Read Online The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern by Victor Davis Hanson - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Victor Davis Hanson
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(Ayman al-Zawahiri has listed dozens of grievances for al-Qaeda’s war on America that commenced on September 11, 2001—among them, our lack of campaign finance reform and the supposed presence of Jewish women in the holy city of Mecca.)
The terrorist despises, of course, his own attraction toward our ease and liberality, explaining why some of the most virulent Islamists are precisely those, who chose to be educated in the West. Mohammed Atta, the tactician of 9/11, and Khalid Sheik Mohammed, its strategic architect, studied at the Technical University of Hamburg and North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, respectively.
The terrorist recognizes that our freedom and affluence spur on his appetites more than Islam can repress them. But just as important, the al-Qaedist perceives that there is a sort of aristocratic guilt within a minority of influential Americans, who are too often ashamed of, or apologetic about, their culture—or have lost any ability even to articulate it. And in this hesitance, our enemies sense not merely our unfamiliarity with our own foundations but perhaps weakness as well—and at times wrongly believe that their assaults on America are simply an extreme reification of what many inside the West, in the abstract, do not like about the West.
Apologizing for our past sins may reveal character and for a time lessen anti-Americanism abroad, but if it is done without acknowledging that the sins of America are the sins of mankind, and that our remedies are so often exceptional, then it only earns transitory applause—and a more lasting contempt that we ourselves do not believe in the values we profess.
To sum up the Hellenic view of war and the lessons we may learn from the Greeks: Conflict is omnipresent. It is often irrational in nature and more a result of strong emotions than of material need. Preparedness is more of a deterrent than is empathy, understanding, or demonstrations of good intentions. War is sometimes won or lost as much by confidence in one’s culture as by military assets themselves. It is often not a question of a choice between good or bad but between bad or worse. And war should be judged moral or immoral by the circumstances in which it breaks out and the conditions under which it is waged, rather than by the fact that violence is employed.
We may not like such a bitter message, but recent events have shown the empirical Greeks of the past are still more relevant to present warfare than what passes for much of the wisdom of the contemporary age.
CHAPTER 3
Raw, Relevant History:
From the 300 Spartans to the
History of Thucydides
Why the Public Is Still Fascinated by the Wars of the Past *
Real, Imagined, or Stylized Spartans?
W HILE, AS I argued in chapter 2, the study of classics can serve as a valuable foundation of military history, Greek and Latin nevertheless are difficult languages that require hundreds of hours of study, apart from the study of military history itself. And even in translation, the themes and ideas found in classical history, philosophy, and literature are not easy to digest. To study the Persian Wars is to enter a distant world of esoteric place names, unpronounceable nomenclature, and weird protocols presented by Herodotus or Plutarch as if they were second nature to the reader. A knowledge of the arcane disciplines of archaeology, art history, epigraphy, numismatics, and philology is often necessary just to make one’s way through the written record of the Greek past.
The result is that classics is often a mandarin discipline, as poorly understood by the general public as it is fascinating. Almost any effort, then, that brings the Greeks to the general public—vulgarization, as it is sometimes called—is to be welcomed. The public’s innate interest in our classical heritage sometimes manifests itself in surprising ways.
For example, on a Monday night in Hollywood in March 2007, I attended an advance screening of the Zack
The terrorist despises, of course, his own attraction toward our ease and liberality, explaining why some of the most virulent Islamists are precisely those, who chose to be educated in the West. Mohammed Atta, the tactician of 9/11, and Khalid Sheik Mohammed, its strategic architect, studied at the Technical University of Hamburg and North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, respectively.
The terrorist recognizes that our freedom and affluence spur on his appetites more than Islam can repress them. But just as important, the al-Qaedist perceives that there is a sort of aristocratic guilt within a minority of influential Americans, who are too often ashamed of, or apologetic about, their culture—or have lost any ability even to articulate it. And in this hesitance, our enemies sense not merely our unfamiliarity with our own foundations but perhaps weakness as well—and at times wrongly believe that their assaults on America are simply an extreme reification of what many inside the West, in the abstract, do not like about the West.
Apologizing for our past sins may reveal character and for a time lessen anti-Americanism abroad, but if it is done without acknowledging that the sins of America are the sins of mankind, and that our remedies are so often exceptional, then it only earns transitory applause—and a more lasting contempt that we ourselves do not believe in the values we profess.
To sum up the Hellenic view of war and the lessons we may learn from the Greeks: Conflict is omnipresent. It is often irrational in nature and more a result of strong emotions than of material need. Preparedness is more of a deterrent than is empathy, understanding, or demonstrations of good intentions. War is sometimes won or lost as much by confidence in one’s culture as by military assets themselves. It is often not a question of a choice between good or bad but between bad or worse. And war should be judged moral or immoral by the circumstances in which it breaks out and the conditions under which it is waged, rather than by the fact that violence is employed.
We may not like such a bitter message, but recent events have shown the empirical Greeks of the past are still more relevant to present warfare than what passes for much of the wisdom of the contemporary age.
CHAPTER 3
Raw, Relevant History:
From the 300 Spartans to the
History of Thucydides
Why the Public Is Still Fascinated by the Wars of the Past *
Real, Imagined, or Stylized Spartans?
W HILE, AS I argued in chapter 2, the study of classics can serve as a valuable foundation of military history, Greek and Latin nevertheless are difficult languages that require hundreds of hours of study, apart from the study of military history itself. And even in translation, the themes and ideas found in classical history, philosophy, and literature are not easy to digest. To study the Persian Wars is to enter a distant world of esoteric place names, unpronounceable nomenclature, and weird protocols presented by Herodotus or Plutarch as if they were second nature to the reader. A knowledge of the arcane disciplines of archaeology, art history, epigraphy, numismatics, and philology is often necessary just to make one’s way through the written record of the Greek past.
The result is that classics is often a mandarin discipline, as poorly understood by the general public as it is fascinating. Almost any effort, then, that brings the Greeks to the general public—vulgarization, as it is sometimes called—is to be welcomed. The public’s innate interest in our classical heritage sometimes manifests itself in surprising ways.
For example, on a Monday night in Hollywood in March 2007, I attended an advance screening of the Zack
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