Listen in as Victor Davis Hanson and cohost Jack Fowler entertain questions from listeners on the Battle of Teutoburg Forest and the Roman conquest of Germany, its legacy, an analysis of the best militaries of the past, warrior v. soldier, and Latin American professionals and skilled labor leaving their home countries, and the immigration narrative of the left is changing.
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The US Marines in the Pacific, 1944 — pretty good as soldiers AND warriors.
“Quinctilius Varus, WHERE ARE MY EAGLES?!!”
A note on the “cult” of Hermann, though, as the modern Germans called Arminius, whether that’s accurate or not.
It wasn’t the Nazis who developed that cult, it was the German national liberals, as they were called. That was the intellectual movement released by Napoleon as he spread the French Revolution’s principles across the territory France had conquered. The German national liberals believed in the uniqueness, the distinctness, of the German people, compared to the Romance peoples. They also believed in the right of all Germans (German-speakers) to live in a nation-state, more or less democratic, a constitutional monarchy, as the English and French had established. And they seized on Arminius as an avatar of that national right.
Even after the National Liberals were defeated in the 1840s by more conservative forces throughout the German states, the “cult” of Hermann was adopted by all German nationalists. The Hohenzollerns, especially Wilhelm II, evoked Hermann. And of course, the Nazis saw value in it, too.