“The End of Sparta” — A Review

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A classicist’s exemplary historical novel.

by Albert Louis Zambone // BooksandCulture.com

imagesClassicists should infuriate other humanists, in the way that the handsome scholar-athlete who volunteers to help dyslexic children and is a genuinely nice guy should infuriate the guy who just made it onto the football team and has a hard time keeping up his GPA, or the kid with the great GPA who can’t do a pull-up—but they don’t hate him, because he’s just so good. That, at least, is how this historian feels whenever he reads a classicist.

These feelings of bitter self-recrimination are a normal part of the intellectual life, according to most intellectuals, but especially strong within me because I have just finished Victor Davis Hanson’s The End of Sparta, first published in 2011 and issued in paperback this spring. It was an absolutely infuriating experience. Isn’t enough for Hanson to have conceived of a genuinely original theory for the development of classical Greece? Can’t he be satisfied with roiling the waters of military history with his arguments for a “western Continue reading ““The End of Sparta” — A Review” →

Angry Reader #9 — A Facebook Comment

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“I will concede that you are almost always right (no joke). However, I don’t agree that a year from now the “American public will have a vague idea that about a year earlier something happened sometime to someone in Syria, but what and when and where and why they are not quite sure.” Continue reading “Angry Reader #9 — A Facebook Comment” →

Mideast Nuclear Holocaust

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by Raymond Ibrahim // FrontPage Magazine 

A Review of The Last Israelis by Noah Beck

lliAfter constant exposure to critically important news, it begins to lose all meaning and sense of urgency.  Hearing the same warnings over and over again—especially when the status quo seems static—can cause a certain desensitization, a resigned apathy that ignores the warnings in the wishful hope that they won’t materialize.  This hope becomes more optimistic (and passive) with each passing day that the warnings do not materialize.

One of the most evident examples of this phenomenon is the threat of a nuclear Iran.  For years, the international community has been hearing about Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons; for years, the world has been hearing Iran make bold, genocidal threats—most notoriously, that it will wipe the state of Israel off the map. But so far, Iran reportedly still has no nukes, and no large attack has been launched on Israel.  Thus, many have become desensitized to the situation—including those charged with ensuring that a nuclear Iran never becomes a reality. Continue reading “Mideast Nuclear Holocaust” →

Syria Postmortem

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by Victor Davis Hanson // NRO’s The Corner 

I think the so-called Syrian crisis is working out as most anticipated:

1) In about a year or so Assad and Putin will announce that they “think” they might have in theory rounded up a lot of the WMD, and will soon make plans to turn it over to “authorities,” subject to further negotiations. Continue reading “Syria Postmortem” →

The Decline of College

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by Victor Davis Hanson // Tribune Media Services 

For the last 70 years, American higher education was assumed to be the pathway to upper-mobility and a rich shared-learning experience.

Young Americans for four years took a common core of classes, learned to look at the world dispassionately, and gained the concrete knowledge to make informed arguments logically.

The result was a more skilled workforce and a competent democratic citizenry. That ideal may still be true at our flagship universities, with their enormous endowments and stellar world rankings.

Yet most elsewhere, something went terribly wrong with that model. Almost all the old campus protocols are now tragically outdated or antithetical to their original mission.

Tenure — virtual lifelong job security for full-time faculty after six years — was supposed to protect free speech on campus. How, then, did campus ideology become more monotonous than diverse, more intolerant of politically unpopular views than open-minded?

Continue reading “The Decline of College” →

Muslim Husbands Must Hate Non-Muslim Wives

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by Raymond Ibrahim // CBN News 

Often translated as “Loyalty and Enmity,” the little-known Islamic doctrine of wala’ wa bara’commands Muslims never to befriend or be loyal to non-Muslims, while being clean of, disavowing and ultimately hating them.

Dr. Burhami: Non-Muslim wife akin to rape victim
Dr. Burhami: Non-Muslim wife akin to rape victim

During a question-and-answer session at an Islamic conference, the full extent of this divisive doctrine was given full expression (see video; also posted below).  Popular preacher Dr. Yassir Burhami, the vice president of the Salafi party in Egypt, explained how Loyalty and Enmity must be upheld at all times—even with a Muslim’s wife, if she happens to Continue reading “Muslim Husbands Must Hate Non-Muslim Wives” →

Vote for Me Or Else: Patterns between Egypt and Pakistan

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by Raymond Ibrahim // Gatestone Institute 

In what seems to be a pattern in many Muslim nations of finding new pretexts to justify anti-Christian—and “anti-Other”—behavior, Egypt’s Christians and their churches are under attack, ostensibly because Christians joined the June 30 Revolution, which led to the ouster of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Lesser known is that, even before the revolution back during the 2012 presidential elections, Christians were often threatened and sometimes attacked simply for not voting for the Muslim Brotherhood—an absurd expectation considering that it has long been the Brotherhood and its many Islamist/jihadi offshoots that have terrorized Egypt’s Christians for decades. Continue reading “Vote for Me Or Else: Patterns between Egypt and Pakistan” →

Obama’s Box Canyon

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Our Hamlet-in-cheif wanted simultaneously to act and not act.

by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online

The Syrian fiasco arose from two mutually contradictory desires. Barack Obama sincerely wanted Bashar Assad to stop killing his own people. Barack Obama also really was not willing to use force to ensure that Assad would stop killing his own people. At Harvard, those desires would not be antithetical. Elsewhere they are.

The desire to avoid the use of force was understandable. Obama ran for president as an anti-war candidate. He damned Bush’s “bad war” in Iraq, while critiquing the conduct of the “good war” in Afghanistan. He had no success with his own bombing in Libya. And he was embarrassed by even a rhetorical entry into the Egyptian quagmire. The president sensed rightly that the country was “tired” after Afghanistan and Iraq. Continue reading “Obama’s Box Canyon” →

The Charade Can Go On — and On and On . . .

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by Victor Davis Hanson // NRO’s The Corner

So far in the Syrian charade, Bashar Assad has won de facto permission to be a legitimate ruler negotiating with superpowers, while promising to kill thousands more by blowing them up, shelling them, and shooting them without “obscene” chemical weapons.

Vladimir Putin controls the tempo of the crisis. He now issues new initiatives, now delays for consultations and retrospection — as he steps up profitable arms shipments to the Syrians and Iranians. In short, he is in the short-term “saving” Obama from himself, while in the long term insidiously destroying presidential credibility, influence, and respect by the sheer force of his cunning and audacity, as Obama in terms of foreign influence curls up into a veritable fetal position and wishes it would all just go away. Continue reading “The Charade Can Go On — and On and On . . .” →

Syria in the Age of Myth

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by Victor Davis Hanson // PJ Media 

Myth I. Conservatives opposed to bombing Syria are isolationists.

Hardly. It would be better to call conservative skepticism a new Jacksonianism that is not wedded to any Pavlovian support for intervention or particular political party. Continue reading “Syria in the Age of Myth” →