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This Week in Private Papers
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Front Page Ayatollah of Anti-Americanism |
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Culture
Gibson'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 |
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July 16, 2004
History’s Verdict The summers of 1944 and 2004 by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online About this time 60 years ago, six weeks after the Normandy beach landings, Americans were dying in droves in France. We think of the 76-day Normandy campaign of summer and autumn 1944 as an astounding American success — and indeed it was, as Anglo-American forces cleared much of France of its Nazi occupiers in less than three months. But the outcome was not at all preordained, and more often was the stuff of great tragedy. Blunders were daily occurrences — resulting in 2,500 Allied casualties a day. In any average three-day period, more were killed, wounded, or missing than there have been in over a year in Iraq. |
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July 14, 2004
Faux Populism by Victor Davis Hanson Private Papers It is going to be hard to convince the American people that two East Coast, liberal lawyers, one Senator married to a billionaire, the other worth $75 million, are men of the people. No wonder they and their supporters have introduced some very strange arguments. The first is that John Edwards really has not embraced the privileged life of a multimillionaire who got rich suing obstetricians because he was born poor. But there are two problems with this. First, being the son of a postal employee and a mill worker doesn't necessarily make one impoverished in America. Some of my best friends are postal hourly-wage employees—including my wife and daughter. |
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For all the mayhem in the Sunni Triangle, and for all our mishaps at trying to reconstruct a pathological society reeling from 30 years of mass murder, we are beginning now to see the emergence of new civilized beginning in Iraq. Sadly our allies are mostly neutral, if not hostile to this radically new world, mostly out of spite, narrow self-interest, and deductive anger and envy of the United States. In the process, they have done the near impossible: lost the good will of the American people, a development that will have radical repercussions in the years ahead. |
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The Anti-Chomsky Reader, ed. by Peter Collier and David Horowitz (Encounter Books) More "Ayatollah" |
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July 9, 2004 |
| July 18, 2004
Response to Readership Did the US and Kissinger support bringing the Shah into the US for medical treatment? Kissinger I think did, but he was out of office. Carter, of course, had him shuttled all over the globe. The problem with the pathetic “Will you take him for us” or “Let’s hope he dies first” was that we got blamed both for supporting a dictator and then appeared ungracious, if not petty, in abandoning him; thus the mullahs hated us for>>> |
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Recent Works by Victor Davis Hanson Review of Rural Greece under the Democracy, by Nicholas F. Jones, in Times Literary Supplement, June 25, 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 |
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| Response to Readership VDH will post a response to readers' questions daily. Please email questions to author@victorhanson.com. |
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| July 18, 2004 Current Affairs and Classics Did the US and Kissinger support bringing the Shah into the US for medical treatment? Kissinger I think did, but he was out of office. Carter, of course, had him shuttled all over the globe. The problem with the pathetic “Will you take him for us” or “Let’s hope he dies first” was that we got blamed both for supporting a dictator and then appeared ungracious, if not petty, in abandoning him; thus the mullahs hated us for being both hostile and weak at the same time. The students wanted a repeat of the Tsar executions, or a Stalinist moment to wipe out his entire family in televised show trials. But history is full of ironies. Those wild-eyed student Marxists got rid of the client of the Great Satan and now have had a quarter-century of indigenous Iranian theocracy to savor. I’ve met too many Iranian Marxist exiles; they are a strange bunch, still nursing wounds of the 1950s; angry at the US for the Shah; angry at the US for allowing Khomeini to hijack their leftist revolution; angry at everyone but themselves—and angry always at America but not too angry to come to live in the Great Satan. The hostage-takers themselves, now aging, are not so proud of their acts. They don’t regret the lawlessness or the anti-Americanism, but they grasp that they helped solidify Khomeini, who was as autocratic and corrupt as the Shah but without the efforts to modernize or emancipate women. Why these creeps like Khomeini who lived in France can’t leave the West alone, I don’t know, but they all seem to flock to what they profess hatred for. |
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