what/who cheney spends all of his time reading ..Victor Davis Hanson

[ElsewheresDaughter]

for both business and pleasure and imho this is why cheney hates humanity/people. he has always fed his soul on this mans dark philosphy! :scared:
http://ontology.buffalo.edu/smith//courses01/rrtw/HansonV.htm

<snip>
Deterrence alone can stop bullies. The astute Theban general Pagondas once reminded his unsure troops that the only way they could live safely next to Athens was by projecting an air of strength, since peoples such as the Athenians attacked, rather than admired, neighbors who were docile. His hoplites then defeated the Athenians and the latter never again invaded Boeotia.

So states that seek to start wars can be dissuaded from attacking when they realize there is a very good chance that the ensuing calamity will be worse for them than for their enemies — or, if irrational, they can be summarily defeated only through superior military force.

We cannot fathom exactly the state of mind of autocratic leaders in Iran, North Korea, or China. We know only two things about them: Given the state of America's current defenses these countries will not attack us; and should they be so foolish, they would lose quickly. Should we reduce our arms and begin relying on our NATO allies, the U.N., or the goodwill of authoritarian states to leave us alone, it is more — rather than less — likely that we would find ourselves at war with all of them.


Book Review: Mexifornia by Victor Davis Hanson... Victor Davis Hansen writes about this in MEXIFORNIA. But, like greying Europe with its birth-dearth, we can fail with or without Latino immigrants. ...
www.townhall.com/bookclub/hanson.


OpinionJournal - A DECAYING BODY... Who Cares? Kofi Annan & Co. might as well move to Brussels or Geneva. BY VICTOR DAVIS HANSON Thursday, September 23, 2004 12:01 am These are surreal times. ...
www.opinionjournal.com/ forms/printThis.html?id=110005658

Philosophy in Wartime... 11 Attack Victor Davis Hansen : Why the Muslims Misjudged Us: They Hate us Because Their Culture is Backward and Corrupt. Victor ...
http://ontology.buffalo.edu/smith//courses01/rrtw/HansonV.htm

<snip>
A number of great philosophers, political scientists, and historians have written vast treatises on the subject. While there is no general agreement, few believe that they arise simply out of real material "grievances" — the inequity and oppression that leave thousands of innocents poor, sick, and hungry. Make everyone literate and well fed, and war might become less common — but it would not go away. Hannibal as a child swore eternal enmity toward Rome not because of an impoverished Carthage, but to restore the pride of his clan and country after the humiliation of the First Punic War

North Korea and North Vietnam invaded the southern halves of their peninsulas neither because their respective peoples were under attack by non-Communists, nor because their own resources and land were being stolen. Rather, they knew that only with absolute conquest of a nearby antithetical — and more attractive — alternative to their own rule could their hold on power be preserved. Kim Il Sung and Ho Chi Minh had no illusions that Marxism or totalitarianism would make the Koreans or Vietnamese freer, wealthier, or happier. In fact, they had good reason to think just the opposite. But both did trust that they could invade and win, or at least achieve stalemate — and so both attacked, were proved right, and thus held onto or expanded their power.

Saddam Hussein wanted land from Iran, oil from Kuwait, and obeisance from the Kurds, and sought allies by attacking Israel. Yet his own people had plenty of territory and resources well before he went to war. He was stopped not by U.N. envoys or the Arab League, but only by the guns of the United States. And he is a threat today not as a result of our determination to rid the world of him, but because of a misguided forbearance that spared him. Sadly, the careers of the real war-makers — Alexander, Caesar, Cortés, Hitler, or Tojo-confirm that the Greeks had it right after all: States often fight for irrational reasons like "honor, fear, and self-interest," and ambitious men regard restraint as weakness, not mercy.

more....

[UTUSN]

1. You've Got HANSON Pegged One with PAGLIA, STRAUSS, NIETSCHE

A week or two before the illegal Iraq attack, CHEENEE paraded HANSON in front of the press corps as his "guru" with a high profile lunch. The reporting at the time described his role for the Mal-administration PNACers as being providing examples from history on use of military force in itself and preemption in order to keep "vitality" for the nation, avoid stagnation, and spread its own model abroad.

Here's HANSON giving marching orders for the Iraq attack:

********QUOTE*******

Full HANSON archive: http://www.nationalreview.com/hanson/hanson-archive.asp

Nat'l Cathedral: (History or Hysteria?) http://www.nationalreview.com/hanson/hanson032803.asp
.... In disgust at the hysteria, I took a drive to Washington to the National Cathedral on Sunday. Big mistake. All except one of the entrances were closed due to security concerns. I walked in under the wonderful sculptures of Frederick Hart, an authentic American genius who almost single-handedly restored classical realism to American sculpture. A small statue of a kneeling Lincoln, who sent thousands into battle to eradicate slavery, was in the corner. A plaque of quotations from Churchill, about the need for sacrifice in war, was on the wall. So I was feeling somewhat good again — until I heard the pious sermon on “shock and awe.” In pompous tones the minister was deprecating the war effort, calling down calumnies upon the administration, and alleging the immoral nature of our nation at war.

Such a strange man at such a strange time, I thought. His entire congregation, by its own admission, is in danger from foreign terrorists (why else bar the gates?). His church is itself a monument to the utility of force for moral purposes. His own existence as a free-speaking, freely worshiping man of God is possible only thanks to the United States military — whose present mission he was openly deriding at the country’s national shrine. ....
*************UNQUOTE********

And here's an example of how NIETZSCHE was distorted by the Nazis, with HANSON-the-thinker giving his views on Mexican immigration, "Mexifornia", (not "racist" despite whether we agree or disagree), as his words are taken over by unintellectual, unthinking wingnut racists for their own purposes:

**********QUOTE********
Mexifornia: http://www.city-journal.org/html/12_2_do_we_want.html
Thousands arrive illegally from Mexico into California each year—and the state is now home to fully 40 percent of America’s immigrants, legal and illegal. They come in such numbers because a tacit alliance of Right and Left has created an open-borders policy, aimed at keeping wage labor cheap and social problems ever fresh, so that the ministrations of Chicano studies professors, La Raza activists, and all the other self-appointed defenders of group causes will never be unneeded. ....

And while the Democrats think the illegals will eventually turn into liberal voters, the actual Hispanic vote so far remains just a small fraction of the eligible Mexican-American pool: of the 14,173 residents of the central California town of Hanford who identified themselves as Latino (34 percent of the town’s population), for example, only 770 are registered to vote.

My sleepy hometown of Selma, California, is in the dead center of all this. ....It is a schizophrenic existence, living at illegal immigration’s intersection. Each week I pick up trash, dirty diapers, even sofas and old beds dumped in our orchard by illegal aliens—only to call a Mexican-American sheriff who empathizes when I show him the evidence of Spanish names and addresses on bills and letters scattered among the trash. ....

Yet I also walk through vineyards at 7 AM in the fog and see whole families from Mexico, hard at work in the cold—while the native-born unemployed of all races will not—and cannot—prune a single vine. By natural selection, we are getting some of the most intelligent and industrious people in the world, people who have the courage to cross the border, the tenacity to stay—and, if not assimilated, the potential to cost the state far, far more than they can contribute. ....

Our elites do not understand just how rare consensual government is in the history of civilization, and therefore they wrongly think that they can instill confidence by praising the other, less successful, cultures that aliens are escaping from rather than explaining the dynamism and morality of the civilization that they have voted for with their feet. ....
*****UNQUOTE****

The racists:
from this website: http://www.bustamanteno.com/Lawlessness.html comes this:

[UTUSN]

2. It's the CLASSICS Department!!!!!

NIEZSCHE is one of a group who are often portrayed as strange, impenetrable, and on some weird and original tangent all their own, when the secret that binds ALL of these seeming mavericks ---NIETZSCHE, STRAUSS, PAGLIA, and Victor Davis HANSON (CHEENEE's guru)--- is the CLASSICS Department, the pre-Christian values they are INDIVIDUALLY steeped in ---and wanted to live by TODAY.

It's not that NIETZSCHE "influenced" the ones after him, it's that EACH of these WENT BACK individually to the Ancients. They want to live by the "strong" pre-Christian values of STRENGH, physical force/domination, PRIDE ("gloating") as opposed to the "weak" values of humility, mercy, turning the other cheek.

And it's NOT that NIEZCHE was a proto-Nazi. Richard WAGNER *was* one and NIETZSCHE broke with him. After he went into his mental helplessness his unintellectual sister took control of his body and dressed him as a prophet, literally, with people visiting to pay obeissance, which would have REPELLED him, and herself courted the proto-Nazis according to her own small understanding of him, or just for her self-interest.

CHEENEE did a little dance right before the Iraq attack, presenting Victor Davis HANSON to the media as his guru. This dude has been laying out the PNAC working plans for public consumption, the two-pronged thing of active war (preemptive/proactive) plus "noble goals" (forcing "democracy" on others). His role has been to dig up historical examples as precedents for what the PNAC-ers want to do anyway.

Here's a whimsical, but prescient, capturing of what goes on with the Classics types:

******QUOTE*****

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum
Music: Stephen Sondheim Lyrics: Stephen Sondheim Book: Larry Gelbart + Burt Shevelove Film: 1966

"Bring Me My Bride" (I, Miles Gloriosus)
http://libretto.musicals.ru/text.php?textid=5&language=1

....Let haste be made,
I cannot be delayed!
There are lands to conquer,
Cities to loot
And people to degrade!

SOLDIERS
Look at those arms!
Look at that chest!
Look at them!

MILES
Not to mention the rest!
Even I am impressed. ....

SOLDIERS
Look at that foot!
Look at that heel!
Mark the magnificent muscles of steel!

MILES
I am my ideal! ....

MILES
COURTESANS
I, Miles Gloriosus,
I, Paragon of virtues,
Him, Miles Gloriosus
Him, Paragon of virtues,

SOLDIERS
A man among men!
With sword and with pen!

MILES
I, in war the most admired,
In wit the most inspired,
In love the most desired,
In dress the best displayed,
I am a parade! ....

*****UNQUOTE****