My anthology Revisions and Dissents deal critically with
Hoover Institute fellow and frequent contributor to the American Greatness
website Victor Davis Hanson. A Fox-news superstar in addition to his other
claims to fame, Hanson specializes in totally unexamined assertions about
modern history that as a professor I would never have tolerated even in a
college freshman. Hanson has done well expressing these half-truths and
fictions because they obviously please his neoconservative benefactors who have
raised him to media prominence.
Contrary to Hanson’s telling,
Germany (which didn’t exist as a unified country until 1871) did not
unilaterally start a war against France in 1870. When I last checked, it was
the French who declared war on Prussia in 1870 and did as much to provoke that
conflict as the other side. According to Hanson, the evil Germans launched two
world wars in the twentieth century, neither of which the other side supposedly
did anything noteworthy to incite. Indeed, the unleashing of the First
World War was entirely the work of the German government,
which was then making a mad dash to swallow up Europe.
Revisions and Dissents...Paul
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A vast, multilingual
literature is available that shows that both sides contributed about equally to
greasing the skids for the conflagration that came in August 1914. Hanson
considers as “the lesson of World War One” that the US should not only have
clobbered the Germans in World War One. The best course would then have been to
occupy the defeated country and make its inhabitants pay unlimited reparations
in accordance with the punitive Treaty of Versailles. (The US might have done
best to stay out of the war, since no vital American interests were at stake.
By the end of 1917, the French and Germans had begun to negotiate a peace that
might have been concluded if the US had not entered the fray.) Hanson also
tells us that the provisional war aims drawn up by the German chancellor in
September, 1914 were uniquely outrageous. But the annexationist aims framed by the French simultaneously
(which Hanson may be blithely unaware of) were even more horrific.
Hanson’s latest syndicated column illustrates perfectly
his anti-German fixation. Thus he opines:
Germany
started and lost two world wars — and was defeated due in part to the late
entrance of the United States. The unification of Germany brought millions of
East Germans into the west, many of them raised under a communist system that
blamed the U.S. for the world’s ills.
Allow
me to offer some corrections here. The US did not enter the Second World War “late”
but came in somewhere well before the middle. Although Germany lost two world
wars, the German Empire did no more to create the conditions for the first of
these disasters than the French, Russians, Serbs– and various members of the
British cabinet who were conspiring before the war against the Germans and
Austrians. There is, furthermore, no evidence that East Germans are blaming the
world’s ills on the US because they were “raised under a communist system.” In
terms of voting trends, those areas that were under Communist rule are the most
nationalist parts of Germany. Parties of the Right like the AfD and even
the ultra-Right National Democrats have done much better in onetime
Soviet-occupied German regions than in the more pro-American and less nationalist
Western parts of Germany. The reason for this difference is the same as the one
that explains why Poland, Hungary and Slovakia are more conservative than, say,
France and Spain. They were less influenced by American and Western ideas,
including feminism, LGBT-rights, and antifascism.
Merkel is buying gas from the
Russians (and thereby supposedly weakening NATO), not because she resents the
US as a hindrance to German expansion. The daughter of devoutly
anti-nationalist, very far leftist parents, the German chancellor has never said
anything that would suggest however remotely that she’s any kind of German
nationalist. Certainly Merkel didn’t flood her country with over a million
Muslim migrants and provide them with generous social allowances because she’s
planning to conquer Europe.
Even more relevant, the deal
to buy natural gas from the distributor Nord Stream in
Vyborg, Russia goes back to Merkel’s Socialist predecessor Gerhard Schröder,
who was a good friend of President Obama and a firm internationalist. Merkel
has honored this agreement, because the Russians are selling Germany badly needed gas at
a cheap price and because the gas is coming through a relatively short pipeline
of 800 miles via the Baltic Sea. The fact that the German government has not
repudiated Schröder’s agreement does not testify, pace Hanson, to its
anti-Americanism. Germans and other Europeans need cheap abundant energy,
which the Russians are now willing to supply. Other European countries have not
condemned Germany for this supposed misstep but not for the reason that Hanson
gives, because “they are used to being dominated” by Hanson’s whipping boy.
They may be considering the possibility of upping their own shipments of
Russian gas.
Kelley:
I have an article on Franco-German peace negotiation during World War One
in Independent Review 23.2 (Fall
2018), 7-11. Unfortunately it’s not yet online.
The Second World Wars:...Victor
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Mexifornia: A State of...Victor
Davis HansonBest Price: $7.94Buy New $14.70(as
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D. HansonBest Price: $2.30Buy New $6.94(as
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Paul
Gottfried [send
him mail] is Horace Raffensperger Professor Emeritus of Humanities
at Elizabethtown College and author of Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt, The Strange Death of Marxism, and Conservatism in America: Making Sense of the American
Right. His latest books are Fascism: The Career of a Concept and Encounters: My Life with Nixon, Marcuse, and Other
Friends and Teachers.