One also need not be a supporter of Israel to sense that Mr. Day's discussion of its history is offered up in an exclusively negative context. From Mr. Day's account, no one would imagine that the Jews had a connection with Palestine in some form or another for some 5,000 years, that early Jewish settlers often bought rather than stole Arab properties, and that Israel fought numerous existential wars against autocratic neighbors that sought to liquidate Israeli democracy and with it all traces of Jews in the Middle East. The one million Arabs who vote and participate in contemporary Israeli politics — uniquely so in the otherwise autocratic Arab Middle East — surely enjoy a much different status from the Untermenschen who were slaughtered en masse by Hitler's Wehrmacht. There is also something jarring in reading about the plight of the Aborigines, Palestinians, and Native Americans juxtaposed with similarly brief accounts of Hitler's Final Solution. Orders of magnitude, then, are of less importance to Mr. Day; thus the 4,000 lost along the Trail of Tears take their places alongside the million-plus butchered in Rwanda, apparently as proof of similar barbarism on the part of the supplanting society.
Nowhere in Conquest do we receive a nuanced analysis of why some invaders fail and others succeed, whether some are abjectly amoral and others less so, whether the supplanted are sometimes worse folk than the supplanters, or the degree to which some conquerors differ in aims, methods, and attitudes from each other. Surely all cannot quite fall into Mr. Day's universal blueprint of invasion, conquest, and control?
< ... excerpted ... >
victorhanson.com had to be excerpted. Original publication: http://www.nysun.com/arts/marking-our-territory-conquest-by-david-day/81090/?print=1264065121
Let me know if you want in or out.
Links: FR Index of his articles: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/keyword?k=victordavishanson
His website: http://victorhanson.com/
NRO archive: http://www.nationalreview.com/hanson/hanson-archive.asp
Pajamasmedia: http://victordavishanson.pajamasmedia.com/
I find it troubling that VDH is now using the politically correct B.C.E. rather than B.C. to denote the historical era. This is how the leftists win. A bunch of looney nobodys decide that BC is insensitive to non-Christians” and come-up with BCE to replace it. Rather than fighting to maintain the traditional BC, conservatives go along, insuring a victory for the PC/anti-Chrisitans.
As is generally the case with liberals; they are intellectual and moral bigots while claiming to be just the opposite.
Typical Hansonesque empty rhetoric.
The German’s lost their African colonial holdings because they lost WW1
The Japanese lost Korea because they lost WW2
There is no such thing as a stupid question, but there are plenty of pointless ones in which the answer is already obvious.
The ultimate utility and exercise of force makes conquest possible. That is how much power you can bring to bear against the conquered and how far you are willing to leverage it.
As usual, Hanson is “spot on”.