August 2006

Response to Readership

Do you agree with Nietzsche's criticism that Western understanding of ancient Greek wisdom is fundamentally flawed? Do you believe that we (as the philosophical descendants of the Greeks) place too little emphasis on the Greek's irrationality?

Hanson: He wrote in reaction to the 19th-century romance popular in Victorian Britain and imperial Germany that the Greeks were the stiff forbearers of order, reason, and rationality as seen in the symmetrical colonnades of the Parthenon, the logic of Plato and Aristotle, and the realism of Greek vase-painting and sculpture. But he tried to show that whether you look at something like Euripides' Bacchae, or the frenzied world of centaurs, satyrs, gorgons, amazons, and maenids, or the irrational world of Pan, Dionysius, and various mother-goddesses, that the Greeks really did live in a world of superstition, faith, extremism even — and that this was necessary and a good thing to have such strong spiritual drives and irrational appetites, which created the essence of Greek tension, stability and culture through the irrational's antithesis to reason and order. For all Nietzsche's exuberance and absence of scholarly documentation — Wilamowitz I seem to remember rightly called him a "prophet" rather than a scholar — I think he was largely right, and later scholars from Frazier to Dodds tried to fill in the gaps.

Why are tragic defeats — Thermopylae; Dien Bien Phu; Corregidor, etc. — given an aura of romanticism and importance by Westerners that is often not accorded to similarly epic victories? Do you feel this is a general human inclination, or do you see it as a more peculiarly Western quirk?

Hanson: Here are a couple of reasons, discussed earlier in Carnage and Culture: first, there is a Western monopoly on historical reporting, ancient and modern. We simply do not have Persian sources of the number or caliber of a Herodotus, so battles like Thermopylae will be largely seen through Western eyes for a Western audience. We see this phenomenon everywhere today: the power and wealth of the West results in the world learning minutiae about the suspect killer of the Benet child, but to this day we know almost nothing about the actual on-the-ground carnage in Rwanda or Darfur.

Second, much of the history of Western warfare is the history of Western success, so we feel our defeats far more keenly. There are more books published each year about the minor loss at the Little Big Horn than on Stalingrad or Leningrad, where millions perished.

Which ideology, Paleo-conservatism or Neo-conservatism, do you consider more important and more effective in a post-September 11 world?

Hanson: The now demonized neo-conservatism.

It simply means "new conservatism" and refers mostly to former liberals and moderate Democrats who left the Democratic party due to its fuzziness on the Cold War and national defense, but don't share all the traditional conservative notions, especially those on the Buchanan right. Oddly, the most caricatured, after Iraq , is the neo-con support of democracies abroad, a theme voiced by JFK and Reagan alike that helped to end the Cold War.

While I was not impressed by some of the early zeal of the neo-cons (cf. the letters sent by the Project for the New American Century calling for preemption in Iraq prior to 9/11), their point that democracy is in the long-term interest and security of the United States abroad is absolutely right. Now, unfortunately, the term is used as a euphemism for anti-Israeli bias, a way of trying to caricature a Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, or Michael Leeden.

Few admit that a George Bush, Condoleeza Rice, Dick Cheney, and Don Rumsfeld (none Jewish) were big supporters of the idea that democracy, not strongmen, must follow the removal of the Taliban and Saddam, and democratic change must come to the Middle East to end the "cycle of violence." I suppose I am a neo-con on foreign policy, but hardly on immigration or other cultural and social libertarian notions.

Do you envision the demise of the American Empire as a result of the United States being transformed like a Brazil, Mexico, Central America, or South Africa, a country in which Caucasians and possibly some Asians and select others are the ethnic minority but still hold the economic and legislative power whilst the majority (mostly Hispanics and blacks) are poor, disgruntled, and plotting a revolution?

Hanson: Not really. For all the rhetoric, Hispanics come here to flee their countries, not replicate them. If we can monitor the numbers, bring legality to the equation, and reemphasize assimilation, the La Raza myth, born as it is out of insecurity, will dissipate. But the ball is in the court of the host, and we must engage the issue of illegal immigration, ignore the rhetoric, and assume any who cross our borders want to be Americans, and should be assisted in that often rough wake-up that all naturalized citizens must make.

Did fifth-century Athens really lose in the overall scheme of things?  For that matter, did the U.S. actually lose the Vietnam War? Sparta is, after all, no more than a set of ruins for tourists and archaeologists and there is a Kentucky Fried Chicken in Ho Chi Minh City .

Hanson: You, like Thucydides, make a good point. By 394 B.C. Athenian democracy was restored and immune from Spartan danger. Its dynamism, along with the new democratic fervor in Thebes , explains the latter fourth century B.C.; Sparta didn't even show up at Chaironeia (338 B.C.). But that being said, the loss in the Peloponnesian War damaged Athens , materially and spiritually, and so the 19th-century scholarly notion of its 'decline' in the subsequent fourth century is largely right.

Ditto Vietnam . The march of consumer capitalism finally will submerge even the last atolls of murderous Marxism in Vietnam , while the U.S. is ascendant still. But Vietnam took much out of us, and skewered our culture. Note the recent controversies over Dan Rather, the doctored pictures, the venom of the Kos-like blogs, and the street theater of Michael Moore, along with the corruption of the universities and main-stream media. This stridency and loss of disinterested commentary and observation are all legacies from our defeat in Vietnam , and I hope they end with the passing of this jaded and cynical (and aging badly) 1960s generation.

In Why the West Has Won, you make a point that is difficult to reconcile with the main thesis.  In the chapter on Midway, you state that American (western) individualism was what made the difference in this battle; you give examples of U.S. missions resulting from flexible policy as opposed to Japanese rigidity in its battle plans.  In the previous section on Rorke's Drift however, it was the discipline of the British soldiers in not breaking their ranks and acting in an egalitarian fashion — as opposed to the Zulus, who acted more spontaneously in their attack — which made the difference. In these two battles, British military maneuvers seem comparable to that of the Japanese. How do you reconcile disparity here?

Hanson: Don't confuse the inculcation of initiative and spontaneity within the ranks of organized command — the need to keep rank, to follow orders, to understand military rules and regulations — with tribal individualism. For example, the flexibility of Roman centurions to take charge and alter tactics was far different from soldiers in Xerxes' army, and yet different as well from the tribal warfare of the Gauls or Numidians that stressed examples of individual prowess, e.g. number of kills, spectacular displays of rushing the enemy, etc.

In the same context, an American colonel can offer candid advice to his commanding general that would have been unthinkable in Saddam's army — and this too is far different from the spontaneity of insurgents in the Sunni Triangle. Within the general landscape of superb discipline and regimental training, many soldiers at Rorke's Drift, without being told, took all sorts of initiative, both about the defense of the compound, and the nature of saving the wounded or supplying water. None were awarded commendations on the basis of kills, but on grounds of individual heroics within the larger context of saving the whole.