Tea at Trianon: 'The Anti-Communist Manifestos' and Conservatives Who Behave Badly

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

Tuesday, October 7, 2025

'The Anti-Communist Manifestos' and Conservatives Who Behave Badly

From Mark Judge at Hot Air:

I’ve been writing a series of articles for Hot Air about the Anti-Communist Film Festival, which is being planned for the fall of 2026. One thing that is important about the festival is the reality that some of the greatest anti-Communists have been flawed human beings. Of course, we don’t want to celebrate bad behavior - we have the left to do that - but conservatives can sometimes wall themselves off from the rest of the world with a clean, Holy Roller image that doesn’t get its hands dirty. The fact that many freedom-loving people have had experience with the darker side of life and with the enemies of freedom can make them great strategists. Such street smarts can prevent things like the recent killing of Charlie Kirk.
In his great book The Anti-Communist Manifestos: Four Books That Shaped the Cold War, the Princeton scholar John Fleming notes that some of the great anti-communists of the 20th century were not saints. “The moral relationship between an author’s life and work is a question with a troubled history going back at least to Plato,” Fleming writes. “All four of the authors dealt with in this book attract my full attention, but only at best my partial admiration. The life experience of each, which included that special form of purgatorial fire Communism orchestrated for its apostates, would have been enough to test even the strongest character.”
Fleming then talks about Arthur Koestler, the author of the classic Darkness at Noon, as “a modern genius” who could nonetheless be boorish towards women. Jan Valtin, author of the huge bestseller Out of the Night, “was by his own testimony a professional thug for half his adult life.” Fleming adds that Valtin “was probably a murderer, though his time spent in San Quentin was only for attempted murder.” Like many former Soviet citizens, Victor Kravchenko, author of I Choose Freedom, “never entirely succeeded in leaving behind him the evidence of dishonest servility and self-preserving self-centeredness that the experience of the 1930s required of so many Soviet bureaucrats. Even Whittaker Chambers, well-educated journalist and the author of the classic Witness, “has to have been among the most divisively controversial Americans of the twentieth century” and “lacked any kind of public graciousness that might counteract the fierce attacks and smears unleashed upon him. He combined, unpleasingly, an unconvincing Quaker meekness with the grumpiness of the prophet without honor in his own land.” (Read more.)