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To: combat_boots
Yes. VDH has become, over the last five or six years, one of my go-to voices on the Internet. I have read several of his books (The Second World Wars, The Dying Citizen, The Case for Trump, A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War, and his last one, The End of Everything: How Wars Descend into Annihilation) had a disproportionate impact on me, as it describes how cultural differences and miscommunication between various countries has, in the past, resulted in the complete annihilation of one of the combatants. It dealt with the following wars:
  1. Thebes (335 BC) - Destroyed by Alexander the Great's Macedonians. The city-state was razed, its inhabitants killed or enslaved, as a brutal signal of Alexander's ruthlessness to deter rivals.

  2. Carthage (146 BC) - Obliterated by the Romans in the Third Punic War. After centuries of rivalry, Rome salted the earth (symbolically or literally), killed or enslaved the population, and ended Carthaginian civilization entirely.

  3. Constantinople (1453) - The Byzantine Empire's capital fell to the Ottoman Turks under Mehmed II. The city was sacked, Emperor Constantine XI killed, thousands slaughtered or enslaved, marking the end of the Eastern Roman Empire.

  4. Tenochtitlán (1521) - The Aztec capital was conquered by Hernan Cortés and Spanish forces allied with indigenous rivals. Block-by-block fighting, combined with disease and superior weaponry, led to massive Aztec deaths and the destruction of their empire.

I just finished reading Comanches: The History of a People and it struck me the could have been the fifth war. For example, the Comanches for hundreds of years had been preying on their fellow Native Americans (The author referred to them as "Amerindians" which I found convenient) as well as being preyed on themselves by the Apaches and others they had blood feuds with. Their warfare, always going on, involved raiding, killing as many as possible, torturing, mutilating, and carrying off women and children. This was how they conducted warfare. It seemed as if, when the particular raiding event was done, it was treated as a separate incident from the whole, and life went on. When they began doing that to whites, particularly the Texans, they completely didn't understand why they would be pursued, sometimes even for years, by a man trying to get his wife and children back. It simply did not compute with them, and confused them. They just did not understand.

The whole time I was reading it, I was thinking of Hanson's book.

35 posted on 12/29/2025 10:48:42 AM PST by rlmorel (Factio Communistica Sinensis Delenda Est.)
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To: rlmorel

https://victorhanson.com/a-ring/#:~:text=Victor%20Hanson%2C%20Jr.%20had%20been,as%20an%20outstanding%20Marine%20and

You may like this story. I am moved, every time I read it.


38 posted on 12/29/2025 12:10:14 PM PST by jttpwalsh
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To: rlmorel

I have read several books about children that were taken off the white people’s farms in Texas. Very interesting stories. Some never wanted to return to their former lives and many didn’t remember it. There is also the story about the woman that was taken in the late 1700s somewhere nearer the east coast and she walked back...800 miles. Very interesting reads.


55 posted on 12/29/2025 4:22:43 PM PST by dandiegirl (BOBBY m)
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