Tea at Trianon: Cuban Communism and LGBT Rights

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

Sunday, March 19, 2023

Cuban Communism and LGBT Rights

From Return to Order:

According to the well-known classification by Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira, communism is the third stage of the Revolution, that is, a process of decadence which, since the fall of the Middle Ages, has been pushing the world away from Christian civilization. Two notions express the spirit of this Revolution: absolute equality and complete freedom. Both seem and indeed are somewhat contradictory from some points of view. However, they are reconciled in the communist utopia of an anarchist paradise, the final result of the revolutionary process. According to Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira’s classification, this transformation into anarchy would be a Fourth Revolution aimed at “liberating” not the proletarians but the instincts of man for all restraints.

At points during the communist phase, the Revolution often had to sacrifice freedom to impose equality. This is what happened, for example, to the Soviet Union and its massive repressive state. Communist theorists hold that the Revolutionary process goes from “liberation” to “liberation” as part of the historical dialectical process as it advances inexorably toward the final utopia that will be totally free and absolutely equal.

This dialectic process was reflected in the preamble of the Soviet Constitution, which stated: “The supreme goal of the Soviet state is the construction of a classless communist society in which communist social self-management will develop.”2 FV Konstantinov of the Soviet Academy of Sciences explains that this process with bring about “the withering away of the state,” i.e., the disappearance of the repressive apparatus that characterized the Soviet period and the beginning of a new era of total freedom and total equality, precisely the communist utopia.3

Throughout the twentieth century, the transition from state socialism to a communist, libertarian utopia was a major topic of discussion among communist and socialist intellectuals. None of them defended the continuation of the Soviet status quo. Theirs is an evolutionary vision that conceives history as a continuous becoming. During the Soviet period, several attempts were made to implement transitions to the next phase: Gramscism, Frankfurt School, Freudian Marxism, Marxist Humanism, the Cultural Revolution, Self-managing Socialism and so on.

This tension within the Revolution to transition to new liberations has survived to this day. And so we return to Mariela Castro Espín.

Everything in Cuba is completely controlled. Any activity not sanctioned by the government can lead to prison or, worse, the paredón—the wall of execution. It is inconceivable that Castro Espín, a high-ranking member of the Cuban nomenklatura, could do anything that is not explicitly permitted, indeed, promoted by the Communist Party. (Read more.)