Tea at Trianon: Sacrificing Your Children on the Altar of Diversity

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, February 12, 2025

Sacrificing Your Children on the Altar of Diversity

From Mark Steyn:

~The Spectator, whose headlines are lazy and terrible and an embarrassment to a once great publication, had a particularly bad example the other day:

How many more knife attacks can France take?

Well, as noted in the very first sentence of the article, there are currently 120 "knife attacks" every day in France. A generation ago it would have been inconceivable that the French would accept with a collective Gallic shrug 850 "knife attacks" per week.

Yet they do. So would they be able to "take" a thousand per week? Check back with me later this year. Fifteen hundred? Two thousand? That's the way to bet.

The French state, like other Continental countries, has certain advantages when it comes to holding the lid on things. For example, just a few days ago, Elias, 14, was leaving footie practice when he was impeded and told to cough up his cellphone. He refused. So they stabbed him. Elias was taken to hospital, but died the following day.

This didn't happen in some distant provincial town the French elites don't care about, but in the fourteenth arrondissement of Paris, as Elias was leaving the Jules Noël stadium, which has hosted prestigious international sporting events. So, unlike the other 119 "knife attacks" that day, it made the national news, and put officialdom on the backfoot. Thus, last Saturday, the Fédération française de football ordered a minute's silence in Elias's memory at all matches in Paris and across the country.

And, even as the nation rose in dignified hommage to fourteen-year-old Elias, just ten miles south the gendarmes were securing a crime scene in the woods at Épinay-sur-Orge, where the body of eleven-year-old Louise had just been discovered. She had been intercepted while leaving school the previous day, and found with more than a dozen stab wounds.

By now you may be wondering: Elias who? Louise who? Well, under the prevailing rules in France, as in Germany, the full names of the deceased cannot be published in the media. Unlike, say, the three little girls slaughtered by the Welsh choir boy in Southport. Which rule, very conveniently for the authorities, renders the victims all but anonymous even in death. All the things that were once standard in journalism - interviewing the old lady at the house next door, etc - cannot be done in French newspapers, so the dead never quite swim into focus. We know Louise's last name - Lasalle - only because, when she didn't come home on the Friday, her sister posted an alert on her social media. But that surname does not appear in the French papers. The same veil descends on the suspects, too. The particular character of a "knife attack" has to be discerned through generalities: Jean-Pierre A has died of his wounds; Mohammed Z has been taken into custody.

Look at that sweetly innocent little girl above. That's the picture her sister posted when she was missing and her fate was not yet known. In some French media outlets poor Louise is only shown with her face blurred, as if she has entered the witness protection programme. Alas, in France, there is no witness protection programme. For an old-school newspaperman such as the late David English, the poignancy of that photograph alone would have commanded the full-court Daily Mail treatment. But fourteen-year-old Elias and eleven-year-old Louise are already fading into the vast general blur: to modify Stalin, one stabbed kid is a tragedy, a million are a statistic. So the answer to The Spectator's lousy headline is my own from last month:

I Have Seen the Future and It's Stabbed

News is not news because it affects the thirty-seven people who knew the nine-year-old boy or six-year-old girl or whoever's next. It's news because it's relevant to tens of millions of people who had never heard of the poor child until she was killed. Western Europe is a stabber's paradise as a consequence of public policy that has turned once peaceable polities such as France and Sweden into low-trust fractious hellholes. And the leadership class, whether preening metrosexuals like Macron or cold unfeeling bastards like Starmer, are insistent that nothing can be changed. (Read more.)