I'm with Farley. I can't wait to read these posts:
Posted by binky at October 26, 2007 01:12 PM | TrackBack | Posted to War and HistoryOur host has been kind enough to provide me a bully pulpit for the next several weeks as I take down one of the most profound perverts of the historical record in the modern era, Mr. Victor Davis Hanson.
If you are not familiar with him, Hanson, or "VDH" as he sometimes styles himself, is a historian of classical Greece, or at least he was a historian of that place and era. Now he is something different. Since 2001 he has laid claims to being a military and cultural historian for the ages, in addition to becoming a columnist for the National Review Online and other hyper-conservative outlets. Personally, I do not care what he writes in an op-ed, so long as he does not torture historical facts in order to validate his own pet theories. But Hanson does exactly that, and so, from my seat, he is the worst sort of polemicist: one who claims academic credentials as a neutral observer, but then insidiously inserts political interpretations of his own present-day biases into the historical record.
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Hanson's dismissals of those who would correct the record he distorted are based upon two biases: "Campus liberals" would engage in culture wars, and "non-military historians" don't know about military history and are thus unqualified to speak on the topic at hand. Well, Victor, I am afraid that I'm not going to be so easy to dismiss. Although I teach at Georgetown now, I used to teach at West Point, and the topic I taught is the same that I have studied for 18 years, military history. It is one thing for you to brush off an inhabitant of, say, the history departments at Yale or the University of Wisconsin as knowing nothing of the military or military history. It is quite another to attempt the same with an Army Airborne Ranger who also happens to be an academic historian and who thinks that your personal signal work is a pile of poorly constructed, deliberately misleading, intellectually dishonest feces.
"Personally, I do not care what he writes in an op-ed, so long as he does not torture historical facts in order to validate his own pet theories."
Of course someone who writes a column for media matters for America could never be accused of the same.
He also wrote a column in MSNBC back in May 2006:
"I will not dispute the accounts now appearing about events that took place in the Iraqi town of Haditha. So far as I can determine, there is nothing to dispute in the coverage thereof by the national (and international) press. Thus far their reporting has confined itself, appropriately, to what is known. That is bad enough."
Of course, the media was not confining itself "to what is known," but LTC Bateman decided, although people in our country trust the military three times as much as they trust the print media, he would trust the print media more than he would trust the military. Just as our country has enemies within, so does our military. Although he would and does describe in that article "moral failures" in the military, he shares his own "deliberately misleading, intellectually dishonest feces." Or to level at him his own criticism of Hanson, the Haditah reporting consisted of "fabrications constructed by actors on the historical stage, and they were exposed through straightforward historical spadework [or at least by the military iteself and not by his trusted print media]."
Posted by: Morris at October 27, 2007 10:24 AM | PERMALINK"our country trust the military three times as much as they trust the print media"
does this count for the "phony soldiers" (among whom, count just about every high-profile military leader who's retired after spending time in iraq) who dare to deviate from the party line, or only those who have karl rove's, et al.'s, hands on the controls beneath their shirts?
Posted by: moon at October 30, 2007 01:16 PM | PERMALINK