Tea at Trianon: The Revolution Comes To The Cornfields

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 Revolution Comes To The Cornfields

From Rod Dreher at The American Conservative:

Read this post of mine from earlier today about the weaponization of civil rights to demolish every liberty that stands in the way of Social Justice Warriors’ goals. The revolution has made its way into classrooms in Midwestern small towns. There is nowhere to hide from this stuff. We have to fight, and fight hard. But the fight is not just political and legal. After I saw the film A Hidden Life, about the Catholic anti-Nazi martyr Franz Jägerstätter, I realized that this film is precisely the explanation of the Benedict Option, one that will help me get through to people who insist, despite the evidence, that I’m urging people to head for the hills. The evil came to Franz’s remote Austrian mountain village. Nowhere was safe. But when it came, Franz, because he had built himself up in the faith, recognized the evil for what it was, and resisted it in the only way possible to him at that point. Most everybody in that village, one imagines, was a Christian, but only Franz and his family had both the ability to see the ideology for what it truly was, and to find within the strength to stand up to it, even as everyone around him was surrendering to it.

It is the same with us. If your kids’ public or private school has embraced this ideology, you should get them out of it, if you can. If you can’t, then you should be educating them as to why it is a lie, and helping them to find the spiritual resources to resist it. This will not be easy. I imagine that even in small towns, the pressure from the herd to conform is serious. Note well that all of us live in a propaganda environment that acculturates us to accept all of this, and to feel shame if we do not. In Hungary last year, when I interviewed for my forthcoming book a couple who grew up under communism, they told me that their childhoods were filled with propaganda designed to encourage everyone to feel intense shame over any belief or tradition that contradicted socialism. The same thing is happening right here.

We need the Benedict Option, and we need to fight on political and legal fronts, while we still can. There are plenty of conservatives and Christians who are under the mistaken belief that political and legal victories are enough. They’re wrong. As writer Christopher Caldwell points out in his important new book:

In the quarter-century after Reagan, conservatives lost every battle against the substance of political correctness. … Political correctness was not a joke after all. It was the most comprehensive ideological capture of institutional power in the history of the United States.
… This language of “-bashing” and “-phobia” and “bigotry” and “lies” was new. No longer was the irreconcilability of individuals’ and society’s sexual priorities a tragedy or a disagreement. Recast in the categories of civil rights law, it was a crime, a crime that was being committed against a whole class of people. The customs and traditions in the name of which it was being committed were mere alibis.
… Once social issues could be cast as battles over civil rights, Republicans would lose 100 percent of the time. The agenda of “diversity” advanced when its proponents won elections and when they lost them.
Social Justice Warriors have weaponized Midwestern niceness to conquer the minds of kids, their teachers, and their parents in places you would think would have natural immunity to this insanity. What we must wake up and understand is that the old liberal-democratic arguments based in a familiar defense of traditional liberties are ceasing to work, in part because the culture has been changed, and is changing very fast. When teaching your children — even your corn-fed Midwestern children from prairie villages — that it is okay for them to take cross-sex hormones and surgically alter their bodies because it is a civil rights issue, then you know — you must know — that we have gone through the looking glass. (Read more.)