Vermont is not all that controversial. Is it? No. It’s just this rather pleasant New England state with the odd distinction of being among the most Democratic in the United States and the most heavily armed. But precisely because it does not arouse strong passions, it’s interesting to reflect on its admission to the Union on February 18 of 1791.

Interestingly, that decision was controversial, because Vermont was on land ceded by the French after the Seven Years’ War and at one point New York, Massachusetts and New Hampshire all claimed some of it. By 1770 it was basically New York versus the local staid pious New England rowdies, especially Ethan Allan and his "Green Mountain Boys" who were frankly rather scary vigilantes against New York authority.

Until, of course, the British decided to suppress liberty in their colonies at which point everybody decided to forget their old quarrels and go get George III even though Ethan Allan continued to contest New York’s authority. So here’s the interesting thing.

In the general uprising against British authority, a group of Vermonters gathered in convention declared themselves a sovereign state in 1777. Then they named themselves Vermont, and adopted the first constitution in North America to ban adult slavery. (Eighty-one years later, in 1858, Vermont banned slavery altogether.)

For fourteen years people tried to avoid the awkward topic of whether there was or was not a "Vermont" even though it issued its own money, had a postal service and elected governors. And Congress could not act without New York’s consent under Article IV, Section 3 of the constitution. Finally New York threw in the towel and, after successful negotiations over where exactly the border lay and what compensation was due to New Yorkers whose land titles had been ignored in Vermont, Vermont became the 14^th state and (duh) the first new one after the original 13.

What’s interesting here is that Vermont’s claim to statehood rested on two key points. First, the people who then lived there wanted it. And second, they had successfully acted as a state in fact. In short, people bowed to reality.

I’m not saying might makes right. The origins of many nations and subnational jurisdictions give serious pause on grounds of legitimacy, especially in a world that no longer recognises the "Doctrine of Discovery" of places that already had people in them, and is distinctly uneasy with the "Doctrine of Conquest". But the simple fact is that as far back as you can find anything resembling reliable records, land is in possession of those who took it from others including the aboriginals who were in Vermont when Europeans showed up. And sometimes de facto is the best basis you can find for de jure, that is, you agree that Vermont should be accepted as existing essentially because it does exist.

We still hope for perfect justice. We cannot do less. But at times we admit that things are what they are and we must make the best of them.

I do not think a great many people, even in New York, go about today saying Vermont is a fraud and an imposition. But precisely because it does not arouse strong passions, it’s a good test case of our willingness to defy, or accept, what actually does exist in favour of what we wish existed or feel might perhaps have existed under other circumstances.

On this date in 364 AD, February 17, Jovian was found dead in his tent. And if your reaction was a rudely pointed "Who?", well, you have a point. Actually he was a Roman Emperor and an illustration of the vanity of much worldly ambition.

He only reigned for eight months, following Julian the Apostate’s sudden death during his bungled campaign against the Persians. He was foisted on the empire by soldiers, possibly in a case of mistaken identity. And though he was found dead in suspicious circumstances, nobody much cared to investigate them.

On the plus side, he did restore Christianity after Julian’s rather pathetic efforts to restore worship of the Olympian deities. And he did proclaim freedom of conscience while, um, forbidding magical rites and imposing the death penalty for those who worshipped ye olde Gods like Jupiter. Oh, and he had the Library of Antioch burned down because Julian had filled it with pagan books. Which actually annoyed his Christian as well as non-Christian subjects.

He then continued Julian’s retreat from the far east and signed a humiliating treaty with the Sassinids surrendering five Roman provinces. After which he made a bee-line for Constantinople to bolster his political position somehow. Except it ended up a bee-line to the cemetery.

To rub it all in, his successor Valentinian I did such a good job that he was nicknamed "the Great". Whereas Jovian was nicknamed "Who dat" or some such.

Another person who would have been better off staying on his farm. As would his nation.

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In what seems truly a bygone era, Fidel Castro seized power in Cuba on February 16 of 1959. Yes, 58 years ago. And a Castro is still in power in this ghastly real-life Autumn of the Patriarch.

I could say a lot of things about Fidel Castro without getting to anything nice. Like how revealing it is that he would have switched jobs repeatedly while still being the guy you got shot for disobeying. And how typical it is of a regime that for all its yapping about true democracy had no legitimacy that it became dynastic like North Korea. (Mind you his own daughter, from one of his many infidelities, fled the island prison in disguise in 1993 and his own sister opposed him from American exile.) But never mind him.

What I want to do on this dismal anniversary is insult all the leftists who placed such high hopes on him to begin with and then somehow insisted despite everything that he really was a good man and a liberator. Anybody can make a mistake. Even the New York Times in originally hailing him as "the Robin Hood of the Caribbean". But to persist in one, to speak of democracy and human rights and peace in a sanctimonious tone while siding with this seedy brutal villain and denying repeatedly that he was a Communist, or in case he was denying that it mattered if he was one, surely indicates grave defects in judgement.

Especially as it is a habit of the left, from Stalin through Castro to Mugabe and beyond; as Jay Nordlinger memorably put it in National Review back in 1994, "Like an adolescent girl on holiday, the radical Left is always falling in love with some unsuitable foreigner..."

To do it and learn nothing is to double down on nasty folly. Why have so many done it, and not just on the radical left, including our own Prime Minister Justin Trudeau?

For that matter, why are there still Che T-shirts?

"The question is no longer as Dostoevsky put it: 'Can civilized men believe?' Rather: 'Can unbelieving men be civilized?'" Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic

It is hard to believe that, as late as Edward Coke’s time, it was credible in England to assert that the monarchy was originally founded by Brutus of Troy. (Not et tu Brutus. Another guy.) And yet in Japan it was believed well into the 20^th century that their monarchy was founded in the 7th century BC, specifically on February 11 of 660 BC, by Jimmu, a descendant of the sun goddess Amaterasu. Also of the storm god Susanoo, by the way. I mean, why stop at one?

Now it may well be that the Emperorship was in some way established by a guy named Jimmu or something of the sort in or around 660 B.C. Possibly he set up shop in Yamato on February 11, now celebrated as "National Foundation Day" in Japan. After all, there was a historical figure at the centre of the Arthurian legend, a leader of the Romanized Britons after the legions left, despite later embellishments ranging from the inspiring to the downright silly. And Jimmu too may well have been a real person, or modeled on one.

Brutus of Troy? Not so much. I mean, maybe there was a Trojan called Brutus and maybe he even was descended from Aeneas. But however he got into a 9th century Historia Britonum it was not by ship west from Troy, out through the Pillars of Hercules and then north to glory. Nor was "Britain" named for "Brutus". (Nor, I submit, did Aeneas flee to Italy after the sack of Troy and have a son Ascanius who founded Alba Longa. Nor was Brutus descended from Noah’s son Ham. And so on.)

Perhaps you think it childish of me to make sport of these legends. But I do so in order to draw attention to a crucial difference between the governments, constitutions and political cultures of England and Japan. And I do it while acknowledging that the government of Japan seems in many ways to have enjoyed a more organic and harmonious relationship to its citizens than elsewhere.

The thing is, even if people believed the more fanciful tales about Brutus, and gave them some minor weight in legitimizing monarchy in Britain in principle, nobody ever sought to bolster their claim to kingship, or for sweeping powers for the king, by pointing to Brutus. English kings, going back long before Canute, established their claim to the throne by governing well. And governing tyrannically was never justified by the origins of the monarchy even if people sometimes got away with it for a while. At bottom, Brutus was just a piece of colourful embroidery.

Jimmu was not. Or rather, Amaterasu was not. The Japanese Emperor really did claim divinity, via Amaterasu’s grandson Ninigi, supposedly Jimmu’s great grandfather, and a whole lot of his people believed it. Not all, of course. But those who did not kept their mouths shut or someone shut them permanently for them. And because the Emperor was a living god, to the point that when after defeat in 1945 they actually saw the rather unimpressive figure of Hirohito in his ill-fitting suits (because tailors were not permitted to touch a living god even to measure him) and heard his all-too-human voice they were profoundly shocked.

It sounds as silly as Brutus of Troy. But this claim, which incidentally could not be made in a Christian society, made genuine self-government impossible. Canute rebuked courtiers for telling him he was such a favourite of God that he could command the waves. Japanese Emperors would have rebuked and possibly executed courtiers for telling him he was not himself a God. And it matters.

It’s no accident that a regime headed by a living god could launch World War II even though it was neither morally justified nor practically sensible. Who’s going to tell a divinity he’s a belligerent nitwit?

Sometimes things are just too easy to ridicule. Like Poland's "Wedding to the Sea" on February 10, 1920. It was so popular there that they had another one in 1945 under the Communists. In fact quite a few. But we should not let Communism, or cynicism, spoil things for us. And in fact the 1920 ceremony, though absurd, is also touching.

The reason it happened, or at least the occasion, was that following World War I Poland had regained access to the Baltic Sea, lost more than a century earlier in 1793 when its neighbours had partitioned it again but not for the last time. Including in the 20^th century when Hitler and Stalin did it in 1939. Poland is in a bad neighbourhood and quite frankly has deserved better of history than it has usually received.

It was partly dismembered in 1772 by Prussia and Russia. They did it again in 1793 at which point Poland lost access to the sea, and then in 1795 they and Austria did it and Poland lost access to Poland, vanishing from the map.

It was briefly sort of resurrected by Napoleon, as the Duchy of Warsaw, after which Russia created a Kingdom of Poland from which it later removed another chunk including Warsaw itself which you’d think was sort of clearly Polish. And after crushing a Polish uprising in 1831 the Russians decided to teach their ungrateful slaves a lesson and recrushed them. Ditto after the 1863 uprising when they tried to replace Polish with Russian.

Things were better in the Austrian bit. But not, you’ll be unsurprised to hear, the Prussian one. Anyway, the upshot of all of this is that after Russia, Germany and Austria-Hungary all managed to lose World War I, Poland reappeared thanks to the Treaty of Versailles. Russia attacked again, of all things. But lost.

Back to our wedding.

In October 1919 General Jozef Haller was given the task of peacefully reoccuping formerly German formerly Polish Pomerelia, which has Gdansk in it. As the Germans mostly yielded it peacefully, with a bit of sabotage, the 16th Infantry Division under Haller reached the Baltic Sea. And at Puck, which has nothing to do with hockey or A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Haller conjured up a rather touching if theatrical ceremony with a sermon, raising of the Polish Navy flag to a 21 gun salute, and after local fishermen cut a hole in the ice Haller threw in a platinum ring and said "In the name of the Holy Republic of Poland, I, General Jozef Haller, am taking control of this ancient Slavic Baltic Sea shore".

A commemorative post was erected and, predictably, destroyed by the Nazis 19 years later. But a replica now stands in the Port of Puck next to Haller’s bust.

Obviously the great pride and relief Poles took in getting their nation back was short-lived as they got brutally rumbled by their neighbours again and then subjected to hideous Nazi and Stalinist tyranny. And it took some gall for the Stalinists to pose as liberators in 1945 right down to permitting new versions of the ceremony. But there are still reenactments to this day.

OK, so it’s not exactly canonical. But despite the superficial absurdity, when I think of all that Poland has endured, I find it endearing, even moving.

Happy anniversary.

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