewd example) to ensure that the taxpayer paid the bribes But Leopold and his successors did not want to reconcile Fleming and Walloon in a common culture since they might then make common cause against the family state...

...He bribed leading politicians to keep them loyal...

...The end-result, as Mr...

...His brutalities were eventually uncovered by the campaigning journalist, E.D...

...ILARIOUS FOR THE READER, all this is a sad story for Belgium...

...They make the Borgias look like pickpockets and Richard III like a philanthropist...

...The economic statistics are bad enough...

...Morel, and the British civil servant (and later Irish Nationalist gun-runner), Sir Roger Casement...

...Morel, as a young shipping clerk, had noticed that ships coming from the Congo were loaded with ivory and rubber while those going there contained little more than guns and ammunition...

...Belien and earlier historians...

...He was in line to exercise the power of the boudoir over the world's dominant power...

...In 1967, this was reduced to 30 years, but by then Churchill was dead, having got in with his documents well ahead of the pack...

...Money, however, was not enough...

...By the end of the 19th century, other descendants of Leopold occupied the thrones of Belgium, Bulgaria, and Portugal...

...Belien establishes convincingly that the scandals, betrayals, and failures of the Saxe-Coburgs are not accidents of heredity but arise directly from the nature of the country created for and by Leopold I. Not only is Belgium not a nation, it is a country founded upon the rejection of nationality—indeed, the first multi-ethnic, multicultural polity...

...They created an entire corrupt political establishment that had a vested interest in the continuation of the Belgian state that was the source of their wealth and titles...

...Queen Elizabeth, who lived on for years as a dowager, went mad politically, switching effortlessly from Hitler to Stalin but always rejecting "the Americans" and capital-ism, always "progressive...

...Only when the tide definitely turned in July 1918 did Albert allow Belgian troops to take part in an Allied offensive—the first time they had done so in a war in which the Allies had come to Belgium's assistance...

...Under strong pressure, the Belgian 68 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 2005government took over the colony—not, however, before Leopold had destroyed all its accounts...

...Those who defended Belgium did so because it was their gravy train...

...Belien, however, who cites chapter and verse to show that Albert secretly sought a separate peace with the Germans on several occasions...

...How different, how very, very different, from the home life of his own dear daughter-in-law...

...As the history of Belgium since 1831 shows, however, it can do a great deal of damage in the course of failing...

...Belien documents in a depressing final chapter, is the most corrupt, highly taxed, economically inefficient, and constitutionally undemocratic country in Europe...

...And the attitude of Eurocrats to inconvenient referendum results—namely, keep voting until you get it right—belongs firmly to the Saxe-Coburg school of political science...

...As late as the 1980s, it was withheld from researchers because it might damage Belgium's reputation...

...necessary to keep enough Belgians loyal to the Saxe-Coburg family state...

...Dissatisfied with the relative modesty of his kingdom, he set out to build an empire by stealth...

...Patriots for Themselves J N THE LAST FEW YEARS Belgian politicians have passed a law empowering them to arrest anyone for crimes committed anywhere, threatened to put Israel's prime minister, Ariel Sharon, under its provisions, generously amended the legislation slightly when Donald Rumsfeld said that NATO would have to move from Brussels if it remained on the books, and in general thrown about the weight of a much larger nation...

...And Mr...

...But the scandals are worse...

...Leopold helped to put Albert next to a throne, if not on it, by his intrigues to match him with Victoria...

...And he seems to have been complicit in the plot to murder the Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba—less from concern for Belgium's vast assets in Africa than from priggish indignation at Lumumba's contradicting his encomium to Leopold publicly...

...Their marriage gave Leopold British nationality, the rank of Field-Marshal, a lifetime annual stipend of £50,000 ($6.25 million in today's money), and various grand houses in London and Europe...

...As the 20th century wore on, they increasingly sought covert political alliances with the socialist left and labor unions to create welfare arrangements that would corrupt entire communities rather than just individual politicians into their clients...

...Leopold started the trend...

...In writing his masterpiece describing the course of the greatest of all wars, and his own role in it, he knew very well that he was fighting for his place in history...

...In effect, the period of revision-ism did not begin until after his death, and by then many of the verdicts he sought to impose had already become part of the concrete and granite of historical teaching, exceedingly hard to undermine and replace...

...Leopold was king of a territory rather than a nation...

...As he came out of both episodes with great personal credit, to omit them must have cost him a pang...

...The diplomatic compromise eventually reached was to create a new country, Belgium...

...Today Saxe-Coburgs occupy two royal thrones in Britain and Belgium and one prime ministerial limousine in post-communist Bulgaria...

...Corruption in Brussels is both pervasive and glossed over...

...But Leopold and his successors did not want to reconcile Fleming and Walloon in a common culture since they might then make common cause against the family state...

...With the covert assistance of another high-placed mistress (this time the Russian Tsar's sister), he outmaneuvered other suitors to win Princess Charlotte, daughter of Britain's George IV...

...With the help of British ministers who hoped to offload thisfinancial liability onto some other polity, he contrived to be offered the Kingdom of Greece...

...He was the secret owner of two newspapers (one conservative, one liberal) whose editorial line followed his direct instructions...

...These remained top secret for many years, even after Churchill was dead...

...In place of a common reconciling patriot-ism, they invented a state ideology, "Belgicism," an early version of multiculturalism, which presents Belgium as the antidote to "selfish" or "racist" national-ism to uphold the Belgicist establishment...

...Paul Belien answers these questions in a consistently shocking book that begins with a shocking little historical curiosity...

...Leopold entrenched the diplomatic compromise by marrying the daughter of the French king...

...He presents them clearly and readably...

...They were happy...

...tinental U.S., gave it to a private commercial company controlled by himself, and set about making all of the natives there his slaves...

...All was set fair...

...That is the habit here...

...This reputation is seriously undermined by Mr...

...The Congolese were forced to labor for the Crown without pay...

...But kings are rarely convicted of small crimes...

...Exactly how did the home of moules-frites and child rape acquire notions of such undeserved grandeur...

...And even the would-be-saintly Baudoin at the age of 22 shared a sleeping compartment with his louche but glamorous stepmother, Liliane, then estranged from Leopold III, though more, it seems, from repressed family affection than for sex...

...Only Baudoin was a faithful husband to his fellow-Catholic mystic, Queen Fabiola—suggesting that a Prince Albert crops up about every 150 years in the family...

...Telling the other European powers that he wanted to end slavery in the Congo, he seized an area of central Africa equal to one-third of the conLeopold II achieved the remarkable feat of being even worse than his father...

...Belien lays out this bill of indictment very powerfully...

...Neither group was loyal to Belgium or to Leopold...

...By such methods Leopold halved the population of the Congolese Free State (CFS) over a period in which the value of a share in his company rose from Francs 500 to Francs 22,500...

...There is a wealth of hilarious anecdotes about the sex life of the male Saxe-Coburgs who BOOKS I N R E V I E W spend more time with call girls than with prime ministers (though Leopold II's tours of Parisian brothels were partly a cover for more sinister political dealings...

...Draconian taxes were imposed on them...

...and its closest allies react to this possibility...

...There were also suppressions...

...Being in opposition, and moving (all things considered) with all deliberate speed, Churchill published before, long before, the various generals, admirals, air marshals, and politicians who might have helped to shape the vision of history...

...So, after a brief career of social soldiering, first on Napoleon's side and then serving the Russian Tsar, Leopold set out to find "a suitable gel" in postwar London...

...Failure to pay led to such punishments as the lopping-off of hands, the rape of wives, the incarceration of children, and of course execution...

...Yet while indulging establishment politicians caught committing serious crimes, the courts have outlawed the largest political party in Flanders on spurious charges but in reality because, as everyone knows, it threatens the oligopolistic control of government by the Belgicist establishment...

...Albert I has enjoyed a rather better historical reputation than his two successors...

...He was a marital entrepreneur...

...It can't work...

...He fought hard, and took no prisoners, and on the whole he won the war of words too, as he had earlier won the war of deeds...

...His extraordinary folly in praising Leopold II to an audience of native Congolese provoked the long Congo crisis of the 1960s, in which thousands perished...

...One of these was Leopold...

...Then he had second thoughts—Greece was far away and unstable—and turned it down...

...Between them they made his rule an inter-national scandal...

...But he was forced to abdicate in 1950 in favor of his son...

...And, as he once truly remarked (May 1938), "Words are the only things that last for ever...

...Stalin wrote no memoirs, thinking official Soviet history would do instead...

...It has since provided the evidence of Leopold's extraordinary cruel-ties for Mr...

...They invented a whole series of undemocratic institutions—notably a "Social Partnership" of corporations and labor unions—that overrode democratic parliamentary governments whenever they threatened these economic, constitutional, or political arrangements...

...Not a bad record for a penniless princeling from a small German province...

...Belien tells the story of this slimy dynasty with great gusto...

...Readers must judge for themselves by studying the chapters that Reynolds provides for each volume...

...This marriage, contracted before his second (and abandoned) wife's suicide, was probably bigamous...

...Then he suffered one of the few blows in a charmed life...

...Only one piece of documentation survived: an official report into the CFS that had been quietly shelved by the Belgian government...

...Many of these constitutional features already exist in the European Union, albeit in embryonic form...

...There was a bonus too—Leopold liked Charlotte...

...Morel and Casement were even better at PR than Leopold...

...It was divided between French-speakers in the south and Flemish-speakers in the north...

...After the war, he returned and risked civil war by trying to keep his throne...

...He is remembered as the brave king who led gallant little Belgium in its resistance to the Kaiser in 1914...

...And his tale has a moral for the wider world...

...J S THE WORK, THEN, TRUE HISTORY...

...Leading Belgian politicians, mostly in the socialist party, have been slapped lightly on the wrist after pleading guilty to serious charges of corruption...

...This personal empire recognized no limits in its ruthless exploitation of people and resources...

...A Throne in Brussels: Britain, the Saxe-Coburgs and the Belgianization of Europe by Paul Belien (IMPRINT ACADEMIC, 384 PAGES, $49) Reviewed by John O'Sullivan B O O K S I N R E V I E W practiced roue who, while in the service of Napoleon, serviced the Empress Josephine (and her daughter) among others, writing home with happy surprise to his sister: "Here if you ask a lady to be seated, she goes to bed...

...But in a sense the question is irrelevant, since the message of the work, and many of its details, have passed into the public historical memory, at least in the English-speaking world, and probably much wider...

...Charlotte died giving birth to a still-born child...

...and to guarantee its borders by an international treaty...

...So they had to keep them divided and inside Belgium by whatever discreditable means were necessary...

...He writes from a certain perspective—that of a moderate Flemish nationalist...

...He wanted to own a country too—thus outranking his brother, Duke Ernst, as well as cuckolding him...

...And how should the U.S...

...Leopold was briefly sad but permanently rich...

...At times he overstates that case by always seeing mitigating circumstances whenever Flemish nationalists behave wrongly or foolishly as when they sought the Kaiser's support for their cause late in the war...

...Despite their temperamental differences the father did right by Albert—and by his other bastards, and even by his legitimate children too...

...He collaborated with the Occupation, seeking Hitler's guarantee for the continuation of the Saxe-Coburg dynasty, living a pleasant life under German protection, and occasionally asking the Nazis to make it seem that he was acting under duress...

...There were, as he shows, many exaggerations (e.g., on the air victory of 15 September 1940, which Churchill presents as the climax of the Battle of Britain, and is a rhetorical passage of great power: he gives the German air losses on this day as 183, whereas they were actually, as the German records show, only 56...

...B O O K S I N R E V I E W Rule," which meant half a century had to elapse be-fore the public could ask to see a particular document...

...How did Leopold do it...

...The female Saxe-Coburgs retaliated by dying prematurely or going mad in different ways...

...He made the Catholic Church into a virtual agent of his monarchy by affecting to be its protector...

...Belien puts it, "Some loved France, some loved the Netherlands, others loved their local Flemish or Walloon communities, but no one loved Belgium...

...Dissatisfied with the relative modesty of his kingdom, he set out to build an empire by stealth...

...It is hard to say how widely the work is still read, half a century after it was published, though as there are still millions of volumes of it on the shelves of public and private collections, one must assume it is still dipped into...

...Prince Albert is known to history as the man who achieved a perfect family life with Queen Victoria, brought a German seriousness to the court at Windsor, and all but invented British respectability...

...That treaty ultimately dragged Britain into the First World War and thus ensured its genocidal longevity...

...Yet his biological father, Leopold, was a hn )'Su van is editor at large of National Review and a columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times...

...For these anecdotes are dotted throughout a serious political history of the country...

...It reveals that Prince Albert, the consort of Queen Victoria, is now thought to be the illegitimate son of his supposed uncle, Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, later King of the Belgians...

...to give it to Leopold...

...S Aso OFTEN, THOUGH, there was a drawback...