Tea at Trianon: The Children of Venezuela

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

Saturday, February 9, 2019

The Children of Venezuela

From The Daily Mail:

Pity the children. Starving to death, dying of curable diseases, sold to sexual predators or simply abandoned, youngsters are paying a terrible price for Venezuela's failed socialist experiment. More than one in seven children are currently suffering from malnutrition as their hard-working parents' salaries no longer cover the soaring cost of everyday living. Common curable diseases – measles, diphtheria, and rotavirus diarrhea – which had been almost eradicated from the oil-rich state are now killing children in huge numbers. Pneumonia is picking off those too weak to fight. Desperate mothers are selling their daughters' young bodies for sex to buy food. Other poverty-stricken parents abandoned their children in the street to fight for themselves.

'Venezuela was once the richest country in Latin America,' Dr Huniades Urbina, a director of Caracas' main children's hospital, told MailOnline.'Patients would come to Caracas because we could provide the best care in the region. Now we can't even feed the patients.' (Read more.)