Tea at Trianon: The Anti-Communist Film Festival: The Unbearable Lightness of Being

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

Saturday, November 8, 2025

The Anti-Communist Film Festival: The Unbearable Lightness of Being

From Mark Judge at Hot Air:

Americans revere the Founding Fathers and honor our military veterans and the sacrifices they made to keep us free. Yet as Kundera notes, there is also a level of lived-in culture that makes one not just appreciate a certain place, but adore it. Americans don’t just respect America - we adore it. We adore our movies and novels and TV shows and comedians, or at least we did before they all went woke. We adore John Coltrane and Johnny Carson and Taylor Swift and Richard Pryor and baseball and skateboarding and swing dancing and Marvel Comics.
This is why woke culture is so Soviet, so uniform, and so poisonous. Rather than appreciating the variety of cultures and traditions — some more conservative and some more liberal — that make America so dynamic, fun, and interesting, the woke try to force a humorless, totalizing society exactly like the one Kundera battled against. Kundera’s 1967 novel The Joke explored the despair and absurdity of life under Stalin, where a single joke about a government official could destroy a person’s entire life. Of course, in today’s woke culture, a politically incorrect joke can have the same effect. In recent years, Kundera himself has been in danger of being canceled by feminists, who don’t like the depiction of women in some of his books. A young Kundera today might find himself canceled before publishing a word.
In A Kidnapped West, Kundera despairs for America. Our country, he writes, “has forgotten what it is.” We have forgotten our heritage from both Athens (philosophy) and Jerusalem (Christianity) and are now awash in, as Kundera saw in 1983, not great works of culture but “entertainment and technology.” While Central Europe was once considered just a satellite of the Soviet Eastern Bloc, America is now under the thumb of the Woke West. (Read more.)