Tea at Trianon: A Love Story From Communist China

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

Saturday, March 6, 2021

A Love Story From Communist China

From The Epoch Times:

After braving two years of relentless torture in a communist forced-labor camp in China, a woman was safely rescued to Australia by her fiancé nearly 20 years ago. The couple, now in their 50s, recounted to The Epoch Times their soul-stirring journey through the darkest days of life, exposing the injustices happening behind the closed red-terror walls of the Chinese jails and labor camps. Theirs is a story of true love, firm faith, and unwavering courage.
Almost two decades ago, Ying Li, now 51, was arrested in China for her faith in the Falun Gong spiritual practice. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) launched a brutal persecution campaign against the peaceful meditation system in July 1999, fearing the practice’s universal teaching of truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance as a threat to its ideologies rooted in atheism and Marxism.

Ying, who currently resides in Sydney with her husband and their three children, was persecuted and abused for refusing to give up her faith.

“It is his love that has supported me through the darkest days of my life,” Ying said. (Read more.)