Tea at Trianon: No One Saw It Coming

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, April 20, 2019

No One Saw It Coming

From Russian Insider:

Winston Churchill once described Russia as a "riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma." Churchill's words ring true today as we see Russia, almost mysteriously, emerge onto the world stage as a military adversary; a geopolitical rival; and a vexing riddle that nobody in Washington, D.C. has quite figured out. Obama got it wrong when he mocked Mitt Romney's concerns that Russia was a menace to world order, calling the Russians a "regional power."

D.C.-based Russian foreign policy experts have a dismal track record as prognosticators. Mr. Leon Aron, in Foreign Policy magazine, writes: "Every revolution is a surprise." Still, the latest Russian Revolution must be counted among the greatest of surprises. In the years leading up to 1991, virtually no Western expert, scholar, official, or politician foresaw the impending collapse of the Soviet Union. (Read more.)