Tea at Trianon: Forgotten Victims

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, February 5, 2020

Forgotten Victims

Polish priests arrested by the Nazis

Of the Holocaust. From Counting Stars:

Undoubtedly, the Jewish people were the main victims of the extermination campaign organized by the Third Reich in World War II. Few peoples have suffered a horror comparable to that suffered by European Jews in those years. That is why the Jews have a prominent role in the tributes to the victims of the Holocaust. It is also frequent that these tributes remember other groups that were victims of genocide crimes at the hands of the nazis: gypsies, homosexuals, political dissidents, Jehovah’s Witnesses, disabled…

However, it is often forgotten that one of the groups that especially suffered the Holocaust were ethnic Poles, mostly Catholics, and on two fronts, since the genocide crimes they suffered during World War II were not only perpetrated by the Nazis, but also by the Soviets. We must recall that in September 1939, Poland was invaded not only by Germany, but also by the USSR, following a secret pact signed by the dictatorships of Hitler and Stalin in August of that year: according to the Polish Institute of National Remembrance (IPN), 150,000 Poles died from the Soviet occupation, partly murdered and partly during the deportations to Siberia ordered by Stalin (in total some 320,000 Poles were deported by the Soviets, a fact also considered a crime of genocide according to the Statute of Rome of the International Criminal Court). (Read more.)

From the Huff Post:

Six million Jewish people were murdered during the genocide in Europe in the years leading up to 1945, and the Jews are rightly remembered as the group that Adolf Hitler’s Nazi party most savagely persecuted during the Holocaust.

But the Nazis targeted many other groups: for their race, beliefs or what they did. Historians estimate the total number of deaths to be 11 million, with the victims encompassing gay people, priests, gypsies, people with mental or physical disabilities, communists, trade unionists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, anarchists, Poles and other Slavic peoples, black people and resistance fighters. Half of the victims who weren’t Jewish were Polish. (Read more.)