Monk

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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, should escape that terrible knowledge.

-- Victor Davis Hanson for City Journal

Victor Davis Hanson gives us a nice, if rather lengthy, essay on how the study of military history has become stunted and why that should be remedied.

( VDH )

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Victor Hanson writes on the biting incongruity in how Fatah can declaim against Hamas barbarity when they have availed themselves of the same remorseless tactics, and in how Mexico can chastise America for not being yet more open about its borders while it exacts the harshest measures against other Latin Americans who illegally cross into Mexico.

( VDH )

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Victor Davis Hanson has a nice overview of the immigration problem, taking our issues over the Mexican border as part of a global immigration problem. The First World and the Third World - when two worlds collide.

( VDH column )

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Victor Davis Hanson has some encouraging words about America's chances in these tumultuous times, unless of course you are one who likes the idea of a falling America. If only Monk's chances were so good!

( VDH )

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Victor Davis Hanson draws out a clear contrast between what a resolved West would look like against the forces of radical Islam and its jihad, in contrast to the divided and enfeebled realites.

( Hanson's column )

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Victor Hanson has a nice column on the movie "300," which is about the heroic Spartan stand at Thermopylae against the invading Persian army in 480 B.C., and which has been making some waves on the American scene. In addition to being a rightward conservative voice in American politics, he is a classicist. I'm not going to see the movie, and I generally don't care for movies that depict ancient history; as Hanson points out, they are mostly comic-book like. But he has some interesting comments that I want to keep:

Finally, some have suggested that "300" is juvenile in its black-and-white depiction - and glorification - of free Greeks versus imperious Persians. The film has actually been banned in Iran as hurtful American propaganda, as the theocracy suddenly is reclaiming its "infidel" ancient past.

But that good/bad contrast comes not from the director or Frank Miller, but is based on accounts from the Greeks themselves, who saw their own society as antithetical to the monarchy of imperial Persia.

True, 2,500 years ago, almost every society in the ancient Mediterranean world had slaves. And all relegated women to a relatively inferior position. Sparta turned the entire region of Messenia into a dependent serf state.

But in the Greek polis alone, there were elected governments, ranging from the constitutional oligarchy at Sparta to much broader-based voting in states like Athens and Thespiae.

Most importantly, only in Greece was there a constant tradition of unfettered expression and self-criticism. Aristophanes, Sophocles and Plato questioned the subordinate position of women. Alcidamas lamented the notion of slavery.

Such openness was found nowhere else in the ancient Mediterranean world. That freedom of expression explains why we rightly consider the ancient Greeks as the founders of our present Western civilization - and, as millions of moviegoers seem to sense, far more like us than the enemy who ultimately failed to conquer them.

(Source: Victor Davis Hanson at RealClearPolitics.com)

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In today's Roman circus, talking populist while enjoying the high life mixes no better for the left than mouthing old-fashioned virtue and living the low life do for the right.

... For both liberals and conservatives, the days of the simple-living Harry Truman and clean-living Dwight Eisenhower are apparently long gone - and for two reasons.

-- Victor Davis Hanson at RealClearPolitics.com

Mr. Hanson is on today, but he has long been good on hitting that cultural-curmudgeonly note on the decline and fall of America. At least he sees it's a bipartisan problem.

( Hanson column )

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Third, why should we think Islamic objections to our culture could justify the violence of the extremists? Jihadists may not like Western drug use, homosexuality, rap music or abortion any more than we do female circumcision, polygamy, sharia law and gender apartheid, which are as common in the Middle East as our purported offenses are in the West. But would anyone thereby justify Americans suicide-bombing Muslim civilians?

-- Victor Davis Hanson at RealClearPolitics.com

This gets my vote for the best and most concise answer to Dinesh D'Souza. Mr. Hanson takes on the whole spectrum of those who have been fond of blaming America for 9/11, from conservatives to liberals, from Christians to secular humanists. I like his diagnosis, too, for this curious phenomenon.

America has enjoyed such a predominant and privileged position that too many Americans expect to see their country realize their greatest ideals, "too many Americans embrace only their fantasy of a perfect United States, rather than the good America we actually have."

( Hanson column )

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[T]he wide gap between what many in the Middle East say and do should be a reminder that much anti-Americanism is poorly thought out or mostly for show. Many who decry America to the press and cameras privately prefer to send their loved ones here to take advantage of our success brought about by secular education, gender equality, meritocratic democracy and the primacy of law.

-- Victor Davis Hanson at RealClearPolitics.com

As America promises to get only more bogged down in the nightmarish Middle East with Dubya staying the course in Iraq, I thought Mr. Hanson's piece a nice counter to the greater anti-Americanism that we will doubtlessly hear, particularly from the Islamists. Sometimes we may be tragically dumb, but we are not the evil. Jihadic Islamists on the other hand...

( Hanson column )

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