The Golden Hanson
Belle Waring writes:
You should really read the Vodkapundit post and accompanying thread. He says you’ll need a drink, and the man is not kidding at all. The story he links to takes grave misreadings of Thucydides to a whole new level, a category in which the competition is stiff. He’s sure to win this year’s coveted “Golden Hanson”. The trophy features a stern VDH uprooting an olive tree with one hand and hitting himself repeatedly on the head with an axe handle with the other.
The Vodkapundit post is here. You can find the collective works of Victor Davis Hanson here. Hanson is an under-analyzed figure on the political media scene. Ever since 9/11 he's been generating words as a fantastical rate the overwhelming plurality of which are based on pretty clear-cut misreadings of Thucydides such that a book about how a once-great country ruined its foreign policy and its own moral virtue in an unnecessary foreign adventure somehow becomes a book about how wars that look really stupid are, in fact, good because they provide a lot of opportunities to show resolve. Why National Review would be interested in publishing this is hard for me to say. Indefensible as the Bush foreign policy has been, it would be child's play to devise less-silly-than-this accounts of why it's a good idea.
I think this is the Vodkapundit link:
http://vodkapundit.com/archives/008753.php
April 17, 2006 7:11 AM | Reply | Permalink
Hanson has always admired Sparta, not Athens.
Sparta was not all that expansionist, unless Hanson considers the whole world Lacadaemon.
But VDH gets all aquiver over the fox and the stomach and with your shield or on it stuff.
Really is scarey stuff, this intermittent admiration of Sparta. A stable military oligarchy, not a dictatorship, so brave warriors like Hanson and Goldberg can imagine themselves big wheels.
This may hit screens in time for the war. We must, once again, save civilization from the advancing Persian hordes.
April 17, 2006 10:33 AM | Reply | Permalink
This may hit screens in time for the war. We must, once again, save civilization from the advancing Persian hordes.
Oh dear Christ. I'd forgotten that was coming out. Better that, I guess, than the inevitable Batman Vs. al Qaeda movie.
April 17, 2006 11:10 AM | Reply | Permalink
'cept the Persians won so the lesson is what? Even if we all fight and die Iran wins?
April 17, 2006 12:03 PM | Reply | Permalink
What the hell is McNulty doing in that?
April 17, 2006 1:12 PM | Reply | Permalink
What is it about Persia? [OK, it makes a good joke] Thucidites wrote primarily about the Peloponesian War between Sparta and Athens that involved almost all Greek city states for about 30 years. Athens lost, Sparta won, but so worn-out that was soon eclipsed by Thebes.
There are sobering lessons galore in the account of Thucidites. For example, for a period of time, Greece was a "unipolar word" dominated by very arrogant Spartans. Until they alienated everybody and got defeated by a bunch of homosexuals.
April 17, 2006 2:30 PM | Reply | Permalink
I've read some of Hanson's stuff before he turned into a Bush whore.
VDH is NOT a fan of Sparta or Athens. Read THE SOUL OF BATTLE --- he is an unapologetic fan of Epaminondas and the Boeotian League led by Thebes during its brief period of dominance before the rise of Macedon. He positively slobbers all over himself describing how the effete urbanites of Athens looked down on the agricultural yeomen of Boeotia. Keep VDH's background as a small farmer from the San Joaquin Valley in mind here.
April 17, 2006 4:11 PM | Reply | Permalink
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September 15, 2006 9:50 AM | Reply | Permalink