Tea at Trianon: Iran’s Pirates

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

Sunday, April 26, 2026

Iran’s Pirates

From Tierney's Real News:

If you’ve never cracked open a history book, the mess coming out of Iran right now probably looks like total chaos with no pattern to it. You’ve got top officials posting contradictory things on social media. You’ve got wild accusations flying back and forth about spies and traitors inside their own government. And you’ve got this desperate scramble to keep Iran’s oil moving toward Communist China while Iran’s entire economy falls apart at the seams. None of this is random. These are the classic signs of a regime that’s cracking under real pressure—the same exact pattern we saw with the Barbary Pirates more than 200 years ago.
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps—the IRGC—and the hardline Shia Twelver Muslim clerics who run things there are behaving like modern-day pirates. They’ve hijacked their own country, holding their own people hostage, just like those North African corsairs once held American sailors captive on the high seas. A corsair was basically a state-backed pirate—not just some random criminal on the high seas, but a sailor who had official permission from his government to attack enemy ships and coastal towns.
President Trump sees it clearly, and he’s responding the same way Thomas Jefferson did back then: with a naval blockade and absolutely no willingness to pay tribute or give in to blackmail. The end is near for this terrorist regime. Let me explain exactly what’s happening, step by step, so you can see how history is repeating itself and Trump is holding the line just like Jefferson did. (Read more.)