Tea at Trianon: Socialism is Not Cool

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, March 5, 2018

Socialism is Not Cool

From USA Today:

My grandmother grew up in Ukraine, which was then a part of the USSR — the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. After waking each morning, she checked to see if any of her family members died during the night. Many of her compatriots were already dead because Joseph Stalin, the Soviet leader, implemented a mass starvation program.

Known as the “Holodomor,” the goal of the policy was to starve Ukrainians into submission. It worked as intended: Stalin murdered perhaps four million Ukrainians. (For this reason and others, Ukrainians are a bit prickly when asked if their accent is Russian.) My grandmother only escaped this torture when she, along with the Russian man who would become my grandfather, were kidnapped by the Nazis and taken to Germany as slave labor. Thus, they stopped living the Soviet Socialist dream and began experiencing the National Socialist dream, instead.

I was reminded of all this last month when CNN celebrated Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday with a tweet that claimed the civil rights hero “was a socialist before it was cool.” There are two substantial problems with this. (Read more.)