Posted on 09/27/2003 7:09:46 AM PDT by Valin
The military historian and classicist Victor Davis Hanson is one of the favorite intellectuals of the Bush White House. He has met with the president and addressed the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Dick Cheney has told aides that Hanson's book ''An Autumn of War'' reflects his own philosophy. It's easy to see why. ''An Autumn of War,'' a collection of pieces written in the months following 9/11, primarily for National Review Online and for conservative publications like City Journal, is a volume that breathes fire and outrage. It calls for ''resolute action and victory'' against terrorism, while waxing indignant over the nation's ''cultural elite,'' people who, Hanson declares, ''as a general rule lead lives rather different from those of most Americans.''
Hanson is a fierce, uncompromising polemicist, yet if that were all he was, he would scarcely stand out in the crowd of partisans who can see little right in the Clinton administration and little wrong in the Bush administration. But what he brings to the public discussion -- along with an unusually vigorous prose style and a remarkable erudition -- is a philosophy of war not meant for the weak-kneed or fainthearted.
Hanson does not celebrate war, but he accepts it as a fact of life, a part of the human condition that no amount of idealistic preaching or good intentions can will away. We are doomed to conflict and bloodletting. The British scholar John Keegan has written that the great military historian of the 19th century is the Prussian Hans Delbruck, but that Delbruck never achieved popularity in the English-speaking world in part because his hard-nosed (one is tempted to say Germanic) acknowledgment of military necessity in the affairs of men did not sit comfortably with optimistic, progressive-minded English and American readers, who liked their historians to explain why warfare was becoming obsolete.
Hanson is in the Delbruck tradition, though the seminal influence on his thinking, as he unhesitatingly tells us, is the father of realpolitik, Thucydides.
Hanson's military studies are impressively wide-ranging, but often frustrating. He has said that generalization ''is indispensable in the writing of history,'' yet those who don't appreciate the past delivered in broad strokes won't be convinced. Islam and the West, Hanson announces, are ''two entirely antithetical cultures,'' despite a busload of experts who would say otherwise.
He writes of the bombing of Tokyo during World War II that ''incinerating thousands of Japanese civilians on March 11, 1945, is seen by Westerners as not nearly so gruesome an act as beheading . . . parachuting B-29 fliers.'' Well, it depends on which Westerners you talk to. And how would a reader even begin to sort out the truth of a statement like ''The West, ancient and modern, placed far fewer religious, cultural and political impediments to natural inquiry, capital formation and individual expression than did other societies''?
Too often, one feels that Hanson isn't so much learning from the past as using it to validate the views he started out with. On the other hand, when he sticks to the facts and doesn't treat history as an occasion for sermonizing, his scholarship can be both rewarding and pleasurable.
His portrait of Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman in ''The Soul of Battle'' is a tour de force, successfully explaining Sherman's special genius and offering a persuasive argument for the morality of his cruel, terroristic march through the South.
Like so much of Hanson's work, ''Ripples of Battle'' has its good and bad sides. Its thesis is that battles have broad, frequently surprising repercussions on the societies that fight them -- an argument so bland and unexceptionable that it's hard to stifle a yawn just stating it. But this is a grab bag of a book, and its real value lies in the freedom it gives Hanson to roam far and wide, pursuing the subjects that interest him.
He focuses on three battles -- Okinawa during World War II, Shiloh during the American Civil War and Delium during the Peloponnesian War. Within the three chapters on these conflicts Hanson explores such topics as suicide bombers, Ernie Pyle, popular fiction, the origins of the Ku Klux Klan, the dramas of Euripides, pre-emptive warfare and Theban statuary.
No reader will give his undivided attention to every page. But there is something here for practically everyone.
The most powerful section is the first one, which describes the fighting on Okinawa and explains how it led, almost inevitably, to the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Japanese on Okinawa, Hanson says, knew that they couldn't win; their aim was simply to kill as many Americans as possible, to demonstrate how costly an invasion of the mainland would be.
Over 12,000 Americans died in the three months of fighting, with another 33,000 wounded or missing. The Japanese losses were even more horrific, and when civilian casualties are counted in, the total number of killed or wounded on Okinawa amounted to almost a quarter of a million people.
There were 110,000 Japanese troops on the island; for the defense of the mainland, 2,350,000 soldiers were available, along with a civilian militia that Tokyo claimed could reach 30 million. The two atomic bombs, Hanson argues, actually saved lives, Japanese as well as American.
His is not the last word on the subject: he does not discuss the possibility of Washington's accepting something less than unconditional surrender or of giving the Japanese a demonstration of the fearsome new weapon. But Hanson's conclusion is unassailable: ''The reasons for Hiroshima . . . are inexplicable without remembrance of Okinawa.''
The larkiest part of ''Ripples of Battle'' plays with a counterfactual proposition. Socrates fought bravely at Delium, an Athenian defeat. What if he had been killed? Here Hanson is having fun.
Socrates had not yet become the mature philosopher we know from Plato and Xenophon. Indeed, the most important portrait of him that existed at the time was Aristophanes' mean-spirited attack in ''The Clouds.'' Hanson writes that ''a dead Socrates at Delium might mean today there would not be a book in any library or bookstore on Socrates.
Plato himself might be as little known to the general reader as a Zeno or Epicurus.''
In his introduction and epilogue, Hanson speaks of the 9/11 attack, which he treats as another ''battle.'' It's an imperfect use of the word, but it allows him to take up themes that run through his other books. One of these is the irresponsibility of the country's ''elite,'' elsewhere called the ''influential'' and the ''sophisticated,'' also the ''leisured class'' (there are times when Hanson gives the impression that the professors, editors and lawyers he disapproves of don't really work, that only physical labor is truly productive and virtuous).
The subject elicits some of his most laughable generalizations: ''The American intelligentsia has always wished foremost to be liked, envied and courted.'' In this book, he also sets his sights on the ''clever but empty games'' of the modern visual arts. Hanson has never given any indication that he cares about contemporary art, or even cares to experience it for himself.
He knows what he doesn't like, and he is confident that most of his countrymen don't like it either. Such populist bullying is unbecoming in someone so learned.
Finally, Hanson returns to his most profound theme, the necessity of war. After a long slumber, the country awakened on 9/11 to the age-old truth that blood must sometimes be shed. Peace, not war, is the historical aberration. Hanson is more unflinching than most writers -- it's this that gets him inside the White House.
He understands that the present administration (or any administration) is in a race against time to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons, and other weapons of mass destruction, before they end up in the hands of terrorists; he understands, too, that military threats or action may prove at least as crucial as diplomacy in achieving this goal.
The objection that can be raised against him is not that he is too bellicose -- his straight talking has a refreshing clarity -- but that he offers no end to our predicament. If warfare is mankind's natural and unchanging condition, then proliferation is inevitable, and just as inevitably we will someday face terrorists capable of blowing up Washington or New York (or Dallas or Indianapolis).
The alternative is to accept the need for military action in the short run while pursuing some kind of W.M.D. moratorium in the long run, whether through a world government, a confederation of nations, a consortium of great powers or an American imperium.
For, contrary to Hanson, if we cannot somehow work toward an end to warfare, breaking with history's nightmare, then it is a certainty that our current age of globalization must eventually give way to an age of apocalypse.
Barry Gewen is an editor at the Book Review.
And last week he learned to tie his shoes
His is not the last word on the subject: he does not discuss the possibility of Washington's accepting something less than unconditional surrender or of giving the Japanese a demonstration of the fearsome new weapon.
Actually, we gave them two.
And how would a reader even begin to sort out the truth of a statement like ''The West, ancient and modern, placed far fewer religious, cultural and political impediments to natural inquiry, capital formation and individual expression than did other societies''?
And then offers up his own absurdity. Try to "sort out" his concluding statement with its ridiculous false dichotomy:
For, contrary to Hanson, if we cannot somehow work toward an end to warfare, breaking with history's nightmare, then it is a certainty that our current age of globalization must eventually give way to an age of apocalypse
This incapacity is the root cause of the modern acceptance of propaganda as substitute for truth(see Orwell).
The truth is too terrible to bear for the sensitive intelligentsia - they flee to the comforting lies of utopian socialism, generally.
This incapacity is the root cause of the modern acceptance of propaganda as substitute for truth(see Orwell).
The truth is too terrible to bear for the sensitive intelligentsia - they flee to the comforting lies of utopian socialism, generally.
Actually, we gave them two.
Indeed we did... and they proved to be the last words on at least one subject.
Mister Gewen began with a deliberately sneering political tone - talk about telegraphing a lack of objectivity - and just didn't let go of it. What a world we have when a social utopian can't even play nice in print.
I don't think I'd say
"imperfect," because these days
many "battles" are
one-sided events,
out-of-the-blue strikes against
unprepared targets.
They are not battles
like old warships squaring off,
but technology
changes everything,
so it might as well change words.
For better and worse.
The Butlers are instead a more common, off-grade species of British import . . .a pedigreed and polite subgroup eager to leave the impoverishment and climate oftheir damp island to find a job, some status, and tans in America, just compensation for a cerebrum full of vital data on Dinarchus and Phronto.. . .With impeccable diction, with manners and demeanor subject to no criticism, these British float in the small eddies of the the American Classics departments, rarely darting out in rougher water to chew or take nicks, mildly contemptuous of their philologically challenged hosts but content all the same to tutor their adopted school . . . Occasionally red-faced, at times teary-eyed at the more outrageous behavior of their ill-mannered and cruder American hosts, these decent and reserved chaps still hear, speak, see no evil.Instead the Butlers serve. Always. They pick up visitors at their airport. They host teas at their cottages. They take ungainly professors to lunch. Like Ratty and Toady on the bank, they lounge and recline in philology, with the smug assurance that every American department needs at least two for their ilk, matching Saxon bookends: "One who really knows Greek, and one who does understand Latin." Blinkered, deaf to the uncouth, passive-aggressive Americans in their midst, they feel comfortable with the tray and goblets. They tolerate no slur against their provident lord and benefactor, the boorish, though munificent American department and university. With blood and hair on the walls, severed limbs on the floor, they stride to the closet for mops and pails.
The fact that the Japanese did not immediately surrender after their first city was in Nuclear-fanned flames, puts the lie to the revisionist argument that the Japanese would have surrendered under any other terms. 1,000,000 demonstations would have had the Japanese simply laughing at us, while they killed more and more American servicemen (as well as Japanese civilians) in a suicidal defense of their homeland.
Liberals just can't accept the fact that their IS true evil in the world, and he is not a Republican President. Liberals have such a warped view of reality that they do not understand that there are manical people who would just as soon kill you and your family as take a walk in the park.
We're dealing with such evil now, wrapped around a religion they call radical Islam. Our experience with WWII Japan and Germany should be instructive, but unfortunately, true Liberals are true "blind faith" believers, and for most, no amount of historical fact will lead them to enlightenment.
SFS
Yep... Clearly he is writing this for consumption by an audience of rabid partisans who can see little wrong in the Clinton administration and despise the Bush administration with all of the venom and bile that they can muster, all the while firmly believing that they are the unbiased, intelligent, tolerant, and open-minded pinnacle of human evolution.
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