The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern QUOTES

1 " Victory may now require a level of force deemed objectionable by civilized peoples, meaning that some, for justifiable reasons, may be reluctant to pursue it. But victory has not become an ossified concept altogether. "

― Victor Davis Hanson , The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern

2 " But wars—or the threat of war—at least put an end to American chattel slavery, Nazism, Fascism, Japanese militarism, and Soviet Communism. It is hard to think of any democracy—Afghan, American, Athenian, contemporary German, Iraqi, Italian, Japanese, ancient Theban—that was not an outcome of armed struggle and war. "

― Victor Davis Hanson , The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern

3 " if Westerners deem themselves too smart, too moral, or too soft to stop aggressors in this complex nuclear age, then—as Socrates and Aristotle alike remind us—they can indeed become real accomplices to evil through inaction. "

― Victor Davis Hanson , The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern

4 " Athens’s disastrous 415 B.C. expedition against Sicily, the largest democracy in the Greek world, may not prefigure our war in Iraq. (A hypothetical parallel to democratic Athens’s preemptive attack on the neutral, distant, far larger, and equally democratic Syracuse in the midst of an ongoing though dormant war with Sparta would be America’s dropping its struggle with al-Qaeda to invade India). "

― Victor Davis Hanson , The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern

5 " The United States was born through war, reunited by war, and saved from destruction by war. No future generation, however comfortable and affluent, can escape that terrible knowledge. Our freedom is not entirely our own; in some sense it is mortgaged from those who paid the ultimate price for its continuance. My own life of security, freedom, opportunity, and relative affluence certainly has been made possible because a grandfather fought and was gassed in the Argonne; an uncle in the Marines died trying to stop Japanese imperialism on Okinawa; a cousin in the Army lost his life at twenty-two trying to stop Hitler in France; and my father in the Army Air Force flew forty times over Japan hoping to end the idea of the expansive Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere. I have spent some time these past decades trying to learn where, how, and why they and their generations fought as they did—and what our own obligations are to acknowledge their sacrifices. "

― Victor Davis Hanson , The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern

6 " The Price of Neglect A PUBLIC THAT’S illiterate about the conflicts of the past can easily find itself confused during wartime. Without standards of historical comparison, people prove ill-equipped to make informed judgments when the dogs of war are unleashed. Neither U.S. politicians nor most citizens seem to recall the incompetence and terrible decisions that, in December 1777, December 1941, and November 1950, led to massive American casualties and, for a time, public despair. "

― Victor Davis Hanson , The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern

7 " Military history teaches us, contrary to popular belief, that wars are not necessarily the most costly of human calamities. The allied coalition lost few lives in getting Saddam out of Kuwait during the Gulf War of 1991, yet doing nothing in Rwanda allowed savage gangs and militias to murder hundreds of thousands with impunity. Bill Clinton stopped a Balkan holocaust through air strikes, without sacrificing American soldiers. His supporters argued, with some merit, that the collateral damage from the NATO bombing of Belgrade resulted in far fewer innocents killed, in such a “terrible arithmetic,” than if the Serbian death squads had been allowed to continue their unchecked cleansing of Islamic communities. "

― Victor Davis Hanson , The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern

8 " When the successful military action against Saddam Hussein ended in April 2003, more than 70 percent of the American people backed the invasion of Iraq, with politicians and pundits alike elbowing each other aside to take credit for their prescient support. "

― Victor Davis Hanson , The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern

9 " The United States is often criticized as interventionist, but in fact America’s traditional propensity has been more isolationist—willing to act forcefully in the world when absolutely necessary, but preferring to be unencumbered. "

― Victor Davis Hanson , The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern

10 " it was the horror of the two world wars—Verdun, the Somme, Hiroshima—that led to our own era’s questioning of the tragic view of war. Such a reaction was certainly true and understandable in a Europe that nearly destroyed itself in two devastating industrial wars within a roughly twenty-year period. Yet out of such numbing losses we may have missed the lesson of the horror. The calamity of sixty million dead was not just because nationalistic Westerners went to war in an industrial age of weaponry of mass annihilation, but rather because the liberal democracies were unwilling to make moderate sacrifices to keep the peace well before 1914 and 1939—when real resolve could have stopped Prussian militarism, and then Nazism without millions of the blameless perishing. "

― Victor Davis Hanson , The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern

11 " To assert that military history suggested that wars broke out because bad men, in fear or in pride, sought material advantage or status, or because sometimes good but naive men had done too little to deter them, was understandably seen as antithetical to a more enlightened understanding of human nature. "

― Victor Davis Hanson , The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern

12 " Military history reminds us that those who died on behalf of democratic freedom to stop totalitarian killing were a different sort than totalitarians who died fighting against it to perpetuate killing. The sacrifice of the former meant that generations yet born might have a greater likelihood of opportunity, security, and freedom; the latter fought for a cause that would have increased the suffering of future generations. "

― Victor Davis Hanson , The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern

13 " General George Patton and others lamented that the Second World War had broken out in 1939 over saving the free peoples of Eastern Europe from totalitarianism—only to end, through the broken 1945 Yalta accords, ensuring their enslavement by an erstwhile Soviet ally whose military we had supplied lavishly. "

― Victor Davis Hanson , The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern

14 " Democratic citizenship requires knowledge of war—and now, in the age of weapons of mass annihilation, more than ever. "

― Victor Davis Hanson , The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern

15 " IT IS HARD to think of many democracies that were not born in some manner out of war, violence, or coercion—beginning with the first example of Cleisthenic Athens in 507 B.C., and including our own revolution in 1776. The best examples are those of the twentieth century, when many of the most successful present-day constitutional governments were epiphenomena of war, imposed by the victors or coalition partners, as we have seen in the cases of Germany, Japan, Italy, South Korea, and more recently Grenada, Liberia, Panama, Serbia—and Afghanistan and Iraq. "

― Victor Davis Hanson , The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern

16 " We forget that even worse choices than those have confronted us in the past—like sending billions of dollars of aid to Joseph Stalin to stop Adolf Hitler, just a few years after the former had slaughtered or starved to death twenty million Soviets, invaded hapless Finland, carved up Poland with Hitler, and sent strategic materials daily to the Third Reich as it firebombed London. "

― Victor Davis Hanson , The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern

17 " Military history is just as often the tangential story of an appeasement that fails to head off warmongering as it is of an aggressive chest-thumping that prompts conflict. The destructive military careers of Alexander the Great, Caesar, Napoleon, and Hitler all would have ended earlier had any of their numerous enemies united when the odds favored them, had any listened to a Demosthenes, a Cato the Younger, or a Churchill. "

― Victor Davis Hanson , The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern

18 " Apologizing for our past sins may reveal character and for a time lessen anti-Americanism abroad, but if it is done without acknowledging that the sins of America are the sins of mankind, and that our remedies are so often exceptional, then it only earns transitory applause—and a more lasting contempt that we ourselves do not believe in the values we profess. "

― Victor Davis Hanson , The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern

19 " In emblematic fashion, America stands as a protector of the global system of market capitalism and constitutional government, and of the often reckless modernist culture that threatens so much of tribal and indigenous custom and protocols. That we are therefore often to be hated by the authoritarian, the statist, and the tribalist—and periodically to be challenged by those who want to diminish our power, riches, or influence—is regrettable but nevertheless conceded. "

― Victor Davis Hanson , The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern

20 " Yet it is hard to find many wars that have resulted from miscommunications or misunderstandings. Far more often they break out because of malevolent intent and the absence of deterrence, or because a prior war ended without a clear resolution or without settling disagreements—in a manner of Rome’s first two wars with Carthage. Again, Margaret Atwood was empirical when she wrote in her poem, “Wars happen because the ones who start them / think they can win. "

― Victor Davis Hanson , The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern