Tea at Trianon: Covert and Overt Treachery

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, July 27, 2018

Covert and Overt Treachery

From The Bruges Group:

As Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky showed in their history of the KGB, the naive idealism in the universities was an open goal for Soviet espionage. The Cambridge Spy Ring comprised five scholars who needed no incentive other than their zealous commitment to the new Jerusalem: Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Kim Philby, Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross. They were inspired by Cambridge don Maurice Dobb, the first British scholar to join the Communist Party of Great Britain, consequently drawing the attention of MI5. Led by Burgess, a predatory homosexual Marxist recruited by the Soviets in 1933, these alumni of Trinity College spent their careers in subversive activity against their own country. Maclean was first of the five to enter the corridors of power, recruited to the Foreign Office in 1935; all of them went on to work in the intelligence services, passing state secrets to the Kremlin. This treason was eventually exposed in the 1950s, after much damage had been done.

Is it fair to relate the actions of Burgess and fellow traitors to the present corpus of senior civil servants who are working to overrule the EU referendum and tie Britain to the Brussels regime? There are major differences, of course. The Cambridge men were working undercover, and their dastardly deeds risked the severest of punishment. Olly Robbins, by contrast, is performing an official role.

Yet there are significant similarities. Both Philby and Robbins were enthused by a supranational order that would eclipse ill-informed popular opinion expressed at the ballot box. In the 1930s the ogre was fascism in a very real form; today the danger is opposition to globalisation and open borders – allegedly also fascist, as displayed in hostility to mass immigration and Islam. In the 1930s the dubious leader of the anti-fascist movement was Stalin; today it is the financier George Soros.

It makes sense that Robbins was once an aficionado of Stalin and Soviet communism. In obstructing the people's quest for renewed nationhood by leaving the EU, he is not alone. Enlightenment values, it seems, are reserved for the ideologically enlightened. Our institutions are dominated by Remainers determined to defy democracy, by ideological curtailments of freedom of speech, and by a legal culture that is abandoning the premise of equality before the law. Was the case of Tommy Robinson not a Stalinist exercise of power over a dissident, with lack of due process uncritically accepted by biased media? Standing up to protect fellow citizens – whether vulnerable girls from rape gangs or society in general from terrorism, is a threat to the authorities. Complain too much and you will be a target of surveillance. (Read more.)