The New World Disorder
To Obama, the retrenchment of the West was not only inevitable but to be welcomed. by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online In just the last five or six years the world has been fundamentally transformed. Instead of the old accustomed Western-inspired postwar global order, crafted and ensured by the United States and its […]
Mythologies and Pathologies of the California Drought
by Victor Davis Hanson // PJMedia The third year of California drought has exposed all sorts of water fantasies. If in wet years they were implicit, now without rain or snow for nearly three years, they are all too explicit. Add them up. Take the Bay Area, Ground Zero of water environmentalism. From Mill Valley […]
Obama’s Hazy Sense of History
For the president, belief in historical predetermination substitutes for action. by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online President Obama doesn’t know much about history. In his therapeutic 2009 Cairo speech, Obama outlined all sorts of Islamic intellectual and technological pedigrees, several of which were undeserved. He exaggerated Muslim contributions to printing and medicine, for […]
Nothing to Do with Islam, Part 2
by Bruce Thornton // FrontPage Magazine To read Part I, click here. In his comments on the jihad being waged by the Islamic State in northern Iraq (ISIL), President Obama recycled yet again the shopworn false knowledge about Islam that continues to compromise our response to Muslim violence: “So ISIL speaks for no religion. Their victims are […]
The Madness of 2008
A nation became unhinged by trivialities like “hope and change.” It has now awakened. by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online America is suddenly angry at the laxity, incompetence, and polarizing politics of the Obama administration, the bad optics of the president putting about in his bright golf clothes while the world burns. […]
Ferguson Postmortem
by Victor Davis Hanson // PJMedia The backstory of Ferguson was that out of the millions of arrests each year only about 100 African-American suspects are shot fatally by white police. And yet we were falsely and ad nauseam told that Michael Brown was proof of an epidemic. There may well be an epidemic of blacks killing […]
Sherman in Gaza
His march through Georgia has been gravely misunderstood ― as has Israel’s strategy in Gaza. by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online William Tecumseh Sherman 150 years ago took Atlanta before heading out on his infamous March to the Sea to make Georgia “howl.” He remains one of the most controversial and misunderstood figures in American […]
All Fall Down
by Victor Davis Hanson // NRO-The Corner Consider our dog days of August: An American journalist savagely beheaded on tape, with more promised to come. The Islamic State rampage. The Gaza war and Hamas’s serial truce violations — and the new neutral U.S. stance with implied disruptions in military support for Israel. The implosion of […]
Fanning the Flames in Ferguson
Why do only handful of such tragedies trigger national outrage? by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online Violence following the recent fatal shooting of an unarmed robbery suspect in Ferguson, Mo, has tragically followed a predictable script. On average, more than 6,000 African Americans are killed by gun violence each year. That startling figure […]
Nothing to Do With Islam
by Bruce S. Thornton // FrontPage Magazine The war against jihadism has been chronically misunderstood because of our failure to acknowledge the religious motives of Muslim jihadists. This failure began in 1979 with the Iranian revolution. Trapped in our Western secularist paradigms, we interpreted the uprising against the Shah as an anti-colonial revolt against a […]
Living Out Critical Legal Theory
by Victor Davis Hanson // NRO- The Corner It may not have been the aim of Missouri Highway Patrol captain Ron Johnson to outsource security responsibilities to someone affiliated with the New Black Panthers and a legal activist group, but that is the impression that one receives from listening to his exchange with and praise of Malik […]
Revolutionary Justice
by Victor Davis Hanson // NRO-The Corner Certainly any time in America that an unarmed suspect is fatally shot by a policeman of the opposite race, there is a need for concern and a quick and full inquiry of the circumstances leading to such a deadly use of force. That said, there is something disturbing […]
Our ‘Face in the Crowd’
by Victor Davis Hanson // PJMedia Elia Kazan’s classic A Face in the Crowd [2] is a good primer on Barack Obama’s rise and fall. Lonesome Rhodes arises out of nowhere in the 1957 film, romancing the nation as a phony populist [3] who serially spins yarns in the most folksy ways — confident that he should never be held to […]
SMALL LATIN, AND LESS GREEK
Thornton reviews the book Confronting the Classics: Traditions, Adventures, and Innovations, by Mary Beard. New York: Liverwright, 2013, 320 pp., $28.95 hardbound. by Bruce S. Thornton // NAS This piece originally appeared in the Fall 2014 issue of Academic Questions (Volume 27, Number 3). Once the heart of liberal education, the study of Greek and Latin languages and literatures has unfortunately […]
On Cyprus, the World Is Silent
Because Turkey is not Israel. by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online Limassol, Cyprus — Cyprus is a beautiful island. But it has never recovered from the Turkish invasion of 1974. Turkish troops still control nearly 40 percent of the island — the most fertile and formerly the richest portion. Some 200,000 Greek refugees never […]
A Quiet Mediterranean?
An unusual calm for history’s constant cauldron. by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online From the deck of a ship on the Mediterranean, the islands that pass by appear as calm as the weather. Huge yachts, not warships, are docked in island ports. I haven’t seen a naval officer in ten days. But it […]
The Un-Midas Touch
by Victor Davis Hanson // PJMedia Everything that Barack Obama touches seems to turn to dross. Think of it for a minute. He inherited a quiet Iraq [1] (no American combat deaths at all in December 2009 [2]). Joe Biden bragged of the calm that it would be the administration’s“greatest achievement.” [3] But by pulling out all U.S. peacekeepers — mostly for a […]
Democracies Like Military Cuts
by Bruce S. Thorton // FrontPage Magazine President Obama has been rightly chastised for his proposed cuts to our military budget. Critics have gone after his Quadrennial Defense Review and its plan to shrink the armed forces, not to mention the clumsy optics of issuing pink slips to thousands of officers still serving in Afghanistan. […]
The Failure of the E.U.
by Bruce S. Thornton // Defining Ideas The European Union has long excited American progressives, who want the United States to model itself after the European body. As each year passes, it has become difficult to understand this admiration. These days the E.U. acts more and more like a bloated bureaucracy staffed with elites armed […]
The End of NATO?
Major existential problems mean the organization may soon unravel. by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online Istanbul — April marked the 65th birthday of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, formed at the height of the Cold War to stop the huge post-war Red Army from overrunning Western Europe. NATO in 1949 had only twelve members, […]