Tea at Trianon: The Politics of Fiasco

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

Monday, August 23, 2021

The Politics of Fiasco

From Mark Steyn:

With the exception of the British Parliament, Washington's uniformly furious allies are remaining circumspect, mostly because of the delicacy of the situation on the ground. If you're a compatriot of Rosette in Khost or Kunduz, you'll be rescued either by a very well thought out commando mission from a friendly nation (ie, not Washington) ...or not at all.

This all began when the Potemtagon abandoned Bagram air base without notifying either the Afghans or their Nato partners. I'm told there is unprecedentedly minimal contact between the British and US troops at Kabul Airport right now, and the former are quite open about their certainty that they'll get no advance warning when Washington pulls out.

~As to the impending influx of Afghan "translators" into Europe and America, we've already brought 50,000 "interpreters" into the United States - which, as Daniel Greenfield points out, is one translator for every two soldiers. So it's just another sleazy racket, like everything else.

As for the Continent, M Macron has subtly drawn attention to the fact that young Afghan chappies (as is traditional, almost all the women and children are staying back home) are not the most assimilable immigrants.

I'll say. Almost exactly five years ago I spent a most agreeable day in Stavenger, Norway, with an utterly delightful lady who was training the Afghan refugees how to be Cary Grant. Since the lads from the Hindu Kush had shown up there had been a sudden uptick in sexual assaults because of misunderstood cultural signals: the nice multiculti Nordic blonde would flash a welcoming smile at the exotic youth from Mazar-i-Sharif and he would respond by dragging her into the undergrowth and ripping her knickers off.

My friend was instructing the young gentlemen in the finer points of the more circuitous approach: "Would you like to come back to my pad and listen to my Lionel Richie CD?", etc. At the end of the afternoon, she asked me, "Well, do you think this is working?"

She was a charming companion, and I was doing my best Cary Grant myself. But I was not unsympathetic to the young Mohammedans. You leave a society where it is forbidden to look upon a woman from outside your family unless she's wearing the mandatory body bag. And you land in a country where the women are perambulating down the sidewalk in cut-off shorts and halter tops: it's legs, arms, cleavage everywhere you look.

And you're expected to suppress every inclination because the people who dropped you on that street from the other side of the world are so impenetrably stupid that the core tenet of their state religion of "multiculturalism" is that all cultures are basically the same. (Read more.)

From The National:

It is true that women come from all kinds of socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds, and as a result they will have been shaped as individuals by various experiences over the course of their lives. Women differ in our beliefs, political values, personalities and ethics.

Yet, looking at events unfolding in Afghanistan in recent days, many women around the world feel a shared sense of dread and heartache for the women trapped in such intolerable circumstances. The sickening, sinking feeling is an instinctive one that bypasses all pseudo-intellectualism. Strip away the relatively superficial differences between women and that sickening, sinking feeling is an instinctive one precisely because there are some experiences that only female humans can be subjected to. For better or worse, there is a common reality that no convoluted, nonsensical definition can erase. (Read more.)