Tea at Trianon: The Red Butcher

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

Saturday, December 4, 2021

The Red Butcher

From Chronicles:

This massive tome is more than a new history of World War II. It is above all a depressing confirmation that the crimes against humanity committed by Stalin’s regime, including during the war, were comparable to those of Hitler. Moreover, McMeekin reveals that the Nazi regime could have been removed from power without the disastrous territorial concessions in Eastern Europe that FDR and Churchill granted to Stalin and his underlings.

McMeekin shows there were defensible limits on wartime help that American congressmen and most of the American public wished to impose on the Soviets after their former Nazi allies invaded Russia. In Congress in the summer of 1941, Hamilton Fish III, Robert M. La Follette, Jr., Robert Taft, and Harry Truman all reminded listeners of Stalin’s crimes when Lend-Lease aid to Russia came up for discussion.

Throughout the period of Soviet-Nazi cooperation between September 1939 and June 1941, the Soviets swallowed up as many onetime independent countries as did Hitler’s armies. After German and Soviet armies invaded Poland in 1939, the Soviets murdered in just two years four to five times as many civilians as did the Germans. During their accord with Nazi Germany, the Soviets grabbed even more foreign territory than Hitler appropriated. Stalin’s regime spread aggressively into Eastern European countries and threatened the mineral and fuel resources on which Nazi Germany was dependent, e.g., the Ploieşti oilfields in Romania. Although there is no conclusive indication that Stalin planned to attack Nazi Germany before being attacked on June 22, 1941, what happened should not have been shocking. The attack on the Soviet Union came after relations between the two partners in crime deteriorated into squabbling over their ill-gotten conquests. (Read more.)