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  Israel is not losing its wars against radical Islamic terrorists in Gaza, at least not as we are led to believe by the Western media and political apparatuses. The usual pessimism runs something like this: no state can eradicate terrorism, especially of the radical Islamic brand. Terrorist, Hamas-like cells, we are further lectured, are […]

Victor Davis Hanson We saw on October 7 unprovoked mass slaughter, rape, torture, mutilation, decapitation, and hostage-taking, and agreed that human nature has not changed much since the era of the Aztecs or Macedonians. But the delivery systems of mass death—nuclear, chemical, biological, and the use of artificial intelligence—have evolved far beyond the muscular strength

Victor Davis Hanson Hernán Cortés was an unlikely conqueror of civilizations. He was born into a middle-class Castilian family, leaving Spain just 12 years after the European discovery of the New World. At 18, the young Cortés planned to get rich, acquire estates, and thus advance in the New World’s Spanish elite hierarchy—in a way

Victor Davis Hanson Despite bouts of destructive bubonic plague, the pillaging of the city by fellow Christians from Western Europe during the aborted Fourth Crusade (1204), and a tidal wave of Turkish invasions that finally under the Ottoman Sultanate had surrounded Constantinople, the eternal city of 1453 and its vestigial outlands still held out. Under

Victor Davis Hanson Carthage had fought and lost two Punic wars against Rome (264 BC–201 BC). After the end of the Hannibalic War (201), the city lost almost all its empire, many of its North African alliances, and was forced to pay Rome huge fines. Yet a mere half-century later, by 149 BC, Carthage was

Victor Davis Hanson As the power of the fifth-century Athenian and fourth-century Spartan empires declined, and after the stunning defeat of Sparta at the battle of Leuctra (371 BC), the most ancient of the Greek city-states Thebes proved re-ascendant. And for more than a decade under the twin leadership of Epaminondas and Pelopidas, it dominated

Victor Davis Hanson I wrote The End of Everything: How Wars Descend into Annihilation out of curiosity as to why on rare conditions wars don’t just end in the capitulation of the defeated, the occupation or annexation of its homelands, or the victors’ demands to pay reparations or fines.* Rather, they sometimes cease only with