VDH: Go forth and read, my friends....

[ARCHIVED THREAD] - VDH: Go forth and read, my friends....

Posted: 12/30/2003 8:37:21 AM EDT

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON

www.nationalreview.com/hanson/hanson200312300000.asp

There is something terribly wrong, something terribly amoral with the Western intelligentsia, most prominently in academia, the media, and politics. We don’t need Osama bin Laden’s preschool jabbering about “the weak horse” to be worried about the causes of this Western disease: thousands of the richest, most leisured people in the history of civilization have become self-absorbed, ungracious, and completely divorced from the natural world — the age-old horrific realities of dearth, plague, hunger, rapine, or conquest.

Indeed, it is even worse than that: a Paul Krugman or French barrister neither knows anything of how life is lived beyond his artificial cocoon nor of the rather different men and women whose unacknowledged work in the shadows ensures his own bounty in such a pampered landscape — toil that allows our anointed to rage at those purportedly culpable for allowing the world to function differently from an Ivy League lounge or the newsroom of the New York Times. Neither knows what it is like to be in a village gassed by Saddam Hussein or how hard it is to go across the world to Tikrit and chain such a monster.

Our Western intellectuals are sheltered orchids who are naïve about the world beyond their upscale hothouses. The Western disease of deductive fury at everything the West does provides a sort of psychological relief (without costs) for apparent guilt over privileged circumstances. It is such a strange mixture of faux-populism and aristocratic snobbery. They believe only a blessed few such as themselves have the requisite education or breeding to understand the “real” world of Western pathologies and its victims.

Holy shit, my friends. The intellectual firepower this guy brings to bear is humbling. He "gets it" and is today's required reading.

Posted: 12/30/2003 9:12:03 AM EDT

[#1]

No shit. VDH is like the Yoda of conservative intellectuals. Dick Cheney loves the guy, has dinner with him every time he's in Washington.

VDH observed that European and American intellectuals, given the choice between a West led by the United States or having no West at all, usually would prefer the latter. That's how deep anti-Americanism runs.

[ARCHIVED THREAD] - VDH: Go forth and read, my friends....

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