Tea at Trianon: A Long Slow Death

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

Friday, September 3, 2021

A Long Slow Death

From Lara Logan:

Lara Logan, a veteran foreign and war correspondent, described what life was like for women under Taliban rule. "It is a long slow death," Logan told Fox News. "If you're unlucky. If you're lucky, you'll just be slaughtered quickly, because that is what life is like for women under the Taliban, a long slow death."

"It is the end of freedom, it is the end of possibility. It is the end of hope," Logan said, pausing as she held back tears. "It is the end of light."

"It is the beginning of a life of possibly sexual slavery, which is a nice way of saying being raped everyday by a man you don’t love," she continued. "Being denied the ability to love. You are denied the ability to have your own family. To have privacy. To have a dream."

"It is the end of everything that is good in us," Logan told Fox News. Logan, who hosts a show on Fox Nation, was previously the chief foreign affairs correspondent for CBS News. She's embedded with the Taliban's forces and has interviewed their political leaders, members of their military counsel and covered stories on the front lines of the war.

"Everything that was difficult about life in Afghanistan under war became much more difficult under the Taliban," Logan told Fox News." Women were not allowed to work, attend school or leave their homes without a male presence."

"Women were beaten if their belt buckles were too shiny," she continued. "Girls were not fed in the orphanages until the boys have been fed—and there wasn’t enough food for the boys. On top of that, there is no joy in tyranny and rule by terror."

When Kabul fell to the Afghans in 2001, the city hadn't seen the face of a woman in more than eight years, Logan told Fox News. Over the next 20 years, with help from the U.S., Afghanistan established schools for girls and vastly expanded women's rights. Logan called the Taliban's promises to allow women more freedoms compared to their previous rule "propaganda talking points as agreed upon by its political masters and backers." (Read more.)