VDH's Blade of Perseus

An article by my Hoover colleague Dr. Paul Gregory in The Hill

By forcing the standards of “wokeness” on a Western institution like Amnesty International, the Kremlin has weakened Russian dissident Aleksei Navalny as he begins his almost three years in a penal colony near Vladimir (190 km from Moscow). Everyone understands he is a political prisoner, isolated from Russian political life. That is the definition of “prisoner of conscience,” which Amnesty International has chosen to withdraw from his name.

Navalny, the major opposition figure to Vladimir Putin, was a public relations challenge for the Kremlin even before his run for Moscow mayor in 2013. Through his Fund for the Battle Against Corruption (FBK), he has exposed the corruption and criminality of the Kremlin leadership. He barely survived the poisoning carried out, allegedly, by the Kremlin’s Federal Security Service (FSB); he returned to Moscow from treatment in Germany, only to be sentenced by a Russian kangaroo court to two years and eight months in a labor colony. To the Kremlin’s irritation, Navalny has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by Poland’s Lech Walesa. Amnesty International, itself a Nobel prize-winning organization, added Navalny to its list of “Prisoners of Conscience,” whose honor roll includes Nobel laureates Nelson Mandela and Aung San Suu Kyi.

The Kremlin could ill-afford to have a principled political prisoner in its penal colonies, revered Mandela-like by the international community. Therefore, its disinformation machine — masterful at discrediting persons inconvenient to the regime — switched into high gear. For Navalny, a young and attractive family man with teenage children, the usual charge of pedophilia would not have stuck. Instead, the Kremlin played on Amnesty International’s “own scruples,” as one writer put it.

The Kremlin attacked Navalny for “racist” anti-migrant statements he purportedly made a decade or so ago. The attack was handled largely through foreign journalists associated with RT — a Kremlin-directed international news and TV network — in various countries.

Read the full article here

Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness

In the 1970s and 1980s, furor arose over our possible use of the “neutron bomb” that macabrely would “kill people, but not destroy property.” The logic of the perverse weapon was that on allied and friendly European ground, outnumbered defensive NATO troops might radiate and destroy invading masses of Soviet armored troops by periodic detonations of low-yield thermonuclear shells, rockets, and bombs. 

The ensuing blasts of heat would sear flesh, but would lack commensurate repercussion power to destroy most structures and buildings, and leave far smaller toxic radiation trails. In eerie Strangelovian terms, once the enemy was finished off, returning friendly troops and populations could sort their way among the mass dead to find their infrastructure intact—without “collateral” damage or fear of serious radiation sickness. 

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Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness

Rush Limbaugh created modern national talk radio as we now know it—from nothing. For over three decades he kept at rapt attention weekdays—live from noon to three—the largest conservative audience in broadcast history. Over 15 million tuned in each week. 

Last week—32 years, and over 23,000 hours of on-air commentary after Rush went national in August 1988—he is gone, at 70 years young. 

By the 1990s he had become the voice—literally and iconically—of the conservative movement and its hot/cold liaisons with the Republican Party. Rush was hated by the Left because he was deadly effective in fighting them, and feared at times by the Republican establishment—because he could also be deadly effective in fighting them. 

Limbaugh had an uncanny sense of what conservative populism could do—such as abruptly end Barack Obama’s control of Congress after just two years, in the sweeping Tea Party midterm election of 2010.  And he also instinctively sensed what it should not do: endorse Ross Perot’s Quixotic third-party surge of 1992 that eventually would split the conservative vote and ensure Bill Clinton the presidency with just 43 percent of the popular vote. 

Read the full article here

Victor Davis Hanson / American Greatness

What causes wars?

Innately aggressive cultures and governments, megalomania, the desire for power, resources, and empire prompt nations to bully or attack others. Less rational Thucydidean motives such as fear and honor and perceptions of self-interest are not to be discounted either. 

But what allows these preemptive or aggressive agendas to reify, to take shape, and to leave tens of thousands dead?

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Listen to “Remembering Rush Limbaugh With Comments From Dr. Victor Davis Hanson Heard Exclusively on The Trevor Carey Show” on Spreaker.

Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness

These are crazy times. A pandemic led to national quarantine, to self-induced recession, to riot, arson, and looting, to a contested election, and to a riot at the Capitol. 

In response, are we focusing solely on upping the daily vaccination rate? 

Getting the country back to work? Opening the schools as the virus attenuates? Ensuring safety in the streets? 

Or are we descending into a sort of madness?  

It might have been understandable that trillions of dollars had to be borrowed to keep a suffocating economy breathing. 

But it makes little sense to keep borrowing $2 trillion a year to prime an economy now set to roar back with herd-like immunity on the horizon. 

Trillions of dollars in stimulus are already priming the economy. 

Read the full article here

VDH talks to John Bachelor Podcast. See the link below.

http://hvr.co/3k6WnqL

Rush and Other Things (Issue #2)