The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern by Victor Davis Hanson Read Free Book Online Page A

attacked Athens in spring 431, Thucydides says, because of a “fear” of growing Athenian power—and apparently without a desire to annex Attic farmland, or a detailed plan to confiscate the rich Athenian silver mines at Laurium, or a plot to raise bullion by enslaving and selling off the population.
    We of the present do not quite understand this idea of simple “fear” causing wars. Indeed, we of the post-Marxist age of materialism, wedded as we are to the supremacy of reason, often search in vain for a magic oil field or strategic concession that would explain the inexplicable wars in Vietnam or Iraq. We insist that there is a shady pipeline that must “really” account for the intervention in an otherwise impoverished Afghanistan, and that some sort of offshore treasure near the Falklands Islands made the desolate atoll of some strategic or economic value to the British navy. In truth, Greek catalysts like anger, pride, honor, fear, and perceived self-interest often better explain the desire to wage such conflicts, big and small. When asked why one-billion-person-strong China would consider invading much smaller but similarly communist Vietnam—and to the benefit the genocidal regime in Cambodia—Chinese paramount leader Deng Xiaoping matter-of-factly said to his American hosts in January 1979, “It’s time to smack the bottom of unruly little children.”
    According to the canons of such self-acknowledged Hellenic cynicism, the Japanese and Germans in 1941 were not starving, or short of land, or unable to acquire strategic materials on the open market. Hitler received far more strategic materials through purchase from a compliant Stalin before June 1941 than he was ever as able to extract through violence from an occupied and bitterly hostile Soviet Union. Rather they were proud peoples, stung by past slights and perceived grievances, who wanted deference from those whom they deemed inferior and weak. Both countries, after all, now seem nonthreatening, and content enough with larger populations and smaller territories in peacetime than they did in 1939 on the eve of the Second World War. Both have consensual governments as well, which apparently understand the bitter wages of attacking neighbors in wars of aggrandizement.
    Does China, with trillions of dollars in foreign reserves, really need the few extra million Taiwanese as a part of its citizenry, or the rather mountainous terrain of the island of Formosa to add to its agricultural potential? Is the allure of blackmail money—or fear and a distorted sense of honor—what makes a bankrupt North Korea, whose people are often reduced to eating grass, serially threaten to annihilate South Korea, Japan, and the United States with expensive nuclear missiles? Much of the justification for the Russian invasion of Georgia in August 2008 transcended worry about Russian speakers in Georgian-controlled South Ossetia and instead seemed to focus on Russian “dignity” and “honor”—especially the sense of exasperation that a once tiny republic of the former Soviet Union now had the audacity to consider itself an equal to, and rival of, Mother Russia herself.
    To a student of classics who gleans from a Thucydides or a Plato some notion of war, the present crisis that grew out of September 11, I think, might be interpreted in reductive fashion: The United States, being a strong and wealthy society, and with unrivaled global influence, invites envy. The success of its restless culture of freedom, constitutional democracy, self-critique, secular rationalism, and open markets provokes the resentment of both weaker and less-secure theocracy and autocracy alike. Who we are, how we think, and the manner in which we act, ipsis factis, are considered obnoxious, dangerous, and unpalatable to many fundamentalist Muslims around the globe, who endure manifestations of our power and influence daily, from DVDs in Kabul to text-messaging ads in Yemen.
    In emblematic fashion,