H/t Mercy https://t.me/OneStopPatriot
Good morning stackers! Anytime I come across material or articles with Victor Davis Hanson in them, I stop what I am doing and absorb it. The results are an all day or even all week processing of his comments and where they are leading my mind to find someway to mitigate his warnings. VDH speaks with big medicine. This is my morning coffee read and it should frighten every sane, critical thinking American to your core. This linked Interview discusses his new book out “The End Of Everything” that explores the premise that civilizations not only lose wars but many civilizations are actually extinguished as a result of warfare. He discusses the Carthaginians, the Aztecs, the Armenians, the Macedonians and others.
His words as parsed from the interview with Rob Bluey from the Daily Signal Interview :
VDH- “They also had this kind of naive egocentric idea that allies would come to their rescue—the Spartans will come and save us, the Venetians will come to Constantinople, the Macedonians will attack the Romans from the rear. And they didn’t really understand that all allies are self-interested.
And then, finally, they didn’t understand that these killers, the destroyers, were not like Genghis Khan or Tamerlane, they were men of education. Alexander was tutored by Aristotle. Scipio Aemilianus had Polybius, had his side, the great Roman historian, when he destroyed the city. Mehmed had the largest library in the Islamic world. Cortes was a man of letters.
So, they didn’t realize that they had thought deeply about how to destroy. They didn’t just come in, kill, rape women, and leave. They really had an existential plan to erase these cities.”
VDH mentions the particular threat posed by China. Chinese issued threats of nuclear attack on Japan and even Taiwan if required.
It’s especially interesting when Hanson gets canceled by the Chinese:
“In the case of China, they have threatened to wipe out Taiwan and destroy the bastard idea of a Taiwanese civilization, they say it doesn’t exist. And they’ve threatened to nuke, as well, Japan if it aids Taiwan.
I only mentioned that because I’ve had pretty good luck with Chinese publishers buying books on military history. I wrote a book on World War II they purchased, but they sent a letter to my publisher and basically said if I didn’t take that sentence out of the book, then they were going to cancel the publication agreement. And, of course, I couldn’t take it out. Instead, I sent back, not just one threat of Taiwan, I found about 15 others, and I said, “This is ridiculous, you’ve done this more than—” And so, they’ve canceled the Chinese translation. But it’s pretty prevalent.”
VDH explains further the particular importance of our military precariousness regarding China:
“I don’t think the average American understands that the Chinese are producing four ships per year to our one ship. Or that if you took any of our $15 billion carriers and you put them in the straits between Taiwan and China, they wouldn’t last more than an hour given the Chinese have developed missile batteries where they could launch 5,000 or 6,000 small missiles that would go about 6 inches above the water and hit the waterline at night. And you couldn’t stop that.
They are building nuclear weapons at a phenomenal rate. They’re working on anti-missile defense. They’re back up to probably 250,000 students in the United States, if 1% are engaged in espionage—and the FBI says it’s more than that—you’ve got thousands of people who are appropriating technology.
I don’t think anybody understands that it’s going to take us six years to replenish Javelin stocks and maybe we can’t. North Korea is producing more 155 mm shells than we are. At least they sent 2 million of them to the Russians.
So, we are not armed and yet, our strategic responsibilities, our strategic confidence, our arrogance has not lessened commensurately with our reduced defense capacity.
We’re 40,000 recruits short now in the military, never happened before. And when you analyze who is not joining the military, it’s not blacks, it’s not Latinos, it’s not gays, it’s not women, it’s not trans people, all of those numbers are the same, it’s the largest group are white males from the lower and middle classes whose families fought in Vietnam, first Gulf War, Afghanistan, but this third and fourth generation are not joining up.
And unfortunately, for the military, if you look at the casualty or the fatality rates in Afghanistan and Iraq, that demographic dies at twice their demographics—72% to 74% of all the dead in Afghanistan, in Iraq are white males from the middle and lower classes.
And yet, this is the very demographic that [retired Gen.] Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and [Defense Secretary] Lloyd Austin, in testimonies, have suggested suffer from white rage or white privilege. And the Pentagon was investigating just those kind of slanders about that demographic and they found, of course, in December, they quietly issued a report, there was no cabal of white supremacists.
But the point is, you can’t really have a successful military when you’re 40,000 recruits short in just a year”
VDH gets it. Simply amazing how he can distill into a logic paragraph, very complex and frightening outcomes.
Hanson’s take on the future of the United States:
“But the Democratic Party, as we’re seeing with Columbia [University] and all these student protests, they are a revolutionary party. It’s not that they believe in a porous border, they believe in no border. It’s not that they believe in light sentencing, they don’t want to sentence anybody. They don’t want to have bail. They don’t believe that there is such a thing as deterrence, the way we got out of Afghanistan. They believe in radical climate change. You can show them data, you can show them all sorts, they don’t care, they want to ban combustible engines, they don’t want fossil.
So, this is a group of people, as we’re seeing in this split screen with Donald Trump charged with these ridiculous misdemeanors bootstrapped onto felonies. At the same time, people are entering with violence into a Columbia building. And as one of them said the other night, “They will be out in 24 hours.” I don’t think they’re even in jail as we speak, they’re already out.
I guess what I’m saying is we’re in a revolutionary Jacobin period, kind of a Reign of Terror. And I don’t see it stopping unless—I don’t think the election of Donald Trump will be enough. You’ll have to elect the Senate, Donald Trump, and enlarge the House majority. And then, they’re going to have to act very quickly to stop it, to restore the border, to restore deterrence, to restore deterrence against criminals, to get back our preeminent position economically, to stop this $1 trillion borrowing every 100 days.
We’re in bad shape in every category. And I think, whether we like it, I know there’s a lot of Never-Trumpers out there, but whatever problem they have with Trump’s temperament, it just pales in comparison with the ideological revolutionaries that are in there now … .
If [President Joe] Biden is reelected, what we saw the first term will be nothing, it’ll be enhanced to a magnitude, it’ll be so much greater. So, I’m really worried about this election, especially the integrity of the balloting and turnout and all of those other issues.”
Well there it is. You can watch the linked videos and see party of the interview for yourself. The future is indeed uncertain and interesting. I agree with the description of “Jacobin reign of terror” analogy. Time is short and I don’t believe we can patch the holes to save our ship of state. So what to do? Accept it and prepare.
VDH Interview link here.
The fall of empires starts from within.
Scary indeed. He's a very bright man., to whom we need to listen.