America’s Worst "Historian"
By Werther does the necessary work of demolishing Victor Davis Hanson. Charles Murray isn’t the only transparent hack on the right. Via Wolcott.
Mr. Hanson, Cal State Fresno’s contribution to human letters, is the favorite historian of the administration, the Naval War College, and other groves of disinterested research. His academic niche is to drag the Peloponnesian War into every contemporary foreign policy controversy and thereby justify whatever course of action our magistrates have taken. One suspects that if the neo-cons at the American Enterprise Institute were suddenly seized by the notion to invade Patagonia, Mr. Hanson would be quoting Pericles in support.
Once we strip away all the classical Greek fustian, it becomes clear that the name of his game is to take every erroneous conventional wisdom, cliche, faulty generalization, and common-man imbecility, and elevate them to a catechism. In this process, he showcases a technique beloved of pseudo-conservatives stuck at the Sean Hannity level of debate: he swallows whatever quasi-historical balderdash serves the interest of those in power, announces it with an air of surprised discovery, and then congratulates himself on his boldness in telling truth to power.
And, near and dear to my own heart, Werther smashes Hanson’s pretensions regarding World War II and the “Western Way of War”:
Seven-eighths of all Wehrmacht combat-division-months (i.e., one division spending one month in combat) during World War II occurred on the Russian Front.[6] It was the Red Army, as Churchill admitted, which “tore the guts out of the German Army.” Without diminishing the courage of the assault troops of D-Day, the successful operation in Normandy would have been impossible in 1944 without Stalingrad and Kursk.
Can human imagination encompass the fact that there were 27 million Russian deaths in World War II? That fact was a demographic catastrophe from which Russia has never recovered. Yes, Stalin was a swine, and the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was an act of treachery. But that does not entitle comfortable court historians to simulate outrage at how the American role in World War II has allegedly been belittled by (uncited) Marxist scribblers. Equally, the memoirs of German veterans of the Russian Front generally regarded a posting to the West as virtual salvation compared to the relentless meat grinder of the East. Their testimony has more credibility regarding the Russian contribution to World War II than the jeremiad of a shallow intellect.
Finally, for those of you who might doubt Werther’s assertion about the attractiveness of Thucydides to the boys at Naval War College Review, see this article comparing the position of Taiwan to that of Melos. While the authors make some clever comparisons, they also take pains to mold the situation into a neo-con vision of clashing empires. . .