Tea at Trianon: The Demonic Karl Marx

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

Monday, September 7, 2020

The Demonic Karl Marx

From the Catholic World Report:

Those who make that claim exhibit profound ignorance. Frankly, it is shocking, truly hard to believe. It is flatly and factually incorrect and utterly and wholly indefensible. Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Bukharin, and the founders of the American Communist Party would disagree with them. And obviously, the Roman Catholic Church would disagree with them. If they’d like, they can grab a highlighter and start highlighting passage after passage and quote after quote in my book underlining examples.
Here’s one:

“Communism begins where atheism begins,” said Karl Marx. Of Christianity, Marx added: “The social principles of Christianity preach cowardice, self-contempt, abasement, submission, humility. The social principles of Christianity are hypocritical…. So much for the social principles of Christianity.”

The Roman Catholic Church condemned communism as a “satanic scourge” conceived by “the sons of darkness.” Of socialism, in 1931 Pope Pius XI issued his seminal Quadragesimo Anno, where he stated: “Religious socialism, Christian socialism, are contradictory terms; no one can be at the same time a good Catholic and a true socialist.”

Even Dorothy Day’s The Catholic Worker insisted: “no true Catholic can be a member of the Communist Party.”

I could go on and on. Those who say that Karl Marx was somehow doing Christian social justice or some such nonsense make fools of themselves.

One of the worst articles I’ve ever seen in the Catholic press was a piece published by the Jesuit America Magazine in the summer of 2019, titled “The Catholic Case for Communism.” I was aghast. Marx and Engels and Lenin would have been aghast as well. (Read more.)

From The American Mind:

The American media—and many politicians on the American Right—have failed to point out to the American people that BLM was created and is led by radical Marxist racialists. Their heroes and teachers are the violent radicals of the 1960s and ’70s. As Murray Bessette points out in “Listen When They Tell You Who They Are“, we know this because they tell us so. They call themselves “trained Marxists.” This doesn’t mean that they merely propose left-leaning economic policies like free healthcare for all. Instead, as Bessette says, they want to destroy the family and abolish private education and private property along with the police.

Most Americans still have no idea what they actually stand for. Since America is not racist, most people support the idea that black lives matter, because they believe that in America, all lives matter. But their own lack of racism is being used as a weapon against them. BLM and its elite backers reject both the old civil rights movement and America itself.

Even their main public policy prescription, now written in towering letters on our city streets—”defund the police”—does not reflect the views of over 80% of Black America. Yet BLM and friends now have hundreds of millions of dollars at their command, if not more, and some polls this summer reveal they have become more popular than our major political parties. How did this happen? (Read more.)