Author: victorhanson

Victor Davis Hanson is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow in Residence in Classics and Military History at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, a professor of Classics Emeritus at California State University, Fresno, and a nationally syndicated columnist for Tribune Media Services. He is also the Wayne & Marcia Buske Distinguished Fellow in History, Hillsdale College, where he teaches each fall semester courses in military history and classical culture.

A Little DACA Honesty

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The Corner- The one and only.  // National Review

By Victor Davis Hanson

It is surreal to look at more than a dozen clips of Barack Obama in non-campaign mode prior to 2012 assuring the country (“I am not king”) that he simply could not usurp the power of the Congress and by fiat illegally issue blanket amnesties in precisely the fashion he would in 2012 — presumably on the assumption that new polls worded along the lines of “would you deport small children brought by their parents to the country as infants” showed a majority of Americans would not.

 

So, on the basis of both short-term gain in 2012 and long-term progressive interest in creating a new demographic reality in swing states in the southwest, Obama eagerly did exactly what he had said that he could not legally do — and not with reluctance, but with the self-righteous zeal of a convert, and in condemnation of anyone morally suspect enough to have agreed with his position prior to his reelection campaign. Such is identity politics. Continue reading “A Little DACA Honesty” →

victorhanson

09/15/2017

From An Angry Reader:

Angry Reader Sam Davidson

Victor,

I enjoy reading your articles in the National Review. I never understood why this country has statues that honor people that took up arms against the United States. I do not think there are any statues honoring Lord Cornwallis, General Santa Ana, Ludendorf, Tojo, or Hitler. The Confederates were lucky President Johnson was a Southerner and every officer over the rank of captain wasn’t shot. In my opinion this isn’t about slavery or state’s rights, it is about treason.

Best Wishes,

Sam Davidson

________________________

Victor Davis Hanson’s Reply:

Dear Kinda Angry Reader Sam Davidson,

To answer you, question why are Confederate statues somewhat different from those of a few monsters you list? Continue reading →

victorhanson

09/14/2017

From An Angry Reader:

Angry Reader Wes Bridgeman

Dear Mr. Hanson,

My father, Lt. Col. William Bridgeman (Retired), sent me the attached links and quotes that I would like to bring to your attention. This features the words of the figures themselves (Forrest and Lincoln), and I will let them speak for themselves.

Please consider a correction to your recent statements regarding Forrest, whereas he is factually innocent of “founding the KKK.” Forrest was actually a leader in civil rights, despite current dogma.

Thank you in advance,

Wes Bridgeman

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Victor Davis Hanson’s Reply:

Dear Angry Reader Wes Bridgeman,

Forrest claimed that he had changed after the war (at a time when he was sick, bankrupt, and in need of commercial opportunities), but I address the issue at length in the chapter on Shiloh in Ripples of Battle; you might revisit that book and my section on Forrest and the Klan and I think you will find that he did in fact, at least stealthily, spearhead its origins.

Thank you,

Victor Hanson

Throwing Away the Russian Card

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By Victor Davis Hanson
National Review

The love-hate relation with Putin, from the Obama-era red reset button to the current collusion hysteria, has been a disaster.

“They [the North Koreans] will eat grass but will not stop their program as long as they do not feel safe.”— Vladimir Putin, Beijing, China, September 5, 2017

China has put the U.S. into an existential dilemma. Its surrogate North Korea — whose nuclear arsenal is certainly in large part a product of Chinese technology and commercial ties — by any standard of international standing is a failed, fourth-world state. North Korean population, industry, culture, and politics would otherwise warrant very little attention.

Continue reading “Throwing Away the Russian Card” →

victorhanson

09/13/17

From An Angry Reader:

Angry Reader Rich Laughlin

 

Mr. Hanson, please try using sentences with less words. Most recently, I read one of your articles that had a sentence with 44 words. Other sentences in the same article were almost as bad. Really.

You are loosing me with those lengthy paragraphs that contain so many examples of organizations, groups, etc., etc. One or two would, in most cases, satisfy the message. And, I find I have to keep a dictionary nearby while reading some of your articles.

Less is good!

 

Rich Laughlin

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Victor Davis Hanson’s Reply:

Dear Angry Reader Rich Laughlin,

 

Perhaps I should agree with your Callimachean advice: μέγα βιβλίον μέγα κακόν.

 

Sincerely,

Victor Hanson

(and I do not get paid by the word, so my verbiage would be unprofitable and unnecessary).

victorhanson

09/12/17

From An Angry Reader:

Angry Reader Bob McCarthy

For one who loves to cast aspersions on political incorrectness in the use of words, maybe you should ‘splain to your readers your use of the term “Mexifornia” in decrying the Mexican “takeover” of California, as racist a piece as I’ve ever read. I find it shameful that The Bee chooses to run your right-wing screeds every Sunday. Jim Boren once defended you to me for being “local” as in Selma, as if that gives you special cred. It certainly doesn’t.

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Victor Davis Hanson’s Reply:

Dear Quite Angry Reader Bob McCarthy,

Why the unhinged anger?

I do not have to “splain” anything to you, given that you clearly have never read the book Mexifornia. It was a call for legal, measured, and diverse immigration, a return to the melting pot of integration, assimilation, and intermarriage, and an immigration solution that would allow those who broke the law but who are employed, have not committed a crime, and have lengthy U.S. residence to apply for a green card and legal residence in exchange for a national policy of enforcing existing immigration law—in other words, the policies embraced by Bill and Hillary Clinton in the 1990s. It championed a unifying multiracialism rather than a separatist multiculturalism. You have no idea of the origins of the word Mexifornia, which is not my own, but one borrowed from a preexisting and common Latino gang reference that was apparently meant to highlight ethnic tribalism. Continue reading →

Virtual Virtue

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By Victor Davis Hanson//American Greatness

It is not healthy for a society to live two lives that are antithetical, as America has been doing in recent decades.

Disillusionment with government and popular culture arises at anger over two entirely different realities. One truth is politically correct and voiced on the news and by the government. It is often abstract and theoretical. And the other truth is empirical, hushed and accepted informally by ordinary people from what they see and hear on the ground.

Public orthodoxy signals virtue, private heterodoxy ensures ostracism. So Americans increasingly make the necessary adjustments, modeling their lives in some part as those once did in totalitarian societies of the 20th century. The reality they live is the stuff of the shadows; the falsity they are told and repeat is public and amplified.

Cynicism and eventual anger at the schizophrenia are always the harvests of such bipolarity.

Continue reading “Virtual Virtue” →

Two Resistances

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By Victor Davis Hanson
National Review

The quiet resistance — the one without black masks and clubs — is the more revolutionary force, and it transcends race, class, and gender.

After the election of Donald Trump, there arose a self-described “Resistance.” It apparently posed as a decentralized network of progressive activist groups dedicated to derailing the newly elected Trump administration.

Democrats and progressives borrowed their brand name from World War II French partisans. In rather psychodramatic fashion, they envisioned their heroic role over the next four years as that of virtual French insurgents — coming down from the Maquis hills, perhaps to waylay Trump’s White House, as if the president were an SS Obergruppenführer und General der Police running occupied Paris. Vanity Fair and Rolling Stone wrote admiringly about the furious Resistance’s pushback against Trump, with extravagant claims that his agenda was already derailed thanks to a zillion grass-roots and modern-day insurgents.

Continue reading “Two Resistances” →

Linguistic McCarthyism

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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, in furor over the assassination of Julius Caesar, encounters on the street a poet named Cinna. The innocent poet was not the conspiratorial assassin Cinna, but unfortunately shared a name with the killer. Continue reading “Linguistic McCarthyism” →

Calculating The Risk Of Preventive War

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by Max Boot
Strategika

War Savings poster WWII
Image credit: Poster Collection, UK 4018, Hoover Institution Archives.

The issue of “preemptive” war is more in the news now than at any time since the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The impetus, of course, is the rapid development of North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs, which will soon give Pyongyang the capability to hit any American city with a nuclear-tipped ICBM. President Trump has been threatening “fire and fury” in response, and warning that the United States is “locked and loaded” for war. His national security adviser, Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, has said that North Korea may not be deterrable and that, therefore, a preemptive strike may be justified.

In truth, the use of “preemptive” in this context is a misnomer. In international law, a “preemptive” strike is one undertaken just before an enemy attack. There are few examples of such conflicts beyond the 1967 Six Day War. The use of force in such an instance is labeled “anticipatory self-defense” and is clearly legal and logical. If Washington were to acquire intelligence that North Korea was about to attack the United States—or even U.S. allies such as South Korea and Japan—there is no doubt that a preemptive strike would be warranted. Continue reading “Calculating The Risk Of Preventive War” →

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