Victor Davis Hanson strikes again

Shrewsbury writes:

Shrewsbury is really, really sick of reading about how the utterly contemptible “Baby Boom” generation has mucked up the nearly perfect world bequeathed to it by the magnificent “Greatest Generation.” I have no idea what the motive for this mythos is, and I hope I don’t even believe in anything so retarded as categorizing people by generation;—what, do homo sapiens breed once every 17 years like cicadas?—but as long as we’re playing this game, can we deal with a few facts for once? Vietnam. Who fought it? Who threw it away? More than 50,000 “baby boomers” died in that swamp, while the D.C. pols and military brass of the “Greatest Generation” conducted the war like retards playing Stratego, and the “Greatest Generation” “journalists” feigned that the Tet Offensive, heroically crushed by sheer American grit, was a disastrous defeat. So who lost that war—or rather, who threw away the victory in that war? Was that great mustachioed vacuum Walter Krankheit, er, Cronkite a “boomer?” Excuse me, maybe I just hallucinated that nearly all the cannon fodder were born after 1944. If I didn’t, why don’t we ever hear about them when we’re being instructed how utterly worthless “boomers” are? (Also, by the way, one can’t help noticing that although 50,000 “boomers” died in ‘Nam, the people who are now writing about and despising them, didn’t.) Who invented the modern disease of left-liberalism? Not a single “boomer” was eligible to vote in the 1964 election when the flagitious “LBJ” squashed the noble Goldwater in the largest landslide in history. And prithee, what did “boomers” have to do with the nation-busting 1965 Immigration Act, when the oldest of them was 20 years of age? Who was it who decided to replace the historic population of the United States with hordes of illiterate Third Worlders—even as they sent their sons off to be slaughtered in an unsupported war? It was the GG which did all this, which wrecked the country, which took the greatest patrimony that any generation had ever inherited and did everything it could to piss it away; it was the GG which enthroned the cankered king Liberalism who henceforth would sap away the nation’s lifeblood. Why did they do it? I don’t know the reason. Maybe the problem was in part that the best half-million men of the GG died in World War II, and what you had left was to some extent sort of the dregs, and dregs did what dregs do—muck everything up. I know not. But what cannot be disputed is that post WWII, the GG made a hash of nearly everything it touched, including their families—from whence the supremely repulsive spectacle of “The Sixties.” But then, as I say, I hope I don’t even believe in anything so retarded as categorizing people by generation.

LA replies:

Hanson is incapable of analyzing any political, cultural, or moral issue conceptually. For him, all bad politics comes down to negative “attitudes” that people have, and his columns basically consist of catalogs of these attitudes. My guess is that his focus on generations is an extension of his focus on attitudes; a generation is a collective attitude.

Further, that Hanson make the Greatest Generation (a term coined by the repulsive liberal and white-despiser Tom Brokaw) his standard of excellence shows how liberal and how derivative he is.

Of all the things that show the moronism of today’s “conservatives,” Hanson’s prestige and popularity among them may be the most telling.

LA continues:

Shrewsbury’s angle on this issue is entirely new to me and seems correct.

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Paul Mulshine writes:

Shrewsbury and I think alike. Here’s a column I did in ‘01 on the same subject.By the way, the H.R. McMaster I cite later went on to become the leading exponent of intelligent counterinsurgency as an officer in the Sunni section of Iraq. He had studied the flawed approach of the so-called Greatest Generation in Vietnam and helped avoid a repetition in Iraq. And he is of course a baby-boomer.

LBJ and the greatest degeneration
By PAUL MULSHINE
STAR-LEDGER STAFF
May 6, 2001

This flap over Bob Kerrey’s experiences in Vietnam has raised the question of whether we as a nation need to once again rehash the Vietnam War.

We do. And this time we need to put the blame where it belongs: On the people Tom Brokaw labeled the Greatest Generation.

Brokaw’s book about the generation of Americans who grew up during World War II conveniently overlooked a major flaw in that generation’s way of looking at the world: They believed government could be trusted. Perhaps that was true when Franklin Roosevelt was running things, but by the time the crucial decisions about Vietnam had to be made, a distinctly inferior type of politician was loose on the land. Unfortunately, the voters of the greatest generation endorsed him in a landslide.

In the 1964 presidential election, the Republican candidate was Barry Goldwater, an Arizonan who happened to be obsessed with the idea of liberty. He therefore hated Roosevelt’s New Deal, which he saw as a surrender of liberty to the government in return for security.

This alone would have doomed him in the presidential race, but he also made the mistake of telling the truth about Vietnam. As an Air Force Reserve pilot, Goldwater was in touch with the military’s view of the Vietnam situation, which was that every war must be fought with the aim of quickly destroying the enemy’s will to fight. He told the voters that the only way to win was to declare war on North Vietnam and then fight that war in Hanoi, not in Saigon.

Democrat Lyndon Johnson painted Goldwater as a dangerous hawk. “We are not about to send American boys 9 or 10 thousand miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing,” he promised as he was planning to do just that (a pattern well documented in the excellent book “Dereliction of Duty” by H.R. McMaster).

Goldwater ran on principles. Johnson—like a certain later Democratic president from the same neck of the woods—ran on polls. When the Viet Cong blew up an American air base a few days before the election, he had Bill Moyers—yes, the same Bill Moyers who now drips compassion on public television—commission a poll to determine if he needed to bomb North Vietnam before Election Day. The pollsters said no. The bombs didn’t drop.

Six months after his election the peace candidate was sending ground troops into Vietnam. That was bad enough. Worse was that he personally instructed the Joint Chiefs of Staff, “I want to kill more Viet Cong.”

In other words, he was about to make the exact mistake Goldwater had warned against—fighting a guerrilla war on the guerrillas’ terms. In conventional war, the enemy is in uniform. But it is the nature of guerrilla war that the guerrillas pose as noncombatants. The inevitable result was what happened to that unfortunate village of Thanh Phong when Kerrey’s Raiders visited. Thanks to Johnson’s lack of leadership, the United States had pinned its hopes for victory on the absurd notion that America’s young men could be trained to go to a jungle land halfway around the world, sneak into hostile villages at night, instantly pick out the bad guys from the good guys, kill the bad guys and leave the good guys alive.

Contrast this with the way the members of the greatest generation fought their own war against an Asian opponent. They didn’t merely kill a few women and children in the heat of battle. They dropped nuclear bombs on whole cities.

Not that those bombings weren’t justified. But notice how the standard changed when a different generation’s hides were on the line. And notice how that generation attacked the Baby Boomers for daring to protest their idiotic leadership.

I bring all this up not to mock my elders but to point out the flaw in the political philosophy that led them to such massive mistakes. All of this could have been avoided if they had not ignored the lessons of the true greatest generation, the one that included Washington, Jefferson, Madison and Hamilton. Their writings, particularly the Federalist papers, amount to explicit warnings against concentrating government power in the hands of people like Lyndon Johnson.

The liberals in the media have done a wonderful job of reconstructing history so that Vietnam was a failure of “the right wing.” But the failed strategy came from good liberal Democrats like Johnson and his pet efficiency expert, Robert MacNamara. It was the inevitable result of the World War II generation’s decision to build a huge central government that would be run by wise men. Building the government was easy, but the wise men turned out to be in short supply.

Paul Mulshine writes:

I think I first became a conservative when I reacted in the 1950s to a lot of the received notions of the adults around me. They all seemed to have internalized the socialism of the New Deal. I recall thinking that any intelligent person would be opposed to the draft just on principle even if he wanted to serve in the military. That of course was Barry Goldwater’s position in 1964. He proposed to eliminate the draft. Yet somehow he was perceived as the militarist while Johnson was the pacifist.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 16, 2008 12:48 PM | Send