May 2005

Response to Readership

Does the fact that both political parties consider securing U.S.-Mexican border to be a political third rail indicate that the U.S. has already lost its sovereignty to a voting block with allegiance to a foreign power and people?  Do you believe the situation erodes president Bush's credibility as a leader of principle?

Hanson: We are reaching a tipping point. Anywhere from 8-20 million are here illegally. Los Angeles has more Mexican citizens than most cities in Mexico. There is no respect for the tradition of law and legality anymore. The salad bowl not the melting pot is the supposed paradigm.

Unionization is impossible with entry-level workers given the alternative supply of cheap labor in the shadows. Mexico berates us and provokes us on moral grounds to hide its own abject amorality of deliberately sending 3 million northward to cover up its own failures at home, and to garner $20 million in remittances in lieu of reform—money that leaves poor communities in the United States and must be made up by state entitlements to ensure rough parity of citizens in the United States in their need for education, health care and housing.

When the state of California bickers over the budget of its new start-up U.C. campus at Merced (ca $ 20-5 million) while it incarcerates nearly 15,000 illegal aliens from Mexico (ca. $400-450 million), and cannot talk about that dilemma due to fears of being called “racist”, then you have a classically paralyzed society who understands that the necessary medicine is felt worse than the disease.

To discuss the issue rationally is to expect charges of racist and nativist. So it is a depressing scenario. A grass-roots backlash is in its infancy, but growing and right now the two parties — either captive to the race industry on the left or the corporate establishment on the right — are watching the dynamics of this angst, unsure whether it is a passing venting or something more that must be addressed.

A sensible program of 50,000-100,000 or so legal immigrants from Mexico, assimilation, and employer sanctions, would solve the problem in 5-6 years, since we can assimilate easily thousands a year, but not millions who break the law by their very coming, do not learn English quickly, and are not often with high school diplomas. It is all very tragic — the promoters of open borders either believe that they have enough money to live elsewhere from the ground-zero problems of having 3 million from central Mexico come each year (very few agribusinessmen, contractors or hoteliers live in, or put their children in schools in, the communities from which they draw their workers), or trust that the resulting hybrid culture will need gatekeepers like themselves to serve this new Alta-California.

Prior to the battle of Marathon, Miltiades asks Callimachus for his vote of approval to go to war with the Persians.  Miltiades suggests they should go to war before the citizens cause a disturbance.  Is Herodotus in The Histories pointing out the nature of democracies to be a bit unstable when it comes to war? Does the inherent character of democracies — debate, dissent, public audit, and censure — cause the citizenry to be fickle or unstable?  I can’t think of a modern American military engagement that didn’t have some kind of social unrest or dissent.

Hanson: I think he is pointing out that sober leaders, like a Miltiades (or later a Pericles), understand the volatility of democracies and seek to ensure that this citizen involvement is used to advantage often by the sheer force of wartime dogmatic leadership that the charismatic exercise.

In two places, Thucydides praises democracies at war, pointing out why democratic Syracuse gave democratic Athens such trouble, and why Sparta was much less imaginative in using its advantages to finish off the Athenians. Roosevelt understood that democratic citizenry is loathe to make sacrifices and prefers to react rather than preempt, but that once the citizens are fully engaged in war they bring all the resources to the fray and enjoy advantages not found in monarchies or oligarchies, inasmuch as consensual government sanctions action and leaves the public no one to blame but itself.

For all the depressing antics of a Michael Moore or Noam Chomsky, the democratic US took out the Taliban and Saddam Hussein in a matter of weeks; we implanted democracies in inhospitable territory; and despite the tragedy of our losses, we have still suffered about half the number of dead in 3 years of fighting abroad that we lost on the first day of the conflict here at home. All that is a testament to the efficacy of democratic war making.

Why are this administration and its supporters (by their silence mostly) so dismissive of the North Korean threat when it is imminently more dangerous than any regime present or past in the Middle East?

Hanson: I do not think they are dismissive, but there are no good choices. Appeasement, cash, and food in the Clinton-Carter paradigm did not work. South Korea is edgy. Japan does not know quite what to do, whether to appease or go nuclear. China is the key, but it enjoys the long leash given its rabid dog, and the angst it gives the West, costing them nothing really. So, we must sit down and apprise China of the trade and economic stakes involved and how it would be tragic to lose our relationship over this lunatic regime.

Meanwhile, we need to rush ahead with our ABM system, and talk honestly with our allies in the region. It makes no sense that thousands of Americans are on the DMZ while South Korea triangulates with the North. Perhaps we can better position ourselves to the south at Pusan, so that we are not held captive by a communist first strike that could take out 40,000 American soldiers. 

The solution rests with China, but now we are in a discovery phase of determining what level of discomfort it must experience before it will put the screws on Kim Jong Il. A purely military option at this point is not feasible since we don’t know the extent of the North Korean arsenal and might lose Seoul or Tokyo to a miscalculation.  So we plod on: hoping to get China to rein in its rabid pet, hoping to race ahead with a regional and strategic ABM system, hoping that the South will keep up its deterrence and forsake appeasement, and hoping the regime collapses before it sells nukes to terrorists or sets off a missile.

There are no good options once North Korea goes nuclear — hence the concern about Iran.

In The Western Way of War, you mention a great deal about the hoplite's shield, but I have tried to find out exactly how they were constructed to no avail. I am particularly curious as to how they gave the shield its bowl-like shape and how deep it was. Have you come across anything in your research that would help me?

Hanson: There is a surviving wood core in the Vatican Museum in Rome, and it has been published with ample detail about it construction (the article is mentioned in both the second edition of Western War of War and in the bibliography of Hoplites, where in an article on the shield I talk in more detail about its shape and size). In a word, a series of oak planks was cured, bent, and shaped, then the curved pieces were fitted and glued together to create this convex disk, and finally reinforced with a supporting wooden rim around the perimeter. A thin metal veneer was riveted to the outer surface and various metal grips and strings were attached to the inside surface.

How does the Left write about and understand the motivation of those on the Right?

Hanson: In two ways: they believe that rightists are first less bright and “mechanical” rather than creative, thus flocking to finance, engineering, or math and leaving the arts, literature, and the academy to the truly imaginative people; and second, the right is seen as greedier. The Left says “I have singular empathy for the poorer and want all of us to take money from some to give it to others less fortunate.” The Right answers, “Wait a minute; you might make things far worse, by creating a dependency on largess that stifles incentive, and, by the way, who are you to judge who is to succeed and fail?”

Of course, most leftists respect freedom and liberty, and most rightists grant a large role for government in addressing poverty, but we see where the extremes would gravitate — either a coerced Maoist commune or a 1890s Gilded Age. Right now what is bizarre is that I can’t see much difference in how leftists live from rightists: upscale conservatives might like plush unnatural carpet in their homes, chic liberals might prefer cutting down oaks to give their floors a natural look, but the price would be about the same either way.

The Right, it seems to me, does not suffer that additional wage of hypocrisy, the death knell for any leftist who chooses to cash in from corporate American and then turn around and trash the very system that enriched him. Very wealthy people — the Turners, Soroses, Kennedys, and Kerrys — seem to have decided expansive government is good for everyone, and high taxes will translate into more money for poor people but won’t make much of a dent in their own vast fortunes.

It is not just parents that determine one’s outlook: those who run hardware stores are going to be much more rightist than university professors, since they have no secure jobs and deal with an array of challenges beyond the protection of tenure. So much of our politics depends on how we live, really. I just saw notice of John Edwards selling his homes for mega-millions to upscale into something even bigger, while he works with his poverty center, strange to say the least.

I read Neil Sheehan’s A Bright Shining Lie several years ago, and I was wondering if you had an opinion on the book (which I thought was terribly platitudinous) and the military record and strategic views of John Paul Vann?

Hanson: I read the book years ago and had mixed feelings. He obviously admired Vann, saw his talents as wasted in a lost cause, and perhaps felt Vann came to the same conclusion and thus gradually self-destructed. That being said, he shows little appreciation that after all that tragedy, by 1973 the lines of a settlement were reached, American ground troops were mostly gone, and a corrupt but capitalist south had the potential to reform and become a South Korea or Japan — if only the U.S. kept its promise to provide air power to keep the communists to their signed agreements. But once the Senate after Watergate cut that funding off, we abdicated, the North won a conventional war through a conventional invasion, and 10 years of sacrifice were wasted, while 1 million were killed or took to the seas, and 25 years of communist death and misery followed. None of the 60s generation talks about the latter holocaust or the Cambodia genocide that likewise followed from unchecked communism.

Could you recommend an honest book on Che Guevara?

Hanson: Cannot really, since I don’t know much about him, although from time to time am curious how a failed Stalinist thug who accomplished nothing other than helping an awful revolution in Cuba and getting a lot of peasants killed in South America became a college popular icon. Was it the get-up — youth, wild hair, funny facial moustache and beard, and beret that made him look cute to some? Apparently, a lot of very sad people who emulate that look think it has some sort of cachet. So I do notice these mostly wealthy white boys from the suburbs who go to elite colleges and for a while put on that Che getup to feel important, before going to law or business school and making their very un-Che pile.

Is the root of the word "thespian" in any way tied to or related to the ancient Greek city of Thebes?

Hanson: Theban means a citizen of Thebes, capital of Boiotia. Thespian means a citizen of the deme/city of nearby Thespiai that was a reluctant member of the Boiotian confederation. Don’t confuse Thespian/citizen of Thespiai with our modern notion of Thespian/actor, a word that derives from a wholly different source, Thespis, the legendary Greek actor of the 6th century B.C. who supposedly first took a role on stage.

Would you please recommend an account of the battle of Zama that would be suitable for a high school class?

Hanson: I like the books of Don Nardo on Rome and Greece that are aimed at intelligent young readers. A scholarly treatment is John Lazenby’s Hannibal’s War, with ample bibliography to modern works. Cannae — 600 legionaries killed a second — is the more famous battle, but Zama was the more accurate representation of the Carthage-Rome rivalry. Hannibal was a military genius, but Scipio was a real strategist who knew what he wanted and where he should be. Hannibal in contrast never quite understood that battle victories mean nothing if there is no ultimate plan to use them to destroy your enemy’s ability to continue. Pericles had the same problem: a good rope-a-dope plan for a tie, but no idea how to dismantle the Spartan state — quite unlike Epaminondas 50 years later.

You stated that President Bush appears to be weak here at home only because he's perceived, in comparison, to be strong abroad. I firmly believe it's because of his weak stance on the illegal immigration problem that is confronting our country.  Please explain to me why he has not done anything to strengthen our southern borders from an assault that is weakening our country from within.

Hanson: I wish I knew. I‘ve written too much already on illegal immigration, mostly seeing it as a legal and moral problem. It seems so simple: the law says immigrate legally; millions don’t; and then we do nothing. When we reach a point that to object to an open border is considered nativist or racist, and yet 75% of the population wants reform, then we can sense the power of the Orwellian Wall Street Journal/La Raza alliance, the one wanting cheap labor, the other unassimilated large ethnic blocs that translate into political power for themselves. Anywhere we look — the Balkans, Rwanda, Iraq — we see the tragedy of creating multicultural societies of unassimilated tribes and interests.

We, who created the world’s first successful multiracial society, should know better. 50,000 legal immigrants a year from Mexico could easily be assimilated and everything from bilingualism, porous borders, erosion in respect for the law, ethnic chauvinism would gradually fade through time-honored practices that have worked so well with other immigrants. 1 million illegal interlopers a year, however, is a recipe for disaster, undermining the sanctity of the law, creating alternative universes of language and culture, letting Mexico vent and profit in lieu of needed reform.

And there is the sheer dishonesty of it all: no one knows how many are here illegally; how many billions are lost to us through remittances sent back to Mexico; how many billions in cash wages are lost to the IRS — and the tired rhetoric that the 18-year-old from Oaxaca without education, legality, and English is a great boon to the economy, as if he will not age and very soon need all sorts of entitlements and state aid. And finally, there is a small percentage of very dangerous people coming in — for example the 15,000 aliens in the California penal system cost us $500 million a year, when we have no money for new U.C. campuses. So we all know the truth we won’t speak, and the lies that we do. Nothing will change until Americans of all political persuasions and races simply say, “No more — and by the way defaming me as a racist or a nativist is an old, tired trick and reflects on you not me.” When we can all do that, the problem will vanish.

What do you think of Thomas Friedman's The World is Flat?

Hanson: I haven’t read it yet, and thus will withhold judgment until I do. I enjoyed his first book on Beirut and Jerusalem far more than his columns; but it is hard to maintain the zeal and ordeal of youth when you were more on the edge and once resided in difficult landscapes. When I visit Greece in the summers, I shudder to think where I used to live or the conditions under which I would camp out or sleep, or the places I used to find perfectly fine at 20 in the midst of the November 1973 failed coup and the later 1974 revolution. Old age makes us complacent and not so ready for the trenches, so I think Friedman was an astute first-hand observer of the Middle East, and with difficulty made the transition to New York and D.C. insider.

In some areas — worry about out competitiveness and education of our youth — I agree with his concerns, especially the idea that our material appetites are not always warranted by our productivity and financial strength. My criticism is that he like most observers, cannot speak candidly about the Middle East:  they know privately that the Palestinians and other Arabs are not fully yet democratic and are still pledged to tribal autocracies and thus can’t be depended on to make real peace with Israel; but in lieu of stating just that, they tend to ankle-bite the democracy in Israel in hopes that concessions might bring the Palestinians to the table, even though they rightly fear that any sign of weakness will only embolden the terrorists.

So his heart is at odds with his head, and he is too smart a guy to write the things he sometimes does, when the mood hits him and he wants “everyone just to get along” — meaning Israel as a Western nation must not expect reciprocal treatment from those who will get a pass for being autocratic. But on matters of globalization and homogenization, he is a world traveler and meets some interesting people who no doubt frame his observations and warnings.

I am hoping that you have read Civilization And Its Enemies: The Next Stage Of History and will comment on it.

Hanson: I only have read the various chapters as they came out separately as published essays, so I haven’t seen them together in book form. I think I would give a little more credit to Clausewitz than does Harris.

Al Qaeda doesn’t seem so crazy to me, but rather had a pretty clear political agenda: continue horrific terrorist acts that repel and shock a leisured and affluent Western public so it withdraws from the Middle East; topple autocratic leaders under the banner of Islamic purity and political reform; install theocratic anti-Western, dark-age regimes; use oil revenues to buy horrific weapons; blackmail the West into further political concession either through terrorism or promises to take out a Western city; and gradually erode Western confidence to the point that a reborn caliphate recaptures glory and power of old.

We think this is nuts and hypocritical, given that Islamicists hunger for all things Western, especially our technology; but the Taliban, the impunity of bin Laden to arrest, and the unanswered terror attacks of a quarter century suggested that the strategy was actually working in the 1990s, especially among the terrified Europeans. I agree with Harris that this is nothing less than a war for what we call civilized behavior, and that everything we hold dear is antithetical to the worldview of the Islamicists.

I just finished John Steinbeck's excellent Travels with Charley, which contains his keen observations and insights on the United States gathered from his 1960 journey around the country with his giant French Poodle. How do you think Steinbeck would view the contemporary American scene given the profound divisions that exist in America over domestic and foreign policy? Would he be pleased with the state of the nation, or would he find it wanting?

Hanson: Steinbeck had various views that changed as he aged and the country evolved beyond the Depression. As I recall he, like Jack Kerouac, was a critic of the hippie movement and the anti-war people who waved the Viet Cong flags and such. Of course, he wrote about his skepticism of the power of accumulated capital and preferred the lives of the working poor who are of little interest to the very rich, so he would find those same themes today, perhaps especially among the casualties of globalization, the family farmers, local businessmen, and manufacturing workers who were simply “not needed” and disappeared.

On the other hand, he was a cultural conservative and deeply in tune with America’s traditions. So the popular culture of Paris Hilton and Ms. Spears I think would repel him, as well as the general craze to look beautiful and have nothing inside your head but a few banal pronouncements about your looks and body. We live in very weird times when so-called Leftists in Los Angeles give us a bastardized culture of sit-coms and bad movies, while New York artists and literary types dress up as art embarrassing literature and childish fashions — even as so-called rightists in the corporate world find a way to make a buck out of peddling our junk worldwide. No, Steinbeck would not necessarily like all that and try to see a different America in the forgotten rural areas and pockets of tradition.

When you look at China, does a scenario of an economic meltdown followed by social upheaval then political revolution and gradual re-establishment of order and progress seem likely to you?

Hanson: Perhaps. China is like America in the 1890s, when we likewise rapidly modernized. It has a looming date with unions, environmentalism, anti-corruption reformers, crusading journalists, and open universities, and if it seeks to circumvent that accounting, eventually its economic miracle will stall. Second, its economic power should win it legitimacy, but privately the nations of the world consider it a rogue regime that violates intellectual property rights, copyrights, patents, and more or less behaves like it wishes, always pleading its former third-world status, or how much better it is than under the Maoists. We worry about all its students over here that are stealing our technology and will use it against us; but remember, they are becoming “liberalized” in the process, and much of the Chinese anger at dissidents concerns returning professionals and students who don’t see why a rich China can’t become as open a society as the U.S.

Do you believe that China has the same fear of encirclement by as Germany did at the start of WWI? And if so, could an invasion of Taiwan do for the U.S. what the German invasion of Belgium did for Britain by bringing us into a Pacific War?

Hanson: There are parallels. China managed in the last half-century to have had border wars with Russia, India, Korea, and Vietnam; it is ringed by nuclear Pakistan, India, Russia, North Korea, and U.S. bases. And its two greatest economic competitors are Japan and Taiwan, right off its shores. So geopolitically, its foreign service seems pretty stupid to have accomplished all that. People think that Taiwan is just an island. It is not. It is a representation of the West’s willingness to protect, at potentially great cost, a successful democracy. We know Europe wouldn’t lift a finger for it, and, for neatness and profit sake, would perhaps prefer a communist victory. Yet should China take Taiwan, well apart from the death and carnage, there would be a changed neighborhood as Japan and South Korea would have to go nuclear or make arrangements and concessions with the Chinese, while America would have to explain why its alliance and presence are still valuable after it allowed Taiwan to disappear. So I am worried and our statesmen must explain to the Chinese now why we would not let that happen and how horrific the consequences would be worldwide if they attacked the Taiwanese.

Is there some perspective — beyond a sort of endless war on Islamism — that we ought to be considering? Should the US do more than just "promote democracy?" Should we move to reorganize the entire IMF system, to return to a system of fixed rates, the sine qua non of long-term investments in physical capital?

A Response the Bruce Thornton’s “A Smoking Gun at Columbia University”:Hanson: I don’t know really. But it seems to me that never has the US fought a war with so little resources and attention devoted to it. Perhaps 1% of GDP invested in this war, and we can see it has moved off the front pages.  Democracy is the antidote to Middle East pathology where Islamicists and terrorists have this quirkily symbiotic relationship with their autocratic patrons, who in turn appease them through bribes and sanctuary — all on the premise of turning their venom on the Great Satan. Financially, it seems that we are at an impasse when those abroad will finance our profligacy. Given the corruption worldwide, the lack of transparency in the Asian financial markets, the creeping socialism in Europe, the world’s investors have decided the US is still the best place to invest and store profits, so they keep lending us billions at low interest to buy their junk. It has gone on now far longer than more sober economist predicted it could. But yes, I am worried about trade imbalances, budget deficits, national debt — all these statistics that seem to confirm what I tend to see with my eyes and hear with my ears: there are a lot of Americans who don’t seem very educated and lack the zeal and energy to work competitively and yet think they have a birth right to all sorts of expensive cars, electrical supplies, and leisure.

Just what exactly are WE supposed to do about academic freedom in universities?  Students can do nothing -- academic freedom doesn't apply to them.  Professors can't easily charge one of their own with misconduct. Government can't do anything without charges of censorship.  University administrators with a conscience have their hands tied by financial, social, and legal binds. The public has to send its kids to school somewhere, right?  It isn't as if one can sue the university for not meeting even its published lofty standards, correct?  Even if you could, who would pay your bill?  The university would probably be defended by pro bono lawyers.  What is a university legally responsible for, anyway?  Not much, it seems.

Thornton: I don't think I'm as pessimistic as the reader, for a couple of reasons. First, all universities have become increasingly dependent on outside funds, and I'm not sure there are enough millionaire lefties to make up the shortfall that would follow if alumni and businesses started cutting back on their giving. This means that we need to alert prospective donors on what's really being done with their money, and in this effort the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (www.goacta.org) has been doing yeoman's work. Supporting such organizations is one way to make sure that donors know the truth behind the spin.

Nor do I think that we should give up on the universities, if only because they are supported by our tax dollars — and that includes so-called private universities. But we can inform ourselves and others about what's going on. Parents particularly need to ask the right sorts of questions when they and their kids visit a campus — for example, ask if the college has a speech code, if it has mandatory orientation sessions in which freshmen are introduced to the joys of deviant sex, if people of faith are welcome, etc. Parents should also inform themselves about student rights, and know about organizations like the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (www.thefire.org), which provides guides to student rights and resources for students whose rights have been violated.

An ancient doctor said sunlight is the first cure. The more media attention focused on universities, the more pressure they will face to change their ways. There's nothing that concentrates a college administrator's mind more than the thought of TV news cameras gathering outside his office window.

Why did the Latin language die? Is the Greek that was spoken by Socrates similar to what is spoken in Greece now? If so, then why was Greek more durable and Latin not?

Hanson: These are a lot of inquiries. But here goes an informal answer to a very complex and difficult question. Latin died in the sense that it is not a commonly spoken tongue today and those who read and write it emulate classical style without the reinforcement of a living evolving language.

When did this occur? There is clear evidence by the 6th and 7th centuries that the classical Latin vocabulary is often not used, the demonstrative pronoun is sometimes employed in novel fashion as if it were a definite article and prepositions are being used in lieu of case endings especially in the dative and ablative. Speakers in Spain, Italy and France were adopting indigenous pronunciations that were not corrected any longer by a "standard" Roman Latin, as the fumes of the empire dissipated. The modern romance languages of what we might call proto-French or -Spanish were emerging in lieu of the old vulgate Latin, as Medieval Latin begin to crystallize as a formal written language and spoken largely by the clergy, itself a different language than what we see in Cicero or Sallust.

Modern Greek is far different from ancient Greek, perhaps as widely divergent as modern American English is from Medieval English. Contemporary Demotic Greek is a mixture of borrowed words from the Turkish occupation, modern colloquialisms, and abbreviated grammar and syntax that evolved out of what Byzantine Greek was like in the 8th to 15th centuries — itself a much different language than Attic Greek of the fifth century BC.

That is not to deny that majority of modern Greek words are either the same or similar to classical Greek vocabulary, but rather that the pronunciation, syntax, grammar, and range of meaning of words have evolved to the point where a Socrates might well not understand much of a modern Greek speaker, who in turn would have trouble understanding Socrates.

Yet there is at least a greater superficial resemblance between modern and ancient Greek than say between Italian or Spanish and Latin because the Greek imperial east remained a monolithic culture from the 5th to the 15th century A.D., while the Latin West underwent fragmentation and dispersion a millennium earlier. Secondly today there are probably only 10-12 million Greek speakers in the Mediterranean, and another 1-2 million others in the Greek diaspora who understand the modern language—in contrast to millions of Romance language speakers.

In other words, the story of Latin is one of expansion and dispersion into cognate languages that swept Europe, while Greek is one of steady constriction from Attic to Hellenistic to Romaic to Byzantine to Demotic Greek, as fewer and fewer people spoke the language. It may well be an endangered tongue and with the globalization of English and the advent of the EU, we might some day see modern Greek become something like Estonian or Basque.