Victor Davis Hanson: Response to Readership 6/18/04

Q: Why do you think is the Bush administration so reluctant to publicly call out the U.N. on the humanitarian crisis in the Sudan? Why is there no major media attention to this disaster?

Hanson: They tried. But look, the world cares not about the dead, but whether the United States or Israel can be blamed for them. …

Q: Could you address how organized crime and the subsequent corrosive effect it has on the fabric of a society may have led to the demise of a great many civilizations?

Hanson: Well, when such crime permeates down to the mundane — bribes for traffic tickets, pay-offs for insurance fraud, cash for favors at school or sports — then a society is about through. …

Q: From your study of ancient Greece and Rome and your analysis of modern Western civilization in general, do you see Western culture lending itself to a moral base? In other words, is there a morality intrinsic to Western culture? Furthermore, do you view morality as something created by culture and civilization, or something that can be traced back to the very beginning of man?

Hanson: Man is born with a moral sense, but one without culture and religion that is easily buried by an instinctual drive to survive above all when under marginal circumstances. …

Q: Isn't it true that the citizens of Iraq consented to the 25-year rule of the dictator? Isn't it equally true then that the Iraqi population simply refused to change their circumstances?

Hanson: That is an age-old dilemma, whether people create their dictators or dictators create their suppressed subjects. …

Q: Would the United States make better progress in the War Against Terrorism by de-Islamifying their environment, rather than trying to kill or capture individual hedgehogs?

Hanson: Perhaps. I wish we would quit the deference to insane things like “not fighting during Ramadan” or allowing us to be shot from mosques, and simply wage an information campaign against these mullahs: …

June 11, 2004
Response to Readership

Current Affairs and Classics

Do you have any reading recommendations that could offer a coherent overview of Greek culture in the time of the Battle of Delium discussed in Ripples of Battle?

Hanson: There are many good books on classical Greece by MI Finley, CM Bowra, HDF Kitto, KJ Dover, my colleague Bruce Thornton and others. I wrote about the battle in another context in The Soul of Battle, and in an article once in Military History Quarterly.

Why do you think is the Bush administration so reluctant to publicly call out the U.N. on the humanitarian crisis in the Sudan? Why is there no major media attention to this disaster?

Hanson: They tried. But look, the world cares not about the dead, but whether the United States or Israel can be blamed for them. India built a brutal $1 billion fence to cut off Bangladesh; the world snored. Muslims kill thousands in Africa; the world sleeps until the IDF kills 2-3 Hamas leaders. That is just the way it is—the UN, the EU, the Arab League these are all associations of morally inept and opportunistic elites who care very little for lives per se, but very much for the attention—both public and psychic—garnered by selectively damning the United States. Why we subsidize it all I don’t know—but perhaps this censure serves some deep psychic need within ourselves to welcome blame and rebuke.

Could you address how organized crime and the subsequent corrosive effect it has on the fabric of a society may have led to the demise of a great many civilizations?

Hanson: Well, when such crime permeates down to the mundane—bribes for traffic tickets, pay-offs for insurance fraud, cash for favors at school or sports—then a society is about through. So far we have stopped organized crime from strangling our daily commerce and undermining all respect for the law. But we are fraying, and there are towns in California right now where the police, city council, and schools are neither transparent nor even honest. And it is something that weighs on us a great deal. Given the education of the past decades with its emphasis on situational ethics and moral equivalence, it will be hard to determine whether this next generation is up to enforcing codes of decorum that they themselves grew up with and expected. Throughout history a terrible problem has been a generation’s failure to be vigilant and maintain the standards handed them.

From your study of ancient Greece and Rome and your analysis of modern Western civilization in general, do you see Western culture lending itself to a moral base? In other words, is there a morality intrinsic to Western culture? Furthermore, do you view morality as something created by culture and civilization, or something that can be traced back to the very beginning of man?

Hanson: Man is born with a moral sense, but one without culture and religion that is easily buried by an instinctual drive to survive above all when under marginal circumstances. Thucydides taught us how savage we are when the veneer of civilization is lost. The West was and is unique precisely because it trusts the individual—and then provides, with varying success, religious and humanistic support so that he does not abuse his legal and political freedom. For all our faults, Western civilization is the only hope for mankind. Look at the alternatives.

Isn't it true that the citizens of Iraq consented to the 25-year rule of the dictator? Isn't it equally true then that the Iraqi population simply refused to change their circumstances?

Hanson: That is an age-old dilemma, whether people create their dictators or dictators create their suppressed subjects. Perhaps there is a little of both in Iraq. I wrote about some of this in the “Mirror of Fallujah,” and was unsure whether the people who burn, desecrate, and laugh over corpses were made this way by Saddam or Saddam was simply a reflection of such preexisting barbarism. If Saddam were not there, would you have to invent him? That is the great gamble we are now entered upon. As Americans, we believe he had to be a fluke and an Iraq, like a republican Kurdistan, is possible; in contrast, our skeptical critics point to Assad and Khadafy and so say, “These are the leaders that reflect the people.”

Would the United States make better progress in the War Against Terrorism by de-Islamifying their environment, rather than trying to kill or capture individual hedgehogs?

Perhaps. I wish we would quit the deference to insane things like “not fighting during Ramadan” or allowing us to be shot from mosques, and simply wage an information campaign against these mullahs: to let the world know of their relatives in America; their bank accounts; their criminal records. The American people would like to know how many children, nieces, nephews, and grandchildren are in our universities whose sires are mullahs in Iran, thugs in the West Bank, or corrupt grandees in the Gulf. That would have enormous value in undermining the pretense that the Islamicists want nothing to do with the West. In fact, they are parasitic on it, and exist for it in a strange, very unhealthy way .Osama’s webmaster did not learn his decadent Western craft in the Middle East.

For centuries, Western societies have, to varying degrees, played out the conflict between the opposed ideals of Athens and Sparta. I've heard it argued that American society has "squared the circle," so to speak by finding a way to incorporate both ideals without being paralyzed by the underlying contradiction of such an endeavor. Do you agree with this argument or does American society break from this age-old philosophical battle?

In some ways, yes. We have a radically popular and democratic culture like Athens, but under a sober constitutional government that is mostly stable and thus somewhat more akin to Sparta—sort of the classical ideal of the “mixed constitution.” My worry is that we are bifurcating, one culture on the coasts, another in-between—America as something more like rural and urban Athens that really were two different worlds. Losing the Peloponnesian War, and the revolutions of 411 and 403 were perhaps explicable by that divide at Athens between conservative and radical.

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.

If the media is now an extension of the battlefield, how can America successfully conduct war in this context. How do we seize the all-important 'initiative' in this sort of war-making without infringing upon the First Amendment and public trust?

And a thousand other media landmines as well. We know this fantasy condition as a postmodern war of sorts waged on global television in which an al Jazeera is by any definition akin to Goebbels’s propaganda ministry—the only difference being that Goebbels did not send his reporters over here in the midst of the fighting to enjoy fellowships and internships. The media thinks it is a crusading, moral force as usual; but its recent biases are so sharp and transparent that it is simply losing readers and viewers as never before, who now get their news increasingly from blogs, internet news, talk radio, cable news, and opinion journalism. The old idea that CBS News, the International Herald Tribune, the New York Times, or National Public Radio were even-handed is a cruel joke. And it is not just the coverage that is the problem; the reporters have a very different world view and live under different auspices from most Americans—increasingly a weird blend of easy aristocratic tastes and upper-middle class affluence coupled with a crusading leftism practiced always at a safe distance. A remarkable mix really, but one that has discredited the media like none other. All this does not mean that there are not thousands of honest, professional reporters—only that to prosper in the media one must confront a particular priori idea that does not favor the United States taking any armed action at all.

Which of your books might I read to get a better idea of HOW, after centuries of democracy, a “Phillip II” could take control?

I wrote a little about it in The Soul of Battle. But there are a number of narratives by John Buckler, very dry but often reliable and sober. George Cawkwell is superb on the fourth century B.C. There are biographies of Demosthenes, but perhaps the best way might be to read his own “On the Crown” which reviews his sad career in detail. It is always tragic to read of a leader who has sized up his opponent, has the material means to defeat him, but cannot organize any of his countrymen to galvanize the courage to do so.

I have heard that you will be a feature on a cruise of the Aegean this summer. What cruise is this? Would it include your on-the-spot commentary during shore excursions to Sparta and Thermopylae?

I did that cruise last autumn with Hillsdale College at Athens and Sicily. This summer I will give some lectures on Renaissance Italy from June 7th to 15th (David Horowitz’s frontpagemag.com trip), also follow Patton’s trek through Europe in the last two weeks of July (Hillsdale again), and a final one in November with National Review. I lived in Greece almost 3 years, and try to return each summer. Usually I visit either Sparta or Thermopylae on one of those visits.

What is the best books on General Sherman and Epaminondas?

Hanson: I cannot answer that without incriminating myself.

My question is why do people not remember that houses of worship are protected under the Geneva Convention?

Hanson: Here’s the rule in this war: You cannot shoot from a Church; but if you do, expect to be shot at if a Christian, but given a pass if you are Muslim; by the same token, expect to be shot at from a mosque, but if you shoot back at such a holy shrine, you’re a crusading infidel whose “recklessness” warrants extreme censure. I suppose the hypocrisy arises for the same reason we forget that our enemies have no uniforms and thus also should not be treated as armed, uniformed combatants of a hostile state. Look, this double standard is what we expect from the Middle East, where we must play by the rules, be caricatured for it, and then allow them a pass to act as they typically do—head chopping, body burning, corpse dragging, hostage taking, and brains being blown out on television. Worse, should we offer visas to any of those fedayeen who are now blowing up in cowardly fashion Americans, they would be the first to line up. This entire war has been doubly exasperating because it is a passive-aggressive conflict: every time we strike back, we are told we are too mean; then we pause; then we are hit; and then the whining starts again as we resume.

Apparently the binary nerve gas shell that was used unsuccessfully in the recent bomb in Baghdad was of 155 mm caliber. I think any of the Russian or Chinese manufactured guns are 155 mm. Was this shell for a G-6? Who helped them design a binary shell? Did we even know that they had the capacity to manufacture binary shells? Did they manufacture this shell?

Hanson: Let me answer them in sequence. I understand that there are literally thousands of 155mm shells everywhere in Iraq-and many were locally produced. Why we didn't explode these depots in the first months of the occupation I don't know since they seem to be the favorite ingredient in the so-call improvised explosive devices that have killed so many of our soldiers. Again, I understand that Iraq was capable of making these shells inside Iraq, albeit based on foreign designs. Iran, I know, is now capable not only of mass-producing 155 mm shells, but also the artillery pieces themselves. Most likely Iraqi 155 mm artillery pieces were fabricated on G-6 designs (a South African self-propelled 155 mm howitzer) that have been sold all over the world and are comparable in quality to NATO's arsenals.

I agree that there is not just one shell with Sarin gas, but no doubt hundreds lying somewhere around, though I imagine that most are already leaking and rusting, and thus much of the sarin gas is in the process of escaping-whether that is bad or good news I am not sure. The WMD story is not over yet; and skeptics may be proved wrong in the way that we know now more and more that there really were ties between Al Qaeda's and Saddam's intelligence agencies.

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