Tea at Trianon: Neoliberalism Bites The Dust in Afghanistan

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

Friday, February 23, 2024

Neoliberalism Bites The Dust in Afghanistan

This 2021 article explains how the myth of Joe Biden's competence was destroyed in Kabul. From Emerald Robinson:

Each day, the Biden Administration seemed to ask itself: what’s the dumbest thing we can possibly do over there? And then they did it. We abandoned the airport first, and then called an evacuation! We left behind $84 billion worth of military-grade weapons for the Taliban! We flew home 100,000 bacha bazi enthusiasts but abandoned our own citizens there! This week’s debacle was so absurd that it was almost diabolical: our very own State Department was busy blocking Americans from evacuating that hell-hole on private flights they had chartered themselves.

How could anyone keep up with all the defeats and debacles and dark jokes that were on us? It was only last week that we discovered that half the population of Afghanistan was pretending to be enlisted in the Afghan Army to be on the CIA payroll. (That particular joke lasted twenty years.) Our military leaders had been reassuring the Biden Administration that Afghanistan’s security forces would hold off the Taliban for awhile if we finally left the country and then —poof! — they all quit over the weekend once the Taliban called.

A day or two later, they all showed up together at the Kabul airport pretending to be interpreters in order to get airlifted to America. (Read more.)