Civil War

Waging War Against the Dead

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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The Issues That Tore Us Apart

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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The Ideology of Statue Smashing

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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Why Do These Wars Never End?

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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The Need For Missile Defense

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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The Strange Case of Confederate Cool

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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Our War against Memory

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 …

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