The Case of Victor Davis Hanson: Farmer, Scholar, Warmonger

The Occidental Quarterly ^ | Winter 2004 | F. Roger Devlin, Ph.D

[Drammach]

Verrrry Long.. but interesting, not boring..
( Yes, I read the whole thing..)

I must admit having to take the author's word for his conclusions concerning Davis' later works, as I have not read them..
His extensive "cliff notes" on the earlier works are fascinating reading, however, and "make sense"..
I am curiously encouraged to investigate further..

My only concern is of course, with Mr Devlin's conclusions concerning the American Ideal vs. Terrorism..
I cannot in all honesty, see much parallel between the ancient greek agrarians and the american military machine, nor how it applies to a "guerrilla" war..

I'll make a copy of the article, make a few bookmarks, do some Googling, and peruse my own library, and see what conclusions I can arrive at..

Thanks, robo, for the post.
I think I'm getting a headache... ;op

[AmishDude]

Paid by the word?

[aculeus]

He seems oddly out of place among the professional libelers and callow minds now posing as heirs to that once respectable journal[National Review].

Isn't "professional libelers" ,er, libelous?

(Calling all FR lawyers.)

[Thud]

You got that right.

"Read half-way placemarker."

Hanson gets less useful, more error-prone and even silly, the farther he gets from his personal experience (his Mexifornia is superb as well as Fields Without Dreams) or his academic specialty. But he does understand the psychology of conflict and war.

[Cobra Scott]

To compensate for the inferiority of the soil, they began to experiment with other crops, notably olives, figs, and vines—inventing the practice of grafting in the process.

Environmental determinism rears its ugly head. Ironically, in the purported history of the earliest determinists, LOL!

[Cobra Scott]

Aristotle saw this: “when the farmer class and the class having moderate means are in control of the government, they govern according to laws; the reason is because they have a livelihood, and they are not able to be at leisure, so that they put laws in control of the state and hold only the minimum number of assemblies necessary”

An example of that environmental determinism in their own philosophy.

[redrock]

BUMP!!

redrock

[Diddle E. Squat]

.

[Bonaparte]

"I guess he's auditioning for a job at some liberal university. Looks like he's on the right track to gainful employment..."

Not if he's writing for TOQ. Read their home page. They advocate separation of the races in America and a halt to all immigration of people who are not of white European extraction.

[68skylark]

I didn't know that -- it's funny to learn how many kook, fringe web sites and journals there are out there. It's hard to keep track of all of them!

[68skylark]

I guess that's why the author slams on Sherman so hard -- accusing him of "imperial aggression." Pretty funny, IMHO.

I didn't read this piece. (I try to avoid articles by kooks -- especially long articles by kooks.) So I just assumed it was some liberal slamming on VDH.

I guess from what you've said that the author's agenda is something else (and something equally repellant).

[omega4412]

"Wealth is not extracted from unfree men by the free; it is produced by the labor of all men."

OK, so wealth is produced by the labor of all men, slave and free. And then the wealth produced by slaves is taken by the slaveowners. I fail to see the distinction.

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

“when the farmer class and the class having moderate means are in control of the government, they govern according to laws; the reason is because they have a livelihood, and they are not able to be at leisure, so that they put laws in control of the state and hold only the minimum number of assemblies necessary”

I'd be tempted to buy that one; although the Democratic Party belabors the Republicans as "the party of the rich," it is the Democratic Party which has few modest contributions and the majority of the largest ones. Republican voters want a government of laws rather than of men, whereas the Democratic voter is seduced by the claim of the patrician Democratic candidate to "fight for you."

The Republican Party is centered in the middle class whereas the Democratic Party is bifurcated. On the one hand it helps repulse (via taxation) the challenge of the middle class to the rich. And OTOH it subverts the distinction between the middle class and the lower class via the demagogic subversion of the traditions which middle class people know they must transmit to keep the next generation from being and remaining poor. This is seen not only in the preponderance of modest contributions from middle-class Republicans and of large contributions by rich Democrats but in the geographic concentration of Democratic votes in the "inner city" and in the toney close-in suburbs.

[Bonaparte]

...slams on Sherman so hard -- accusing him of "imperial aggression."

You're a quick study, 68skylark. TOQ is also hardcore isolationist. They would have been content to just let Stalin take the whole world, disrupting our foreign trade, enslaving our friends and marshalling all those resources against us.

If Hanson bothers to rebutt Devlin, I expect his counter-attack to be devastating.

[meadsjn]

VDH related bump.

[Major_Risktaker]

I cannot in all honesty, see much parallel between the ancient greek agrarians and the american military machine, nor how it applies to a "guerrilla" war..

How about those kill ratios Drammach:

The death toll he reports for the battle 6400 Persians versus 192 Greeks gives some idea of the superiority of the western way of war.

British soldiers killed 35 Iraqi attackers.

Oh wait....nevermind....I'm screwing up the math...no Brittish dead with 35 insurgents killed is 35-0 which can't be calculated in terms of ratio.

[Amerigomag]

Hanson must be gaining influence.

The first sign that you are effective against the left is the commencement of character attacks and this is among the first I've seen published. Expect more.

The other interesting note is the glaring absence of any reference to what will surely be judged to be Hanson's most influential work, contrary to this hackneyed authors opinion, a treatise on the 20th century, Mexican invasion of California.

My suspicion is that this incipient discredidation has nothing to do with the Greeks and the middle east but rather is an attempt to blunt the truth and popularity of the "Mexifornia" publication.

[Bonaparte]

But it's not the left, Amerigomag. It's the paleolibertarians -- successors to the America Firsters, kissing cousins to the anarchists and unwitting handmaidens to left.

[x]

Between 1988 and 1993 Hanson wrote what is likely to remain his most important book, The Other Greeks: the Family Farm and the Agrarian Roots of Western Civilization (Free Press, 1995). It is an extraordinary contribution to our understanding of classical Greece: the achievement of a lifetime, really, though produced by a man still in his thirties.

...

At this point in his career Hanson was only forty-two years old and little known outside specialist circles. He had already achieved more than most scholars do in a lifetime. He could have rested on his laurels; perhaps he should have.

That is true. Unfortunately, after that it's pretty much been downhill for Hanson. And indeed, after these sentence it's downhill all the way for Devlin as well. Hanson at least had some real accomplishments to his credit before he convinced himself that he was some sort of military genius and set himself up as a propagandist. Devlin is a less accomplished, petty crank. Hanson's demonstrated that he can think when he wants to, but Devlin just seems to be repeating the fashionable buzzwords of his cult.