History

Walls and Immigration — Ancient and Modern

The Roman empire faced a challenge similar to what the EU faces. By Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online When standing today at Hadrian’s Wall in northern England, everything appears indistinguishably affluent and serene on both sides. It was not nearly as calm some 1,900 years ago. In A.D. 122, the exasperated Roman emperor Hadrian […]

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The Myth Of Progress

By Victor Davis Hanson // Defining Ideas President Obama is fond of using the phrase “the arc of the moral universe,” a line derived from Martin Luther King Jr’s longer quote, “The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.” King, in fact, lifted the often-used sentence from earlier Christian ministers.

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Setting the Record Straight on Britain, America, and World War II

By Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online While in London last week, President Obama waded into the upcoming British referendum about whether the United Kingdom should stay in the European Union. Controversy followed his lecture about the future of the Anglo-American relationship should Britain depart the EU. Obama also implied that without an EU,

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World War II Amnesia

by Victor Davis Hanson // Defining Ideas   Seventy-seven years ago, Nazi Germany invaded Poland, triggering a declaration of war by Great Britain and its Empire and France. After Hitler’s serial aggressions in the Rhineland, the Anschluss with Austria, the Munich Agreement, and the carving up of Czechoslovakia, no one believed that a formal war

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The Horrors of Hiroshima in Context

  By Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online The dropping of two atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 remains the only wartime use of nuclear weapons in history. No one knows exactly how many Japanese citizens were killed by the two American bombs. A macabre guess is

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The Tough Choices of Overseas Intervention

Victor Davis Hanson // Tribune Media Services The United States has targeted a lot of rogues and their regimes in recent decades: Muammar Gadhafi, Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milosevic, Mohamed Farrah Aidid, Manuel Noriega and the Taliban. As a general rule over the last 100 years, any time the U.S. has bombed or intervened and then

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Barack Churchill, 1939

“Certainly we do not need a disproportionate response to Herr Hitler that initiates a cycle of violence on both sides. We need to tamp down the rhetoric.”  by Victor Davis Hanson // PJ Media I have nothing to offer you, except blood, sweat, and arugula. Winston Churchill, well before he became prime minister in May

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Is the West Dead Yet?

The West is paradoxically dominant on the global stage and eroding from within. by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online  Never has Western culture seemed so all-powerful. Look at the 30 top-ranked universities in the world; they are all American, British, or European — albeit these rankings are based largely on the excellence of

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History’s Complexity Should Discourage Liberals’ Cheap Retroactive Morality

by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online Some Democratic-party groups are renouncing their once-egalitarian idols, the renaissance genius Thomas Jefferson and the populist Andrew Jackson. Both presidents, some two centuries ago, owned slaves. Consequently, the two men have been suddenly deemed unworthy of further liberal reverence. Share This

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Iran, the Munich Comparison, and the Abuse of History

The Iran Deal is not Munich, but the same foolishness of Western leaders is close enough to warn us what happens next. And it will not be good.  by Victor Davis Hanson // PJ Media The Iranian deal has called to mind the Munich Agreement of 1938. Then Britain and France signed away the sovereignty

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