Tea at Trianon: Echoes of the Great Famine in the Covid Era

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

Tuesday, October 14, 2025

Echoes of the Great Famine in the Covid Era

From Brownstone Institute:

In Spring 2020, supposedly “civilized” nations of the world tackled the prospects of how best to subjugate their domestic populations. At this time I was struck by seemingly obvious parallels to another sad chapter in the history of human misery: the Irish Potato Famine. There are many core similarities marking the two calamities.
Both evolved from real biological threats that did actually exist (a potato blight in Ireland and a novel coronavirus globally); yet government choices (rooted more in ideology and control) amplified the suffering far beyond anything naturally inflicted. British policies during the famine prioritized exports and landlord profit over human lives (Irish landlords at this time were a gentry class called the “Protestant Ascendancy” that exercised social, political, and economic domination over the subject population). Likewise, lockdown mandates favored top-down edicts over personal choice and community resilience, which only favored the social elite who could afford to sequester. Both eras saw freedoms trampled: the Irish lost access to their own food and land, while Covid restrictions silenced dissent, shuttered churches, and confined people to their homes, all under the guise of public safety.

The Irish catastrophe of 1845-1852 killed over a million and forced another million to emigrate, but it stemmed from more than crop failure. British governance enforced a system where Irish tenant farmers grew cash crops for export, leaving potatoes as their sole staple. When the blight hit, food ships sailed out of Irish ports laden with grain and livestock, bound for England, while locals starved. Relief came too late and too stingy, burdened on absentee landlords who evicted families to cut costs. This was no act of God, but rather policy as punishment and tied to centuries of colonial disdain.

Fast-forward to 2020, and a similar script unfolded. The virus was indeed deadly for the vulnerable, but the response (in the form of indefinite shutdowns, mask mandates, and travel bans) created a cascade of harms far worse than the thing it was trying to mitigate. Economies ground to a halt, mental health crises surged, and children lost years of schooling, all while leaders preached “Follow the science” from their insulated bubbles. Freedom of speech crumbled under censorship of dissenting doctors, religious gatherings faced police raids, and personal autonomy yielded to tracking apps and vaccine passports. These toxic measures (sold as temporary) corrosively lingered, forever eroding trust in institutions. (Read more.)