Tea at Trianon: A Tale of Three Cities & the End of the Old New World Order

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

Wednesday, June 7, 2023

A Tale of Three Cities & the End of the Old New World Order

From The Imaginative Conservative:

The year 1989 may well be seen by future historians as one of those rare pivotal years of this past millennium—like 1066, 1492, 1793, and 1914—that profoundly altered the direction of Western Civilization. It is, of course, still too early to say for certain that we as a society set ourselves on a dangerous collision course that year, but none should be surprised if it turns out that lost opportunities in 1989 (and subsequent years) will have dire consequences for the rest of this century. The events that unfolded in Beijing, Moscow, and Washington have all the elements of a jumbled Greek tragedy: good intentions, foolish misunderstandings, unspeakable violence, and that most crucial of all ingredients: overweening hubris.
In May of that same year, I was a mid-level American diplomat who had just gotten an assignment he had dreamed of for many years: Senior Watch Officer (SWO) in the State Department’s Operations Center, an office designed to detect, monitor, and report on crises around the world. Timing could not have been better. That year witnessed a stunning number of crises, but the two most influential were the Tiananmen Square Massacre and the Fall of the Berlin Wall. How we interpreted and responded to these two crises have paved our path for the foreseeable future. We might have changed direction at various points along the way, but we never did, and we are now—as in any true tragedy—increasingly unable to make amends. (Read more.)