Tea at Trianon: At the Greece-Turkey Border

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, March 18, 2020

At the Greece-Turkey Border

From The American Thinker:

World War I was not an intentional war. The great powers stumbled into it over two months. In June 1914, anarcho-socialist Bosnians assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the tottering Austro-Hungarian Empire. The empire declared war on Serbia, Russia countered, Germany declared war on Russia, and Germany then attacked France and Belgium. The Belgian king sought help from Britain, and — boom! — World War I. By War's end, Russia was communist, America was a world power, and 40 million people were dead, not counting the approximately 17 to 100 million who died when war unleashed the Spanish Influenza on the world. The point of that little history lesson is a reminder that, in Europe, limited border wars have spiraled out of control before. It would be well if Western Europe, not just Central Europe, would take a firm stand against Turkey and an equally firm stand against uncontrolled Muslim invasions. (Read more.)