Historian’s Corner

Victor Davis Hanson Myth #3: The Noble Illegal Immigrant Somehow from all the photos of the thousands swarming into across the border, we have constructed the would-be illegal alien into a nobility of sorts. But well aside from the hypocrisy—we fired military personnel who chose not to be vaccinated, but welcomed in illegal aliens who

Victor Davis Hanson Myth #1: Mexico is our “partner.” Joe Biden has recently praised President Andrés Manuel López Obrador as working hand-in-glove with him to alleviate the influx of illegal immigrants crossing into the U.S. from his country. In fact, Obrador is one of the main reasons there have been over seven million illegal entries

Victor Davis Hanson In any case, I forgot about the electric motor shop after I went away from the farm for a decade both overseas and at school over on the coast. After the death of my grandfather, when I had returned to farm myself, I noticed that the young guy whom I remembered years

Victor Davis Hanson Since antiquity farmers have been characterized as boorish (Greek agros, “farm/field,” English “agrarian”; Latin rus, “countryside,” English “rustic”), as if nature coarsened those who worked with it. My experience of more than six decades on the farm is that such impressions certainly can be true. I remember the old ditch tender, whom

Victor Davis Hanson The history of nations is a story of borders. Most wars break out over a nation’s private space, essential to create and maintain a unique culture. I once studied why Greek states fought three out of four years in the fifth century B.C. The answer was easy: disputed borderlands. Democratic Athens was

Victor Davis Hanson Debt and its twin inflation destroy civilizations. Ancient coins were sometimes called “redheads” as the raised impressed silhouettes of grandees stamped on “silver” coins were the first to have their silver veneers worn away revealing the “red” bronze beneath. Our paper money is similarly becoming less and less valuable, the more we

Victor Davis Hanson No civilization can continue if its bedrock values and institutions are eroding—especially if the effort to save them is considered worse than their destruction. When we look to the civilizational decline of the Greek polis, the Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire, or of Europe in the 1930s we learn that erosion is

Victor Davis Hanson Under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 23, 1939, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany divided up Poland. Germany invaded first from the north, west, and south, the Soviet Union subsequently from the east. By early October the war was over. A victorious Germany concluded that while its forces had learned much about