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> The Crown also likely hold ultimate title ...

Some Americans think they don't have to pay income tax because the 16th Amendment (1913) was never properly ratified. Some people think they own a star because they have a certificate that says so. You'll see this kind of analysis in all sort of "secret knowledge" conspiracy-theory-eqsue posts like this. It turns out these hundred-year-old (or much more) technicalities pretty much always handily lose to the modern reality of whatever the people alive today want. Nobody gives a shit if Pope Pius V signed a proclamation in 1571 that gives half of Finland to the Knights Templar, and a group today still claims to be the same Knights Templar, or whatever weird shadow cabals always creep into these discussions. If these "Knights Templar" went to claim Helsinki with that justification, they'd be told to get fucked, and they could do nothing about it. If "The Crown" decided to exercise their rights to this "ultimate title" they hold over all of Australia or whatever, they'd be told to get fucked just the same.

Get the Aussies to tell them to get fucked thinking they own it then. Funny how this doesn’t ever happen.

If they have no need to why would they?

What I’m kind of getting at is that they have no need, because the only people who could tell them to get fucked act in the name of The Crown.

If Australia becomes a republic and its own place then maybe, but I can’t see it happening.

Great comment, I think this illustrates a deeper issue- about people misunderstanding what power is and how it works.

Power is a dynamic social thing that involves your ability to influence others behavior. Organizations, laws, governments, titles, positions, even money have no inherent power associated with them, and often reflect vestigial/historical power structures rather than the actual power structures at the present moment.

> If "The Crown" decided to exercise their rights to this "ultimate title" they hold over all of Australia or whatever, they'd be told to get fucked just the same.

Sounds to me The Crown holds an NFT to Australia.

I agree that in most cases things like this is a subject of conspiracy-theory-eqsue speculations. However, while rarely, things happen which make you think that under some circumstances even some fantastic scenarios realize. For instance, most people thought that Australian general-governor is purely decorative position until in 1975 it turned out that its latent power can be seized.

The Duchy of Cornwall and the Duchy of Lancaster are not really land ownership. The Prince of Wales and the Monarch respectively receive the income, which is not nothing, but the land and commercial estates are held in trust, afair.

Yeah but kind of the same thing innit, although the Crown is probably several steps removed higher up the chain. Those Duchys the controller of the trust is certainly the beneficial owner ie The Prince of Wales. God only knows who runs and controls the trusts behind the crown, they’re as good as invisible.

In cases where they technically own this land in foreign countries- if they tried to exercise any property rights at all the "ownership" would immediately be revoked.

Nevertheless they don’t, because they simply don’t have to. You’d be dealing with a power of such age and with such overwhelmingly strong and sticky ideological tentacles that it can’t be undone. But yeah if parts of it, such as islands in the Caribbean, want to become independent and republics they play along, but deals are still done and control still wielded.

Do they have any power, and if so how? Just because they are complicated and ancient, doesn't mean they wield any power in modern times. I don't really know much about the crown but in my impression the only "power" they've had for a long time was that of well loved celebrities, and even that seems to have evaporated in recent times.

It somewhat seems to me that at some point the power and wealth of the Crown was transferred to various private companies, some of which are still quite wealthy but no longer associated with the Crown.

Control of the judiciary and their training is a big one. How do you overturn the ideology of justice and power itself? It can’t really be done, because everyone in the system has sworn allegiance not to do so, and they apply cognitive dissonance to the very idea that the root of their authority can be undone. What I’m getting at is that it’s a power so old and embedded in the very fabric of the land it controls that it almost controls thought itself, controls the language and the meaning of language (legalese), prints the money and legitimises its use, allows concepts to become statutes or not. It’s like a web of embedded ideas concerning power and control in the areas where it operates - that’s what The Crown is, essentially, and it uses confusion and divide & rule tactics to hide in plain sight. What I’m saying sounds almost absurd but it’s kind of how it is. You’re dealing with the very idea that a whole territory can be “owned” by writing on dead paper, and everyone embedded in the system agreeing that’s how things are. In the case of Australia, these rules on dead paper were enforced over the living, non-contracting people already there. But the dead paper is backed with guns and extreme force, and makes for a neater world once it’s running.

Brit-ish means “men of the covenant/contract” in Hebrew - the covenant with God to go and conquer the world in His name and enforce it with the same kind of dead-paper laws as found in His book. This trumps living people just “on” the land. And as for the sea…

For example, if you think the Crown still wields real power in Australia, could they today go to some remote Aboriginal community they supposedly "own," and tell those people to clear out so they can build a big resort, and pocket the profits?

If they tried that there would be massive outrage, and immediate action to leave the Commonwealth.

Yet relatively small construction firms pull this sort of thing successfully everyday, all around the world. It would seem to me, those ordinary construction firms each have more real power than the Crown.

Neom in Saudi Arabia is also an example where this was actually done in modern times, showing that The House of Saud wields massive power.

Your assertion seems to be that the Crown is so powerful that they don't need to actually do anything? That sounds like insisting I'm the strongest man in the world, and am so strong I don't need to lift anything. Power is fleeting, and rapidly evaporates when it isn't wielded.

It’s not really the style any more to go and bash up aboriginal communities, but it was what was done originally over the whole continent, ie what legitimises Gina owning that giant swathe of land, which was certainly aboriginal territory? The Crown. Call it The State if you like, but as I mentioned, it’s an entity that looks like The State, but in reality is much more nebulous and complex like that. See even the Wikipedia article:

“Legal scholars Maurice Sunkin and Sebastian Payne opined, "the nature of the crown has been taken for granted, in part because it is fundamental and, in part, because many academics have no idea what the term the crown amounts to".[4] Nicholas Browne-Wilkinson theorised that the crown is "an amorphous, abstract concept" and, thus, "impossible to define",[5] while William Wade stated the crown "means simply the Queen".

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crown

These scholars find it impossible to define because it’s the sort of entity that has set itself up to be impossible to define, even to the best scholars, and everyone invested in the legal system with the ability to try and define it still cannot define it, because to do so would be to talk “externally” to the very system of language and being in which they’re embedded and allowed to comment upon. But in reality, The Crown is much much more akin to a private corporation with private beneficial owners and controllers than it is to a government or state, it’s just now constructed where it looks like the state and can’t actually properly be defined to delineate it from the powers it has and wields through the state.

I’m really not trying to spread confusion or conspiracy, or talk shit, but you almost hit the nail on the head saying “I’m the strongest man in the world, and am so strong I don’t even need to list anything” because that’s basically correct as to the level of power and strength you’re dealing with.

I appreciate that you are discussing this in good faith, and you know a lot about the complexity of the Crown that I don't, but I just don't see it. It seems to me that those examples you are giving are historical examples of power that is now held by a bunch of separate people and organizations with no modern day connections to one another or to the current Crown.

Edit: e.g. for example, what does Gina Rinehart have to do with the Square Mile in London today?

It’s extremely complicated to type out, and it’s late here in the UK. But I’m not saying all this just to blow hot air, it just runs deep.

Quickly though, Gina owns the land because the financial system she uses to get title from the legal system are one and the same. The legal system was implemented in Australia based on that run from London - barristers today still get their authority from the Inns of Court based in the city. So the legal system passes acts on paper saying “this is how you own things” and the state / the crown claimed dominion over the whole continent of Australia, ignoring and negating that there were already people there - the aboriginals were simply outside the system, and also didn’t have guns. So The Crown acts as the legitimising power of the legal system, the financial system, the military, basically the root of everything, that says “if it says on paper that you own it, you own it, and we’ll enforce it and ensure you own it (provided you pay us and we get a cut)” but the very idea that paper title means ownership was a system imposed, and one in this case formed in The City, so the whole system of The Crown is like a web that covers almost everything and one bit of it can’t actually be separated from any other any more. The Crown not only has land claims, it’s the force that legitimises land claims, and although now Australia is a federation that passes its own laws and has its own government, that new state is just so entangled with the old system of doing business that tracking back “all roads lead to Rome” in this case being London. The City of London is part of the corporation that is The Crown, because it itself is a corporation that goes back to time immemorial - before records - and the main mechanism for it doing business and maintaining order is both military power and legislation on paper. So when we talk about The Crown we’re pointing at a system that is a step above even ownership, it’s the system that legitimises and frames the very concept of ownership and then grants the force of law for that ownership to be enforced.

Like I say, it’s too complicated to really type out with my thumbs on my smartphone. It’s deep though, as deep and as baroque as it gets.

That makes sense, but you and the rest of the people here are talking past each other. You are talking about a social phenomenon with historical roots that affects how power is still distributed today, e.g. like institutional racism or colonialism. Everyone else here thinks you were talking about a small group of specific individuals, e.g. a royal family that definitely doesn't include people like Gina.

> You’d be dealing with a power of such age and with such overwhelmingly strong and sticky ideological tentacles that it can’t be undone.

I always find silly the amount of ritual and ceremony around Kings, Popes, heads of state, and the like. It's so clearly this big theatrical production to try to convince everyone that these people aren't just frail, mediocre little humans whose backs hurt and whose farts stink. The vast majority of any "power" they have comes from people believing that they have that power, and the theatrics serve that purpose very well -- look at how deeply they've convinced you, for instance. They don't want to be hidden! If some small remnant of these formerly-powerful groups do take to the shadows, their power goes away, because nobody believes that they have it anymore. It'd be like talking about a secret group of celebrities -- it's an oxymoron.

Power does not grow as it ages. Old power is just diluted remnants of wistful theatrics that occasionally shits its pants.

Yeah but that’s what I’m also getting at. It’s the kind of ritualised control that’s done in a very baroque way and in total plain sight, but nevertheless slips under the radar or virtually everybody, or the confusion around it leads to even articles like the one posted thinking that “King Charles” owns those lands, when in reality it’s a corporation he’s the frontman for, same as he’s the frontman for the British state. Being the frontman for one isn’t identical with being the frontman for the other, yet hardly anyone even notices, including the author of the article.

What I’m saying isn’t even controversial, it’s simple to look up. I’m not some “believer” in a conspiracy. It’s just that how an entity such as “The Crown” wields its power is done in a way that confuses almost everyone, because it’s not really an entity like any other, being some hybrid of government, corporation, trust, club, society, and one whose members all do other things and are embedded in other roles in the state, so it’s both clear and in plain sight while actually being totally weird and hidden. Just go to the Square Mile in London - you’re in London and not, both at the same time, and there’s no passport control, but it’s nevertheless some kind of alternate domain that’s privately, not state, controlled at its fundamental level. It’s not woo woo, it’s just how it operates, and has been doing for about 1000 years.

See also the Dutch East India Company - a private company / entity that acted as if it was a state, because it had the backing of the Dutch state, and why not, it may as well be the state given it’s on the other side of the earth and there’s nobody to stop it acting like one.

It's somewhat baffling to me that this comment is still here and hasn't been flagged to death. Does someone have a citation for the claims made here, or are they as tinfoil hat as they sound?

I can't find anything like this except for on Conspiracy Wiki, which is... not a great source. Every legitimate source I can find describes "crown land" in the non-UK Commonwealth as effectively just being the Commonwealth version of federal land in the US.

(Edit: to clarify, they've mixed in some legitimate truths about some quirky historical artifacts to do with the City of London. I'm objecting to the whole shadowy conspiracy allegations—unless there are some solid citations it doesn't feel appropriate for HN.)

Because it’s not a conspiracy, it’s done in plain sight you’ve just never looked it up. Not everything that is deeply hidden ideologically involves tinfoil-hattery.

I've been looking for the last 20 minutes and have found no evidence outside of Conspiracy Wiki.

You have some legitimate truths about the City of London mixed in with a bunch of things that I can find no sources for. I'm not going to engage further with you without sources, I just wanted to flag this (both literally and figuratively) to try to restore some sanity to this discussion.

https://youtube.com/shorts/ngmw4HHdWm0?feature=share Here’s a meme-level bit of it.

You might not be looking in the right places.

That falls in the category of "legitimate truths about the City of London" which you've mingled with blatant conspiracy theories. I want a source for the conspiracy, not for the quirky, vestigial rituals.

Ok I take it all back. It’s just fancy hats and old rituals that are done for fun and don’t mean anything. The Crown just means The Head of State, it’s all just a conspiracy same as the rest.

> It’s like a bit of a cabal that uses smoke and mirrors to hide the nature of its ownership of whole swathes of the Earth, while pretending to act in the name and interests of the British/Soverign.

I want to read a Dan Brown-style thriller about them

“The Business” by Iain Banks kind of runs with a similar line even though it’s not The Crown per se, more like an old European money power/family, but it would be the thriller you’re looking for.

The Guardian (UK) has published excellent articles about the square mile.