Tea at Trianon: The State as Rootless Transient

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, November 9, 2023

The State as Rootless Transient

From Mark Steyn:

The latest adaptation is "the oldest hatred" meets the new religion of "identity politics" - which is Lenin's old who/whom paradigm applied to every one on the planet. So a murdered Israeli baby can never be a victim, because, even at four months old, he is part of the oppressor class.

We're taught it in school. If a white girl in kindergarten is already an avatar of "white privilege", then we are all not our brother's keeper (for this, sadly, is an age of only children) but our great-great-great-grandfather's keeper. If a white six-year-old bears the sin of what white men did in the eighteenth century, then why wouldn't a French Jewess in Lyon not be a legitimate target for those who wish to protest the Gaza "occupation"? This is the hideous dehumanising logic of "identity politics".

I'm doing way too much self-quoting these days, so just for a change of pace let me re-quote my quotation of somebody else - another French Jew, the philosopher Alain Finkielkraut:

'The lofty idea of "the war on racism" is gradually turning into a hideously false ideology,' he said in 2005. 'And this anti-racism will be for the 21st century what Communism was for the 20th century: a source of violence.'

Just so. The polytechnic left marching for the Palestinians won't cut them any slack in the long run. For (back to self-quoting), as I wrote a long time ago, "in one of history's bleaker jests, in the coming Europe the Europeans will be the new Jews."

This is a column almost two decades old, beginning with some literary citations that stayed with me: The Heart of Princess Osra led to my own Prisoner of Windsor and Roumanian Journey became a Tale for Our Time. But the central thesis has broadened, too. The mobs chanting "Gas the Jews!" outside Sydney Opera House and "Kill them all!" in downtown Montreal are the future of the west, absent serious, sustained course correction. Absent that, then like the Lost Tribes of the ancient Kingdom of Israel, what remains of less ancient but still venerable kingdoms will be held by Lost Tribes of England, Lost Tribes of France, Lost Tribes of [Your Nation Here], fleeing their homelands and wandering the earth. There's your "refugees". (Read more.)