{"id":10338,"date":"2017-06-29T12:03:37","date_gmt":"2017-06-29T19:03:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/?p=10338"},"modified":"2017-07-04T23:47:32","modified_gmt":"2017-07-05T06:47:32","slug":"the-islamist-minotaur","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-islamist-minotaur\/","title":{"rendered":"The Islamist Minotaur"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Victor Davis Hanson
\nDefining Ideas<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"
Image credit: Barbara Kelley<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

According to Greek myth, the Athenian hero Theseus sailed to Crete to stop the tribute of seven Athenian men and seven women sent every nine years to the distant carnivorous Minotaur in his haunt within the labyrinth beneath the palace of Knossos on Crete.<\/p>\n

In various versions of the prehistorical myth, the Athenian King Aegeus had conceded earlier to the attacking Cretan King Minos to surrender the youths as tribute to prevent a wider war. Then his heroic son Theseus came of age and volunteered to stop the scripted slaughter, sailing to Crete, where he slew the Minotaur. And that was that.<\/p>\n

The idea of harvesting people as part of some strange protocol to preclude a wider, far more destructive war is to not unknown in both history and popular myth.<\/p>\n

Many of the thousands of human victims sacrificed to the various hungry gods of the Aztecs such as Huitzilopochtli and Tezcatlipoca often were delivered as a sort of human tribute forced from neighboring conquered cities and tribes. The subdued assumed that paying the smaller human toll was cheaper than waging a far bloodier and likely futile revolt against the Aztec Empire\u2014at least until the arrival of Hernan Cortes and his conquistadors in 1519, who found restive conquered peoples eager for revolt, largely on promises to overthrow the Aztecs and stop their collection of human tribute.<\/p>\n

A half-century ago, in the 1967 Star Trek episode \u201cA Taste of Armageddon,\u201d the starship Enterprise visits an imaginary planet Eminiar II, that was engaged in an existential\u2014but virtual\u2014war with the neighboring planet Vendikar. To avoid full-scale Armageddon, both sides far earlier had agreed to wage a computer-simulated war, in which electronically projected losses were reified by ordering selected \u201cfatalities\u201d to report to \u201cdisintegration\u201d chambers\u2014TV-land\u2019s version of the Minotaur myth\u2014to avoid a larger (and real) war.\u00a0 Captain Kirk plays a role somewhat analogous to Theseus and puts an end to the nightmarish nonsense.<\/p>\n

To read more, please click link: http:\/\/www.hoover.org\/research\/islamist-minotaur?utm_source=hdr&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=2017-06-29<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Victor Davis Hanson Defining Ideas According to Greek myth, the Athenian hero Theseus sailed to Crete to stop the tribute of seven Athenian men and seven women sent every nine years to the distant carnivorous Minotaur in his haunt within the labyrinth beneath the palace of Knossos on Crete. In various versions of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[1114,28,29,59,194,216,1],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-2GK","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":2702,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wandering-around-europe\/","url_meta":{"origin":10338,"position":0},"title":"Wandering Around Europe","author":"victorhanson","date":"May 31, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson PJ Media The Beauty of Europe One can see why millions of Muslims flock to Europe. 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