Tea at Trianon: The Horror of Comfort Women

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

Friday, May 3, 2019

The Horror of Comfort Women

From OZY:

As author Mary Lynn Bracht recites the opening lines from her critically acclaimed debut novel, White Chrysanthemum, in the basement of the Curzon arthouse cinema, we’re transported half a world away from London’s Soho neighborhood. “It is nearly dawn, and the semi-darkness casts strange shadows along the footpath. Hana distracts her mind so that she doesn’t imagine creatures reaching for her ankles.”

It’s a discomforting read about an issue — forced prostitution of “comfort women” during World War II — that roils East Asia to this day, and it emerges from an unlikely source: a Texas-born writer who once aspired to be a soldier herself. The novel explores the harrowing history of comfort women — the tens of thousands of women subjected to forced prostitution by the imperial Japanese army between 1932 and 1945. In response to mass rapes by Japanese troops, Emperor Hirohito, according to historians, ordered the expansion of comfort stations, a euphemism for military brothels, with the idea it would reduce those atrocities while servicing the soldiers’ sexual appetites. (Read more.)