Tea at Trianon: Socialism of the Twenty-first Century

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, May 11, 2019

Socialism of the Twenty-first Century

From Freedom Today Network:

The socialist experiments which were most popular with Western intellectuals were the ones that were least tainted by associations with earlier, now discredited, experiments. Intellectuals had to be able to convince themselves, and others, that they had found a genuinely novel model of socialism, which had nothing in common with those earlier ones. It was not enough for a country to just adopt socialism: it had to contain the promise of a fresh start, a promise that ‘this time will be different.

Mao-mania started at the time of the Sino-Soviet split. Hoxhaism started at the time of the Sino-Albanian split. The Cuban revolution was popular because it was homegrown. The same was true of the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua. Pilgrims of a more romantic disposition were drawn to politically isolated places such as North Korea and Cambodia, because isolated places could not be tainted by associations with earlier, now discredited, attempts to build a socialist society. The German Democratic Republic, in contrast, received some praise, but it never inspired starry-eyed enthusiasm.

‘Venezuela-mania’ is an extension of this pattern. It took off around the time that the Venezuelan government started to brand its policies internationally as a new model of socialism. It defined this new model not just in opposition to capitalism, but also, crucially, to earlier socialist models. In 2005, President Hugo Chávez was a keynote speaker at the World Social Forum, an annual conference of various anti-capitalist groups from around the world. (Read more.)