
The Air Force of the Knights Hospitaller - apsec112
https://twitter.com/garius/status/1151832864494903296
======
aasasd
I made me a script to load country data from Wikidata. And what do I see in
the output? Weird numbers linked to the Sovereign Military Order of Malta. It
has zero land, two citizens but 13500 order members, 80000 volunteers, 42000
employees. And it has diplomatic relations with 108 countries—which, according
to analysis by experts in whatever field this is, exhibit the signs that the
order is indeed a de-facto recognized sovereign entity even though this
recognition is not so firm as that of a full-blown state.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_Military_Order_of_Ma...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_Military_Order_of_Malta)

BTW, if we consider just the members and volunteers, the order would rank
twelfth least-populous country, between Andorra and Antigua-and-Barbuda. And
its population would be almost 1/5th that of the current population of Malta.

~~~
idoh
The citizens thing is really weird. On investigation, the cap is three max, so
one slot remains.

~~~
jessaustin
They don't like to max this out; in that case they'd have to set up a three-
way duel to the death whenever a higher-status person wanted to join.

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jabv
My friend's dad is a Knight of Malta. I think he helps to build hospitals and
assists with pilgrimages to Lourdes.

There is some recent controversy surrounding Malta in the Catholic world. To
dive into that rabbit hole: [https://rorate-caeli.blogspot.com/2017/01/a-note-
on-sovereig...](https://rorate-caeli.blogspot.com/2017/01/a-note-on-
sovereignity-of-order-of.html)

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mothsonasloth
Here is a wiki link -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_Military_Order_of_Ma...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_Military_Order_of_Malta#Air_force)

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mrandish
This was a fun read. That old-timey secret orders of knights actually still
exist is awesome. I'd totally want to be in such a secret cabal, except for
the whole believing in religion aspect...

~~~
Hoasi
> except for the whole believing in religion aspect...

I suspect this is not mandatory as long as the protocol is respected.

~~~
subpixel
A lot of secular-minded people stay in religious organizations and communities
for the perks. That said, I don't think groups like the Knights of Malta are
recruiting.

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freeflight
I never realized there is so much interesting history behind the "Knights
Hospitaller" which is kinda funny considering I've donated to a German branch
of them in the past [0].

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johanniter-Unfall-
Hilfe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johanniter-Unfall-Hilfe)

~~~
Tomte
The Johanniter are not really a branch, they are a protestant offshoot. Also,
they are really young, founded in 1952.

There is also the Malteser in Germany, and that's the real branch.

~~~
HarryHirsch
You are mixing up Johanniter-Unfallhilfe and Johanniterorden. The Catholic
counterpart to the _Unfallhilfe_ is the Malteser-Hilfsdienst, founded in 1953.
The St John's branch of the Order was established 1538.

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quickthrower2
I’m adding them to my country select option list. Ill assume Malta time zone.

~~~
aasasd
Import your country list from Wikidata, and you'll get the Sovereign Military
Order of Malta with all the rest.

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Yizahi
Malta history is very entertaining. Much more than its almost nonexistent
beaches :) . I was astonished when I discovered that they defended the island
for several months with basically 3 biplanes. And whole siege is insane (same
as Ottoman and French previously).
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Malta_(World_War_II)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Malta_\(World_War_II\))
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gloster_Gladiator#Malta](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gloster_Gladiator#Malta)

~~~
msla
The Maltese language is interesting: It's fundamentally a variety of Arabic
with a lot of Romance language influence.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maltese_language](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maltese_language)

> Although the original vocabulary of the language was Siculo-Arabic, it has
> incorporated a large number of borrowings from Romance sources of influence
> (Sicilian, Italian, and French), and more recently Germanic ones (from
> English).[45]

> The historical source of modern Maltese vocabulary is 52% Italian/Sicilian,
> 32% Siculo-Arabic, and 6% English, with some of the remainder being
> French.[10][46] Today, most function words are Semitic. In this way, it is
> similar to English, which is a Germanic language that had large influence
> from Norman French. As a result of this, Romance language-speakers may
> easily be able to comprehend conceptual ideas expressed in Maltese, such as
> "Ġeografikament, l-Ewropa hi parti tas-superkontinent ta' l-Ewrasja"
> (Geographically, Europe is part of the Supercontinent of Eurasia), while not
> understanding a single word of a functional sentence such as "Ir-raġel
> qiegħed fid-dar" (The man is in the house), which would be easily understood
> by any Arabic speaker.

~~~
Cyph0n
I also heard that modern Maltese is closest to Tunisian Arabic, which is
interesting to a Tunisian like myself.

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emmelaich
Folks might be interested in a previous HN article

"The Last True Knight of Malta" from the BBC

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18568638](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18568638)

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iandanforth
This is fantastic. What do I have to do to get a Knights Hospitaller passport?

~~~
michaelt
According to [1] first, you must become a member by invitation, and you need
"undoubted Catholic morality and practice" and to show "merit over the years
with regard to the Order of Malta, its institutions and its humanitarian
works"

[1] [https://www.orderofmalta.int/sovereign-order-of-
malta/faq/](https://www.orderofmalta.int/sovereign-order-of-malta/faq/)

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decebalus1
What's up with this new trend of writing long-ish form crap on Twitter?

~~~
garius
Twitter thread author here!

Because, as others have said, you go where the people are, otherwise you're
just howling into the void, and what's the point of doing it? If I only wrote
on Medium, or for niche magazines, or newspapers, then there's a whole lot of
people who would never discover interesting stuff.

So I do both, depending on when the mood takes me, or if the subject can work
in a Twitter format (not everything can) or needs the full longform treatment.
If it's the latter, then I stick it up on Medium.

Horses for courses and all that.

~~~
Yizahi
There is so much visual garbage on Twitter, please add links to a normal text
if possible. Twitter is borderline unreadable and god forbid accidentally
clicking anywhere on the page - everything just instantly closes and you get
thrown somewhere randomly. Truly horrible UX/UI.

~~~
garius
Sure - if someone pays me to!

I do this mostly for fun. So tbh the alternative here was "not tell people
something interesting at all" rather than "write a longform piece about the
Hospitallers".

I DO have plans for the latter. Eventually. But it requires lots of research
and time, and I don't have a lot of either to spare these days.

That's something I would suggest that is always worth remembering, I would
gently suggest. Writing isn't a free action. It takes time and mental
energy/effort. I'd love it if we lived in a world where people would magically
give me money to do that, just as I suspect artists and musicians would say
the same, but that doesn't happen unfortunately!

~~~
Yizahi
I didn't propose to you doing anything for free or additionally inconvenience
yourself. But in case if you don't have any preference for media type and if
you already have a text you want to publish for free/ads, then it would be
nice to duplicate it to other more sane platform, whatever - medium, lj
(dreamwidth) or anything else. It was just a suggestion. And if,
hypothetically, the only concern is that normal text need more time to be
prepared - you can just dump all these tweets as is as a single post and it
will still be more readable than in Twitter.

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arminiusreturns
There is so much more the KoM than meets the eye. For example, the relatively
recent hubub between them and the papacy. The fact that so many heads of CIA
and other countries intel agencies are KoM. That you don't have to be Catholic
to join. The old connections to the templars and to masonry. It's permanent
observer status at the UN. The connections of Elizabeth II to it (she was
queen of Malta until 74)... the list goes on and on.

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afterburner
"After the Napoleonic wars no one really wanted to bring up the whole Malta
thing with the British (the Putin's Russia of the era)"

lol what? Britain was the USA of its time, not Putin. As in, global dominant
superpower.

