My Bizarre Libyan Holiday
It wasn’t just the politics. by Victor Davis Hanson City Journal (Autumn 2006) Libya? Most are rightly taken aback at the thought. But I was also intrigued when an educational cruise line invited me to lecture this past April on the classical antiquities of Libya — or, more properly, “The Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya the […]
James Webb and Lessons in Make-Believe
by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services Democracies have seen novelists who entered politics (Upton Sinclair and Mario Vargas Llosa). Sometimes politicians aspire to become novelists (Georges Clemenceau and Newt Gingrich). In almost every case, their fiction at one time or another was wrongly used against them in campaigns and political life — on the […]
Troubling “Facts” of the Paris Riots
How our newspapers might turn bias to balance. by Bruce S. Thornton Private Papers The media’s techniques for smuggling opinion into what are supposed to be news stories are so pervasive that often we don’t even notice when they are at work.
Kerryism
by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online Kerry surely must be one of the saddest Democratic liabilities around. Some afterthoughts about his latest gaffe, which is one of those rare glimpses into an entire troubled ideology:
Before Iraq
The assumptions of a forgetful chattering class are badly off the mark. by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online What is written about Iraq now is exclusively acrimonious. The narrative is the suicide bomber and IED, never how many terrorists we have killed, how many Iraqis have been given a chance for something different than […]
The Dark Ages: Live from the Middle East
by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services The most frightening aspect of the present war is how easily our pre-modern enemies from the Middle East have brought a stunned postmodern world back into the Dark Ages.
The Wonders of Hindsight
Looking back is a sure way to stumble. by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online Most of the blame game being played over the Iraqi occupation — and always with the wisdom of hindsight — is now irrelevant.
Liberals Gone Wild!
by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services Why do Republicans drive leftists so crazy these days? Liberal democrats are beginning to sound like rowdy students on spring break, shrieking and exhibiting themselves on camera.
The Pseudo-Histories of the Iraq War
by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services Three recent books about the “fiasco” in Iraq — Cobra II by Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor, State of Denial by Bob Woodward and just plainFiasco by Tom Ricks — have attracted a lot of attention, and sales. All three well-written exposés repeat the now well-known argument that our government’s incompetence and arrogance […]
The New Old Eco-Pessimism
by Victor Davis Hanson The American Spectator The release of Al Gore’s environmental documentary An Inconvenient Truth — and its attendant criticism that our heating planet arises out of Western pathology — harkens back to a long tradition of gloom and doom in Western thought and art.
Do We Have a Strategy in the War?
Yes, and a multifaceted one, at that. by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online It is often said that the United States has neither a long-term strategy in this larger war against terror nor an immediate one in Iraq. Both are unfair charges, since we seem to have both.
The Shifting Debate over Illegal Immigration
by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services When I wrote Mexifornia more than three years ago, much of the criticism came from the academic and open-borders left. The memoir was considered insensitive in our politically correct age for complaining that it was not wise or moral that millions were here illegally from Mexico.
Total Silence
Conquest reveals Western “traitors to the human mind.” by Bruce S. Thornton Private Papers I’ve been reading one of the great works of recent history, Robert Conquest’s Reflections on a Ravaged Century.
Traitors to the Enlightenment
Europe turns its back on Socrates, Locke, et al. by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online The first Western Enlightenment of the Greek fifth-century B.C. sought to explain natural phenomena through reason rather than superstition alone. Ethics were to be discussed in the realm of logic as well as religion.
The New Anti-Semitism
by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services Hating Jews, on racial as well as religious grounds, is as old as the Roman destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem. Later in Europe, pogroms and the Holocaust were the natural devolution of that elemental venom.
Islamic Fascism 101
On all they’ve done to earn the name. by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online Make no apologies for the use of “Islamic fascism.” It is the perfect nomenclature for the agenda of radical Islam, for a variety of historical and scholarly reasons. That such usage also causes extreme embarrassment to both the Islamists themselves […]
Warning: Quote History at Your Own Risk
The Pope’s Remark Revisited by Raymond Ibrahim Private Papers The Pope is under attack. Once again, riots, demonstrations, and “retaliations” have sparked throughout the Muslim world.
Democratic Hares: No Match for Steady Republican Policy
by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services Despite their dreams of recapturing one or both houses of Congress this November, the Democrats seem determined to reprise their poor showings in 2002 and 2004.
Islam’s Appeal
Or, Boys will be Boys by Raymond Ibrahim Private Papers If seeing Arab, Pakistani, or other “ethnic” Muslims menacingly wave their hands while lambasting the West is nothing strange, seeing homegrown, non-accented Western converts doing the same thing is.
Osama’s 9/11 Anniversary
by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services In speeches leading up to the fifth anniversary of Sept. 11, President Bush focused on the dangers of Islamic fascism and the efforts, both at home and abroad, to combat them.