Tea at Trianon: The Bunker at Greenbrier

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

Friday, September 4, 2015

The Bunker at Greenbrier

From NPR:

The story of how the bunker was kept secret for 30 years and how it even got here is stranger than any conspiracy theory. For one thing, it was built as an addition to one of America's most famous luxury resorts, the Greenbrier Resort in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Bankers, industrialists and government advisers all hobnobbed at the resort, unknowingly right next door to the post-apocalyptic bunker. When the Greenbriar's official historian, Bob Conte, arrived in 1978, locals started badgering him with questions.

"Why is there a 7,000-foot landing strip for a town of 3,000 people?" he recounts to All Things Considered weekend host Guy Raz. Mostly, he told them there was no such thing — not that it was so "the government could fly their people in here in case of war and go to the bunker that's under the Greenbrier." (Read more.)