Tea at Trianon: Avenging Angels and Fauci

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, November 1, 2021

Avenging Angels and Fauci

Sometimes the worst crimes are too much for our minds to grasp. From The Stream:

There are also evil things that fit this description, acts so monstrous and massive we might call them “sublime evil.” Or perhaps more simply, “atrocities.”

We cannot really conceive of what it means when we say that modern governments murdered 170 million citizens between 1914 and 1990. So we focus on individuals, like Anne Frank. Nor can we fathom the 60 million American children aborted thanks to conscious lies by justices of the U.S. Supreme Court. If we really pondered the sheer, epic scale of the evil, it would paralyze us. It might drive us to despair of our nation’s future, since God is just. So we focus on “partial birth” abortions, or eugenic abortions, or racially motivated abortions — like Planned Parenthood’s. It’s all our minds can handle.
If a person in power commits full-scale atrocities, he might very well get away with it. If his evil is on a sufficiently vast scale that it boggles the mind, overwhelms the heart, and exceeds our normal capacities for judgment … his chances are pretty good. For one thing, the more outrageous it is, the harder it is to persuade people it’s real.

Well into 1943, the Western Allies doubted the reports of the Holocaust. So did Jewish-owned newspapers like the New York Times. Nobody wanted to believe such horrors, so it was easier to wave off real reports as exaggerations or propaganda. But lesser crimes of the Nazis seemed more plausible, so they got reported.
In the same spirit, then, Andrew Cuomo left the USS Comfort, the Javits Center, and Samaritan’s Purse hospitals empty. But he dumped contagious COVID patients in nursing homes, where the most vulnerable grandmas and veterans coughed out their lungs and died in agony. Not by the hundreds but by the tens of thousands. They perished like forgotten shelter pets, cut off from their families, denied last prayers with their pastors, and deprived of Christian burial. Instead, Cuomo cremated them en masse like dogs and cats at the city pound.

Meanwhile, Cuomo blathered on television about his concern for his own elderly mother, Matilda. His motive? We really don’t know. Maybe to maximize federal death bounties for COVID. Maybe to spike the death stats, to help justify the lockdown that was tanking the economy and hurting Donald Trump. Maybe he agreed with Joe Biden’s chief COVID advisor, Ezekiel Immanuel, that nobody over 70 deserves life-saving medicine. Like the Muslim suicide bomber who dies screaming “Allahu akbar!” we may never know Cuomo’s motives.

Cuomo got away with all of that, brazened it out. Because it was so big, so monstrous, so heinous, that people like me sounded like maniacs when we talked about it. But then Cuomo lost his office, and might face criminal charges … for groping women on his staff, like a male baboon in rut. Then again, Al Capone only went to prison for tax evasion. And public health dictator Anthony Fauci may fall from his seat of power for sanctioning the useless torture of beagle puppies. (Read more.)