Tea at Trianon: The 'Errors of Russia'

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

Sunday, August 22, 2021

The 'Errors of Russia'

From Catholicism:

But, what, then, are the “errors of Russia” as they were developing at the time of the Bolshevik-Russian Revolution shortly after the Fatima apparitions? It would seem that they include, among other things, the following list of characteristics:
A reductively atheistic materialist world-view which aims at undermining anything Christian in society;
An ideology that is disconnected from Truth and reality;
A cultural Marxism that later permeated also the West with the help of the Frankfurt School and Antonio Gramsci’s ideas;
A revolutionary socialistic spirit that undermines especially major aspects of family life – especially with the help of feminism, divorce and abortion;
A Hegelian dialectic philosophy, along with dialectic materialism, which claims that strife and ongoing contention in society are necessary in order to bring about higher and unfolding forms of life; such an approach essentially denies and purportedly transcends the principle or law of non-contradiction.
A form of governing “revolutionary socialism” that is also constitutionally called “Democratic Centralism,” the latter formulation meaning that things have the appearance of being openly democratic, yet they are all centrally organized and managed in the background (Dr. Robert Hickson recently applied this principle to the current situation in the Church – especially with regard to the Family Synods – here);
A disregard for tradition and for the traditional institutions of society (or now of the Church, such as the Curia?) as “counter-revolutionary forces”;
A deceitful misuse of language with the intent to manipulate the public;
A method of branding one’s own opponents with sweeping and demeaning epithets that abstractly categorize them as “right-wing” or “counter-revolutionary” [and what about the most-common term in use among the left: “fascist”?];
An approach to ongoing revolutionary changes where there is both “a slow path” and “a fast path” of the Revolution; such is “the Dialectic” and the “dialectical process”;
Toward more moderate and compromising opponents, one first tries to incorporate them into the professed new system so as to use them as Lenin’s “useful idiots” in the sense that they help give to the world the illusory idea that nothing has really changed;
As a last element – but of course a very important and painful one for those who lived under Communism – there is a constant sense of distrust and fear, unto the imprisonment and killing of one’s intransigent opponents. (Read more.)