[Hanson] The Present Farce: Should we laugh or cry as we watch history come full circle?

National Review Online ^ | February 28, 2003 | Victor Davis Hanson

[HumanaeVitae]

What an article. Hanson is--poetically--right on the money.

[CatoRenasci]

Good stuff. Put a bit of starch into the backbone, and soldier on, America!

[CatoRenasci]

Good stuff. Put a bit of starch into the backbone, and soldier on, America!

[LiteKeeper]

Army retiree Hooah!

[Humvee]

Beauteous!!!

[CatoRenasci]

I love the reference to Napoleon III, especially since his armies collapsed in 1870-71 -- another example of French rodomontade and posturing exposed by the harsh reality of real life. So thoughtful to provide another generation of German soldiers with the opportunity to enjoy the shaded boulevard Champs d'Elysee!

Saddam is not even fit to be considered one of Hitler, Stalin or Mao's epigoni, and the ash heap of history is too good for him.

[aBootes]

bttt Don't lose this one...

[Dolphy]

Great article. It should serve as a screenplay where all the actors come together in the theater of the absurd called the United Nations.

[Friend of thunder]

The world, not America, has gone off the deep end — just as it did some 70 years ago when faced with similar choices between cheap rhetoric and real sacrifice. And so just as the tragedy of Pearl Harbor for Americans put an end to all the nonsense of the 1930s, let us hope that the memory of September 11 and the looming showdown with Iraq will do the same for the present farce as well.

As always, Hanson is clear concise and to the point.

We can only hope – or pray – that sanity will prevail and we will do the right thing. No sane person wants war, but oppressors do want oppression; this is something the world should remember.

[Celtjew Libertarian]

BTTT

[Snuffington]

Western Europe has almost gone the way of Weimar. Amoral, disarmed, and socialist, it seeks ephemeral peace at all costs, never long-term security, much less justice. Furious that history has not ended in perpetual peace and leisure, it has woken up angry that Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair disturbed its fanciful slumber with chatter about germs and genocide.

Wow. Very well phrased and terribly accurate. But of course we know what happened to Weimar. Might a similar fate await Western Europe?

[Gritty]

Another great article by Hanson!

[Sans-Culotte]

Bump for a helluva great read.

[Billthedrill]

Furious that history has not ended in perpetual peace and leisure...

But for many of them it did, and that's part of the problem. The degree to which the European Union members have rejected military spending and participation in favor of social spending over the last 40 years has wound their present-day governments in a bit of a fix, consisting of welfare programs costing more than their long-term revenue expectations will allow and a taste for the direction of world affairs far beyond any actual capacity to affect them. At least part of the noisy, self-righteous insistence that endless negotiation is a panacea for world troubles is the realization that for most of them there is no alternative anyway. Hence, too, the resentment that for the U.S. there is.

[Billthedrill]

Furious that history has not ended in perpetual peace and leisure...

But for many of them it did, and that's part of the problem. The degree to which the European Union members have rejected military spending and participation in favor of social spending over the last 40 years has wound their present-day governments in a bit of a fix, consisting of welfare programs costing more than their long-term revenue expectations will allow and a taste for the direction of world affairs far beyond any actual capacity to affect them. At least part of the noisy, self-righteous insistence that endless negotiation is a panacea for world troubles is the realization that for most of them there is no alternative anyway. Hence, too, the resentment that for the U.S. there is.

[Britton J Wingfield]

VDH is awesome.

[Stefan Stackhouse]

Meanwhile our "liberal" columnists defame Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, William Kristol, and the bogeymen known as "the neoconservatives." So the ancient prejudice has returned, now whispering that "they" are getting "us" into war to save "them."

So others are beginning to notice this. I hope that someone soon really lays into one of the "liberal" anti-semetic Nazi fascist pigs and really lets them have it. It is time to expose them for what they are.

[SamAdams76]

Furious that history has not ended in perpetual peace and leisure, it [Europe] has woken up angry that Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair disturbed its fanciful slumber with chatter about germs and genocide.

It should be noted that the "perpetual peace and leisure" that the Europeans have been enjoying was bought and paid for by England and the U.S. at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives during the 1940s. As well, the "perpetual peace and leisure" has been sustained for the past half century by the military presence of the United States all over Europe, not to mention the enormous expenditures to make this all possible by the American taxpayer.

So we're the bad guys?