Tea at Trianon: The West's Fear That Dare Not Speak Its Name

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

Tuesday, December 7, 2021

The West's Fear That Dare Not Speak Its Name

From PJB at Chronicles:

Zemmour is being called "the Donald Trump of France." And he and Le Pen are now running third and second behind Macron in the polling to become the next president of France, which suggests the power of the issue on which they agree: uninvited and unwelcome Third-World migration.

"You feel like a foreigner in your own country," said Zemmour in his announcement speech Tuesday, declaiming, "We will not be replaced."

Neighboring Spain is gripped by the same concern. Refugees and migrants from the global south use Morocco as a base from which to breach the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla on the African coast.

Spain has taken to pushing the intruders back into Morocco.

Madrid has accused Rabat of using the migrants as a diplomatic weapon to extort changes in Spanish policy.

Italy, whose native-born ethnic population has been in a steady decline, patrols the Mediterranean Sea to prevent migrants from Libya from reaching its shores. Drowning deaths are not uncommon. The Channel and the Mediterranean Sea are more formidable and unforgiving waters to cross than the Rio Grande.

Greece is attempting to keep Turkey from moving refugees and migrants from Middle East wars onto the Greek islands off Turkey's coast.

Half a decade ago, Turkey was bought off with billions of euros to prevent the millions of Arab and Muslim refugees within its borders from crossing over into the EU.

In the recent clash between Poland and Belarus, the weapon of choice for Alexander Lukashenko was—migrants.

Brought into Belarus from the Mideast, they were moved to the Polish border, forcing Warsaw to deploy troops to keep thousands out of Poland. Lukashenko was exploiting the migrants to punish Poland and the EU for supporting sanctions on his regime.

After Europe united against him, Lukashenko moved the migrants away from the border and sent many back to Syria and countries whence they came.

In the hierarchy of European fears, the perceived threat to national identities that comes with mass migrations from the failed and failing states of the Third World appears to rank as a greater concern than the prospect of a Russian army driving toward the Rhine.

Most European nations have a birth rate below what is needed to replace their native-born ethnic populations. And as the founding peoples of these nations pass on, they are being replaced by peoples from what were once colonies that the old European empires controlled.

Most of these European nations have not had the experience with mass immigration the Americans have—from the Irish migration of 1845-1849 to the millions from Central and Eastern Europe between 1890 and 1924.

Yet even the Americans had never known a migration of the magnitude of the one that began in 1965 and continues today, legal and illegal, a migration that has altered irreversibly the ethnic composition of the country of Ike and JFK.

In President Joe Biden's first year, over a million illegals breached the U.S. southern border along with hundreds of thousands of "got-aways" who made it into our country without any contact with border authority.

The rising resistance to illegal immigration in Europe is being denounced by Euro-elites as xenophobia and racism, and the proscribed term used to define it is the one the Times associates with Zemmour. (Read more.)