Hanson on CSpan Booknotes Saturday 4:00 PM

[dickmc]

Take a break from Kerry and the SwiftVets on Saturday, August 21 at 4:00 pm and Monday, August 23 at 12:00 am

In Depth: Victor Davis Hanson for three hours. (I think this is a rerun from the March 7 program)
He is usually quite interesting and worth watching.

Victor Davis Hanson is the guest on Book TV's March 7 In Depth program. Mr. Hanson is the author of numerous books, including "Warfare and Agriculture in Classical Greece" (1983),
"The Western Way of War: Infantry Battle in Classical Greece" (1989),
"Hoplites: The Ancient Greek Battle Experience" (1991), "The Other Greeks: The Family Farm and the Agrarian Roots of Western Civilization" (1995), "Fields Without Dreams: Defending the Agrarian Idea" (1996), "Who Killed Homer? The Decline of Classical Education and the Recovery of Greek Wisdom" (w/ John Heath, 1998) "The Soul of Battle" (1999), "The Land Was Everything: Letters from an American Farmer" (2000),

"The Wars of the Ancient Greeks" (1999), "Bonfire of the Humanities" (w/John Heath & Bruce Thornton, 2001),

"Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power" (2001), "An Autumn of War" (2002), "Ripples of Battle: Moments that Changed the Centuries" (2003),

"Mexifornia: A State of Becoming" (2003),
and his new book,
"Between War and Peace: Lessons from Afghanistan and Iraq" (2004).


Some reviews:


From Publishers Weekly: Hanson (An Autumn of War), who has been compared to John Keegan as a historian of war, doesn't display the objectivity of a scholar here. These 39 previously published essays (35 from National Review Online) assessing the U.S. war on terrorism mostly focus on broad-brush denunciations of Europeans, Arabs, the U.N. and Muslims, reserving praise for the U.S. and Israel as beacons of democracy. America's pre-emptive war in Iraq is applauded and, Hanson says, Syria should be next. Saudi Arabia should be seen more as an enemy than an ally and actively subverted. His targets are mostly caricatures;"he portrays Europeans, for instance, as reactionaries in their anti-Americanism. Hanson, a scholar of the ancient Greek military, does not appeal to research or direct experience in the Arab world, but merely to what one can infer from mass media accounts. He professes faith that U.S. arms and good intentions will bring secular democracy to Iraq, and then beyond, but his dark portrayal of Arab culture gives little cause for optimism. The volume might have been more interesting if Hanson had confronted the difficult issue of just how less corrupt secular democracies might take root in the Middle East, including the problems of previous democratic experiments in the Arab world (in Lebanon, Algeria and Iraq itself before Saddam). What went wrong?

Donald Kagan, author of On the Origins of War and the Preservation of Peace: Victor Hanson is a national treasure. . . . Every American needs to learn from him.

Anazon Reader: For those unfamiliar, Victor Hanson is a military historian that specializes in Greek History and teaches classical history. This work is very much a continuation of his other excellent book An Autumn of war and has the same format; they both are a collection of his biweekly essays from the National Review written over the course of the official war. As he states in his introduction, the essays are not changed because of the conditions on the ground; thus, the reader gets a view into the accuracy of Hanson and can judge for themselves how his analysis shaped up.
Throughout, Hanson developed his thesis that Saddam needed to be removed on much more than WMDs and gets to the core issues; how the US could not allow Hussein to violate the deal of the armistice (as even Hans Blixs confirms), fire daily on US warplanes, harbor and support terrorists (Hussein paid money to suicide bombers, tried to establish a relationship with Al Qaeda and harbored Zarqawi and other terrorists) and be allowed to commit mass murder and starvation while we had the power to stop him.
He also takes to task the failure of some of the European community for their lack of support; how the French view themselves as the counterbalance to US power, how the destruction of the Soviet Union and reliance on the US for protection, and the decline in Europe's faith in the nation state (as Margaret Thatcher eloquently covers in her book Statecraft) and rise of the European community that largely exists in name only.

Victor Davis Hanson teaches classics at California State University, Fresno, and is also the Coordinator of the University's Classical Studies Program. He is a Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institute at Stanford University and writes a biweekly column about contemporary culture and military history for National Review Online. He lives on a 40-acre tree and vine farm near Selma, California. The farm has belonged to his family since the 1870s. Call in during the show or e-mail your questions for Mr. Hanson to booktv@c-span.org.

[gilliam]

Another loyal American

[Aetius]

Hanson's Mexifornia book is a good example of how, no matter how hard one tries and how far they go to establish their non-racist bonafides, one will still be called racist, xenophobe, anti-immigrant/immigration/latino/etc for daring to say anything critical of mass immigration.

[larryjohnson]

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