Tea at Trianon: Europe Has Failed Armenia

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, December 6, 2023

Europe Has Failed Armenia

From First Things:

The Cold War had already broken out while Adenauer, Schuman, and De Gasperi began to lay out the plans for a united Europe. We, the children of the war, rejoiced in their plans. They meant freedom: a solid future. Such was my own hope in the united Europe that I stayed in the Europa-Haus dormitory while I studied in Göttingen, and lived alongside my Spanish, French, German, and Norwegian friends. We all wore pins with the European flag.

But the ideological battle that the war had left in its wake killed our dream before it was born. The late sixties were filled with loud, angry protests, and the seventies with terrorism. Worse than the violence was the hypocrisy of those who ignored the underlying discord, who refused to address it. And now that hypocrisy has destroyed Nagorno-Karabakh.

The war that I grew up in never really ended. It has reached my beloved Artsakh, the Artsakh in which I drank Tuti oghi (mulberry vodka) under a star-filled sky near the excavations of the old city of Tigranakert, the city founded by the great Armenian king Tigran the Great. It was handed over to Azerbaijan after the 44-Day War in 2020. And now, more recently, over 100,000 Armenians have been driven from Nagorno-Karabakh after Azerbaijan launched an attack in September.

I saw that governments would make grand statements about morality and do nothing. I saw that they would try to take advantage of the unrest in the Caucasus in order to further their own ideological agendas. I saw that it would be the people, my people, the Armenians of Artsakh, who would suffer.

I hope the United States, who liberated us before, will remember its extraordinary generosity. Our memories of violence stretch back millennia. Centuries and centuries of wars and invasions have made hypocrites of us. (Read more.)