Tea at Trianon: The Devil’s Renaissance

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, September 9, 2024

The Devil’s Renaissance

From Armas:

The nature and persistence of antisemitism on its own terms, its intellectual and theological content (such as it is), is properly a topic for others, who have engaged it in ways I never have. I have been satisfied merely to know the history in outline, and that has been sufficient to warn against it and its advocates. What I can offer is an interpretive framework or two for understanding its abrupt resurgence now, rooted not in the thing itself, but in the nature of history — and of man.
The first is fairly simple: the generation that experienced antisemitism’s most-horrific episode in the Holocaust is now mostly gone, and so the social prohibitions upon its expression are concurrently lessened. This is also partially explanatory as to why Western societies are increasingly tolerant of migrant cohorts that never had any such prohibition, most notably those from the Muslim world, who will now express openly their loathing of the hated Jew. In a single lifetime we have gone from a society in which this was unthinkable — because nearly every parent or grandparent had played some part in a great World War against the operators of the hideous camps — to one in which very few feel a direct and living connection to what they see as yesterday’s fight. When my grandmother was a child she knew veterans of the American Civil War, and it shaped her society and personal perceptions powerfully — especially in east Texas, where the defeated and their descendants gathered. A similar role is played by the Second World War in the civic memory and values of every generation born clear through the close of the last century: the major difference being that, as Americans, we were all heirs to the victors.
That time is over. The last veterans approach centenarian status, and the last time Americans elected a Second World War-veteran President was thirty-six years ago. The proportion of the American population that has no meaningful experience of that generation in public life approaches sixty percent of the whole. The proportion of the American population that is actually in that generation is under one percent of the whole. (Read more.)

Andrew Klavan shreds the faux history of Daryll Cooper.