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Respected classical historian reduced to classical name-dropper
(Note: this thread includes an exchange between Paul Mulshine and me on the propriety of the phrase “chicken-hawk.”)
Victor Hanson writes at the Corner:
Yet now, rather than pursuing leads the last few weeks about the swirling rumors concerning Blago, the media continues to discourse on their Constitutional frustration that President-elect Obama simply could not assume power right now! To outsiders, they all seem eager to audition for parts in a Sophoclean tragedy of their own making.
Excuse me for my mental slowness, but what is Hanson talking about? What does he mean in this context by a Sophoclean tragedy? A young woman destroyed by her uncontrolled fury at her mother’s murder of her father? A woman sacrificing her life by resisting her king and uncle over a matter of principle? A great hero driven to madness and self-destruction because he was denied the honor that was his due? A man, having been told that he’s going to kill his father and marry his mother, and trying to avoid this fate, fleeing his home and proceeding to kill a man old enough to be his father and marry a woman old enough to be his mother, and then, when he finds out that he has killed his father and married his mother, putting his eyes out so that he won’t have to look on the world? What could there possibly be of a Sophoclean nature about the media’s over-eagerness for Barack Obama to be president? Hanson doesn’t give his readers any clue. Does he think his readers are so smart that they’ll pick up on his deep meaning (whatever it is) without his having to spell it out? Or, more likely, does he himself have not the foggiest idea what he means? Or, more cynically, relying on the awe that the moron “conservatives” feel toward him as a great classical historian, did he think he would just drop that little phrase about Sophoclean tragedy into his post and his readers would coo like pigeons and be so impressed by his great learning, and so impressed by themselves for reading him?
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Paul Mulshine writes:
I like to call Hanson the Banana Slug Chicken Hawk. He did his undergrad work at UC Santa Cruz, the hippie capital of the UC system whose mascot is the banana slug. And then, with no background in the military whatsoever, he has styled himself as an expert on modern warfare, based solely on his expertise in the Peloponnesian War. As someone else pointed out long ago, back then there was no such thing as counterinsurgency, so it has no relevance whatsoever to the modern era. I got much more useful knowledge about modern warfare covering the three Central American wars of the 1980s, where I met many a Santa Cruz student helping the Communists control Nicaragua. And his whining about the media is particularly moronic. It’s a free country. Why doesn’t this clown start his own newspaper? And he got everything wrong about Iraq. Here’s something I compiled on that. Pay close attention to the line about people not fighting well for fascists. Wasn’t the Wehrmacht a fairly impressive fighting force? The GIs fighting them sure thought so. If recent history teaches us anything, it’s that people fight extremely well indeed for fascists. This guy is living in a fantasy world.
This is from an article in a Fresno paper about what this moron predicted right after the invasion:
He predicted the war would last three or four weeks, and he termed the Iraqis’ guerrilla-style warfare a “nuisance” that won’t bog down the military.
“For a guerrilla war to be successful, the invading power should be odious and the defenders have a cause the people can believe in,” Hanson said. “But in this case, we offer freedom and [Saddam] offers slavery.”
Then there was this pre-war comment:
And conservative commentator Victor Davis Hansen argued the other day that America’s military might “will win far more allies than sitting through yet another sanctimonious United Nations debate.”
Where are those allies? I guess the war guru of UC Santa Cruz got that wrong, too.
Here’s another one excerpt from a pre-war article:
Instead, Hanson, who supports the war, estimates that the civilian deaths will be in the hundreds or low thousands. It’s a number he extrapolates from other recent wars. Would-be prognosticators, he says, “have a duty as enlightened people to look at the last engagements—Gulf War I, Panama, Grenada, Belgrade and the Taliban. If they looked at those engagements, they could come up with anywhere from 200 to 3,500 casualties on an average.” His estimation is founded in part on an expectation of Iraqi military passivity: “Based on what I saw in Panama and the first Gulf War and Serbia, there’s a pattern. People don’t fight very well for fascists.”
Meanwhile, he notes that Saddam has butchered hundreds of thousands of his own people, driven 4 million into exile, and tortured countless others. Thus, for him, the math is easy. “If you ask, ‘Do you really want to free Iraq at the price of 500,000 dead?’ people will say, ‘Of course not.’ If you ask, ‘Do you want to free Iraq at the price of 2000 or 3,000?’ more people would say yes.”
LA replies:
I respectfully object to Mr. Mulshine’s use of the anti-war right phrase “chicken-hawk,” as it is a pure ad hominem term devoid of objective meaning.
Do the people who freely use this phrase against the neocons mean that only people who are military veterans have a right to an opinion on any given war that America might fight? No. Do they mean that they themselves would be “chicken hawks” if they happened to believe that a particular war was necessary, and if they had not served in the military? No. What, then, do they mean by “chicken hawk”? They don’t mean anything by it. It is simply an expression of belittling contempt for people who happen to favor a particular war which the people who are wielding the phrase oppose.
Paul Mulshine replies:
I would disagree in the sense that those who engage in pure analysis do not deserve the term, but those who engage in the sort of “ain’t war just wonderful?” rhetoric of Hanson do. Like a lot of guys, I like to stay up late with a beer and watch the Military Channel, but it’s important to not let that spirit enter into one’s writing. But technically he wasn’t a banana slug. They adopted the name after he left Santa Cruz. My nephew, who placed baseball for UCSC, was in fact a proud banana slug.
LA replies:
It is misstating the issue to describe it as a choice between the extremes of engaging in “pure analysis” and engaging in “ain’t war just wonderful” rhetoric.
Let’s say the United States is attacked by an Islamic terrorist group headquartered in Afghanistan. The government intends to invade this country, overthrow its government, and destroy the terrorist group. Some people support this policy, others oppose it.
Are the people who support this invasion, if they are not military veterans, “chicken-hawks”?
If your answer is yes, then what you’re saying is either (1) that non-military veterans are obligated to oppose all possible wars; or, since that is absurd, (2) that only military veterans have a right to an opinion on whether the U.S. should fight any particular war. That’s also unsustainable, and I doubt that that is your position.
What then is the logic by which you label as “chicken-hawks” supporters of a war that you don’t support? There is no logic. It is pure ad hominem. This is proven by the fact that if there were a war that you supported, you would NOT call non-veteran supporters of that war chicken-hawks. You would call them people who are taking the right position.
So “chicken-hawks” has no meaning and no objective content. It is a smear, used to put down people you disagree with on a particular issue.
Now let’s say that you call chicken hawks only those who are really gung-ho about this war. Then what about people who are not gung-ho, but support this war, and argue affirmatively for it? Where are people supposed to see the distinction? When people hear the word “chicken-hawk,” they’re going to take it to mean anyone who vocally supports this war who is not a veteran. So the distinction breaks down between “ordinary” supporters of the war and “gung-ho” supporters of the war.
And what about veterans who are gung-ho, and say “ain’t war grand?” Are they cool, because they’re veterans?
My point is that the rightness or wrongness of a position must be evaluated based on its own merits, not on the biography of the person whose position you are discussing.
Finally, as I’ve said many times, if the anti-war right has focused in a responsible way on the arguments against the invasion of Iraq instead of smearing the neocons for supporting it, there might have been a real debate in this country before the war took place, and perhaps some terrible mistakes might have been avoided.
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Decemer 17
Roland D. writes:
You write:
“[I]f the anti-war right has focused in a responsible way on the arguments against the invasion of Iraq instead of smearing the neocons for supporting it, there might have been a real debate in this country before the war took place, and perhaps some terrible mistakes might have been avoided.”
There was a lot of reasoned argument against the Iraq War, but David Frum and his friends at the National Review decided to denigrate those making the arguments (including insulting Stephen Tonsor) and made the statement “we turn our backs on you” in the pages of the National Review:
Given that NR is considered the house organ of respectable mainstream conservatism, that kind of effectively ended further debate in arenas viewed as having at least marginal importance to the neocon imperium, even though every single issue which has come up in the postwar reconstruction effort was anticipated and warned against by us “unpatriotic conservatives.”
LA replies:
You’re missing the fact of the actual anti-Americanism of the anti-war right that Frum brought out in his article, in the part of his article that I said at the time I agreed with, while I said that other parts of his article were a vicious lie. (Here is the VFR discussion about the Frum article, and here is my comment quoting the parts of the article I said agreed with.) It was because of the anti-war right’s demonstrated anti-Americanism that Frum said, “we turn our backs on you,” not because they had rational disagreement with the war. The fact that you seriously believe that Frum would have said, “We turn our backs on the antiwar right” merely because they had stated rational disagreements with the war, shows how out of touch with reality you are. It’s exactly like Israel-haters who innocently proclaim, “We’re being called anti-Semites merely for criticizing Israel,” when in reality they are called anti-Semites for siding with Israel’s enemies in a hate campaign against Israel and a total assault on its right to exist. (That was an analogy to show a certain type of fallacy; I was not saying that you are anti-Semitic or an Israel hater.)
I have no hope of persuading you of this, because the anti-war right—exactly like a minority victim group—no matter how outrageously its members behave, has an indefeasable sense of its own innocence and victimhood.
Roland D. replies:
You wrote:
“You’re missing the fact of the actual anti-Americanism of the anti- war right that Frum brought out in his article, in the part of his article that I said at the time I agreed with and which I linked in the current post. THAT’s why Frum said, we turn our back on you, not because they disagreed with the war.”
Sometimes, I wish I had Frum’s kind of certainty, to so roundly condemn men who have accomplished far more in their lives than he, who are more serious thinkers than he.
Other times, I’m glad I’m not so arrogant.
I know some of these men, like Dr. Jerry Pournelle—anyone who considers Dr. Pournelle to be anti-American is, quite simply, mad.
Frum got his war, and what, precisely, did we get? What, precisely, did the Iraqi people get?
Unbelievably, they were better off under Saddam Hussein than they are now, by and large; while we ended up with putting inexperienced kids in positions of authority they had no place filling, leading to stains on our honor like Abu Ghraib (which, incidentally, lost us the moral high ground when it comes to treatment of POWs forever; American soldiers no longer have even the faintest chance of expecting fair quarter, as a result).
You wrote:
“I have no hope of persuading you of this, because the anti-war right—exactly like a minority victim group—no matter how outrageously its members behave, has an indefeasable sense of its own innocence and victimhood.”
You can’t persuade me of this because I foresaw *every single issue* which has come up during the reconstruction phase, before we ever went to war. I opposed this war because I thought it was not in the national security interests of the United States; unfortunately, I was proven right.
Here’s something I wrote on the subject five years ago, while the initial flush of victory had yet to wear off:
and something else.
I’m a nobody; I’m not a public intellectual, nor a published writer. I didn’t attend university, or even finish high school. But I knew that the Mesopotamian Expedition was going to end up a huge drag on the United States at a time when we needed it least—when we needed to finish the job in Afghanistan, and work on disentangling ourselves from the Middle East by way of working towards energy independence.
And, no—I don’t consider myself innocent, or a victim. I just consider myself to be an ordinary citizen who, despite his own lack of impressive qualifications or special knowledge, knew enough about history and culture, and human nature, and the general incompetence of the U.S. government to know that invading Iraq was a Very Bad Idea.
We have spent a trillion dollars, and yet the Taliban still control Afghanistan. It is my belief that Osama bin Laden died at Tora Bora in 2001, and yet, we couldn’t do something as simple as definitively kill or capture this one man, in part because of the enormous distraction of the Iraq War.
LA replies:
All of this apart from your initial point that I was replying to. I’m not talking about the pros and cons of the war. You don’t have to persuade me that the Bush/neocon democratization policy has been wrong. I was replying to the issue of Frum’s saying, ‘we turn our back on you.” See my linked comment in the 2003 thread.
LA continues:
Mr. D.,
I want to show you, point by point, where you are making invalid arguments.
You write:
“Sometimes, I wish I had Frum’s kind of certainty, to so roundly condemn men who have accomplished far more in their lives than he, who are more serious thinkers than he.”
This is what is called an ad hominem argument, an argument against the man, rather than against what he’s saying. The issue is not Frum’s character and accomplishments (argumentum ad hominem); the issue is what Frum said in his article, whether it’s true or false. When you say that Frum is wrong because the men he’s criticizing are better men than he, you are showing a failure to engage in valid argument. You are suggesting that you oppose Frum’s position because you don’t like him as a person. Making such an argument disqualifies a person as a participant in a serious discussion.
You write:
“I know some of these men, like Dr. Jerry Pournelle—anyone who considers Dr. Pournelle to be anti-American is, quite simply, mad.”
I don’t think that Frum or I mentioned Pournelle. Frum gave specific examples with quotations of the anti-Americanism of the antiwar right. You need to respond to those specific points, not complain about the fact that not all members of the anti-war right are anti-American.
You write:
“Frum got his war, and what, precisely, did we get? What, precisely, did the Iraqi people get?
“Unbelievably, they were better off under Saddam Hussein than they are now, by and large; while we ended up with putting inexperienced kids in positions of authority they had no place filling, leading to stains on our honor like Abu Ghraib (which, incidentally, lost us the moral high ground when it comes to treatment of POWs forever; American soldiers no longer have even the faintest chance of expecting fair quarter, as a result).”
This is irrelevant to the issue at hand. The issue was Frum’s reason for saying, “We turn our back on you.” The issue is not whether Frum was right or wrong on the war.
You write:
“You can’t persuade me of this because I foresaw *every single issue* which has come up during the reconstruction phase, before we ever went to war. I opposed this war because I thought it was not in the national security interests of the United States; unfortunately, I was proven right.”
This is a complete non-sequitur, an argument that doesn’t follow from what was previously said. I was not trying to persuade you on the rightness of the war. I was trying to persuade you that the anti-war right deservedly marginalized itself by its anti-Americanism.
The point is, in a discussion, to stay with the issue at hand, not to change the subject when the argument is not going well for you.
Best regards,
Lawrence Auster
Roland replies:
“This is what is called an ad hominem argument, an argument against the man, rather than against what he’s saying.”
My argument is against Frum’s ad hominem argument, sorry for being unclear about that. My point is that a lightweight like Frum has no standing to attack the character of his intellectual betters.
“The issue is not Frum’s character and accomplishments (argumentum ad hominem); the issue is what Frum said in his article, whether it’s true or false.”
This is where we disagree. The whole tone of Frum’s article, his rudeness to Stephen Tonsor, et. al., are merely adjuncts to *his* unwillingness to seriously engage with those of us in the anti-war Right.
“When you say that Frum is wrong because the men he’s criticizing are better men than he, you are showing a failure to engage in valid argument. You are suggesting that you oppose Frum’s position because you don’t like him as a person. Making such an argument disqualifies a person as a participant in a serious discussion.”
I had no opinion of David Frum until he started making ad hominem arguments and character slurs against people with serious intellectual credentials and serious arguments against the war.
I have friends today who were in favor of the war (fewer in number, these days, but some of them still hold this position). I don’t think less of them as people because we disagree, because they treated my arguments and those of others opposed to the war seriously, even though they disagreed with us.
Frum doesn’t merit that distinction; quite the opposite.
“I don’t think that Frum or I mentioned Pournelle. Frum gave specific examples with quotations of the anti-Americanism of the antiwar right. You need to respond to those specific points, not complain about the fact that not all members of the anti-war right are anti- American.”
Frum tarred all of us with the same brush, ad hominem.
LA replies:
“My argument is against Frum’s ad hominem argument, sorry for being unclear about that. My point is that a lightweight like Frum has no standing to attack the character of his intellectual betters.”
I’ll say this once more, and that will be enough. The issue is not whether Frum is objectionable. I frequently consider him objectionable, and certainly considered him so in much of what he said in that 2003 article. And by the way he smeared me (in a private e-mail exchange) with the same brush with which he smeared others.
But that was not my point in the blog entry to which you are objecting. My point was that the antiwar right engaged in anti-American statements that deservedly marginalized it.
And that statement is true, even if David Frum is the most objectionable person on earth.
LA to Roland:
I’ve posted your [earlier] comment, and my reply.
Roland replies:
Thanks much—even when I disagree with you, I greatly respect your intellectual rigor, honesty, and willingness to engage in serious discussion, even with those with whom you disagree. It’s a trait far too rare, these days.
LA replies:
That’s very generous of you, given that I was being rather tough on you in that exchange.
Roland replies:
I recognize “instructive conflict” when I see it, and appreciate the motives of its practicioner even when I disagree with his premise.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 16, 2008 10:42 AM | Send
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