Tea at Trianon: The Cult Of Inclusion

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

Friday, June 12, 2020

The Cult Of Inclusion

From The Z Man:

This is something to keep in mind as we watch the American empire succumb to what increasingly looks like the emergence of a bizarre new cult. All the attention has been on the blacks looting and the Antifa stirring up riots, but around this orgy of mayhem has been signs that it is all part of a strange new religion. Images like this are becoming more common, as this new region evolves public rituals. All of the corporate oligarchs are all-in on this new cult and they control the culture now.

To the common people of the empire, this seems bizarre. It is as if the ruling elite has gone mad all at the same time. Large swaths of the national government are in revolt against the President over his failure to comply with the new faith. State and local government officials are a click away from open insurrection. The country is tipping into civil war, with one side on the side of this bizarre new religion and the other side baffled as to what is happening. The empire is a madhouse now.

This cult is not entirely without president. The radicals of the French Revolution created the Cult of the Supreme Being. They first sought to replace Catholicism with a new religion devoted to the abstract concept of reason. That new cult was largely a blend of atheism and anthropocentrism. Robespierre saw the obvious problems and denounced this cult and instead promoted the Cult of the Supreme Being. It was intended to be primarily a state religion with God at the center of it.

This cult we are seeing evolve in the empire is much more like the Cult of Reason, in that it has no gods and elevates abstract concepts like inclusion, diversity, cooperation and openness. When activist chant demands for justice, for example, they are not talking about legal justice or even moral justice. Justice is one of the many words to signify this collection of concepts at the center of the cult. In this case, justice is when all non-whites feel joyfully included in the white society. (Read more.)

The new Cultural Revolution. From Spiked:

The similarities with the Cultural Revolution are striking. In that feverish war on the past, statues were torn down and cast on to fires, as happened in Virginia yesterday. Buddhist statues were a favourite target because they embodied the ‘old customs’ the Red Guards longed to erase. It was a ‘frenzy of smashing’, as one account puts it. Any statue that depicted ‘political swindlers’ was torn down. The Red Guards were as offended by monuments to Confucianism as the Woke Guards are by monuments to long-dead slave traders. Like today’s giddy statue-smashers, they, too, thought they were being progressive by sweeping aside memorials to oppressive ideas or people.

Wrong ideas were the main target in the first Cultural Revolution. Books were burned, overly ‘Westernised’ teachers were humiliated, mass re-education took place. It was a frenzied war against the ‘Four Olds’ – old ideas, old culture, old customs and old habits. Today’s intolerant crusade pursues the same quarry. Although it also rages against the Not-So-Old – even TV shows from a few years ago can be erased by the new moral cleansers of public life. (Read more.)