Tea at Trianon: An Impetus to Rehabilitate Western Civilization

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, November 4, 2020

An Impetus to Rehabilitate Western Civilization

From BESA:

Western civilization was born in Mesopotamia as a civilization of idolatry, slavery, and human sacrifice. Abraham is the forefather of the moral revolution that, as an alternative to the Mesopotamian culture of falsehood, tyranny, and veneration of death, gave the world the culture of monotheistic truth, love of humanity (humanism), and the sanctification of life, freedom, justice, and peace.

Because Abraham spread his values through personal example, with his death and his progeny’s descent into Egypt the civilizational revolution he had started almost disappeared. It was salvaged thanks to Moses, who added to the cultural-moral revolution a religious revolution aimed at preserving Abraham’s values through the observance of commandments and rituals that were derived from morality.

Although the religious revolution indeed preserved Abrahamic morality, the three monotheistic religions that adopted most of the values of that morality failed to make the world more moral. This was not only because of the wars between them, but primarily because of the fierce wars among factions and sects within them.

The horrors of the Thirty Years’ War between Catholics and Protestants (1618-48) played a central role in the secularization of Europe, and also in paving the way to the proclamation of the “death of God”—that is, the death of morality. Freed from the yoke of morality, secular Europe produced tyranny, death, and destruction on an order never seen in the religious wars, nor in the Mesopotamian pre-moral idolatrous era that preceded them.

Unlike Europe, the Anglo-Saxon democracies separated the state from the church but not from the morality of the church, which is Abrahamic morality. As a result, they achieved prolonged stability and prosperity and could fulfill the moral duty to mobilize three times to rescue Europe and the world from the horrors that morality-free European secularism had brought about.

The Abraham Accords were reached at a time when the US, patron of the Accords, is in the midst of a severe domestic societal crisis stemming from European progressive liberalism’s takeover of American democracy. Like communism before it, progressivism strives to dismantle and destroy the old world; but unlike communism—which, as an alternative to the “old” world, offered a “new” world as a replacement—progressivism is satisfied to destroy what exists while changing the world into a mass of humanity without clear boundaries, identities, or obligations, though replete with rights. (Read more.)