Tea at Trianon: The Babi Yar Massacre

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

Sunday, February 2, 2020

The Babi Yar Massacre

From The Jerusalem Post:

The vast and manifold stories of the tragedy surrounding Babi Yar make it a major symbol of the Holocaust in Ukraine. In reality, two crimes took place on the territory of Babi Yar: the mass executions and the subsequent dissipation and oblivion of their memory. In addition to tens of thousands of Jews, all patients of the Pavlov Psychiatric Hospital were shot here, several Roma camping grounds disappeared without a trace, and in the neighboring Syrets concentration camp for prisoners of war, inmates were condemned to destroy evidence against the Nazis before facing their own death.

Following this, the Soviet authorities dismantled the remains of the Jewish cemetery located here, and attempted to fill the ravine itself with construction waste, resulting in the Kurenivka tragedy – a mudslide carrying effluents and bones from the old cemeteries onto residential houses. They tried to bury Babyn Yar. It was only thirty years later, following protests unprecedented in Soviet Kyiv, that a monument was erected, with just the inscription: “One hundred thousand Soviet citizens died here.” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s full support for the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center indicates a change of direction and is very important for us.

THEY TRIED to bury Babi Yar. It was only 30 years later, following protests unprecedented in Soviet Kiev, when a monument was erected, with just the inscription: “One hundred thousand Soviet citizens died here.” (Read more.)