 |
|||||||||
|
|
|||||||||
| www.victorhanson.com | |||||||||
|
|
|||||||||
 |
|
This Week in Private Papers
|
|
|
|
Front Page
Feeding the Minotaur By Victor Davis Hanson Gibson's "Passion" Reagan's Second Act Look Back at Normandy Reagan, the Legacy Troy's Literary Offenses |
|
Culture
Gibbson's "Passion" By Honora Howell Chapman Troy's Literary Offenses Power to do Good Wars New and Old "The ancient Greeks: Were they like us at all?" |
| Education This page is under construction |
| Collection of Curiosities Homepage |
 |
|
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
June 14, 2004, 8:11 a.m. As long as the mythical Athenians were willing to send, every nine years, seven maidens and seven young men down to King Minos's monster in the labyrinth, Athens was left alone by the Cretan fleet. The king rightly figured that harvesting just enough Athenians would remind them of their subservience without leading to open rebellion — as long as somebody impetuous like a Theseus didn't show up to wreck the arrangement. |
|
|
July 13, 2004 Columnist Maureen Dowd called her response to Mel Gibson’s movie The Passion of the Christ “Stations of the Crass.” Clever—and rude—but Dowd is right about the ritualistic nature of the film’s presentation. Gibson presents his own profoundly individual and personal interpretation of the gospel accounts of the arrest and execution of Jesus of Nazareth, embellished with some rather odd and sometimes disturbing non-Biblical material. To the dismay of many people, including quite a number in academia, Gibson’s film has become a juggernaut with massive box office success. For one particularly eloquent voice in the academic debate over the film, see the review of Paula Fredriksen. |
|
|
June 12, 2004 Ronald Reagan's death in the midst of a hotly contested presidential election has occasioned all manner of oddities. There was John Kerry, the absolute antithesis of Ronald Reagan, making the pilgrimage to Simi Valley and monitoring his remarks to make sure not a jot of criticism of Reagan escaped his lips. The mainstream media, which once enjoyed telling us what an amiable dunce Reagan was, are now in full beatification mode, with wall-to-wall sound-bite sentimentalism redolent of Princess Di's mourn-fest. |
|
|
|
|
|
June 7, 2004
|
|
|
June 6, 2004 Reagan's achievement and legacy are twofold, but do not necessarily lie in either his legislative record or seminal foreign policy initiatives-although it is hard to believe few other presidents would have gone ahead with the substantial tax cuts, necessary Pershing missile deployments, the decision to fund missile defense, or his reconstruction of our military forces. |
| June 16, 2004
Reponse to Readership Do you consider it a possibility that the anti-Americanism of Western European governments will eventually morph with the anti-Americanism of the Islamists to the point where they are open allies against the U.S.? Well, France is sort of there now, isn’t it? It sold weapons even in the 1990s to Saddam, built his reactor, and de facto stole his oil. It denied air rights during Reagan’s strike against Libya, and actively campaigned to strong-arm our friends and neutrals to embarrass us in the UN. If you read French commentary . . . |
|
Recent Works by Victor Davis Hanson "The ancient Greeks: Were they like us at all?" in The New Criterion, Vol. 22, No. 9, May 2004 "The Power to Do Good" : a review of Niall Ferguson's "Colossus" in the New York Post, April 25, 2004 Review of John Gaddis's Surprise, Security, and the American Experience Introduction to the Modern Library's Plutarch's The Life of Alexander the Great |
 |
||
| June 16, 2004 Response to Readership Victor will post a response to readers' questions daily.If you have questions that Victor can answer, email them to author@victorhanson.com. |
||
|
|
||
| Current Affairs and Classics
Do you consider it a possibility that the anti-Americanism of Western European governments will eventually morph with the anti-Americanism of the Islamists to the point where they are open allies against the U.S.? Well, France is sort of there now, isn’t it? It sold weapons even in the 1990s to Saddam, built his reactor, and de facto stole his oil. It denied air rights during Reagan’s strike against Libya, and actively campaigned to strong-arm our friends and neutrals to embarrass us in the UN. If you read French commentary—from the nationalist right to the socialist left—it is not just anti-American, but hostilely so. A French legislator was on record in favor of granting nukes to the Arab world. Lost in all this equation is how the Europeans can reconcile the fact that if we are as truly bad and corrupt as they say, why does most of the world look to us, not them for help in crises, for innovations—and for visas? At this point, I think we should very quietly start withdrawing from Europe. Smile to Mr. Schroeder, praise Germany, but by all means pull out most of our troops. And I would have nothing to do with France either; but the key is to separate in a congenial way as well and accept they are friends like Switzerland. Praise NATO to the skies, but then don’t make a move with it, at least unless and until the Europeans take the lead. If Kerry thinks his charm and his French will win over NATO to commit to Iraq, he should ask why they sat in the Balkans and put a tiny toe print in Afghanistan. We are their mongrels to whom are thrown a bone once in a while when a thug like Milosevic or Osama sizes them up. |
||
|
|
||
|
