Tea at Trianon: American Despotism

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

Thursday, May 11, 2023

American Despotism

From American Greatness:

While not every member of the neoliberal order, which still employs well-intentioned bureaucrats, has agreed to support a despotic agenda, the regime’s character forces one to draw certain conclusions. Many neoliberals aspired to a global aristocracy, magnificent men and women flipping quarters to grateful peasants. Oligarchs brokered the outsourcing of U.S. industry in return for financial control under the dollar, even as they engineered technologies for a new information age. But today’s globalist American empire is a kleptocracy filled with princelings of the political and corporate elite who inherited—and now drain—the wealthiest and most powerful empire in history. It consolidates market share and outsources its technologies to foreign companies for its private benefit. It despotically introduces a permanent state of exception to the law to rule in its own interests. In fear of the subjects off whom it feeds, it assigns legal identities to groups to determine their privileges.
In this civil war between Western whites, the kleptocrats claim science’s authority to subdue the populace, and they enlist an identity politics priesthood to stoke racial hatred against middle-class whites, who suffer indignities, humiliations, and loyalty tests. Following the COVID lockdowns and unlawful 2020 election, the last vestige of legitimacy has collapsed, and the kleptocracy has revealed itself as an incompetent, corrupt class of degenerates. In their palaces at the center of a rotting kingdom, the despots surround themselves with harems, catamites, and vicious eunuchs to administrate a world of performance rituals and sadomasochistic fantasies even as their people and world hegemony decline. (Read more.)