Tea at Trianon: Centuries of Unremitting Predatory Attacks

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, April 16, 2022

Centuries of Unremitting Predatory Attacks

From Dr. Zmirak at Stream:

Jesus led no armies and forbade His apostles even to defend Him from false arrest. Muhammad had no such scruples, himself assembling armies and leading raids of passing caravans, then battles in wars of conquest. While Jesus stood out from other rabbis in remaining celibate, Muhammad allotted himself dozens of wives, and hundreds of sex slaves (“concubines”) taken from non-Muslims he’d killed in battle. Each Muslim warrior was allowed up to four wives, if he could afford them, with no limit on concubines. Muhammad himself ordered massacres of non-Muslims his armies had conquered, ethnically cleansing Arabia of both Christians and Jews.

The shocking, explosive attacks of suddenly united Arab tribes destroyed the Zoroastrian Persian empire, and cut the size of the Byzantine empire by two-thirds. Muhammad’s heirs made a tidy living off conducting annual raids of Byzantine lands, stealing, raping, and kidnapping Christians to enslave for work or sexual exploitation — with religious blessing.

Muslim regimes now ruled over the sullen populations of long-Christian cities, including most of those named by St. Paul in his epistles. Two of the seats of Christian patriarchs, Jerusalem and Antioch, were firmly in Muslim hands. A third, Constantinople, was under siege — quite literally on two occasions, when the city almost fell to Arab invaders and their barbarian allies.

The degree of religious tolerance for Christians and Jews depended on the whims of individual monarchs. Some were more pious, and exerted greater pressure to squeeze their subjugated non-Muslims to convert. Other rulers saw that the extra taxes paid by non-Muslims made them economically valuable, and preferred not to convert the geese that kept laying golden eggs. Most of the ancient learning that contemporary multiculturalist writers credit Muslims with preserving was actually passed on by Christian monks, some of them working for Arab rulers as their physicians or librarians.

Christian pilgrims trekking to visit the holy sites in Palestine were a source of revenue for Arab rulers. They also made easy targets for Muslim bandits, who could justify their attacks as freelance jihad. In the tenth century (four hundred years after the Muslim conquest) less-civilized Seljuk Turks from central Asia displaced the Arabs as rulers of the Holy Land. They massacred Christian pilgrims, and renewed the onslaught of Muslim assaults on the remaining provinces of the Christian Byzantine empire.

So the eastern Roman emperor Alexios I, overlooking the religious schism which now divided his church from Rome’s, wrote to the pope asking for aid. And Pope Urban II answered. (Read more.)