The Corner The one and only. by Victor Davis Hanson// National Review Campuses and Western critics in the last half-century have turned a once risk-taking and heroic Christopher Columbus into an evil emissary of disease and destruction. History is now seen as one-dimensional melodrama in which our contemporary duty is to pick sinners and […]
Columbus Day: Melodrama or Tragedy? Read More »
By Victor Davis Hanson National Review Most Americans recoil from the statue-smashers and name-changers. ‘The Bard,” William Shakespeare, had a healthy distrust of the sort of mob hysteria typified by our current epidemics of statue-busting and name-changing. In Shakespeare’s tragedy Julius Caesar — a story adopted from Plutarch’s Parallel Lives — a frenzied Roman mob,
Linguistic McCarthyism Read More »
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 »
Why is Everyone Suddenly Quoting Thucydides? By Victor Davis Hanson| American Greatness Currently, the historian Thucydides is the object of debate among those within the Trump Administration and its critics, who, like scholars of the last three millennia, focus on lots of differing Thucydidean personas. Did Thucydides warn in deterministic fashion about ascendant powers like
Does physical labor have a future? By Victor Davis Hanson City Journal Those who would never stoop to paint their own houses gladly expend far more energy sweating at the gym. During the decline in physical-labor jobs over the last 50 years, an entire compensating industry has grown up around physical fitness. As modern work
Brawn in an Age of Brains Read More »
by Victor Davis Hanson// National Review The country is coming apart, and the advocates of radical egalitarianism are winning. The wars between Trump, the media, the deep state, and the progressive party — replete with charges and counter-charges of scandal, collusion, and corruption — are merely symptoms of a much larger fundamental and
The Fifth American War Read More »
By Victor Davis Hanson National Review In Warsaw, the president delivered the antithesis to the fallacious, appeasing lecture Obama preached to the Egyptians. Obama’s Cairo Address, June 4, 2009 About five months after the inauguration of Barack Obama, the president gave a strange address in Cairo. The speech was apparently designed to win over the
Trump’s Anti-Cairo Speech Read More »
By Victor Davis Hanson Defining Ideas According to Greek myth, the Athenian hero Theseus sailed to Crete to stop the tribute of seven Athenian men and seven women sent every nine years to the distant carnivorous Minotaur in his haunt within the labyrinth beneath the palace of Knossos on Crete. In various versions of the
The Islamist Minotaur Read More »
By Victor Davis Hanson National Review History has not been very kind to countries that enter a state of multicultural chaos. The United States is currently the world’s oldest democracy. But America is no more immune from collapse than were some of history’s most stable and impressive consensual governments. Fifth-century Athens, Republican Rome, Renaissance Florence
Can a Divided America Survive? Read More »
By Victor Davis Hanson National Review’s “The Corner” D-Day was the largest amphibious invasion in history since King Xerxes’ 480 BC combined sea and land descent into Greece. The Americans, especially General George Marshall, had wanted to invade France as early as spring 1943, still confident from their World War I experience that they could