Sweden appears to have a full-fledged pirate movement. In addition to The Pirate Bay it also has a Pirate Office and a Pirate Party. The latter are considering entering Swedish politics by taking part in this year’s elections for the Swedish Riksdag and may very well obtain a seat.

The pirate movement started in the summer of 2003 with the establishment of the Pirate Office (Piratbyrån). Its name refers to the Svenska Antipiratbyrån, the lobbying group which was set up by media companies to investigate breaches of copyright and take these to court. The Pirate Office believes that there should be no obstructions to the copying of information and culture, and wants to start a public debate on the issue. In November 2003 the group Bittorent-tracker established The Pirate Bay, which has continued independently since October 2004.

If all goes well, next Wednesday, 28 June, the Cortes Generales, the Spanish Parliament, will “liberate” four species of apes: chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas and orang-utans. Michele Stumpe, an American attorney who is the president of Great Ape Project, International, is overjoyed. She sent us the following comment:

In today’s Belgian newspaper Gazet van Antwerpen Bob Van de Voorde, the spokesman of Frank Vandenbroucke, the minister of Education, says:

“One of the conditions [for homeschooling] is that the homeschoolers must sign a document in which they promise to rear their children along the lines of the UN Convention on Children’s Rights. These parents have not done this. This is why the ministry has started an inquiry.”

The parents Mr Van de Voorde is referring to in the paper are my husband (TBJ editor Paul Belien) and myself. The “inquiry” is a threat to prosecute us.

The left-wing Slovakian Social-Democrat Smer (Direction) party of Robert Fico won last Saturday’s general election in Slovakia. Voters rejected the government of Mikulas Dzurinda, the longest serving Prime Minister in the region, who has turned the Slovakian economy into one of the most successful in Central Europe.

The election has left conservative and libertarian Slovaks with a hangover. Smer is just short of a parliamentary majority. It won almost 29.1% of the vote compared with 18.4% for Dzurinda’s Slovak Democrat and Christian Movement. The four other parties that won enough votes to enter Parliament were the Ethnic Hungarian Coalition Party and its antithesis, the (anti-Hungarian) Slovak National Party, which both won 11.7%; The Movement for a Democratic Slovakia of the authoritarian former Prime Minister Vladimir Meciar, which took 8.8%; and the Christian Democrats, with 8.3%.

Yesterday my husband Paul Belien, the editor of this website, was summoned to the police station and interrogated. He was told that the Belgian authorities are of the opinion that, as a homeschooler, he has not adequately educated his children and, hence, is neglecting his duty as a parent, which is a criminal offence. The Ministry of Education has asked the judiciary to press charges and the judiciary told the police to investigate and take down his statement.

In his 1977 standard work Nations and States, Hugh Seton-Watson defined a state as a “legal and political organisation with the power to require obedience and loyalty from its citizens.” The word nation proved more difficult to define. Seton-Watson, its most eminent student, conceded that he was “unable to provide a definition which both covers all nations and excludes all communities that are not nations.” He proposed the following definition: “A community of people, whose members are bound together by a sense of solidarity, a common culture, a national consciousness.” This is, as Seton-Watson acknowledged, not a “scientific definition.” He added: “All that I can find to say is that a nation exists when a significant number of people in a community consider themselves to form a nation, or behave as if they formed one. It is not necessary that the whole of the population should so feel, or so behave, and it is not possible to lay down dogmatically a minimum percentage of a population which must be so affected. When a significant group holds this belief, it possesses ‘national consciousness.’”

According to the Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza over 2 million Poles may have emigrated to find work in Western Europe since Poland joined the EU on May 1st, 2004. In July 2004 the Polish population was estimated to be 38.6 million. British demographers, such as Prof. David Coleman of Oxford University, say that the Poles are arriving in Britain in historic record numbers. “From one country in a very short space of time, it must be the largest influx we have ever seen,” Coleman says. Professor John Salt of University College London calls the phenomenon “unprecedented.”

Since the beginning of “Iraq,” this writer had been expressing his muted critique regarding that project. Just in case that you think that this is a retroactive analysis followed by a verbal flight from a difficult situation: it is not. Entering Iraq under the then prevailing assumptions, overthrowing Saddam Hussein and then giving the locals a chance to control their lives, is not questioned. Doubts concerning US policy arose after Baghdad fell. Not wanting to chime in with the quire condemning the US for liquidating a dictatorship that intended to harm it, the appraisal had to be restrained. Basically it asserted that the aid to, and the presence in Iraq, should not be more extensive than what the locals’ behavior warranted.

The Dutch authorities fear that “Submission 2,” Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s soon to be released new movie, might make the Netherlands a target of angry Muslims worldwide. The movie criticizes Muslims for their intolerance of gays. In a report published last Wednesday the country’s National Anti-Terrorism Coordinator (Nationaal Coördinator Terrorismebestrijding, NCTb) warns that one must seriously take into account the possibility of an international Muslim boycott of the Netherlands, similar to the boycott of Denmark by the Islamic world earlier this year over the Muhammad cartoons.

Last Wednesday a scandal erupted in Estonia. Hans Glaubitz, the Dutch ambassador to Estonia, will leave the country early. The ambassador, who is gay, says that his husband (gays are allowed to marry in the Netherlands), a dark-skinned Cuban, has been harassed over his sexuality and race.