Anoop Verma's Diary: Itihasa & Darshana: Victor Davis Hanson’s Blinkered View of Western Warfare

Monday 20 September 2021

Victor Davis Hanson’s Blinkered View of Western Warfare

“This book attempts to explain why that is all so, why Westerners have been so adept at using their civilization to kill others—at warring so brutally, so often without being killed.” ~ Victor Davis Hanson in Carnage and Culture. This is such a sadistic sentence. Only a sadist would brag about the lands his civilization had invaded, the brutality with which they subjugated other communities, and the ease with which they slaughtered the natives.

Why did a disproportionate amount of territory, wealth, and power go to the West during the Age of Imperialism? The irony is that Hanson glorifies invasion and carnage (as long as the West is doing it) while professing a religious belief in liberty, democracy, and culture. If the Western side is committing the invasion and carnage, then people like Hanson will brag about it and justify it as the progress of “liberty, democracy, and good culture.”

To make the case that Western military power is the best, Hanson describes nine battles: Salamis (480 BC); Gaugamela (331 BC); Cannae (216 BC); Poitiers (732); Tenochtitlan (1521); Lepanto (1571); Rorke’s Drift (1879); Midway (1942); and Tet (1968). He presents the Western account on these battles and ignores the account of the non-Western side. It is annoying to read the false claims that he makes to glorify his side, and tarnish the record of the non-Western side.

Using one-sided analysis of just nine battles to prove that the “West is the best” is an irrational approach. Anyone with knowledge of history can come up with a counter-list of battles and do his own one-sided analysis of these battles to prove that some other civilization is the best. Perhaps I should write a book on the following twelve battles to prove that the Western armies are easily defeated by non-Western armies:

1. Battle of Thermopylae (480 BC): Persians versus Athenians. The Persians managed to evict 7000 well-entrenched Athenians in just four days. After that their way to Athens was wide open.

2. Athenian War in Egypt (460 BC): Egyptians (backed by Persians) versus Athenians. The Egyptians and Persians defeated the Athenians. The Athenians lost most of the army and navy that they had sent to invade Egypt.

3. Battle of Lake Trasimene (217 BC): Carthaginians versus Romans. The Carthaginians wiped out an entire Roman Army numbering of around 25000 soldiers. The Romans were also defeated at the Battle of the Trebia (218 BC), and in the Battle of Cannae (216 BC).

4. Battle of Carrhae (53 BC): Parthians versus Romans. The Parthian army of just 10,000 soldiers wiped out a Roman army of 50,000 soldiers led by the Roman general Marcus Licinius Crassus. Crassus and his son were among those who were killed.

5. Battle of Adrianople (378 AD): Goths versus Romans. An army of 20,000 soldiers led by Roman Emperor Valens was destroyed by a Gothic army of 15,000 soldiers. Valens was killed.

6.Battle of the Catalaunian Plains (451 AD): Huns versus Romans. The Roman army consisting of Visigoths and the Alans could not defeat the Hun army led by Attila. The battle ended in a draw.

7. Battle of Guadalete (711 AD): Arabs versus Spanish. The Umayyad Caliphate’s army of 2000 Arab soldiers conquered a large part of Spain after defeating the army of the Visigothic King. The Islamic movements would rule Spain till 1492.

8. Battle of Manzikert: (1071 AD): Seljuk Turks versus Romans. The army led by Byzantine Emperor Romanos IV Diogenes was defeated by the Seljuk Turks. Diogenes was captured by the Turks; he was released after he paid a hefty ransom.

9. Battle of Hattin (1187 AD): Saladin versus Crusaders. The Islamic army of Saladin defeated the crusader army and took control of Palestine, including the city of Jerusalem.

10. Battle of Mansurah (1249 AD): Mamluks versus Crusaders. The crusader army led by Louis IX of France was defeated by Egypt's Mamluk army. Louis IX and most of his soldiers were captured. They had to pay a ransom for their release.

11. Battle of Constantinople (1453 AD): Ottomans versus Romans. The Ottomans conquered the last bastion of the Byzantine Empire after a fifty-three day siege.

12. The Greco-Turkish War (1919–1922): Turks versus Greeks. Despite the fact that the Ottomans lost the First World War, the Turks decisively defeated the Greek forces and imposed their sovereignty over Anatolia, Istanbul, and Eastern Thrace. They created the nation of Turkey.

Victor Davis Hanson’s Neoconservative History

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Nirad C. Chaudhuri

“In the south the temples have survived, and in the north they have not. Over seven centuries from the eleventh to the end of the seventeenth all the great cities of northern India dating from Hindu times were sacked by the Muslim invaders and conquerors of India. All the temples there and in all other centres of Hinduism were systematically destroyed. None were left standing at Ujjain, Ajmere, Delhi, Mathura, Brindaban, Kanauj, Prayag, or Benares—which were the centres of the political, cultural, and religious life of the Hindus. In most of these places mosques were built on the sites of the temples, and in some with pillars taken from them. This religious vandalism also worked its fury on the Buddhist centres. Moreover, it was not simply that the great temples in the cities were destroyed; so were the village temples. For most of the period of Muslim rule, there was a ban on building new temples and rebuilding the old in the regions the Muslims controlled.” ~ Nirad C. Chaudhuri

“The moral ideal, that when slapped on one cheek you should offer the other for a slap, has no place in politics. Here the maxim is just the reverse. If you are slapped, give proper return, and you would at once find a desire by the other side to make friends. The method of offering the other cheek for being slapped has now been tried for over 20 years. There has been enough of coaxing and fawning, which by giving undue importance to the other community has begotten only insolence and impudence. May we not now try the counter method and see its result?” ~ Rai Bahadur Lalchand

“Aristotle died in the autumn of 322 BC. He was sixty-two and at the height of his powers; a scholar whose scientific explorations were as wide-ranging as his philosophical speculations were profound; a teacher who enchanted and inspired the brightest youth of Greece; a public figure who lived a turbulent life in a turbulent world. He bestrode antiquity like an intellectual colossus. No man before him had contributed so much to learning. No man after him might aspire to rival his achievements.” ~ Jonathan Barnes

"Within twelve months Greece had lost her greatest ruler [Alexander], her greatest orator [Demosthenes], and her greatest philosopher [Aristotle]. The glory that had been Greece faded now in the dawn of the Roman sun; and the grandeur that was Rome was the pomp of power rather than the light of thought. Then that grandeur too decayed, that little light went almost out. For a thousand years darkness brooded over the face of Europe. All the world awaited the resurrection of philosophy." ~ Will Durant

“The age at which we obtain the complete use of reason may be determined as follows: [i] as far as the facility (to use it competently to achieve any goal) is concerned it is approximately the twentieth year, [ii] as far as calculation (to use other human beings for one's own purposes) is concerned, it is the fortieth year, and [iii] the age of wisdom be¬ gins around sixty. The latter age is entirely negative. We are finally able to recognize all the foolish mistakes we made in the first two.” ~ Immanuel Kant

“Where Plato is whimsical and ironic, and proceeds by suggestion and indirection, Aristotle is matter-of-fact, almost pedestrian. Where Plato’s writing is filled with his sense of better and more beautiful world behind, above, beyond the world of ordinary experience, illuminating that experience but transcending it, Aristotle keeps his feet firm on the ground of ordinary experience. This is Aristotle's reality, and the business of philosophy in his view is to make sense of the here and now.” ~ W. T. Jones

“The existence of man in political society is historical existence; and a theory of politics, if it penetrates to principles, must at the same time be a theory of history.” ~ Eric Voegelin

“Social evils cannot be reformed by legislation; defects of government machinery cannot be repaired by changes in the constitution; differences of opinion cannot be settled by compromise.” ~ Eric Voegelin

"There is no such thing as a right to be stupid; there is no such thing as a right to be illiterate; there is no such thing as a right to be incompetent.” ~ Eric Voegelin

"Fanaticism consists in redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim." ~ George Santayana

"One can easily imagine how indignant a humanistic liberal will be when he is told that his particular type of immanentism is one step on the road to Marxism.” ~ Eric Voegelin

"In National Socialist and related documents we are still further below the level on which rational argument is possible than in the case of Hegel and Marx. In order to deal with rhetoric of this type, one must first develop a philosophy of language, going into the problems of symbolization on the basis of the philosophers’ experience of humanity and of the perversion of such symbols on the vulgarian level by people who are utterly unable to read a philosopher’s work.” ~ Eric Voegelin

“The fallacy in the ethics of evolution is the equation of the “struggle for existence” with the “survival of the fittest,” and the assumption that “the fittest” is identical with “the best.” But that struggle may favor the worst rather than the best.” ~ Gertrude Himmelfarb

“The quest for the origin must take into account that the world of our experience is not a static structure but a process; and the speculation on the origin must project (in one symbolism or another) this experience into a process in the origin itself.” ~ Eric Voegelin

“The world can only be grasped by action, not by contemplation. The hand is more important than the eye.” ~ Jacob Bronowski

“You can run agriculture for centuries by manual labor and oxcarts. But destroy the last of this country's industrial plant—and centuries of effort won't be able to rebuild it or to gather the economic strength to make a start.” ~ Ayn Rand

“Can you be a conservative and believe in God? Obviously. Can you be a conservative and not believe in God? This is an empirical essay, and so the answer is, as obviously, yes. Can you be a conservative and despise God and feel contempt for those who believe in him? I would say no.” ~ William F. Buckley Jr.

“The most radical change in the human condition we can imagine would be an emigration of men from the earth to some other planet. Such an event, no longer totally impossible, would imply that man would have to live under man-made conditions, radically different from those the earth offers him. Neither labor nor work nor action nor, indeed, thought as we know it would then make sense any longer. Yet even these hypothetical wanderers from the earth would still be human; but the only statement we could make regarding their "nature" is that they still are conditioned beings, even though their condition is now self-made to a considerable extent.” ~ Hannah Arendt

“Carefree, mocking, violent–this is how wisdom wants us: she is a woman, all she ever loves is a warrior.” ~ Nietzsche

“Which great philosopher, so far, has been married? Heraclitus, Plato, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, Schopenhauer – were not; indeed it is impossible to even think about them as married. A married philosopher belongs to comedy, that is my proposition: and that exception, Socrates, the mischievous Socrates, appears to have married ironice, simply in order to demonstrate this proposition.” ~ Nietzsche

“Hubris characterizes our attitude towards ourselves,–for we experiment on ourselves in a way we would never allow on animals, we merrily vivisect our souls out of curiosity: that is how much we care about the ‘salvation’ of the soul!” ~ Nietzsche

“Think you're escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home.” ~ James Joyce