James Wolcott gets all
moist over an attack on a conservative academic:
Victor Davis Hanson is the Marlboro Man of war apologists, a sun-bronzed rider of the purple sage whose stentorian words and battlefield vision have made many a chickenhawk less ashamed of himself as he shuffles around in his fuzzy slippers. The aria Hanson sings in article after article pays Wagnerian tribute to the Western Way of War, or why democracies are so admirably advanced when it comes to committing mass slaughter.
Even the Iraq debacle can not keep him from his appointed rounds from op-ed page to NRO column to Commentary essay to Weekly Standard book review, peddling military aggression for any panacea that ails the godly U S of A.
Finally, one man has had enough. A man who knows his military stuff. Whoever he is writes under the pseudonym Werther, and he torpedoes Hanson's pretentions at Counterpunch that will bring a smile to anyone who has endured Hanson's endless calls to arms. The title of the essay--"Victor David Hanson, Bard of the Booboisie"--pays homage to H.L. Mencken, and the essay itself does the master proud.
After four paragraphs of rambling bullshit
Werther finally gets to some of Hanson's history:
Like a Hellcat aviator at the Great Marianas Turkey Shoot, one hardly knows where to fire first, so target-rich is the Hanson opus. But let us take, exempli gratia, a recent contribution to human understanding in the pseudo-conservatives' flagship publication, National Review. Mr. Hanson's philippic, "Remembering World War II: Revisionists Get It Wrong," [1] is an extended and unsourced whine obviously written from a deep sense of grievance that America's contribution to World War II is somehow underappreciated, if not deliberately slighted.
One blinks in disbelief at such a statement. World War II is the subject of an avalanche of more books and films than any other historical subject, most of them if anything overstating, mainly by implication, the precise American contribution to Allied victory. Has Mr. Hanson never heard, that far from being unheralded, General Patton was the laudatory subject of an Oscar-winning film that is a staple of Turner Classic Movies? Did the overwhelmingly favorable public response to Saving Private Ryan bounce off his consciousness like so many Swedish peas off a steel helmet? [2]. Was there no notice of the recent dedication of the World War II Memorial in Reader's Digest or other publications appropriate to Mr. Hanson's Rotarian tastes? The History Channel is All World War II, All The Time - largely from the American perspective; Mr. Hanson is apparently too busy watching Fox News to notice.
Not surprisingly – the article is in Counterpunch, after all – Werther misrepresents – note that Hanson isn't actually quoted, above – Hanson's work. The focus of
Hanson's article is the downplaying by revisionist historians of the US role in World War II, not the general neglect of the US role:
As the world commemorated the 60th anniversary of the end of the European Theater of World War II, revisionism was the norm. In the last few years, new books and articles have argued for a complete rethinking of the war. The only consistent theme in this various second-guessing was a diminution of the American contribution and suspicion of our very motives.
Indeed, most recent op-eds commemorating V-E day either blamed the United States for Hamburg or for the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, or for our supposed failure to credit the Russians for their sacrifices.
No matter how you look at it, Hanson's article is about revisionism. Popular films like
Patton and
Saving Private Ryan are irrlevant to the matter at hand.
Anyway, the wordy Werther bullshit continues:
Perhaps Hollywood, otherwise a perennial target of America's moralizing jihadists, is not to blame so much as that bugbear of pseudo-conservative rage, the Liberal Education Establishment. Mr. Hanson believes that chalky pedagogues are inserting poison into innocent American youths' crania in the same manner that Claudius dispatched Hamlet's father. Only, rather than killing them, these pied pipers of Trotskyite academia endeavor to turn them into Old Glory-burning zombies.
We have before us at this moment our daughter's high school history textbook. Contra Hanson, there is no mention of the internment of Japanese-American civilians. Mr. Hanson's strange obsession with this subject invites speculation. Does his complaint about the alleged academic emphasis on this episode mean he would have opposed internment, or that it was merely a regrettable but necessary expedient best left unmentioned?
Naturally, he cannot restrain himself from commenting, as if we didn't know, that Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Earl Warren were the instigators of the internment.
Notice how Werther refers to the high svchool text book but doesn't give us the title. If he cited the book's title we could check what it really says.
So, Hanson's obsessed with the internment of Japanese-American's during World War II, is he? Not exactly, here's what he writes in the article:
Revisionism holds a strange attraction for the winners of World War II. American textbooks discuss World War II as if a Patton, Le May, or Nimitz did not exist, as if the war was essentially the Japanese internment and Hiroshima. That blinkered and politically correct focus explains why so many Americans under 30 are simply ignorant about the nature and course of World War II itself. Similarly, the British have monthly debates on the immorality of their bombing Hamburg and Dresden.
But again, most Americans never learned the standard narrative of War II — only what was wrong about it. Whereas it is salutary that an American 17-year-old knows something of the Japanese relocation ordered by liberals such as Earl Warren and FDR, or of the creation and the dropping of the atomic bomb by successive Democratic administrations, they might wish to examine what went on in Nanking, Baatan, Wake Island, Guadalcanal, Manila, or Manchuria — atrocities that their sensitive teachers are probably clueless about as well.
No wonder whoever-he-is uses a pseudonym, no one in his right mind would claim authorship of such bullshit. Unfortunately for Wolcott, he's too stupid to recognize bullshit when he reads it.
Update: Something came up so I had to wrap up this post before I'd intended. Rather than try to pick up the thread again I'll just recommend you read the two articles and see for yourself if Werther's criticisms are valid. As you read Werther's schtick, look for the Hanson quotes he attacks; the best I can tell, he offers only one Hanson quote and it's only three words long. Calling such an effort bullshit is giving it more credit than it's due.
H.L. Mencken my arse.
