It’s been a busy year for me, but I am going to make an effort to post more often. It’s not like the usual gang of idiots has quit shooting their mouth off in ignorant and offensive ways. So lets turn our eyes dear reader to one of this blogs oldest and most reliable sources for getting it wrong and getting well paid for it: Victor Davis Miles Gloriosus Hanson. In his most recent post on his web site (I hate to give him the link or the page views, but for the benefit of those following along at home: http://victorhanson.com/wordpress/?p=8524#more-8524 )he asks, “Is the world becoming fed up?” I’m glad he asked. He asks if Europe is fed up with immigration. He asks if Europe is tired of socialism. He asks if Trump is really so outrageous? He asks if Americans are fed up with the alleged hypocrisy of Hillary Clinton. Victor is truly mailing this one in.
And so, let’s ask ourselves, is the world becoming fed up? You bet your ass. But it’s a curious kind of world for Professor Doctor Hanson, who after breezily mentioning European socialism and immigration, spends the rest of his time talking up Donald Trump, scaremongering about murders committed by undocumented Mexican immigrants, and criticizing Hillary Clinton and President Obama. Why you’d almost think that Victor Davis Pyrgopolynices Hanson’s view of the world was the view from his front porch as seen through lenses of nativism and paranoia. Hanson may not agree with me on many things, but he is right that change is coming. He is old enough to recognize that pressure is building, and smart enough to know that America is going to have to make a serious choice as to what kind of nation it wants to be. And like the lifelong toady that he is, he chose the wrong side. He once again has taken as good a look at current events as his biases allow, and has learned they confirm everything he already believed.
For example, immigration. Ever since the US conquered and stole the entire American southwest from Mexico, and finished the subjugation and displacement of the Native Americans to it’s most desolate corners, Mexicans and Americans have been crossing the border, in both directions seeking jobs, freedom from oppression, and a place to call home. Official US policy has brought guest workers from Mexico to California to work in the fields for decades, only to bus or fly them back when the crops were harvested. It’s possible Hanson’s own family farm has taken part in this program. And even the Hanson family didn’t participate, I would put down money that many of his neighbors have. Hanson doesn’t seem to care where the poor, the homeless, and the starving masses of the 21st century go, as long as they don’t come to the US or Europe. It’s funny how when famine, war, plague or economic depression strikes the far off corners of the world how quick people like Hanson are to say that the inhabitants should leave their backward, war torn, homes and go somewhere less prone to the depredations of the four horsemen. And when the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free queue up at the golden door, people like VDH gleefully slam it in their face. Because to VDH nothing is more important to civilization than law. Hanson thinks that undocumented immigrants are this country’s greatest threat. I’m not mind reading, I’m not putting words in his mouth. http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/jul/8/victor-davis-hanson-hillary-clintons-disregard-of-/? his opening paragraph is particularly rich
Barbarians at the gate usually don’t bring down once-successful civilizations. Nor does climate change. Even mass epidemics like the plague that decimated sixth-century Byzantium do not necessarily destroy a culture.
Because for an alleged historian, he manages to cram a heaping helping of wrong into those three sentences. I’d like to hear what the Romans, the Carthaginians, the Israelites, the Celts, the peoples of India, the pre-Belgian people of the Congo, and a list of other civilizations very nearly too long to mention have to say about invasions of barbarians not being a serious threat. Likewise, plague can and has been the final blow to multiple civilizations of which a Professor of history ought to be aware, for example the Aztecs, and nearly every other Native American nation that was thriving in 1491. Climate change too has put paid to more than a few civilizations. For example, Assyria, Babylon, and every other ancient civilization of the fertile crescent. Right goddamn now, Syria is a current country imploding under climate change as displaced farmers revolted under the Assad regime’s refusal to provide relief in the midst of the longest drought in recorded history in that area. And in that area recorded history goes back more than 2000 years. So he’s repudiating the evidence of basically all of recorded history so he can fear monger about people from Mexico and further south coming here to not starve to death? He spends breathless paragraph after breathless paragraph excoriating immigrants, the Greeks, the IRS and prominent Democrats for breaking laws, for creating a ‘culture of lawlessness’ that threatens to end the USA forever. He fails. He fails to show that there is any kind of causal connection between ‘lawless’ behavior and civilizational collapse. He cherry picks and as far as I can tell, invents, perfidious acts by Democrats, and fails to say how they are worse than the totally unmentioned crimes of republicans. Like for example wasting a few trillion dollars on a war justified by intelligence whose kindest description is “wildly exaggerated” and whose actual description would be more like “utterly fabricated bullshit made to order by the direct command of the president and vice president”. Or even if we give the previous administration the biggest mulligan in history, and sweep the death of thousands of Americans and a few hundred thousand (or just over a million, sources differ) Iraqi deaths under the carpet, we could point at things like Wall Street and the biggest banks in the world running a pump and dump scheme with sub prime mortgages, bundled in to worthless securities, and sold to unsuspecting customers and insured with credit default swaps that meant giant windfalls even as banks collapsed. Now I’m just a simple private citizen with no greater understanding of the complexities of finance than I do of rocket science, but I can’t see how that is anything but deliberate, massive, systemic, premeditated fraud and plunder on a historically unprecedented scale. And so when VDH complains about lawlessness, it rings kind of hollow to me. It almost seems like he’s trying to distract people by suggesting and implying that lawlessness comes from and is only perpetrated by people to his political left, and that his own chosen team is pure as the driven snow, because otherwise a person as wise, as informed and as fair minded as he imagines himself to be would clearly have mentioned any faults they may be even suspected of possessing. I mean give him this, he’s no David Broder writing column after column of false equivalence, so he has that crumb of ‘integrity’ he can claim.
But you’d think a guy whose entire life has been devoted to reading the classics would have more than a passing familiarity with the concept of ‘hubris’ and maybe, just maybe be able to recognize it, even when the people most deluded by it are his closest ideological allies. Or maybe, he’s just bored with the idea of peace and prosperity. Maybe government that isn’t crushing dissent at home and conquering enemies abroad, seems like laziness to a man whose dearest wish seems to be recreating Sparta in the supposed land of the free. Sparta, where there were ten slaves to every citizen, where every healthy male citizen was drafted into the army at around 10, and had to spend 2 years living off the land as a bandit preying on slaves and the defenseless, before taking his place in the phalanx fr then next thirty years or so. Sparta, where they didn’t do abortion, because infanticide worked better for them. Well, to give Sparta it’s due, there’s almost no way they’d willingly suffer under lectures from VDH. If they didn’t toss him down a well shortly after birth, they certainly wouldn’t have listened to the tedious drone of a slave lecturing his ‘betters’. Because in ancient Sparta, he and everyone he knows would have been dead or enslaved. That’s what 10 slaves for every citizen means.
I’m certainly puzzled by his antipathy toward Mexican immigrants. There’s nothing more traditional in California than Mexican immigration. You’d think he’d want his family’s crops harvested.