Tea at Trianon: A Classic Communist Tactic

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

Thursday, October 8, 2020

A Classic Communist Tactic

From The Federalist:

To collectivize agriculture, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin devised a plan to stir up hostilities among the peasants where resentments had never existed before. As would be the case later with Mao’s Red Guard (and today’s radical statue-toppling, Molotov-cocktail-throwing radicals), the Soviets used mobs of youth to do the dirty work.

The communist youth league, known as the Komsomol, went into villages to propagandize and incite divisions, turning formerly peaceful neighbors against one another. In his book “The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia,” Orlando Figes describes the situation:
The villagers had never heard such propaganda in the past, and many were impressed by the long words used by the leaders of the Komsomol. At these meetings, the villagers were told that they belonged to three mutually hostile classes: the poor peasants, who were the allies of the proletariat, the middle peasants, who were neutral, and the rich or ‘kulak’ peasants, who were its enemies. The names of all the peasants in these different classes were listed on a board outside the village school.
This process is eerily similar to the way critical race theory — and all identity politics — has been applied in America. You can see the same three divisions: victims, oppressors, and those who might save themselves by becoming “allies” of the victims.

Note the reference to the Komsomol using impressive “long words.” Today our miseducated youth are easily impressed by new terms such as “systemic racism,” “intersectionality,” and “white fragility.” Finally, the wokesters identify and condemn those marked as oppressors — doxing and canceling them by name — in a written list of names posted in the village. Today such work is helped along by media and Big Tech. (Read more.)