Works and Days
Victor Davis Hanson blogs at Pajamas Media
Sun, Jan 6 2008 9:03 PM
History, Europe, and Our Elections
In War And Everything Else
The Great Historical Questions
Why Northern Europe?
I received a lot of questions the last few weeks about why Mediterranean peoples in Italy and Greece who crafted Western civilization eventually faded before Northern Europeans (tribal barbarians during a thousand years of Greco-Roman civilization), and especially Anglo-American culture.
A couple of observations. First, and most obviously, northern Europeans derived their own Western culture only through the classical inheritance. Second, by the 7th century Islam was on the move, and the Mediterranean and Eastern European states were a sort of buffer belt for the next 1,000 years—as the once classical bastions like northern Egypt, Ionia, Greece, Sicily, Cyprus, and Crete were serially overran. Third, geography was turned upside down, as Mare Nostrum became a sort of dead-end pond, while Spain, Portugal, France, England, and Holland had access to the Atlantic, and with it a direct route to India and China, and the Americas. Fourth, England was spared much of the internecine squabbling on the continent, developed a sort of cosmopolitanism and globalized presence as an island and imperial sea-people, and was able to develop a stronger sense of Protestantism, setting the stage for an Anglo-American global ascendancy.
American Decline?
Another reader wondered whether the United States is now in irrevocable decline, while India, Russia, China, Japan, and Europe reemerge to assume our once global prominence.
I doubt it. All of those countries have far more fundamental problems that we do. India is mired in poverty and overpopulation, prone to religious violence and burdened by a caste system. Russia is a neo-Czarist thugocracy, a $100-a-barrel oil price plastering over the otherwise corrupt and inefficient Russian economy, and a shrinking Russian population. China has not yet come to grips with class strife and unionism, suburban malaise, and must spend hundreds of billions in infrastructure. Its environmental degradation will take years and trillions to repair.
Europe is shrinking, as its socialist/secular/pacifist/heaven-on-earth creed has brought short-term prosperity and stability, but also millions of unassimilated Muslims, no defenses in the face of rising jihadism, possible rogue nuclear states like Iran and North Korea, and a bullying Russia, and a sybarite culture founded on the premise that the here and now is all there is.
In short, America's natural wealth, its meritocracy and legions of different races, religions and tribes that are united under meritocratic values, its superb military, its past avoidance of doctrinaire political extremism, whether fascism, militarism, Nazism, communism, or jihadism, and its ability to react and galvanize almost overnight, all suggest we can rather quickly, should we wish, defeat any foreign enemy, get off our costly dependence on foreign oil, close our borders and end illegal immigration, begin to spend less federal money, promote more individual savings, balance budgets, pay off foreign debt, and restore our financial preeminence—if we get honest charismatic and competent candidates who can appeal to the better angels of our nature.
No War New Under the Sun
Finally, a reader wrote in and asked whether the ancient world offered any parallels in our modern war on jihadism.
Plenty.
Preemption? In 369 BC Epaminondas decided that the Spartans were a non-ending threat. And while the latter had not invaded in over a year and a half, and probably wouldn't, he nevertheless considered them an existential and immediate danger, and so went into the Peloponnese in winter 369, ravaged Laconia, freed the Messenian helots, and spread democracy by force through the creation of the three great citadels at Mantineia, Megalopolis, and Messenê. Sparta never again invaded Boiotia.
Preventative War? Consider Rome' Third Punic War, where Carthage represented no immediate threat (far less than Sparta posed for Thebes), and yet Romans went to war to end their unrelenting fear of a reemergence of a North African empire.
Counterinsurgency? The Romans dealt with magnetic nationalist leaders like Boudica, Jugurtha, Mithridates, and Vercingetorix that required fighting terrorists, winning hearts and minds, and fighting unconventional wars.
A War Against Terror? Pompey's successful war against the pirates, mostly from Cilicia, was waged against a tactic more than a state or people.
Asymmetrical warfare? Athens fought Sparta largely by sea, Sparta by land—until the last bloody decade of the Peloponnesian War. In hellholes like Aitolia and Akarnania conventional Athenian hoplites were bled white by terrorists, light-armed, and missile-troops. Alexander fought a dirty war of ethnic cleansing in Bactria and southern Afghanistan that cost him more losses than in his three conventional battles against the Persians.
In other words, nothing we have encountered since 9/11 is new. All our current challenges have parallels, and they have been faced—and overcome—by past conventional Western leaders. Classical literature reminds us how and why. Human nature is constant, only its technological manifestations change. For every bin Laden there was an Arminus, for every Ahmadinejad there was a Jugurtha, for every David Petraeus there was a successful Sertorius in Spain or Caesar in Pontus.
We are not alone, and nothing we encounter is novel. Millions in the past experienced everything we have, though on a quite different magnitude, and we can learn about almost everything in present by reading from the past.
Sidenote to the May-June European Tour
Our debate/discussion on the future of Europe at the Trianon Hotel at Versailles is shaping up well, with Bruce Thornton and, it looks like, a prominent French intellectual/diplomat soon to be announced. And we hope to have a good tour of Nato headquarters, and similar discussion and debate that evening. Visits to Somme, Verdun, Waterloo, etc. should give us some appreciation of the burdens of European history, and why the European Union frightens us more than it does Europeans wearied by centuries of deadly squabbling.
Empathy for the Candidates
I confess a certain sympathy for the candidates. They are up at dawn and out till late night. Many are over 60. Three have survived melanoma, prostate cancer, and non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. They must be obsequious in the face of often arrogant and stupid questioners ,who try to bait and embarrass them. Less bright media talking heads bully them incessantly. What they wear, how they look, or the blunders they make are the evening small talk of millions. And all this for the Presidency?
So there is a certain Darwinian logic to our process. Any who survive our modern political agôgê, both mentally and physically, are apparently certified to be able to be President. |
