Tea at Trianon: Iran and the Vindication of Christopher Hitchens

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, March 6, 2026

Iran and the Vindication of Christopher Hitchens

From Mark Judge at Hot Air:

In a brilliant essay in the collection A Hitch in Time, Hitchens defends Rushdie, making the point that the attack against the author was fought not just by Western liberals but by plenty of artists and writers in the Muslim world. In fact, Hitchens noted, many Western elites were showing cowardice in coming to Rushdie’s defense:
It’s been remarked before, by keener minds than my own, that almost all great moments in the history of censorship and free expression have turned on the question of blasphemy. There’s a question of proportion here, and I’m sure that Rushdie himself would blush and wriggle at the implied comparison with Socrates, Jesus Christ, Galileo, Luther, Spinoza and Tyndale. Still, a phrase keeps recurring to my mind. It comes, bizarrely, from Paul Newman in The Verdict, as he mutters anxiously outside the courtroom: “There are no other cases. This is the case.” By this he plainly means to convey, not that there are no other disputes or dramas or miscarriages of justice, but that this one has become the unavoidable one, or the defining one. The acid test. The test case. The crux. In our time, those of us who unavoidably missed the opportunity to discover where we might have stood on earlier occasions of sheep-goat separation have now been offered the chance in a rather direct fashion. Paradoxically, perhaps, it is the minds of certain “Oriental” scholars and dissidents which have been swifter to recognize this than many of their self-constrained “Western” counterparts.
Bingo. While Iranian women are dancing in the streets to celebrate their newfound freedom, American and European “intellectuals” are ambivalent - or worse, rooting for the mullahs. I want to emphasize that I am not arguing that you have to agree with war or have no questions about President Trump’s foreign policy. I’m saying that when it comes to free speech and artistic expression, conservatives and liberals have both fallen short.
Readers of Hot Air have accused me, with justification, of obsessively bringing up the Brett Kavanaugh nightmare that I was involved in, yet in re-reading Hitchens and witnessing the cowardice of those who said Salmon Rushdie “had it coming” - a sentiment Hitchens finds absolutely nauseating - I relived a nasty memory of conservative editors going silent when I was under fire in 2018 and no one was speaking up. Conservative author and editor Joseph Bottum was an exception: “The treatment of @markgjudge was awful,” he tweeted, “and the failure of those who published him to defend him was among the most despicable.” Yes, it was. (Read more.)