Victor Davis Hanson

[Doc]

On the Vietnam war

https://www.prageru.com/courses/history ... ietnam-war

[lzzrdgrrl]

I like how VDH acknowledged at the end of the video the inevitable flow and ebb of empires. This isn't strange to him as a historian though it seems to miss the plank for just about everyone in American foreign policy.......'>........

Korea was successful to the extent nation building wasn't an issue. The biggest affront of the war, at least to the American public, is that no one saw an existential threat to the Republic that justified a general draft. Opposing the Left didn't seem sufficient reason to line up at the recruiting station - at least the second hand impression I got.........

[Doc]

I like how VDH acknowledged at the end of the video the inevitable flow and ebb of empires. This isn't strange to him as a historian though it seems to miss the plank for just about everyone in American foreign policy.......'>........

Korea was successful to the extent nation building wasn't an issue. The biggest affront of the war, at least to the American public, is that no one saw an existential threat to the Republic that justified a general draft. Opposing the Left didn't seem sufficient reason to line up at the recruiting station - at least the second hand impression I got.........

Korea was the forgotten war as so many have said. During Vietnam many signed up even though there was not that much of a recruiting effort.

[lzzrdgrrl]

There's that..... a sufficient recruiting effort would've raised sufficient manpower for the cause, but there was this "citizen army vs. professional army" debate going on that I thought was beyond stupid. Global hegemons have standing army, that's a basic requirement......

[Apollonius]

The silliest generation - Victor Davis Hanson, 22 August 2017
http://victorhanson.com/wordpress/the-s ... eneration/

... Apparently, proof our generation’s genius is that no one in the past had a clue how to build an iPhone or do a Google search—or even make a good Starbucks Teavana shaken pineapple black tea infusion. Yet given our own present lack of humility and meager accomplishments, we have combined arrogance with ignorance to become the smuggest generation in memory. What good is the high-tech acceleration in delivering information if there is now precious little learning to be accelerated? Google is an impressive pump, but if there is no real water, what is the point of delivering nothing faster?

[...]

Does a student who demands pulverizing a Confederate statue know for sure whether a General James Longstreet was an abject racist or whether his brave service for an ignoble cause either nullified his later noble postbellum career—or made him a worse figure than an unrepentant racist Woodrow Wilson, who used the power of the federal government to stymie integration of the civil service and military for decades? Or do individuals from our past now just blur into cardboard cutouts to fit the purposes of present ideological activism? How can our generation so hate the past when it is so often ignorant of it?

I once gave a lecture on a local college campus three weeks after 9/11. Dozens of shouting students, egged on by their professor, screamed that the KKK had toppled the twin towers and demanded that I deny it. I said I would discuss it, if just one of 300 students in the hall either could name the founding racist of the KKK or what the triple-K acronym meant. None could; but all yelled louder.