James Wolcott on Victor Davis Hanson
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/blogs/wolcott/2005/09/marlboro_man_ge.htmlVictor Davis Hanson is the Marlboro Man of war apologists, a sun-bronzed rider of the purple sage whose stentorian words and battlefield vision have made many a chickenhawk less ashamed of himself as he shuffles around in his fuzzy slippers. The aria Hanson sings in article after article pays Wagnerian tribute to the Western Way of War, or why democracies are so admirably advanced when it comes to committing mass slaughter.
Even the Iraq debacle cannot keep him from his appointed rounds from op-ed page to NRO column to Commentary essay to Weekly Standard book review, peddling military aggression for any panadea that ails the godly US of A.
Finally, one man has has enough. A man who knows his military stuff. Whoever he is writes under the pseudonym Werther, and he torpedoes Hanson's pretentions at Counterpunch (with an essay) that will bring a smile to anyone who has endured Hanson's endless calls to arms. The title of the essasy -- "Victor Hanson, Bard of the Booboisie" -- pays homage to HL Mencken, and the essay itself does the master proud....
http://counterpunch.com/werther09072005.htmlLet us stipulate straightaway: Victor Davis Hanson is the worst historian since Parson Weems. To picture anything remotely as bad as his pseudo-historical novels and propaganda tracts, one would have to imagine an account of the fiscal policies of the Bush administration authored by Paris Hilton.
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.
This is a surprising and rather hypocritical pose by someone who reportedly sups at the table of Vice President Cheney. For Mr. Hanson is one of a long and undistinguished line of personalities stretching back into the abysm of time: the tribal bard, the court historian, the academic recipient of the Lenin Prize. Compared to him, politically connected scribes such as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., resemble Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
Like a Hellcat aviator at the Great Marianas Turkey Shoot, one hardly knows where to fire first, so target-rich is the Hanson opus. But let us take, exempli gratia, a recent contribution to human understanding in the pseudo-conservatives' flagship publication, National Review. Mr. Hanson's philippic, "Remembering World War II: Revisionists Get It Wrong," <1> is an extended and unsourced whine obviously written from a deep sense of grievance that America's contribution to World War II is somehow underappreciated, if not deliberately slighted.
One blinks in disbelief at such a statement. World War II is the subject of an avalanche of more books and films than any other historical subject, most of them if anything overstating, mainly by implication, the precise American contribution to Allied victory. Has Mr. Hanson never heard, that far from being unheralded, General Patton was the laudatory subject of an Oscar-winning film that is a staple of Turner Classic Movies? ...
Perhaps Hollywood, otherwise a perennial target of America's moralizing jihadists, is not to blame so much as that bugbear of pseudo-conservative rage, the Liberal Education Establishment. Mr. Hanson believes that chalky pedagogues are inserting poison into innocent American youths' crania in the same manner that Claudius dispatched Hamlet's father. Only, rather than killing them, these pied pipers of Trotskyite academia endeavor to turn them into Old Glory-burning zombies.
We have before us at this moment our daughter's high school history textbook. Contra Hanson, there is no mention of the internment of Japanese-American civilians. Mr. Hanson's strange obsession with this subject invites speculation. Does his complaint about the alleged academic emphasis on this episode mean he would have opposed internment, or that it was merely a regrettable but necessary expedient best left unmentioned?
Naturally, he cannot restrain himself from commenting, as if we didn't know, that Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Earl Warren were the instigators of the internment. Does that make it illicit? ...
On the other hand, the textbook contains a long extract from Reichsführer S.S. Heinrich Himmler's 4 October 1943 speech in Posen outlining the intent of the German government to undertake its Final Solution. Hanson, by contrast, suggests that the Liberal obsession with World War II revisionism and the alleged faults of the United States have resulted in the diminution of appreciation for the Axis' killing of innocent civilians. Really?
The number of books, articles, films, commemorations, and newly-opened museums having the holocaust as its subject is a veritable deluge. <4> Somehow, this fact has escaped Mr. Hanson's curiosity. ...
...
To tap the last nail into the Mr. Hanson's reputational sarcophagus, we cite a little-known but seminal work which demonstrates that victory in the Second World War was largely a matter of geology. In Oil And War: How The Deadly Struggle For Oil in World War II Meant Victory Or Defeat, co-authors Robert Goralski and Russell W. Freeburg argue that World War II was not only won by the allies through possession of oil, it was, to an extent far greater than received history admits, about oil.
Mustering a huge, oil-hungry army, the Germans' oil production was always less than a tenth of that of the United States. Japan was in even worse straits, and Italy could not even send its fleet to sea for much of the war for lack of fuel. Pearl Harbor, however large it looms in American iconography, was an important but basically a subsidiary operation to help secure the main thrust towards the oil fields of the Dutch East Indies and Burma. The Germans' Fall Blau of 1942 was largely an oil offensive to reach the fields beyond the Caucasus. Many German operations in North Africa were predicated on capturing British stocks of oil.
Given that 95.9 percent of oil refining capacity lay outside Axis control <8>, victory in a war characterized by corps-sized tank thrusts and thousand-bomber raids was a very long shot for the Axis. Mr. Hanson, however, argues without evidence that the inherent virtue of the ordinary American was what turned the tide for the Allies. While by no means discounting the tremendous heroism of the GI, other factors may loom even larger in the correlation of forces: the Allies' huge industrial capacity, a sea of oil, and the self-sacrifice of the Russian Muzhik.
Turning from Mr. Hanson's preposterous history to his political agenda, it appears that his labored apologia to United States government policy 60 years ago serves as a defense of United States government policy now, anno 2005. <9> Don't let those ungrateful foreigners criticize us, he seems to say, after all, didn't we win World War II? Aren't all our wars just? What are all those Krauts and Frogs bitching about? How convenient when the invasion of Iraq (which Mr. Hanson fervently supports) has manifestly faltered and requires rhetorical support from an alleged man of learning, a species otherwise nowhere in evidence in the administration's camp. ...
...
This essay has barely covered Mr. Hanson's historical fatuity. His errors in interpreting his purported specialty, ancient Greece, are so legion as require an extended treatise. Suffice it to say that he does not praise the Greeks for philosophy, geometry, or literature remotely as much as he whoops it up for their war-making, conveniently ignoring the manifold disasters of the Peloponnesian War. A revealing Freudian slip is his approving and oxymoronic reference to Greece as an "imperial democracy,"<11> no doubt reflecting how his administration benefactors would conceive of our own form of government.
A leitmotiv of pseudo-conservatives is the allegation that public education has gone to hell in a handbasket. As Victor Davis Hanson demonstrates, they may be right.
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
