Tea at Trianon: Confusing the Government With God

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

Thursday, April 12, 2018

Confusing the Government With God

From The Stream:

One of the worst problems in history has been this: We mistake God for the government, and the government for God. By history I mean ancient, as in the Book of Genesis: What else should we call the Tower of Babel but this: A massive government program ordered by a tyrant. Its goal? To forge a purely human link to heaven. To assert that the state (and via group narcissism, its people) could grab eternal glory by man’s own sweaty exertions. God knew just what to do: He knocked down the tower and confused all its people by making them speak different languages.

Now, I’d once thought of this bible passage was in part a “just-so” story to explain the diversity of human tongues. But it’s much more than that. It’s a warning against attempts to weld human peoples together artificially. To ever form one world government, as some idealists dream.

The dream of imposing a single currency, a secret oligarchy, and limitless alien migrants on more than dozen countries will end just as badly as Lenin’s experiment. I’m confident that in my lifetime, delighted crowds will smash the EU’s Brussels headquarters with pickaxes, as they did the Berlin Wall. (Read more.)