Tea at Trianon: The New American Fascists

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

Wednesday, July 31, 2019

The New American Fascists

From Newt Gingrich:

In his 1989 movie, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Steven Spielberg has a remarkable scene of Nazi book burning. The looks of ecstasy as the actors-playing-Germans parade past Hitler and throw inappropriate books on the fire are compelling and convincing. These people are cleansing their society of past and future sins.

Of course, the real Nazis went much further through their attempt to physically cleanse their society of perceived impurities through a holocaust of the Jewish people, murders of minority groups, the selective killing of Germans with genetic defects, and a maniacal sense of righteousness which remains horrifying to this day.

Unfortunately, the Nazi effort to destroy the past in search of a pure future is not an isolated event. During the Reformation militant Protestants destroyed art in Catholic churches. During the French Revolution, the calendar itself was replaced by a new French Revolutionary calendar which lasted from 1793 to 1805. The revolutionaries, in their righteousness, guillotined aristocrats, nuns, and ultimately many of their own revolutionaries. The search for purity was paved with violence.

The Soviets sought purity by establishing the secret police, banning books, turning churches into public restrooms, killing aristocrats, starving the middle-class farmers, and establishing their future utopia on a sea of blood. The Chinese Communists persecuted Christians, Muslims, and Tibetan Buddhists. During Mao Zedong’s cultural revolution, they even went after their own communist leaders as impure. Now, the spirit of fascistic book burning has entered the American system. (Read more.)