Tea at Trianon: Publishers, Not Trump, Endanger Free Speech

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, January 14, 2019

Publishers, Not Trump, Endanger Free Speech

From The National Review:

I won’t bore you by recounting all the times The New Yorker and Vanity Fair have railed against the president for supposedly endangering the freedom of people like its staffers to speak their minds. Now, the owner of these magazines is demanding that its own writers censor themselves, if they know what’s good for them. This is not just a stain on some of a free press’s loudest defenders, it promises to narrow and diminish the range of ideas they publish. If you know a field is mined, but have not been furnished with a map of each explosive’s location, why would you stray into that area at all? The New Yorker might as well place a sign above its office doors saying, “Warning: Do not be interesting.” (“Isn’t it there already?” I hear some wags replying, but The New Yorker remains replete with interesting material.)

As for Vanity Fair, for many years it published the musings of one Christopher Hitchens. Remember him? He said Michelle Obama’s undergraduate thesis wasn’t written in any known language. He said, about the Iraq War, that “the death toll is not nearly high enough.” He called Mother Teresa “a fanatic, a fundamentalist and a fraud.” Most unforgivable of all, he said women aren’t funny. Any guesses on whether, in today’s social-media atmosphere, one or two of his columns might cause a little light apoplexy on Twitbook or Facer? (I can report from personal experience that merely quoting what Hitchens said about Mrs. Obama predictably and boringly gets you tagged as racist.(Read more.)