Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness The 21st century is in danger of becoming an era of statue smashing and historical erasure. Not since the iconoclasts of the Byzantine Empire or the epidemic of statue destruction during the French Revolution has the world seen anything like the current war on the past. In 2001, the […]
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Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Slavery was the issue that blew up America in 1861 and led to the Civil War. But for the 85 years between the nation’s founding and that war, it had seemed that somehow America could eventually phase out the horrific institution and do so largely peacefully. But by 1861,
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Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Americans keep dividing into two hostile camps. It seems the country is back to 1860 on the eve of the Civil War, rather than in 2018, during the greatest age of affluence, leisure, and freedom in the history of civilization. The ancient historian Thucydides called the civil discord that
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Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness Statue smashing is back in the news. One night last week, University of North Carolina students pulled down “Silent Sam,” a bronze monument to students and faculty of the university who fought as Confederate soldiers in the Civil War. The bronze figure is portrayed as static, quiet and without
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by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review To everything, there is a season. America has always enjoyed two antithetical traditions in its political and military heroes. The preferred style is the reticent, sober, and competent executive planner as president or general, from Herbert Hoover to Gerald Ford to Jimmy Carter. George
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By Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Weaker enemies, by design, do not threaten stronger powers existentially; ‘proportionality’ means stalemate. From the Punic Wars (264–146 b.c.) and the Hundred Years War (1337–1453) to the Arab–Israeli wars (1947–) and the so-called War on Terror (2001–), some wars never seem to end. The dilemma
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by Victor Davis Hanson // Defining Ideas America’s great advantage when it entered world affairs after the Civil War was that its distance from Europe and Asia ensured that it was virtually immune from large sea-borne invasions. The Pacific and the Atlantic Oceans proved far better barriers than even the forests and mountain ranges of
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by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Leftists love Johnnie Reb in movies and songs. But statues? Not so much. How exactly did the Left romanticize the Lost Cause Confederacy, and by extension its secession and efforts to preserve slavery? To use a shopworn phrase, “It’s complicated.” Share This
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by Victor Davis Hanson// National Review Will Progressives erase the history of their racist heroes, or only their racist enemies? Much of the country has demanded the elimination of references to, and images of, people of the past — from Christopher Columbus to Robert E. Lee — who do not meet our evolving
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by Victor Davis Hanson// National Review The new abolitio memoriae Back to the Future Romans emperors were often a bad lot — but usually confirmed as such only in retrospect. Monsters such as Nero, of the first-century A.D. Julio-Claudian dynasty, or the later psychopaths Commodus and Caracalla, were flattered by toadies when alive
Our War against Memory Read More »