April 2005

Response to Readership

What do you think of the new process for reading the papyri discovered in England.  What are the chances for a new renaissance?

Hanson: I think it is a tribute to dozens of papyrologists and their affiliated experts who work thousands of hours in obscurity, in hopes that they might be able to find new texts such as were announced. I don't want to explain their work, since they themselves deserve the credit of its exegesis, but they are constantly attempting to find ways to read these usually small scraps from Egypt that often are layered texts.

In Egyptian homes in Ptolemaic and Roman times old texts were often reused for personal letters and everyday lists, and then discarded into rubbish piles, preserved by the climate of Egypt, even as in almost every case they were almost always quickly ruined during the same process in Europe. So on the one hand there are fascinating archives of what life was like in Egypt from say 300 BC to AD 600—irrigation law, Roman garrison troop inventories, letters to sons on duty, tax records, etc.—and on the other hand, there is the even more exciting hunt for either intact scrolls (very rare), or enough fragments of papyrus with original classical texts on them to decipher a poem or play. Everything from Aristotle's Constitution of Athens to a long poem by Archilochus have come only from papyrus, and perhaps these new ways of reading written-over or erased scripts will yield something similar.

We only have 7 plays of Sophocles but know of over 90 titles, so you can see the hopes and dreams with which the papyrologist works. Some of those plays were felt to have been his best, so in theory a play could be reclaimed and in some future date find its way into a humanities class along side Antigone or Oedipus Rex. More likely, we will find shorter poems by the lyric poets or fragments of commentators on oratory and grammar.

But in any case papyrology both in Egypt and in Italy in the cities beneath Vesuvius holds the last best hope that the corpus of classical Greek literature, pretty much known as finite from the manuscript tradition, could be expanded. And remember we probably only have 10-25% of the works of Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles, not to mention even less of Old and New Comedy, and the Greek historians such as Ephorus, Callisthenes, and the so-called Oxyrhynchus Historian.

Realistically, I don't see large numbers of new works, at least enough to make it necessary to rewrite handbooks or to change Western literature itself, but certainly even one new play by Sophocles in toto would have a profound effect both on what we think of his work and on Greek tragedy in general.

President Musharraf is basically a strongman and stopgap in a nuclear-armed and failed state. What precautions should the world take against a possible fall of that state's nuclear weapons into the hands of Islamic fundamentalists.

Hanson: I wrote about this in the next issue of Commentary Magazine. Our choices are bad (criticizing Musharraf’s rule as illiberal and thus playing into the hands of his Islamicist enemies) and really bad (allowing him to consolidate power completely and derail democracy). So we tiptoe about prodding him to be more liberal, hoping that democratic reformers rather than Islamicist nuts can form an opposition and evolve into power. But at least we known the familiar pattern now: unquestioned support for a Shah, Saudi Royal Family or Mubarak leads to resentments, long-term reckoning, and terrorism and fanatics as the only serious opposition rather than democrats whom we might otherwise have aided and supported. So we try to gently move the general to the middle and avoid the hypocrisy of selling him arms while fighting for elections in the Sunni Triangle. The present policy is not sustainable and won’t last if Musharraf persists in rule without voting.

I greatly enjoyed The Soul of Battle. However, I would like you to address Mr. Buchanan’s critique (“Where the Right Went Wrong”) of Sherman as a “moral monster” who spoke of a “final solution to the Indian problem”. This is, of course, after Uncle Billy made his trek across the South. How do you reason with American policy towards the Plain Indians? Was Sherman immoral in his muscular approach?

Hanson: What Sherman said and did were often quite different both in Georgia and the frontier; as I recall his remarks about the Indians, he felt assimilation was the only answer and championed it as much as possible, especially education and agriculture on the reservation. Today, of course, his stance is illiberal, but at the time, his notion of paternalism was not as extreme as some since it was based on the idea that the Indian could only survive by emulating his conquerors and becoming one with him, at least in protected enclaves on the reservation. Only a few hundred died in Georgia and he sought to mitigate the killing at Bentonville, the last battle of the war, so the notion of the “monster” Sherman arose over the hurt of the plantation classes and their fury at seeing stately work of decades put to the torch. Sherman answered that it made no sense to kill young white boys, poor and without slaves, in Virginia while the slaveholding architects of that slaughter remains sacrosanct behind the lines.

You said "Vietnam was a war against global communism on the left; this is a war against people who are fascistic on the right." What do you think of the position that Fascism is actually a movement of the far left, not the right?

Hanson: I think communism and fascism share the same methodologies of rule whatever the politics: state violence, rigged trials, autocratic government, end of human rights, censored press, etc. But the difference in this war is that the Islamicists are more fascistic than communist in their ideology—calling for a reactionary return to a mythical past of religious and tribal purity, the usual anti-Semitism, gender apartheid, a society full of hierarchies, quite different from the rhetoric about a secular atheist society based on remaking a classless society without gender, class, or religious racial differences, but united only by allegiance to the idea of a totalitarian all-powerful state.

Since the Mexican government is passing out pamphlets to explain to their citizens how to come to the U.S. illegally, can't we just invite Mexico to become one or more new U.S. states instead? This seems like the perfect solution since no influence we have had has encouraged Mexico to create a country where its own citizens can live and prosper. What would be the drawbacks of adding new states to our union?

Hanson: I have never pondered this strange idea. I think if your read the Mexican press, look at opinion polls, and review the rhetoric of their politicians, then you see a consistent theme of anger, fury, and resentment prompted by real past hurts, imagined grievances, and deep-seeded feelings of envy and jealousy. For parts of Mexico to resemble the United States one would need a critical mass of US citizens to inculcate our culture and values, as is true of all majority populations who acculturate the minority population. As of now I don’t think there is enough common ground—language, values, traditions, economic and political institutions—to effect such a merger as you propose. And of course it would be arrogant and needlessly provocative of Americans to assume Mexico would want such a thing: so for now, we live with the hypocrisy of millions fleeing to a country that officially at least is seen as pretty awful. The politics and surreal nature of illegal immigration never cease to amaze me.

What do you think of the Prussian General Carl von Clausewitz (1780-1831)? What do you think of Keegan's trashing of Clausewitz in his history of war?

I am a great admirer of his writings, especially their classical antecedents. Every great historian writes at times things in passion and with verve, and Keegan’s ideas about Clausewitz I don’t think nullify the value of his A History of Warfare. His The Face of Battle is probably the best written and most elegantly expressed military history of the last forty years. But I come down on the side that war is more often an extension of politics even if driven by sometimes irrational urges like pride, envy, fear, and honor that don’t arise from real economic or political notions of advantage—rather than anthropologically driven in the realm of ritual, rite, or cult.

Editor’s Note:  General Clausewitz, like Thucydides, is considered among the canon of experts in military thought. He wrote prolifically on strategy and tactics in warfare from the point of view of one who had joined the Prussian army in 1793 at 13, making it a career and then fighting Napoleon’s forces in East Europe and finally at Waterloo.

A recent NRO article mentions the “myth” of the French Resistance. Can you elaborate on this or recommend some further reading?

I think Douglas Porch has written an essay or two on, as well as the standard biographies of De Gaul, Malraux, and others. By “myth” I mean that there were (1) very few resistance fighters in real and relative numbers involved, (2) the military value of resistance troops was not great, (3) and the number of collaborators with the Nazis were far greater than usually admitted; thus the notion of the myth in creating a false and intellectually dishonest image of a populace perennially at the barricades, when in fact for the most part the French either collaborated or bore stoically rather than resisted occupation, and often oiled the machinery of the Holocaust.

What are your personal thoughts toward the Christian Faith? Have you written anything personal on the subject?

Hanson: No, I have not written anything. I try to keep my religious beliefs private, which could best be called generic Protestant. I am afraid that I am not a churchgoer as others in my family are, but have read carefully the New Testament and used to teach it in Greek quite a lot, and from time to time still read the Greek New Testament. I do believe there is a general purpose for us all here and in particular that each individual is unique and has a contract of sorts so to speak with a higher authority, which he dare not break.

Do you think the US will be able to engage in war effectively now and in the future against the backdrop of an ironic and excessively individualistic society, the 24-hour-news culture, and rampant anti-Americanism abroad?

Hanson: I have been pleasantly surprised how well the US military has conducted this war in the postmodern age. Our officers are better educated and trained than was true 50 years ago, and yet still retain the same zeal and dedication of their forefathers. The same is true on the enlisted men as well. The problem as I see it is that the military, being a professional force, is perhaps not representative of the U.S. population as a whole, large segments of which don’t believe that war solves anything in general, and in particular distrust the American military. So with a growing dichotomy like that, we must beware, and find mechanisms to involve more Americans, especially our elites, with military personnel. Since 9/11 the world has learned not just that the American military is superior to all others, but that is so far superior that even its allies find it difficult to work in harmony with it. We don’t have a problem with failing , but rather succeeding so well, that the public either becomes complacent or in their contrarianism thinks we are becoming bullies and begins to sympathize with our enemies.

In Carnage and Culture, you place emphasize the importance of the West's reliance on heavily armed infantry to win the battle of Poitiers. Does this relate to difficulties we encountered in Afghanistan where we were reluctant to use American troops on the ground and resorted to the use of air power and local allies? Was this the cause of our inability to eliminate al Qaeda leadership at Tora Bora, and is this an ongoing problem in our strategy?

Hanson: No, I don’t think so, although we prefer shock to finesse and the indirect approach. In Afghanistan I think there was an understandable reluctance not to wish to airlift a 16,000-man division to the mountaintops of the Pakistani border. We do see, however, sharp differences in the present age of reform, as modernists wish to make a lighter, more unconventional military, based on special forces, GPS bombing, and light amphibious brigades versus the old way of large armor divisions with plentiful firepower and artillery. It is thought in the century ahead we will not have an old-fashioned land war, but something more like Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, and Iraq; perhaps, but it would seem wise not to give up traditional army divisions so readily since I am not convinced that they won’t be needed in places like the DMZ and the Middle East in the decade to come.

How much longer are we going to let the U.N. go on as it is? Why are we in an organization that is populated with non-democratic or anti-democratic governments. Do you think that the continuation of this organization helps or benefits the Unites States in any way?? Should we not now look into establishing a successor organization to the U.N.?

Hanson: We stay because of a lingering nostalgia among the American people and appeasement of the U.N. by the left-wing of the Democratic Party. If we look at Oil-for-Food, sex rings and rapes by U.N. rent-a-cops, or the nature of most of the U.N. resolutions since 1970, then the organization should cease or face massive reform. It is amoral, unaccountable, and arrogant. If we are to reform it, then (1) require democratic government as a prerequisite for membership, as adjudicated by the Security council; (2) make the E.U. have one veto, and give one as well to India and Japan; (3) move it out of New York and the global media spotlight to somewhere like Nigeria or Peru, where the hosts could use the foreign exchange dollars, and we would get committed delegates, rather than frauds who love to come to New York to spout off to the hyper-liberal press, who in turn fawns all over their cheap anti-Americanism. If we were to enact such reforms, then the U.N. might just gain some respectability. It was no accident that the U.N. liked Carter over Reagan, and preferred Clinton to Bush—the weaker American leader always the more favored, even though such multilateralism often weakened U.S. national security and world peace in general.

What practical solutions do you see for capitalism's big problems: that is, our impact on the environment? Would you address the problem itself and our image to rest of the world?