Tea at Trianon: Foolishness

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, April 7, 2021

Foolishness

From The American Thinker:

The most brilliant thing that Trump did when it came to bringing peace to the Middle East was to marginalize the Palestinians. By making them irrelevant, he allowed other countries – none of which like the Palestinians – to come directly to the table with Israel. Biden, of course, is reversing that.

The Palestinians are not a real people, pardon me for saying so. By that, I don’t mean that they’re imaginary; they exist, but the identity they claim does not.

Jews have lived in the land of Israel for at least 3,800 years. They are the indigenous people. Those people who call themselves Palestinians mostly arrived in the 19th century. They were refugees from various internecine battles between Muslims in different Arab countries. They didn’t own the land but, instead, were squatters or laborers on land owned by wealthy Ottoman Turks.

When these drifters settled in the land, it was called Syria-Palestine. The name “Palestine” was the name the Romans applied to the land when they conquered it in 70 A.D. It was a deliberate insult, meant to sever the Jews’ ancient ties to their land. The Syria part was because the Muslims had conquered the land and it eventually ended up under Ottoman Turk control as a swampy, disease-ridden region adjacent to Syria.

Fast forward to WWI. The Ottoman Turks sided with Germany. When Germany lost the War, Britain gained control over the Palestine part of Syria-Palestine. By this time, Theodore Herzl’s dream of returning to all the diaspora Jews to their ancient land to avoid Europe’s deadly anti-Semitism had taken hold. (Read more.)