Tea at Trianon: 'Dreaming Against the World'

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, November 10, 2025

'Dreaming Against the World'

From Mark Judge at Hot Air:

As I have been outlining on Hot Air, we’re planning an Anti-Communist Film Festival in 2026. One of the communist disasters we will be discussing is China’s Cultural Revolution. We would like to show the short documentary Dreaming Against the World. It depicts the life of Mu Xin (1927-2011), a brilliant yet largely forgotten artist of the 20th century. Xin was imprisoned during China’s Cultural Revolution, Mu Xin risked his life to write and paint. Dreaming Against the World tells his story. The documentary portrait filmed on location in China and New York by filmmakers Tim Sternberg and Francisco Bello has been nominated for Academy Awards.
Taking place from 1966-1976, the Cultural Revolution was the doing of China’s “Great Helmsman,” Mao Zedong (1893-1976), the chairman of the Chinese Communist Party. After the failure of Mao’s economic Great Leap Forward, a program of agricultural collectivization that resulted in tens of millions of deaths, Mao saw the Cultural Revolution as a way to finally set things right. As Whittaker Chambers knew, communists always need a “totalizing solution” to the pain of life. “Our objective is to struggle against and crush those persons in authority who are taking the capitalist road ... so as to facilitate the consolidation and development of the socialist system,” Mao said in his “Sixteen Points” declaration of 1966.
In his book The People’s Revolution: A Cultural History (2016), China expert Frank Dikötter observes that Mao hoped his movement would make China the pinnacle of the socialist universe and make him “the man who leads planet Earth into communism.” When Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev denounced Stalin in 1956, Mao took that as a sign of weakness on the part of Khrushchev, a weakness to be exploited by Mao, who saw a clear path to surpassing Stalin himself in greatness. Toward this end, he launched the Cultural Revolution. A flyer from the time outlines the plan:
The whole party must follow Comrade Mao Zedong’s instructions, hold high the great banner of the proletarian Cultural Revolution, thoroughly expose the reactionary bourgeois stand of those so called ‘academic authorities’ who oppose the party and socialism, thoroughly criticize and repudiate the reactionary bourgeois ideas in the sphere of academic work, education, journalism, literature, art and publishing, and seize the leadership in these cultural spheres.

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