Driving Dixie Down: The #GovernmentSupremacist Delusion of Perfection Started Long Ago
"A Most Highly Polished and Effective Instrument in the Hands of God," With a Cosmic Mandate to Correct His Work
"A Most Highly Polished and Effective Instrument in the Hands of God," With a Cosmic Mandate to Correct His Work
FASTEN YOUR SEATBELT! This is a great and lengthy piece from Enoch, the Elder of Vicksburg over at A Memoir of the Occupation. This is well worth following the link and a valuable use of your time. HUZZAH!!! - DD
1907. Europe, confidence ascendant, marches proudly into the last seven years of the Long Peace that followed Bonaparte’s defeat at Waterloo and the settlement of national borders at the Congress of Vienna. The Edwardian Age it’s called by some, Late-Late Victorian by others. And should we not honor the great Queen whose name has come to represent that most glorious of epochs? And whose sons in that year ruled not only the Empire on which the sun never set (Edward VII) but the newly ascendant Germany (Kaiser Wilhelm), the Second Reich established by the work of the great von Bismarck in 1871, and the restless power to the East: Russia (Czar Nicholas II).
Is there a better image of Europe’s civilizational unity, the self-assurance that shrugged off nascent revolutionary movements, the culture that produced art, architecture, poetry and scholarship that captured the spiritual profundities of the European people? In 1907 one could travel from London via Paris to Berlin or Vienna and then on to St Petersburg without a passport check or nasty looks from a border guard. It’s a time that’s bathed in a glorious golden haze, but which would all too soon drown in the blood and mud and horror of the Marne and the Somme, Ypres and Verdun? As Philip Larkin captured in words that break the heart…