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30e02ea
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The great hatred of capitalism in the hearts of the oppressed, ancient and modern, I think, stems not merely from the ensuing vast inequality in wealth, and the often unfair and arbitrary nature of who profits and who suffers, but from the silent acknowledgement that under a free market economy the many victims of the greed of the few are still better off than those under the utopian socialism of the well-intended. It is a hard thing for th..
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economics
income-disparity
inequality
military-history
progressivism
society
utopia
wealth
western-culture
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Victor Davis Hanson |
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b0b631f
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But wars--or the threat of war--at least put an end to American chattel slavery, Nazism, Fascism, Japanese militarism, and Soviet Communism. It is hard to think of any democracy--Afghan, American, Athenian, contemporary German, Iraqi, Italian, Japanese, ancient Theban--that was not an outcome of armed struggle and war.
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Victor Davis Hanson |
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73731cd
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Victory may now require a level of force deemed objectionable by civilized peoples, meaning that some, for justifiable reasons, may be reluctant to pursue it. But victory has not become an ossified concept altogether.
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history
victory
war
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Victor Davis Hanson |
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9c452ac
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This revolutionary idea of Western citizenship--replete with ever more rights and responsibilities--would provide superb manpower for growing legions and a legal framework that would guarantee that the men who fought felt that they themselves in a formal and contractual sense had ratified the conditions of their own battle service. The ancient Western world would soon come to define itself by culture rather than by race, skin color, or lang..
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civilization
consent
contract-for-service
government
politics
rome
soldiers
voluteer-army
war
warfare
western-culture
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Victor Davis Hanson |
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e2d08ac
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if Westerners deem themselves too smart, too moral, or too soft to stop aggressors in this complex nuclear age, then--as Socrates and Aristotle alike remind us--they can indeed become real accomplices to evil through inaction.
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Victor Davis Hanson |
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c489dc6
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Athens's disastrous 415 B.C. expedition against Sicily, the largest democracy in the Greek world, may not prefigure our war in Iraq. (A hypothetical parallel to democratic Athens's preemptive attack on the neutral, distant, far larger, and equally democratic Syracuse in the midst of an ongoing though dormant war with Sparta would be America's dropping its struggle with al-Qaeda to invade India).
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Victor Davis Hanson |
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4fe1e25
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For a capitalist system to work, the state had to protect, not regulate or interfere with, free markets. Both for political and religious reasons, this the sultan could not do: The Ottomans had then no idea of the balance of trade. . . . Originated from an age-old tradition in the Middle East, the Ottoman trade policy was that the state had to be concerned above all that the people and craftsmen in the cities in particular would not suffer ..
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Victor Davis Hanson |
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72a3e7f
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General George Patton and others lamented that the Second World War had broken out in 1939 over saving the free peoples of Eastern Europe from totalitarianism--only to end, through the broken 1945 Yalta accords, ensuring their enslavement by an erstwhile Soviet ally whose military we had supplied lavishly.
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Victor Davis Hanson |
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5cc0bb2
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Democratic citizenship requires knowledge of war--and now, in the age of weapons of mass annihilation, more than ever.
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Victor Davis Hanson |
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4dfd64a
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The United States was born through war, reunited by war, and saved from destruction by war. No future generation, however comfortable and affluent, can escape that terrible knowledge. Our freedom is not entirely our own; in some sense it is mortgaged from those who paid the ultimate price for its continuance. My own life of security, freedom, opportunity, and relative affluence certainly has been made possible because a grandfather fought a..
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Victor Davis Hanson |
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4e9c57f
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Mexica warriors were predicated on birth and status. In a cyclical pattern of cause and effect, such greater innate advantages gave aristocrats predominance on the battlefield in taking captives, which in turn provided proof of their martial excellence--and
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Victor Davis Hanson |
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696f2ae
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The Price of Neglect A PUBLIC THAT'S illiterate about the conflicts of the past can easily find itself confused during wartime. Without standards of historical comparison, people prove ill-equipped to make informed judgments when the dogs of war are unleashed. Neither U.S. politicians nor most citizens seem to recall the incompetence and terrible decisions that, in December 1777, December 1941, and November 1950, led to massive American cas..
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Victor Davis Hanson |
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85ea57f
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Military history teaches us, contrary to popular belief, that wars are not necessarily the most costly of human calamities. The allied coalition lost few lives in getting Saddam out of Kuwait during the Gulf War of 1991, yet doing nothing in Rwanda allowed savage gangs and militias to murder hundreds of thousands with impunity. Bill Clinton stopped a Balkan holocaust through air strikes, without sacrificing American soldiers. His supporters..
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Victor Davis Hanson |
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df895db
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Prewar education, reputation, influence, and rank matter little when the enemy is gaining ground and very few know how to turn him back.
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Victor Davis Hanson |
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81a313a
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In some sense, winning against impossible odds--when most others cannot or would not try--is the only mark of a great general.
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Victor Davis Hanson |
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f27ad00
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When the successful military action against Saddam Hussein ended in April 2003, more than 70 percent of the American people backed the invasion of Iraq, with politicians and pundits alike elbowing each other aside to take credit for their prescient support.
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Victor Davis Hanson |
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6107867
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The United States is often criticized as interventionist, but in fact America's traditional propensity has been more isolationist--willing to act forcefully in the world when absolutely necessary, but preferring to be unencumbered.
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Victor Davis Hanson |
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4878bb5
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how does a state manage to achieve, all at once, the highest basket of gas, sales, and income taxes, yet rate nearly dead last in roads and highways, or school performance tests, and have the nation's greatest number of billionaires, and one-sixth of America's welfare recipients, and the largest percentage of any state population below the poverty line?
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Victor Davis Hanson |
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9268bc9
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With the demise of the inward-looking, stodgy yeomen, enormous wealth and poverty ensued. The Greek-speaking Hellenistic world could now use the Hellenic genius without ethical constraint.
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Victor Davis Hanson |
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d36b2fb
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it was the horror of the two world wars--Verdun, the Somme, Hiroshima--that led to our own era's questioning of the tragic view of war. Such a reaction was certainly true and understandable in a Europe that nearly destroyed itself in two devastating industrial wars within a roughly twenty-year period. Yet out of such numbing losses we may have missed the lesson of the horror. The calamity of sixty million dead was not just because nationali..
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Victor Davis Hanson |
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e4e3e3e
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To assert that military history suggested that wars broke out because bad men, in fear or in pride, sought material advantage or status, or because sometimes good but naive men had done too little to deter them, was understandably seen as antithetical to a more enlightened understanding of human nature.
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Victor Davis Hanson |
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0931bf7
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Military history reminds us that those who died on behalf of democratic freedom to stop totalitarian killing were a different sort than totalitarians who died fighting against it to perpetuate killing. The sacrifice of the former meant that generations yet born might have a greater likelihood of opportunity, security, and freedom; the latter fought for a cause that would have increased the suffering of future generations.
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Victor Davis Hanson |
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24bc205
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Given the Western ability to produce deadly weapons, its propensity to create cheap, plentiful goods, and its tradition of seeing war in pragmatic rather than ritual terms as a mechanism to advance political ends, it is no surprise that Mesoamericans, African tribes, and native North Americans all joined European forces to help kill off Aztecs, Zulus, and Lakotas.
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Victor Davis Hanson |
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2cd79ac
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IT IS HARD to think of many democracies that were not born in some manner out of war, violence, or coercion--beginning with the first example of Cleisthenic Athens in 507 B.C., and including our own revolution in 1776. The best examples are those of the twentieth century, when many of the most successful present-day constitutional governments were epiphenomena of war, imposed by the victors or coalition partners, as we have seen in the case..
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Victor Davis Hanson |
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738d9a1
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We forget that even worse choices than those have confronted us in the past--like sending billions of dollars of aid to Joseph Stalin to stop Adolf Hitler, just a few years after the former had slaughtered or starved to death twenty million Soviets, invaded hapless Finland, carved up Poland with Hitler, and sent strategic materials daily to the Third Reich as it firebombed London.
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Victor Davis Hanson |
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c6337fb
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Military history is just as often the tangential story of an appeasement that fails to head off warmongering as it is of an aggressive chest-thumping that prompts conflict. The destructive military careers of Alexander the Great, Caesar, Napoleon, and Hitler all would have ended earlier had any of their numerous enemies united when the odds favored them, had any listened to a Demosthenes, a Cato the Younger, or a Churchill.
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Victor Davis Hanson |
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6dcb304
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Apologizing for our past sins may reveal character and for a time lessen anti-Americanism abroad, but if it is done without acknowledging that the sins of America are the sins of mankind, and that our remedies are so often exceptional, then it only earns transitory applause--and a more lasting contempt that we ourselves do not believe in the values we profess.
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anti-americanism
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Victor Davis Hanson |
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dba5751
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In emblematic fashion, America stands as a protector of the global system of market capitalism and constitutional government, and of the often reckless modernist culture that threatens so much of tribal and indigenous custom and protocols. That we are therefore often to be hated by the authoritarian, the statist, and the tribalist--and periodically to be challenged by those who want to diminish our power, riches, or influence--is regrettabl..
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Victor Davis Hanson |
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e1a2548
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After September 1939, perhaps one billion of the world's roughly two billion population were soldiers, partisans, and producers engaged in trying to kill people.
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Victor Davis Hanson |
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2557013
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Yet it is hard to find many wars that have resulted from miscommunications or misunderstandings. Far more often they break out because of malevolent intent and the absence of deterrence, or because a prior war ended without a clear resolution or without settling disagreements--in a manner of Rome's first two wars with Carthage. Again, Margaret Atwood was empirical when she wrote in her poem, "Wars happen because the ones who start them / th..
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Victor Davis Hanson |
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93cd6bf
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Osama bin Laden did not attack on September 11 because there was a dearth of American diplomats willing to talk with him in the Hindu Kush. He did not think America denied its Muslim citizens the right to worship freely. He did not think his native Saudi Arabia was impoverished or short of lebensraum. Instead, he recognized that a series of Islamic terrorist assaults against U.S. interests over two decades had met with what he would judge a..
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Victor Davis Hanson |
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739c2ac
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Over many years bin Laden cited dozens of concocted reasons about why he attacked the United States; the only valid one was that he attacked America because he thought--to paraphrase Margaret Atwood--with good reason, he could get away with it.
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Victor Davis Hanson |
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ac083bd
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To conclude wars decisively and achieve prewar aims, the victor must defeat, and often even humiliate militarily, an enemy and force the loser to abandon prewar behavior before offering a magnanimous peace. "Humiliate," here, does not mean to gratuitously insult or ridicule a prostrate enemy but rather to show him that the wages of his unprovoked aggression are the end of his ability to make war on others."
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Victor Davis Hanson |
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76644e9
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General George S. Patton may have been uncouth, but he wasn't wrong when he bellowed, "Americans love a winner and will not tolerate a loser."
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Victor Davis Hanson |
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b39214a
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human character is unchanging and thus its conduct in calamitous times is always predictable.
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Victor Davis Hanson |
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28e479d
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After fighting for four long years, we were completely surprised by the Soviets' efforts to absorb Eastern Europe, and their rejection of almost all wartime assurances of elections to come.
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Victor Davis Hanson |
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a847f01
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Harry Truman, after all, in conjunction with Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson, radically cut back American arms following the end of the Second World War. Johnson himself wished to dismantle the Marine Corps and felt nuclear weapons had made all such conventional arms unnecessary.
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Victor Davis Hanson |
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d2892c7
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Japan would live and die by the race card--defining (and demonizing) America as "white" and thus Japan as a kindred but clearly superior "yellow" people."
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Victor Davis Hanson |
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21b320f
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Greeks and Romans were anti-Mediterranean cultures, in the sense of being at odds with much of the political heritages of Persia, Egypt, and Phoenicia. While Hellenism was influenced--and enriched--at times by Near Eastern, Egyptian, and Persian art, literature, religion, and architecture, its faith in consensual government and free markets was unique. Greek and Latin words for "democracy," "republic," "city-state," "constitution," "freedom..
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Victor Davis Hanson |
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c3f2068
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Few American commentators evaluated MacArthur's strategic sense at various stages in his generalship in Korea; it was instead the perception of whether he was winning or losing that mattered most to the public.
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berserker
declan-chase
dreams-of-a-dark-warrior
immortals-after-dark
kresley-cole
lore
paranormal-romance
regin-the-radiant
valkyrie
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Victor Davis Hanson |
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a983213
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We should note that almost every technological transformation of consequence has taken place under Western auspices--if not Western in the strict geographical sense, then Western in the notion of a cultural landscape shaped by free thought and the chance for profit. Even non-Western innovations, like stirrups and gunpowder, have been quickly modified and improved by Western militaries. Jet fighters, GPS-guided bombs, and laser-guided muniti..
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Victor Davis Hanson |
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9001f0d
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No society in the present age is so self-critical, so ready to embrace foreign ideas, or so transparent and merit-based as the United States. Far more lethal to the U.S. military than a new form of IED would be censorship of ideas back home in the United States, or religious restrictions on research, or politically guided rules of investigation and publication, or government-run monopolies on labor, management, and production.
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Victor Davis Hanson |
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e7aefbc
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The United States, being a strong and wealthy society, and with unrivaled global influence, invites envy. The success of its restless culture of freedom, constitutional democracy, self-critique, secular rationalism, and open markets provokes the resentment of both weaker and less-secure theocracy and autocracy alike.
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Victor Davis Hanson |
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e4a13c7
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Who we are, how we think, and the manner in which we act, ipsis factis, are considered obnoxious, dangerous, and unpalatable to many fundamentalist Muslims around the globe, who endure manifestations of our power and influence daily, from DVDs in Kabul to text-messaging ads in Yemen.
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Victor Davis Hanson |