Tea at Trianon: "Slavery was Never Abolished"

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

Tuesday, November 14, 2017

"Slavery was Never Abolished"

Instead of obsessing about the slavery of a century and a half ago, people need to focus on abolishing the slavery which exists in the world now. From Crux:

“I’m the one. Put a face to it. I had a mother and father who loved me. Remember me when fighting human trafficking.” Those words belong to Rani Hong, who was born in India. She was stolen from her parents at the age of seven, and sold to a slave master, who kept her in a cage to be “seasoned into submission.” When she was eight, due to her physical condition and emotional state, she was near death.

According to United Nations statistics, 40 million people are trapped in slavery today. “They thought I would die, and that I had no value,” Hong said on Monday. “But they wanted one more [source of] profit from me, so my captor sold me into international adoption in Canada.”

Today, Hong is a leading voice in the fight against modern-day slavery. Together with her husband Trong, a Vietnamese refugee who fled his country at the age of nine to avoid being recruited as a child soldier, she runs the Tronie Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to providing freedom to those who are enslaved and to help eliminate the root causes of slavery. Rani Hong was at the Vatican this weekend, participating in a Nov. 4-6 workshop titled “Assisting Victims in Human Trafficking - Best Practice in Resettlement, Legal Aid and Compensation,” organized by the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences (PASS). (Read more.)