Tea at Trianon: Acts of Contempt

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, July 11, 2019

Acts of Contempt

From The Federalist:

Colin Kaepernick has made a fantastic living out of protesting the America flag. That’s fine. No political speech should be inhibited, not even pseudo-intellectual historical revisionism. But let’s stop pretending that kneeling during the national anthem at sporting events is really about “respecting the flag” or criminal justice reform or any fixable policy problem. Whatever the underlying causes for Kaepernick’s popularity—some of them certainly legitimate—these protests are acts of contempt toward an irredeemable nation created in sin. This view of our founding is an increasingly popular position on the left. And if it ever takes hold in mainstream American life, we’re in real trouble. (Read more.)

From PJ Media:

The flag of Betsy Ross – who as a Facebook friend noted should be re-branded as an empowered woman business leader and cutting-edge designer of her era – represents much more than Kaepernick’s tunnel-vision misunderstanding of history.

The American Revolution took place in the context of an age of revolutions against monarchy and hereditary government. It set in motion a series of events that turned the average person into a citizen rather than a subject. This was a deeply profound paradigm shift in the human mind and condition, we can scarcely understand how profound today.

Slavery vexed America’s founders. They wrestled with how to deal with what was a ghastly legal and economic reality, mostly located in one region of the fledgling country, while attempting to build a federation of weak, thinly populated and war-weary states in the New World. They made their long-term intentions quite clear in the opening to the Declaration of Independence signed July 4, 1776, in the phrase “all men are created equal.” “Men,” here, meaning “human,” not a gender-specific identifier. They added that we are “endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights.”

All of this language was profoundly radical in its time. Kings and queens still strode most of the world, and the “divine right of kings” to rule as they pleased was a weakening but still serious idea. The American Revolution carried a deeply anti-authoritarian, pro-humanitarian character in its DNA. If our rights do not come from government or an occupant of a throne, if they are inalienable as the Declaration asserts, if we are all created equal, we the people are truly greater than our government. We do not serve it. It serves us. We vote it in. We vote it out. And as the Declaration states, we can end a government that no longer serves the people. This language flips the world’s existing power order on its head. And the founders were just getting started. (Read more.)