Tea at Trianon: The Banning of Corrie ten Boom

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Monday, September 29, 2014

The Banning of Corrie ten Boom

Remember the book The Hiding Place by Corrie ten Boom, about a Dutch family who hid and rescued hundreds of Jews during the Nazi occupation? It is now a banned book. To quote:

The ten Boom family are heroes by any standard, successfully hiding and saving the lives of some 800 Jews from the Gestapo. Eventually, the Nazis arrested the ten Booms. Corrie’s father was taken to Scheveningen prison, where he died. Corrie and her sister Betsie were taken to Ravensbrück, where Betsie died. Corrie survived and told the tale.

And what motivated the family’s self-sacrifice? Their Christian faith, something to which Corrie’s memoir amply testifies.

Countless Christians were similarly motivated by their faith to harbor Jews or otherwise resist the genocidal horror of the Nazis. Take, for example, Japanese diplomat and Orthodox convert Chiune Sugihara, who helped thousand of Jews escape death in Lithuania. Or take Maria Skobtsova, who sheltered Jews in her Paris home and died in a Ravensbrück gas chamber.

“There is not only a Jewish question, but a Christian question,” said Maria when it came time for Jews to register and wear the yellow Star. “If we were true Christians we would all wear the Star.”

Corrie ten Boom’s father donned the Star. Given this Christian impulse to identify with the oppressed and save those in danger, to remove The Hiding Place from library shelves betrays a sort of societal self-defeat, and similar examples multiply as our culture fumbles toward a more rigorously enforced secularity. We’re like the cannibal committing suicide one nibble at a time. (Read more.)