Tea at Trianon: China’s War on Religion

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

Monday, May 15, 2023

China’s War on Religion

From American Greatness:

On the night of July 22, thousands of Falun Gong followers were rousted from their beds, arrested, beaten, and incarcerated. Their texts were burned in bonfires in cities across the country and their exercise routines banned. As supporters resisted, Chinese authorities ratcheted up the persecution. On Nov. 30, 1999, some 3,000 Communist Party functionaries were summoned to Beijing’s Great Hall of the People where Li Lanqing revealed the regime’s plans for Falun Gong: “Defame their reputations, bankrupt them financially, and destroy them physically.” Only much later did the world come to see the ghastly lengths to which the CCP would go in this campaign.
The discussion among democratic nations about “decoupling” from Beijing over human rights presents a basic conundrum: How much leverage does the West really have over a nation on which it relies for basic necessities, including medical and technological supplies? This problem became acute—and a hot-button political issue—during the COVID-19 outbreak and the ensuing pandemic. But human rights experts and religious freedom advocates have tried to draw attention to a far grislier supply-chain crisis that Beijing has controlled and secretly cultivated for years as the United States and other nations turned a blind eye to its horrors, despite a growing body of evidence. Nearly a year ago, however, the American Journal of Transplantation, the leading medical transplant publication in the world, made it impossible to ignore. (Read more.)