Tea at Trianon: Hellbrew of Hate

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, October 27, 2025

Hellbrew of Hate

From Mark Judge at Hot Air:

In his book The Red and the Black: American Film Noir in the 1950s, Ohio University professor Robert Miklitsch argues that some of the criticism of anti-communist films is not about quality, but politics. Films like I Was a Communist for the F.B.I. (1951), The Whip Hand (1951), Big Jim McLain (1952), and Walk East on Beacon! (1952) “tended to be made ‘on the cheap,’ [and] have been derogated by critics for their aesthetic quality. Since they appeared to promote a right-wing agenda unlike left, progressive pre-1948 noir, they have also been excoriated for their politics. In a word, these anticommunist films are—to invoke Daniel Leab’s verdict on I Married a Communist— ‘awful.’” Miklitsch notes that critic Arthur Lev was quite savage towards I Married a Communist. Miklitsch posits this: “Question: is it possible that Lev’s categorical judgment of I Married a Communist is an alibi for his real criticism—that the film is visually ‘undistinguished’ because it is politically reprehensible?”
Of course it is. Many of these great pro-freedom films were blacklisted because they argued against “the new world coming” of communism. It’s still going on. Look how hard the media has been promoting Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, about a leftist “revolutionary” who wages a guerrilla war against conservatives. The film will lose $100 million, but don't tell Hollywood that.
The best book about communism in Hollywood is still Hollywood Traitors: Blacklisted Screenwriters—Agents of Stalin, Allies of Hitler, by Allan H. Riskind. Riskind reveals how many communists were in Hollywood in the postwar years. One of them was director Abraham Polonsky, who once described a meeting for the founding of the Committee for the First Amendment (CFA) this way: “You could not get into the place. The excitement was intense. Every star was there.” He went on: “We Communists had not created the organization, but we believed in its usefulness and helped to organize its activities.” (Read more.)