The Wages of Inert Citizenship The world outside or before the U.S. was and is not a pretty thing. Even in rare consensual societies, factions and inequality under the law persisted—whether the plebs and populares of early Republican Rome, the greens and blues of Justinian’s Constantinople, or the Guelphs and Ghibellines of thirteenth-century Florence. Belonging […]
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Ignorance of What America Was and Is As the 2020 election season began, the New York Times promised its readers a recalibration of American history called “The 1619 Project.” The ensuing series of essays and media kits had a twofold agenda. One was to rewrite the origins of American history as the four-century foreign intrusion
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Victor Davis Hanson Eeyore’s Cabinet The Silicon Valley Octopus Flexed its Tentacles In George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984, the author describes a soulless world created by an authoritarian cadre that controlled even the thoughts of its subjects through massive electronic surveillance. An all-powerful state bureaucracy warped language, ideas, and history to convince and coerce the
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Victor Davis Hanson Eeyore’s Cabinet Remembering When the Woke Awoke Woke is not new. Consider it an old IED buried and forgotten, but even when dormant an always latent explosive that any heavy traffic—that is, 2020—could finally ignite. Why? Decades-long devolution from citizenship to tribal ideologies explained why extremist groups found followers and felt no
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Were There Really Two Opposing Alliances? As we noted, from June 25, 1940, to December 7, 1941, there were not formal “Allies.” The British-Western European alliance, such as it had been, disappeared with the fall of France in June 1940 and the appeasement or absorption of all of Western Europe. True, Britain encouraged and aided
VDH UltraHistorian’s Corner: Some Mythologies of World War II: Part Six: Read More »
Was Britain Really the Weak Allied Partner? Wars are not always just conflicts of men and materiel; will and principles weigh in as well. In this context, the moral leadership of Britain during World War II proved invaluable to the Allied cause, even if it was often guided at times by imperial concerns. Britain was
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One-Dimensional Versus Global War If in 1939–41, Moscow had sent Nazi Germany huge deliveries of cereals, wheat, soybeans, 100,000 tons of cotton, nearly a million tons of oil and ores and minerals essential to German industry, it would be unable to divert some of such aid to its new friends in its new fight against
VDH UltraHistorian’s Corner: Some Mythologies of World War II: Part Four: Read More »
From An Angry Reader: Subject: I expect better of a supposed historian Your article criticizing the Biden administration for the failure in Afghanistan has several glaring holes in it. For one thing, your figure of $85 Billion in equipment is completely false, that was the cost to train the Afghan army over the course of
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Did the Soviet Union Really “win” the war? There is something amoral in even posing such a question given the horrendous loss of Russian life resisting Nazi aggression. Superlatives are exhausted when describing the four-year-long Eastern Front between June 22, 1941 and the surrender of Nazi forces to the Soviets on May 9, 1945. While
VDH UltraHistorian’s Corner: Some Mythologies of World War II: Part Three: Read More »
How Did Germany Lose a War It Had Won? At the dawn of 1941, there was no expectation in Moscow that Germany would violate the tense but still very much viable August 23, 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, or that the U.S. would intervene on Britain’s side. The U.S.S.R. was eager to stay out of any second
VDH UltraHistorian’s Corner: Some Mythologies of World War II: Part Two: Read More »