Culture critic: How ‘The Crown’ Cheats Thatcher Libertarian: The Danger in Censoring History
Fans of “The Crown” eagerly awaited the move of “the story of the royal family and British politics into the 1980s,” notes Jonathan Tobin at The Federalist, but conservatives dreaded it, suspecting creator Peter Morgan would “trash the reputation of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.” Indeed, the Netflix series portrays “Thatcher as a rigid ideologue” lacking “empathy for the suffering of the British people.” And it gives “short shrift” to her policies, which “ultimately shook Britain out of its postwar socialist lethargy and [led] to its rebirth as a dynamic economic power.” Empathy “couldn’t fix Charles and Diana’s problems any more than it” could let Britain “overcome the toll that decades of the dead hand of socialism had taken on its economy and society.”
“In an act of self-censoring condescension,” snaps Reason’s Ronald Bailey, the National Gallery of Art and three other leading galleries postponed “a major retrospective exhibition of the works of American artist Philip Guston,” because they included depictions of Ku Klux Klan figures. “Curators feared their audiences would not be sophisticated enough to perceive and appreciate the manifestly anti-racist intent of the artist’s works.” Pushback against the decision — “which pretended that suppressing imagery that reminds us of sinister truths can somehow eradicate historical evils” — was swift: “The people who run our great institutions . . . lack faith in the intelligence of their audience,” railed 100 prominent artists of various racial backgrounds in an open letter. Guston’s daughter Musa Mayer was similarly scathing: “The danger is not in looking at Philip Guston’s work,” she asserted, “but in looking away.”
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