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2304291500Sa POPULISM IS A LANGUAGE UNTO ITSELF!

The most descriptive way to describe it is: “the quality of appealing to or being aimed at ordinary people.” The ability to converse with the average person that’s just getting along in their individual lives. It’s literally a language gift from whence it comes I don’t know? The only real requirement seems to be a well grounded self opinion – grounded in reality.

Fox has the problem, whether they realize it or not, of not recognizing how rare a language talent such as speaking populism actually is.

The ability to speak populism is the big edge that President Donald Trump has over others. One person commented on this language attribute by noting that time or place matters not to President Trump as there’s never a deviation from that same boy from Queens – as he put it.

Victor Hanson has that same ability to speak fluent populism wherever he may be.

Rather than some regional accent or other identifying characteristic, populism is the language of sincerity – as simple as that sounds. And it (sincerity) shows though to populists without regard to accents and/or wealth.

And if there’s one thing that’s true it’s that neither Hillary or Joe don’t emanate it’s sincerity.

Posted by: The Telegraph ~ 10 hours ago ~ 227K views (already) ~ 3.66M subscribers
“Fox News can't replace him’ Victor Davis Hanson on Tucker Carlson’s firing”

Please do correct for me any errors that you discern – thanks in advance?

#LETSGOBRANDON ~ A Socialist/Feminist (whether he’s capable of realizing it or not?
#MGTOW (Men Going Their Own Way) an existentialist (individualist) philosophy of life.
#ONLY PEOPLE KILL PEOPLE – STICKS & STONES DON’T, NOT EVEN GUNS KILL PEOPLE

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

pop·u·lism

NOUN
populism (noun)

a political approach that strives to appeal to ordinary people who feel that their concerns are disregarded by established elite groups:

"the question is whether he will tone down his fiery populism now that he has joined the political establishment" · "the Finance Minister performed a commendable balancing act, combining populism with prudence"

  • support for populist politicians or policies:

"the government came to power on a wave of populism"

  • the quality of appealing to or being aimed at ordinary people:

"art museums did not gain bigger audiences through a new populism"

Data from Oxford Languages

1914wizard 8 Apr 29
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In political science, populism is the idea that society is separated into two groups at odds with one another - "the pure people" and "the corrupt elite", according to Cas Mudde, author of Populism: A Very Short Introduction.

The term is often used as a kind of shorthand political insult. Britain's Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, has been accused of populism over his party's slogan "for the many, not the few" - but that's not quite the same thing.

The word "is generally misused, especially in a European context," according to Benjamin Moffitt, author of The Global Rise of Populism.

The true populist leader claims to represent the unified "will of the people". He stands in opposition to an enemy, often embodied by the current system - aiming to "drain the swamp" or tackle the "liberal elite".

Hence I don't think your description of populism: “the quality of appealing to or being aimed at ordinary people.” Is sufficient because it does not reveal the deceptive nature of the many so-called populist politicians, who say what people want to hear in order to use them as battering ramp against the political enemies that occupy the seat of power at the moment. Soon as such a politician comes to power, people are tools again, this time to be exploited and or crushed.

Hitler as perhaps the most infamous dicator and tyrant known in the west, was populist. He pretended to be a lot of things, to hide his intentions. He pretended to be Christian, he pretended to be one of the people for the people, by the people etc.

In his unintentionally chilling 1890 essay, Leaders of Men, Wilson explained that the “true leader” uses the masses like “tools.” He must not traffic in subtleties and nuance, as literary men do. Rather, he must speak to stir their passions, not their intellects. In short, he must be a skillful demagogue.

"The First World War made Hitler possible. Without the experience of war, the humiliation of defeat, and the upheaval of revolution the failed artist and social drop-out would not have discovered what to do with his life by entering politics and finding his métier as a propagandist and beerhall demagogue. And without the trauma of war, defeat, and revolution, without the political radicalization of German society that this trauma brought about, the demagogue would have been without an audience for his raucous, hate-filled message. The legacy of the lost war provided the conditions in which the paths of Hitler and the German people began to cross. Without the war, a Hitler on the Chancellor’s seat that had been occupied by Bismarck would have been unthinkable."

  • Hitler: A Biography, 2010 by Ian Kershaw, Chapter III: Elation and Embitterment

[amazon.com]

It was as a propagandist, not as an ideologue with a unique or special set of political ideas, that Hitler made his mark in these early years. There was nothing new, different, original, or distinctive about the ideas he was peddling in the Munich beerhalls. They were common currency among the various völkisch groups and sects and had already been advanced in all their essentials by the pre-war Pan-Germans. What Hitler did was advertise unoriginal ideas in an original way. He gave voice to phobias, prejudice, and resentment as no one else could. Others could say the same thing but make no impact at all. It was less what he said, than how he said it that counted. As it was to be throughout his ‘career’, presentation was what mattered. He consciously learnt how to make an impression through his speaking. He learnt how to devise effective propaganda and to maximize the impact of targeting specific scapegoats. He learnt, in other words, that he was able to mobilize the masses. For him this was from the outset the route to the attainment of political goals. The ability to convince himself that his way and no other could succeed was the platform for the conviction that he conveyed to others. Conversely, the response of the beerhall crowds – later the mass rallies – gave him the certainty, the self-assurance, the sense of security, which at this time he otherwise lacked. He needed the orgasmic excitement which only the ecstatic masses could give him. The satisfaction gained from the rapturous response and wild applause of cheering crowds must have offered compensation for the emptiness of his personal relations. More than that, it was a sign that he was a success, after three decades in which – apart from the pride he took in his war record – he had no achievements of note to set against his outsized ego.

Simplicity and repetition were two key ingredients in his speaking armoury. These revolved around the unvarying essential driving-points of his message: the nationalization of the masses, the reversal of the great ‘betrayal’ of 1918, the destruction of Germany’s internal enemies (above all the ‘removal’ of the Jews), and material and psychological rebuilding as the prerequisite for external struggle and the attainment of a position of world power. This conception of the path to Germany’s ‘salvation’ and rebirth was already partially devised, at least in embryo, by the date of his letter to Gemlich in September 1919. Important strands remained, however, to be added. The central notion of the quest for ‘living space’ in eastern Europe was, for instance, not fully incorporated until the middle of the decade. It was only in the two years or so following the putsch debacle, therefore, that his ideas finally came together to form the characteristic fully-fledged Weltanschauung that thereafter remained unaltered.

But all this is to run ahead of the crucial developments which shaped the first passage of Hitler’s political ‘career’ as the beerhall agitator of an insignificant Munich racist party and the circumstances under which he came to lead that party.

The crowds that began to flock in 1919 and 1920 to Hitler’s speeches were not motivated by refined theories. For them, simple slogans, kindling the fires of anger, resentment, and hatred, were what worked. But what they were offered in the Munich beerhalls was nevertheless a vulgarized version of ideas which were in far wider circulation. Hitler acknowledged in Mein Kampf that there was no essential distinction between the ideas of the völkisch movement and those of National Socialism. He had little interest in clarifying or systematizing these ideas. Of course, he had his own obsessions – a few basic notions which never left him after 1919, became formed into a rounded ‘world-view’ in the mid-1920s, and provided the driving-force of his ‘mission’ to ‘rescue’ Germany. But ideas held no interest for Hitler as abstractions. They were important to him only as tools of mobilization. Hitler’s achievement as a speaker was, therefore, to become the main popularizer of ideas that were in no way his invention, and that served other interests as well as his own.

When Hitler joined the German Workers’ Party, it was one of some seventy-three völkisch groups in Germany, most of them founded since the end of the war. In Munich alone there were at least fifteen in 1920. Within the völkisch pool of ideas, the notion of a specifically German or national socialism, tied in with an onslaught on ‘Jewish’ capitalism, had gained ground in the last phase of the war, and spawned both Drexler’s German Workers’ Party and what was soon to become its arch-rival, the German-Socialist Party (Deutschsozialistische Partei).

Hitler’s part in the early development of the German Workers’ Party (subsequently the NSDAP) is obscured more than it is clarified by his own tendentious account in Mein Kampf. And, as throughout his book, Hitler’s version of events is aimed, more than all else, at elevating his own role as it denigrates, plays down, or simply ignores that of all others involved. It amounts to the story of a political genius going his way in the face of adversity, a heroic triumph of the will. In his own version, he had joined a tiny body with grandiose ideas but no hope of realizing them, raising it single-handedly to a force of the first magnitude which would come to rescue Germany from its plight. Towering over the weak and vacillating early leaders of the party, certain of himself and of the coming to fruition of his mighty vision, proven successful in his methods, his greatness – so his account was designed to illustrate – was apparent even in these first months after joining the movement. There could be no doubt about his claim to supremacy in the völkisch movement against all pretenders.

After dealing with subsequent successes in building up the party’s following, Hitler returned to the early party history in a later passage in Mein Kampf when, surprisingly briefly and remarkably vaguely, he described his takeover of the party leadership in mid-1921. His terse summary simply indicates that after intrigues against him and ‘the attempt of a group of völkisch lunatics’, supported by the party chairman (Drexler), to obtain the leadership of the party had collapsed, a general membership meeting unanimously gave him leadership over the whole movement. His reorganization of the movement on 1 August 1921 swept away the old, ineffectual quasi-parliamentary way of running party matters by committee and internal democracy, and substituted for it the leadership principle as the organizational basis of the party. His own absolute supremacy was thereby assured.

Here, it seems, embodied in the description in Mein Kampf, is the realization of Hitler’s ambition for dictatorial power in the movement – subsequently in the German state – which could be witnessed in his early conflicts with Harrer and Drexler, and his rejection of the initial inner-party democratic style. The weakness of lesser mortals, their inability to see the light, the certainty with which he went his own way, and the need to follow a supreme leader who alone could ensure ultimate triumph – these, from the outset, are the dominant themes. The beginning of his claim to leadership can thus be located in the earliest phase of his actitity within the party. In turn, this suggests that the self-awareness of political genius was present from the beginning.

Little wonder that, on the basis of this story, the enigma of Hitler is profound. The ‘nobody of Vienna’, the corporal who is not even promoted to sergeant, now appears with a full-blown political philosophy, a strategy for success, and a burning will to lead his party and sees himself as Germany’s coming great leader. However puzzling and extraordinary, the underlying thrust of Hitler’s self-depiction has found a surprising degree of acceptance. But, though not inaccurate in all respects, it requires substantial modification and qualification.

  • Hitler: A Biography, 2010 by Ian Kershaw, Chapter IV: The Beerhall Agitator

[amazon.com]

"Crisis was Hitler’s oxygen. He needed it to survive. And the deteriorating conditions in Germany (with their distinctive flavour in Bavaria) as summer turned to autumn, and the currency collapsed totally under the impact of the ‘passive resistance’ policy, guaranteed an increasing appeal for Hitler’s brand of agitation. By the time he took over the political leadership of the Kampfbund, Germany’s searing crisis was heading for its denouement.

The country was bankrupt, its currency ruined. Inflation had gone into a dizzy tail-spin. Speculators and profiteers thrived. But the material consequences of the hyper-inflation for ordinary people were devastating, the psychological effects incalculable. Savings of a lifetime were wiped out within hours. Insurance policies were not worth the paper they were written on. Those with pensions and fixed incomes saw their only source of support dissolve into worthlessness. Workers were less badly hit. Employers, eager to prevent social unrest, agreed with trade unions to index wages to living costs. Even so, it was little wonder that the massive discontent brought sharp political radicalization on the Left as well as on the Right."

  • Hitler: A Biography, 2010 by Ian Kershaw, Chapter V: The ‘Drummer’

"Hitler spoke from rough notes – mainly a series of jotted headings with key words underlined. As a rule, a speech would last around two hours or more. In the Festsaal of the Hofbräuhaus he used a beer table on one of the long sides of the hall as his platform in order to be in the middle of the crowd – a novel technique for a speaker which helped create what Hitler regarded as a special mood in that hall.

The themes of his speeches varied little: the contrast of Germany’s strength in a glorious past with its current weakness and national humiliation – a sick state in the hands of traitors and cowards who had betrayed the Fatherland to its powerful enemies; the reasons for the collapse in a lost war unleashed by these enemies, and behind them, the Jews; betrayal and revolution brought about by criminals and Jews; English and French intentions of destroying Germany, as shown in the Treaty of Versailles – the ‘Peace of shame’, the instrument of Germany’s slavery; the exploitation of ordinary Germans by Jewish racketeers and profiteers; a cheating and corrupt government and party system presiding over economic misery, social division, political conflict, and ethical collapse; the only way to recovery contained in the points of the party’s programme – ruthless showdown with internal enemies and build-up of national consciousness and unity, leading to renewed strength and eventual restored greatness.

The combination of traditional Bavarian dislike of the Prussians and the experience of the Räterepublik in Munich meant that Hitler’s repeated onslaught on the ‘Marxist’ government in Berlin was certain to meet with an enthusiastic response among the still small minority of the local population drawn to his meetings.

While Hitler basically appealed to negative feelings – anger, resentment, hatred – there was also a ‘positive’ element in the proposed remedy to the proclaimed ills. However platitudinous, the appeal to restoration of liberty through national unity, the need to collaborate of ‘workers of the brain and hand’, the social harmony of a ‘national community’, and the protection of the ‘little man’ through the crushing of his exploiters, were, to go from the applause they invariably produced, undeniably attractive propositions to Hitler’s audiences.

And Hitler’s own passion and fervour successfully conveyed the message – to those already predisposed to it – that no other way was possible; that Germany’s revival would and could be brought about; and that it lay in the power of ordinary Germans to make it happen through their own struggle, sacrifice, and will. The effect was more that of a religious revivalist meeting than a normal political gathering.

Though Hitler was invariably up-to-date in finding easy targets in the daily politics of the crisis-ridden Republic, his main themes were tediously repetitive. Some, in fact, often taken for granted to be part of Hitler’s allegedly unchanging ideology, were missing altogether at this stage. There was, for example, not a single mention of the need for ‘living space’ (Lebensraum) in eastern Europe. Britain and France were the foreign-policy targets at this time. Indeed, Hitler jotted among the notes of one of his speeches, in August 1920, ‘brotherhood towards the east’. Nor did he clamour for a dictatorship. Such a demand occurs only in one speech in 1920, on 27 April, in which Hitler declared that Germany needed ‘a dictator who is a genius’ if it were to rise up again.

There was no implication that he himself was that person. Surprisingly, too, his first outright public assault on Marxism did not occur before his speech at Rosenheim on 21 July 1920 (though he had spoken on a number of occasions before this of the catastrophic effects of Bolshevism in Russia, for which he blamed the Jews). And, remarkably, even race theory – where Hitler drew heavily for his ideas from well-known antisemitic tracts such as Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Adolf Wahrmund, and, especially, the arch-popularizer Theodor Fritsch (one of whose emphases was the alleged sexual abuse of women by Jews) – was explicitly treated in only one speech by Hitler during 1920.

This scarcely meant, however, that Hitler neglected to attack the Jews. On the contrary: the all-devouring manic obsession with the Jews to which all else is subordinated – not observable before 1919, never absent thereafter – courses through almost every Hitler speech at this time. Behind all evil that had befallen or was threatening Germany stood the figure of the Jew. In speech after speech he lashed the Jews in the most vicious and barbaric language imaginable.

Genuine socialism, declared Hitler, meant to be an antisemite. Germans should be ready to enter into a pact with the devil to eradicate the evil of Jewry. But, as in his letter to Gemlich the previous autumn, he did not see emotional antisemitism as the answer. He demanded internment in concentration camps to prevent ‘Jewish undermining of our people’, hanging for racketeers, but ultimately, as the only solution – similar to the Gemlich letter – the ‘removal of the Jews from our people’.

The implication, as in his explicit demands with regard to Ostjuden (usually poor refugees from persecution in eastern Europe), was their expulsion from Germany. This was undoubtedly how it was understood. But the language itself was both terrible and implicitly genocidal in its biological similes. ‘Don’t think that you can combat racial tuberculosis,’ he declared in August 1920, ‘without seeing to it that the people is freed from the causative organ of racial tuberculosis. The impact of Jewry will never pass away, and the poisoning of the people will not end, as long as the causal agent, the Jew, is not removed from our midst.’

His audiences loved it. More than anything else, these attacks evoked torrents of applause and cheering. His technique – beginning slowly, plenty of sarcasm, personalized attacks on named targets, then a gradual crescendo to a climax – whipped his audiences into a frenzy. His speech in the Festsaal of the Hofbräuhaus on 13 August 1920 on ‘Why are we Antisemites?’ – his only speech that year solely relating to the Jews and probably intended as a basic statement on the topic – was interrupted fifty-eight times during its two hours’ duration by ever wilder cheering from the 2,000-strong audience. To go from a report on another Hitler speech a few weeks later, the audience would have been mainly drawn from white-collar workers, the lower-middle class, and better-off workers, with around a quarter women.

At first, Hitler’s antisemitic tirades were invariably linked to anti-capitalism and attacks on ‘Jewish’ war profiteers and racketeers, whom he blamed for exploiting the German people and causing the loss of the war and the German war dead. The influence of Gottfried Feder can be seen in the distinction Hitler drew between essentially healthy ‘industrial capital’ and the real evil of ‘Jewish finance capital’.

There was no link with Marxism or Bolshevism at this stage. Contrary to what is sometimes claimed, Hitler’s antisemitism was not prompted by his anti-Bolshevism; it long predated it. There was no mention of Bolshevism in the Gemlich letter of September 1919, where the ‘Jewish Question’ is related to the rapacious nature of finance capital. Hitler spoke in April and again in June 1920 of Russia being destroyed by the Jews, but it was only in his Rosenheim speech on 21 July that he explicitly married the images of Marxism, Bolshevism, and the Soviet system in Russia to the brutality of Jewish rule, for which he saw Social Democracy preparing the ground in Germany. Hitler admitted in August 1920 that he knew little of the real situation in Russia.

But – perhaps influenced above all by Alfred Rosenberg, who came from the Baltic and had experienced the Russian Revolution at first hand, but probably also soaking up images of the horror of the Russian civil war which were filtering through to the German press – he plainly became preoccupied with Bolshevik Russia in the second half of the year. The dissemination of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion – the forgery about Jewish world domination, widely read and believed in antisemitic circles at the time – probably also helped to focus Hitler’s attention on Russia. These images appear to have provided the catalyst to the merger of antisemitism and anti-Marxism in his ‘world-view’ – an identity which, once forged, never disappeared.

Hitler’s speeches put him on the political map in Munich. But he was still very much a local taste. And however much noise he made, his party was still insignificant compared with the established socialist and Catholic parties. Moreover, though it is going too far to see him as no more than the tool of powerful vested interests ‘behind the scenes’, without influential backers and the ‘connections’ they could provide his talents as a mob-agitator would not have got him very far.

Though Hitler had already signalled his intention of making a living as a political speaker, he was, in fact, until 31 March 1920 still drawing pay from the army. His first patron, Captain Mayr, continued to take a close interest in him and, if his later account can be believed, provided limited funding towards the staging of the mass meetings. At this time, Hitler was still serving both the party and the army.

arly in 1920, before Hitler had left the Reichswehr, Mayr had taken him along to meetings of the ‘Iron Fist’ club for radical nationalist officers, founded by Captain Ernst Röhm. Hitler had been introduced to Röhm by Mayr, probably the previous autumn. Interested in a variety of nationalist parties, particularly with a view to winning the workers to the nationalist cause, Röhm had attended the first meeting of the DAP addressed by Hitler on 16 October 1919 and had joined the party shortly afterwards. Now Hitler came into far closer contact with Röhm, who rapidly came to replace Mayr as the key link with the Reichswehr.

Röhm had been responsible for arming the volunteers and ‘civil defence’ (Einwohnerwehr) units in Bavaria and had in the meantime become an important player in paramilitary politics, with excellent connections in the army, the ‘patriotic associations’, and throughout the völkisch Right. He was, in fact, at this time, along with his fellow officers on the Right, far more interested in the massive Einwohnerwehren, with a membership of over quarter of a million men, than he was in the tiny NSDAP. Even so, he provided the key contact between the NSDAP and the far larger ‘patriotic associations’ and offered avenues to funding which the constantly hard-up party desperately needed. His connections proved invaluable – increasingly so from 1921 onwards, when his interest in Hitler’s party grew.

To the Munich public, by 1921, Hitler was the NSDAP. He was its voice, its representative figure, its embodiment. Asked to name the party’s chairman, perhaps even politically informed citizens might have guessed wrongly. But Hitler did not want the chairmanship. Drexler offered it him on a number of occasions. Each time Hitler refused. Drexler wrote to Feder in spring 1921, stating ‘that each revolutionary movement must have a dictatorial head, and therefore I also think our Hitler is the most suitable for our movement, without wanting to be pushed into the background myself’. But for Hitler, the party chairmanship meant organizational responsibility. He had – this was to remain the case during the rise to power, and when he headed the German state – neither aptitude nor ability for organizational matters. Organization he could leave to others; propaganda – mobilization of the masses – was what he was good at, and what he wanted to do. For that, and that alone, he would take responsibility. Propaganda, for Hitler, was the highest form of political activity.

In Hitler’s own conception, propaganda was the key to the nationalization of the masses, without which there could be no national salvation. It was not that propaganda and ideology were distinctive entities for him. They were inseparable, and reinforced each other. An idea for Hitler was useless unless it mobilized. The self-confidence he gained from the rapturous reception of his speeches assured him that his diagnosis of Germany’s ills and the way to national redemption was right – the only one possible. This in turn gave him the self-conviction that conveyed itself to those in his immediate entourage as well as those listening to his speeches in the beerhalls. To see himself as ‘drummer’ of the national cause was, therefore, for Hitler a high calling. It was why, before the middle of 1921, he preferred to be free for this role, and not to be bogged down in the organizational work which he associated with the chairmanship of the party.

Politics consumed practically his entire existence. When he was not giving speeches, or preparing them, he spent time reading. As always, much of this was the newspapers – giving him regular ammunition for his scourge of Weimar politicians. He had books – a lot of them popular editions – on history, geography, Germanic myths, and, especially, war (including Clausewitz) on the shelves of his shabby, sparsely-furnished room at 41 Thierschstraße, down by the Isar. But what, exactly, he read is impossible to know.

His lifestyle scarcely lent itself to lengthy periods of systematic reading. He claimed, however, to have read up on his hero Frederick the Great, and pounced on the work of his rival in the völkisch camp, Otto Dickel, a 320-page treatise on Die Auferstehung des Abendlandes (The Resurrection of the Western World) immediately on its appearance in 1921 in order to be able to castigate it.

Hitler scarcely cut the figure of a mainstream politician. Not surprisingly, the Bavarian establishment regarded him largely with contempt. But they could not ignore him.

  • Hitler: A Biography, 2010 by Ian Kershaw, Chapter IV: The Beerhall Agitator

[amazon.com]

So is populist really a person who is one of the people or is populist a skillful demagogue who uses people to achieve his political goals?

And lastly.... what about the other side. The populace itself?

The Populist Delusion Kindle Edition
by Neema Parvini (Author)

The 2016 presidential campaign of Donald Trump unleashed a wave of populism not seen in America since the Nixon era, which carried him into the presidency. Seen widely as a vindication of the people over elites, his failure to bring about any meaningful change was then seen as an aberration, a departure from a natural state where the people are sovereign and their representatives govern by their consent. This is the populist delusion.

This book explodes that delusion. Beginning with the Italian elite school, Parvini shows the top-down and elite driven nature of politics by explicating one thinker per chapter: Mosca, Pareto, Michels, Schmitt, Jouvenel, Burnham, Francis, and Gottfried. The sobering picture that emerges is that the interests of the people have only ever been advanced by a tightly organized minority. Just as fire drives out fire, so an elite is only ever driven out by another elite.

The Populist Delusion is the remedy for a self-defeating folk politics that has done the people a great disservice.

[amazon.co.uk]

......................................

The Populist Delusion | Guest: Academic Agent | 5/22/22

0

I used to only hear Victor Hanson talk about domestic issues and he seems to have been saying the correct things, but when you hear him speak about foreign affairs you know he is neocon to the core. He is actually one of the original neocons. Did you know that?

"This fool passes himself off as a military historian, writing columns about Iraq and Afghanistan and everything else he feels like babbling about, but he doesn’t have a clue about contemporary warfare. Every war nerd on the net knows more about what’s happening in Iraq than he does. But that doesn’t stop him. He teaches Classics, he’s written a half dozen books on ancient warfare, and he never lets you forget that he’s a professor and you’re not.

In his last column for the Fresno Bee, he sneered at people who don’t have Ph.D.’s for daring to have opinions about the war in Iraq: “What do a talented Richard Gere, Robert Redford and Madonna all have in common besides loudly blasting the current administration? They either dropped out of, or never started, college. Cher may think George Bush is ‘stupid,’ but she-not he-didn’t finish high school.”

Professor Hanson is one of these “back to the land” assholes who can afford to live on a farm because he’s got tenure for life at Fresno State-they can’t fire him for anything less than a major felony. It’s classic welfare state socialism that funds his estate, but that doesn’t stop him from moralizing about the benefits of free market solutions. So he writes these columns from his farm in Selma, a few miles down the road from Fresno, about the sanctity of private land and private enterprise and the life lessons of farming.

You can read the rest here. or simply search for his videos on forign affairs.

[exiledonline.com]

There is no war and illegall US hegemonic invasion of some country that Hanson did not support it seems.

It’s All Greek to Victor Davis Hanson

A War Like No Other, Victor Davis Hanson, Random House, 416 pages

Gary Brecher
Dec 19, 2005 12:00 AM

Victor Davis Hanson has been writing the same thing for years now: cheerleading for the Iraq War spiced up with classical military history. Doesn’t matter whether he’s writing a 400-page book or a 1000-word column for National Review Online, Hanson uses the same formula. And it’s sure worked out well for him. Hanson’s got his fans convinced that Socrates himself would volunteer for duty in Fallujah, if only he didn’t have to drink that damn goblet of hemlock.

[theamericanconservative.com]

Return of the Neocon?
By Victor Davis Hanson

November 22, 2007 5:00 AM

[nationalreview.com]

The Awful Truth about Victor Davis Hanson

Israel has always contributed to the demise of peace and harmony in the Middle East. The 1982 massacre is a classic example, where Israeli military allowed Lebanese militia to attack Palestinian refugees. They “raped, killed and dismembered at least 800 civilians, while Israeli flares illuminated the camps’ narrow and darkened alleyways.”

By Jonas E. Alexis, Senior Editor - March 9, 2019

Victor Davis Hanson is a military historian and classicist. He is a professor emeritus at California State University and is currently the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow in classics and military history at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He is the author of books such as A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War, Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise to Western Power, and Who Killed Homer: The Demise of Classical Education and the Recovery of Greek Wisdom.

To be fair, those books aren’t bad at all. Who Killed Homer in particular has its place in the academic battle for teaching the classics. But Hanson is a complete disaster when it comes to examining US foreign policy and perpetual wars in the Middle East and elsewhere. Hanson has an entire chapter in The Savior Generals praising the debacle in Iraq which devastated the region in 2003.[1]

To rescue himself and the neoconservative movement from intellectual and political oblivion, Hanson compared the Iraq war with the wars in 1777, 1941, and 1950, and moved on to say that they “led to massive American casualties and, for a time, public despair.”[2]

Not once did Hanson discuss the incontrovertible fact that the Iraq war was based on a massive lie. Not once did he refute the fact that the U.S. intelligence community explicitly told the Bush administration that there was no convincing evidence showing that Saddam had WMDs. Not once did he discuss the fact that Bush told his cohorts to cook up the evidence in order to saturate the American people with the categorical lie that Saddam had to go.[3]

Hanson did not make any attempt to interact with the scholarly evidence on this issue.[4] He did not even discuss the sodomy and torture that occurred at Abu Ghraib.[5] Not once did he say even in passing that prior to the war in Iraq, water-boarding was like a foreign language to America. Not once did he mention that George Washington repudiated torture.[6]

We all know by now that torture was routine in Abu Ghraib, and forcing prisoners to have sex with one another and sodomizing teenagers were fair game. One prisoner testified that he saw one officer

“fucking a kid, his age would be about 15-18 years. The kid was hurting very bad and they covered all the doors with sheets. Then when I heard the screaming I climbed the door because on top it wasn’t covered and I saw [name blacked out], who was wearing the military uniform putting his dick in the little kid’s ass. I couldn’t see the face of the kid because his face wasn’t in front of the door. And the female soldier was taking pictures.”[7]

What’s more even interesting, “150 inmates were crammed into cells designed for 24.”[8] Abu Ghraib, as one writer put it, was “a hell-hole.”[9] Torture was also routine in Afghanistan, where adolescents were beaten with hoses “and pipes and threats of sodomy.”[10] These acts were not done in the dark. Cambridge University published similar reports in a book that is more than 1200 pages long.[11] These acts were also testified to by psychiatrists such as Terry Kupers.[12]

So for Hanson to wiggle out of this body of scholarship is complete dishonesty.


Since the war in Iraq turned out to be a total mess, and since Hanson supported the war from its inception,[13] he has to marshal impressively incoherent and irreducibly irresponsible arguments so that he can simultaneously maintain his Neoconservative equilibrium and justify his lucrative existence as a military historian at the Hoover Institution, which is largely neoconservative in its political orientation.

More importantly, Victor Davis Hanson is a Neocon ideologue and a warmonger. He declared unapologetically:

“I came to support neocon approaches first in the wars against the Taliban and Saddam, largely because I saw little alternative—in a post-9-11 effort to stop radical Islam and state sponsors of terror—to removing such odious enemies, and did not think leaving the defeated in power (as in 1991), or leaving in defeat (as in Lebanon), or installing a postbellum strongman was viable or in U.S. interests.”[14]

Well, Hanson would prefer deliberate lies over truth. The war in Iraq was never about fleshing out an alternative to the Neocon ideology precisely because the Neocons themselves knew that Saddam had no WMDs!

For example, when he was told by deputy national security advisor Stephen Hadley that there was no link between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, Wolfowitz responded with certainty, “We’ll find it. It’s got to be there,”[15] which is another way of saying that if it does not exist, they would make it up.

What we are seeing here is that Hanson has intellectually been deteriorating at an alarming rate. He lost his credibility as a serious thinker when he maintained that Iran planned to promote a Jewish Holocaust, despite the fact that Jews in Iran universally called Netanyahu an “insane vampire” for perpetuating similar views.[16] And Jimmy Carter? Hanson argues that Carter is right in line with anti-Semites.[17] Ignoring Israel’s ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians in the 1940s and beyond, Hanson begins to invent history:

“[Israel] fought three existential wars over its 1947 borders, when the issue at hand was not manifest destiny, but the efforts of its many enemies to exterminate or deport its population.”[18]

Sounding like a mad man who will not listen to the voice of reason, Hanson espouses the view that for more than a half-century, the Arabs want to push “the Jews into Mediterranean.” No serious scholarship. No intellectual or historical rigor or reasonable defense. Just one assertion after another. Hanson continues,

“Over 500,000 Jews have been ethnically-cleansed from Arab capitals since 1947, in waves of pogroms that come every few decades.”[19]

The source and historical evidence? You just have to take Hanson at his word. The statement is self-referentially true because Hanson says so! It is the same sort of circular argument and tautology that we constantly see in the so-called scientific discussion, most notably in the idea behind the survival of the fittest. Why did it survive? Because it is the fittest. How do you know it is the fittest? Because it survived!

Yet years before Hanson marshaled his historical fiction, Jewish historians across the Atlantic and even in Israel have told us quite the opposite: Israel has ethnically liquidated the Palestinians.[20] Listen again to Israeli historian and flaming Zionist Benny Morris:

“A Jewish state would not have come into being without the uprooting of 700,000 Palestinians. Therefore it was necessary to uproot them. There was no choice but to expel that population. It was necessary to cleanse the hinterland and cleanse the border areas and cleanse the main roads. It was necessary to cleanse the villages from which our convoys and our settlements were fired on.”[21]

Israel has always contributed to the demise of peace and harmony in the Middle East. The 1982 massacre is a classic example, where Israeli military allowed Lebanese militia to attack Palestinian refugees; they “raped, killed and dismembered at least 800 civilians, while Israeli flares illuminated the camps’ narrow and darkened alleyways.”[22]

One year later, an Israeli investigation commission found Israel “indirectly responsible” for the massacre, and Ariel Sharon an accomplice.[23] How did the Israeli officials get the U.S. involved? According to declassified documents found in the Israel State Archives, they convinced U.S. officials that Beirut had terrorist cells, and in the end allowed the slaughter of Palestinian civilians whom the U.S. had previously vowed to protect.[24] Ariel Sharon said that Beirut had from 2,000 to 3,000 terrorists.

The American envoy in the Middle East, Morris Draper, basically said that Sharon was lying. Lawrence S. Eagleburger, then Secretary of State, declared that “we appear to some to be the victim of deliberate deception by Israel.”[25]

During his conversation with Sharon, Draper knew that the United States was not standing behind Sharon’s evil pursuit, but Sharon ended an agreement on his own terms. It was reported that Draper told Sharon,

“You should be ashamed. The situation is absolutely appalling. They’re killing children! You have the field completely under your control and are therefore responsible for that area.”[15]

After the massacre, Ronald Reagan, himself a Zionist, was outraged. Secretary of State George P. Shultz declared that the United States was also an accomplice in allowing Israel to manipulate them in order to massacre civilians.

But no sanctions were pronounced on Israel. Nothing was done. Why? Nicholas A. Veliotes, then the assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs, gave us an indirect answer: “Vintage Sharon. It is his way or the highway.”[26] Scholar Seth Anziska declares,

“The Sabra and Shatila massacre severely undercut America’s influence in the Middle East, and its moral authority plummeted.”[27]

How would Hanson respond? Would he dismiss the archival documents that both Morris and Ilan Pappe present in their studies? Would he run away from the fact that Israel has been a problem child in the Middle East? Well, we probably will never know because Hanson does not address historical studies like this. He prefers to stay silent and ignore this body of scholarship.

Victor Davis Hanson and Donald Trump

What has Hanson been doing lately? Well, he has been crowning Trump as a hero. In his recent book The Case for Trump, he argues: “The very idea that Donald Trump could, even in a perverse way, be heroic may appall half of the country.”[28]

It gets worse: “Tragic heroes are often loners. They are aloof by preference and due to society’s understandable unease with them.” In that sense Trump, says Hanson, is comparable to Ajax, Antigone, Oedipus Rex, and Philoctetes.[29]

This is the kind of intellectual dishonesty we are seeing in places like the Hoover Institution. Trump has been advancing perpetual wars in places like Syria since he ascended to the Zionist throne, despite the fact that he universally declared throughout his presidential campaign that he was going to suspend perpetual wars in the Middle East.

Keep also in mind that perpetual wars and foreign entanglements are contrary to what the founding fathers of America themselves articulated.[30] Moreover, the founding fathers would have almost certainly stopped the unconditional alliance with Israel, an essentially diabolical enterprise which has brought nothing but pain and misery in the political sphere. So Trump is a hero because he is essentially deconstructing what the founding fathers articulated?

Complete balderdash.

There is more to Trump than meets the eye and ear. His administration has recently articulated that allied countries ought to pay for hosting US Troops! Here it is:

“Under White House direction, the administration is drawing up demands that Germany, Japan and eventually any other country hosting U.S. troops pay the full price of American soldiers deployed on their soil — plus 50 percent or more for the privilege of hosting them. In some cases, nations hosting American forces could be asked to pay five to six times as much as they do now under the ‘Cost Plus 50’ formula.”[31]

Why doesn’t the administration address the fundamental question? Is sending US troops virtually all over the planet congruent with what the founding fathers clearly said? And if the answer is no, how can Trump be a hero when he is essentially destabilizing the very basis of US foreign policy as articulated by the very people who built America? Moreover, is the Neocon view of the world compatible with the moral and political order at all?

Trump, like his predecessors, is a warmonger and puppet. He has even planned to increase the military budget while “slashing domestic spending.”[32] In other words, supporting perpetual wars in the Middle East and elsewhere, sending at least three billion dollars to Israel every year, and being a supporter of the war machine are more important than taking care of the average American and listening to officers like by Maj. Danny Sjursen.[33]

So when will Victor Davis Hanson wake up? When will he start making some common sense?

[veteranstoday.com]

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