A great quote on conservative historian Victor Davis Hanson

[Fenris]

Apart from his partisanship, it's far from clear what qualified Hanson to speak as an expert on Iraq. His bio explains that he is a Greek and Latin scholar by profession, and while the bio claims that Hanson has published writings on "military history," the titles of many of his books (e.g., Hoplites: The Ancient Greek Battle Experience, The Wars of the Ancient Greeks, and The Western Way of War: Infantry Battle in Classical Greece) appear to indicate that his expertise is in the military history of ancient Greece.

http://mediamatters.org/items/200501260013

I've often wondered, with much confusion, just how Victor Davis Hanson was qualified to talk about which political party I should support, considering the only other place (besides talking head shows) I've seen him talk is in documentaries about the Greeks or Romans on the History Channel. As a historian, it bothers me that his opinions are given some sort of credence just because he is an academic. Academics can themselves be plenty ignorant when they leave the confines of their specific areas.

If Hanson is allowed to bloviate simply because of his academic credentials (and membership at the Hoover Institute), I think the talking head programs should make it at least somewhat fair. I know that will never happen, but it would really be productive to have a historian whose expertise lies in the modern Middle East offer his opinion to counter the classical historian Hanson.

More wishful thinking.

[flamingyouth]

1. Clearly, he's qualified

After all, he contributes to the National Review Online.:eyes:

[ElsewheresDaughter]

2. Hanson is cheney's pleasure read .....answers why cheney hates mankind

[Psephos]

3. Sun-tzu was an expert only in ancient Chinese warfare

Yet, Sun-tzu's Art of War is considered especially insightful about modern warfare. (Like Machiavelli, Sun-tzu doesn't seem particularly conservative or liberal, either.)

Hanson is a smart guy, but of course is limited by seeing the world only through a conservative lens. I'm glad to listen to guys like him, as long as I am also listening to historians whose politics are liberal. In general, I've found the intelligence of the historian more important than the politics, anyway. I can always correct for political bias, but I hate missing out on intelligent thinking and analysis. I cannot, however, stomach blowhards. The conservative blowhards are annoying in the extreme.

We need to listen to historians spanning the political spectrum, even (especially?) when their politics don't match our own. It's what keeps us limber, open-minded, and prepared to argue our own point of view effectively.

[Ms. Clio]

4. Amazingly, he's an expert in Southwestern U.S. history, too

And can tell us all about "Mexifornia."

Do We Want Mexifornia?
Victor Davis Hanson

(snip)

My sleepy hometown of Selma, California, is in the dead center of all this. The once rural San Joaquin Valley community has grown from 7,000 to nearly 20,000 in a mere two decades, as a result of mostly illegal immigration from Mexico. Selma is now somewhere between 60 and 90 percent Hispanic. How many are U.S. citizens is either not known or not publicly disclosed: but of all those admitted legally from Mexico to the United States since 1982, only 20 percent had become citizens by 1997. Some local schools, like the one I went to two miles from our farm, are 90 percent first-generation Mexican immigrants. At the service station a mile away, I rarely hear English spoken; almost every car that pulls in displays a Mexican flag decal pasted somewhere.

To contrast the Selma I live in today with the Selma I grew up in will doubtless seem hopelessly nostalgic. But the point of the contrast is not merely that 40 years ago our community was only 40 or 50 percent Mexican, but rather that the immigrants then were mostly here legally. Crime was far rarer: the hit-and-run accidents, auto theft, drug manufacturing and sale, murders, rapes, and armed robberies that are now customary were then nearly nonexistent. Fights that now end in semi-automatic-weapon fire were settled with knives then.


(snip)

Mexico’s policy for a half-century has been the deliberate and illegal export of millions of its poorest citizens to the United States, which is expected to educate, employ, and protect them in ways not possible at home. Only that way has the chronically corrupt Mexican government avoided a revolution, as its exploited underclass from Oaxaca or the small hamlets of the Sierra Madre Mountains headed north, rather than marching en masse on Mexico City. Only that way can billions of earned foreign currency be sent home to prop up a bankrupt economy; only that way for the first time in his life can a poor Mixtec from Michoacan find an advocate for his health and safety from the Mexican consulate—once he is safely ensconced far north of the border.


http://www.city-journal.org/html/12_2_do_we_want.html


He seems completely unaware that the Spanish/Mexican heritage of California goes back 250 years. His opinion outside his field of study is largely useless.

[UTUSN]

5. It Ain't "Conservative" ------It's the Classics Dept FAULT!!!!

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:



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****