History and War: An Interview with Victor Davis Hanson

John Hawkins  Hawkins:" America's media seems at times to be ambivalent, even to the point of being hostile toward our military and efforts to win the war on terrorism. Can you talk about other times in history that's happened and what the results of it have been?"

Hanson: "I think if we were to go back to England and France between 1920 and take an arbitrary date — 1936 — it was politically incorrect to evoke Verdun. The Battle of Verdun was not mentioned in the school system. By the same token, those who wanted to re-arm in Britain were accused of trying to evoke these ghosts of the Somme. The media wanted to condition the British public to the notion that any other war would end in the nightmare of the trenches. So, it was much better to use the arts of appeasement — which wasn't a dirty word. It was a positive word that meant you were willing to avoid a blood bath in the trenches. The result of that, of course, was the serial aggrandizement of Germany from 1936 to 1939."