Victor Davis Hanson Private Papers

Virtual Virtue

September 8, 2017 11:17 am / Leave a Comment /

By Victor Davis Hanson//American Greatness

It is not healthy for a society to live two lives that are antithetical, as America has been doing in recent decades.

Disillusionment with government and popular culture arises at anger over two entirely different realities. One truth is politically correct and voiced on the news and by the government. It is often abstract and theoretical. And the other truth is empirical, hushed and accepted informally by ordinary people from what they see and hear on the ground.

Public orthodoxy signals virtue, private heterodoxy ensures ostracism. So Americans increasingly make the necessary adjustments, modeling their lives in some part as those once did in totalitarian societies of the 20th century. The reality they live is the stuff of the shadows; the falsity they are told and repeat is public and amplified.

Cynicism and eventual anger at the schizophrenia are always the harvests of such bipolarity.

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Posted in: Identity Politics, Political Culture, Uncategorized

Two Resistances

September 6, 2017 10:07 am / Leave a Comment /

By Victor Davis Hanson
National Review

The quiet resistance — the one without black masks and clubs — is the more revolutionary force, and it transcends race, class, and gender.

After the election of Donald Trump, there arose a self-described “Resistance.” It apparently posed as a decentralized network of progressive activist groups dedicated to derailing the newly elected Trump administration.

Democrats and progressives borrowed their brand name from World War II French partisans. In rather psychodramatic fashion, they envisioned their heroic role over the next four years as that of virtual French insurgents — coming down from the Maquis hills, perhaps to waylay Trump’s White House, as if the president were an SS Obergruppenführer und General der Police running occupied Paris. Vanity Fair and Rolling Stone wrote admiringly about the furious Resistance’s pushback against Trump, with extravagant claims that his agenda was already derailed thanks to a zillion grass-roots and modern-day insurgents.

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Posted in: Trump, Election 2016, Political Culture, The Left, Uncategorized

Linguistic McCarthyism

August 31, 2017 8:43 am / Leave a Comment /

By Victor Davis Hanson
National Review

Most Americans recoil from the statue-smashers and name-changers.

‘The Bard,” William Shakespeare, had a healthy distrust of the sort of mob hysteria typified by our current epidemics of statue-busting and name-changing.

In Shakespeare’s tragedy Julius Caesar — a story adopted from Plutarch’s Parallel Lives — a frenzied Roman mob, in furor over the assassination of Julius Caesar, encounters on the street a poet named Cinna. The innocent poet was not the conspiratorial assassin Cinna, but unfortunately shared a name with the killer. Read more →

Posted in: Sports, American Culture, Race in America, Civilization, History, Literature, Uncategorized, War

Calculating The Risk Of Preventive War

August 31, 2017 8:02 am / Leave a Comment /

by Max Boot
Strategika

War Savings poster WWII

Image credit: Poster Collection, UK 4018, Hoover Institution Archives.

The issue of “preemptive” war is more in the news now than at any time since the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The impetus, of course, is the rapid development of North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs, which will soon give Pyongyang the capability to hit any American city with a nuclear-tipped ICBM. President Trump has been threatening “fire and fury” in response, and warning that the United States is “locked and loaded” for war. His national security adviser, Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, has said that North Korea may not be deterrable and that, therefore, a preemptive strike may be justified.

In truth, the use of “preemptive” in this context is a misnomer. In international law, a “preemptive” strike is one undertaken just before an enemy attack. There are few examples of such conflicts beyond the 1967 Six Day War. The use of force in such an instance is labeled “anticipatory self-defense” and is clearly legal and logical. If Washington were to acquire intelligence that North Korea was about to attack the United States—or even U.S. allies such as South Korea and Japan—there is no doubt that a preemptive strike would be warranted. Read more →

Posted in: Strategika, Uncategorized

Preemptive Strikes and Preventive Wars: A Historian’s Perspective

August 31, 2017 8:00 am / Leave a Comment /

By Barry Strauss
Strategika

Buy War Bonds Poster WWII

Image credit: Poster Collection, US 1684, Hoover Institution Archives.

Preventive wars and preemptive strikes are both risky business. A preventive war is a military, diplomatic, and strategic endeavor, aimed at an enemy whom one expects to grow so strong that delay would cause defeat. A preemptive strike is a military operation or series of operations to preempt an enemy’s ability to attack you. In both cases, a government judges a diplomatic solution impossible. But judgment calls are debatable and preventive wars often stir up controversy. Preemptive strikes run the risk of arousing a sleeping enemy who, now wounded, will fight harder. Yet both preventive wars and preemptive strikes can succeed, under certain limited circumstances. Consider some examples. Read more →

Posted in: Strategika, Uncategorized

Preemptive Strike Or Preventive War?

August 30, 2017 11:27 am / Leave a Comment /
by Williamson Murray // Strategika
 

Image credit:Poster Collection, US 1696, Hoover Institution Archives.

With the troubles bubbling over on the Korean Peninsula, as the North Korean regime approaches possession of nuclear weapons and missiles capable of striking the United States, two words, preemptive and preventive, have gained increasing currency. While similar in meaning, their context is crucial in understanding their applicability to the current crisis. And here, as is so often the case, history is a useful tool in thinking through the possibilities. A preemptive strike usually carries the connotation of attacking or destroying substantial enemy capabilities, in some cases with the hope that it will so wreck the enemy’s military forces that he will not be able to use them effectively, should war result. In the largest sense, those who execute preventive strikes have usually understood that their military effort, no matter how successful, would lead to a conflict of some indeterminate length. Thus, the two words are directly tied together in that preemptive strike almost inevitably will lead to what the attacker in most cases regards as a preventive war.

We, of course, have been down this road in the recent past. In response to 9/11, the Bush administration in its National Security Strategy for 2002 boldly stated that the United States “must be prepared to stop rogue states and their territorial clients before they are able to threaten or use weapons of mass destruction against the United States and our allies and friends.” That statement led directly to the invasion of Iraq in 2003 with the aim of removing Saddam Hussein and his supposed weapons of mass destruction as well as the possibility that he might eventually possess nuclear weapons. Well, there were not any weapons of mass destruction and the United States almost immediately found itself mired in a totally unexpected quagmire—a quagmire at least unexpected by the administration and all too many of its military advisers. The ensuing insurgency against the United States and its allies as well as the civil war between the Sunni and Shi’a religious constituencies proved to be a nightmare for American strategists and policy makers. In retrospect, the result of the Iraq invasion seems obvious, but it was certainly not so at the time. Read more →

Posted in: Strategika, Uncategorized

August 29, 2017 2:16 pm / Leave a Comment /

by Victor Davis Hanson// National Review

 

Partisan conflict is not new, nor is GOP internal dissent. What’s new is in-fighting among the elites.

 

The Left-Wing Trump Haters

About a third of the Democratic party (15–20 percent perhaps of the electorate?) loathes Trump, from reasons of the trivial to the fundamental.

 

The hard-leftist hatred is visceral; it is multidimensional; and it is unalterable.

 

Trump is rich, crass, showy, a white male, and 70. As the anti-Obama, he punches every progressive button in existence. A candidate like Trump was not supposed to exist any longer in the 21st-Century Age of Obama, much less should he have ruined the anticipated progressive Obama-Clinton 16-year regnum. Trump’s accent is outer-borough and seems to exemplify for Trump haters the gaucheness of the golden trump name stamped all over New York. The Europeans have utter contempt for Trump, and that embarrasses leftists especially.

 

Unlike some Republican politicians who wished to be admired by cultural progressives, Trump prefers baiting the Left and its media appendages, as if to remind them that he prefers to overturn the entire progressive project of the last eight years — if not on ideological grounds (Trump not so long ago voiced a number of centrist and liberal views), at least out of tit-for-tat animosity. Unlike a restrained presidential Bush or a sober Romney, the president answers in kind — and trumps — the boilerplate leftist charge of “fascist!” and “Nazi!” leveled against him.

 

The Trump haters dominate our media and the universities, the entertainment industries, Silicon Valley, the billionaire green classes, the foundations and the brigades of professional foot-soldier activists, identity-politics operatives, and the Bernie Sanders shock troops. They are frenzied because they think their 1,000 cuts have finally hit arteries — only to see Trump revive in Nietzschean fashion, emerging stronger for the wounds. To come so close to ending this nightmare only to realize they are at the alpha and not the omega of their efforts intensifies their hatred.
Read more →

Posted in: Conservatives, Reagan, Republicans, Democrats, The Clintons, Trump, America's Future, American Culture, Identity Politics, Political Culture, Popular Culture, Race in America, History, Obama Administration, Uncategorized

Equal by Catastrophe

August 29, 2017 2:02 pm / Leave a Comment /

By Victor Davis Hanson//Inference Review

The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century
by Walter Scheidel
Princeton University Press, 528 pp., USD$35.

Scheidel argues that history offers few peaceful antidotes to the accumulation of property, money, and leverage in the hands of the few. “For thousands of years,” Scheidel observes, “civilization did not lend itself to peaceful equalization. Across a wide range of societies and different levels of development, stability favored economic inequality.”2 Civilization is the culprit; its absence, the cure. Scheidel wrote the book as a warning to progressives: “If we seek to rebalance the current distribution of income and wealth in favor of greater equality, we cannot simply close our eyes to what it took to accomplish this goal in the past.”3 Read more →
Posted in: Uncategorized

The Fire And Fury Of Presidents

August 25, 2017 12:29 pm / Leave a Comment /
by Victor Davis Hanson // Defining Ideas
 

Image credit:Barbara Kelley

“We could, obviously, destroy North Korea with our arsenals.” —Barack Obama, April 2016

The media recently went ballistic over President Trump’s impromptu promises of “fire and fury” in reply to the latest North Korean threats—and even more so when he later doubled down under criticism and claimed he had not been tough enough. But American leaders have always resorted to such blunt talk in exacerbating circumstances such as the current one.

Recall Bill Clinton’s now widely quoted remark that it would be “pointless” for North Korea to develop nuclear weapons because using them would mean “the end of their country.” Likewise, President Harry Truman once promised Japan a “rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth” after dropping the bomb on Hiroshima. Japan apparently got the message that there was no way out but unconditional surrender. President John F. Kennedy referred publicly to an “abyss of destruction” during the Cuban crisis.

To read more: http://www.hoover.org/research/fire-and-fury-presidents

 

Posted in: Media, Trump, Defining Ideas, North Korea, Terrorism, International Relations, Diplomacy, National Security, History, Obama Administration, Benghazi, Uncategorized, Iraq War

The Double Standard in the Progressive War against the Dead

August 24, 2017 1:44 pm / Leave a Comment /

by Victor Davis Hanson// National Review

 

Will Progressives erase the history of their racist heroes, or only their racist enemies?

 

Much of the country has demanded the elimination of references to, and images of, people of the past — from Christopher Columbus to Robert E. Lee — who do not meet our evolving standards of probity.

 

In some cases, such damnation may be understandable if done calmly and peacefully — and democratically, by a majority vote of elected representatives.

 

Few probably wish to see a statue in a public park honoring Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest, one of the founding members of the Ku Klux Klan, or Supreme Court Justice Roger B. Taney, who wrote the majority opinion in the racist Dred Scott decision that set the stage for the Civil War four years later.

 

But cleansing the past is a dangerous business. The wide liberal search for more enemies of the past may soon take progressives down hypocritical pathways they would prefer not to walk. Read more →

Posted in: Civil War, American Culture, Political Culture, Popular Culture, Race in America, Culture, Law, Uncategorized
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