Victor Davis Hanson – whose columns used to be a staple on another blog (but not any more) – cuts through the dogma, political correctness, and pseudo intellectual claptrap to speak truth to issues that too many people are afraid to confront. Immigration, Middle East, Iraq, Ivy League education, affirmative action etc. are all subjects where the accepted mantra should no longer go unchallenged. I particularly enjoyed his take down of the Middle East as being the most “important” crisis in the world.
by Victor Davis Hanson
There are a number of things we simply no longer talk about. The silence is partly due to intellectual laziness. Or maybe it is because of political correctness—or even attributable to ignorance and the absence of curiosity.
In no particular order, I list five propositions that simply have become taboo.
1). Illegal Immigration and California.
There are dozens of recent exposés on the California mess. The “I accuse” themes—all quite accurate—are well known.
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2) Iraq.
We are tired of Iraq and have Trotskyized it out of our existence, given the huge cost and 4,000 dead.
But consider: not a single America died in Iraq in December (38 murdered in Chicago during that period); three have been lost this month (24 murdered so far this month in Chicago).
Some random thoughts. The surge was a brilliant success.
A Harry Reid (“the war is lost”) or Barack Obama (out of Iraq by March 2008 and the surge “is not working”) have never subsequently suggested that they were wrong at a time when our troops desperately were trying against all odds to save the fragile country.
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3) Affirmative Action.
The concept was noble, but now antiquated and mostly absurd. It requires the logic of the Old Confederacy to determine racial purity among the intermarried citizenry. Jet-black Punjabis get no preferences. Light-skinned Mexican-Americans of the fourth-generation claim privilege. Poor whites from Tulare don’t rank. The children of black dentists do. I see very little logic here.
Asians? We both claim them as minorities, and yet we discriminate against them at the University of California admissions process on the basis of their own superior achievement.
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4) The Ivy League is a Naked Emperor.
By Ivy League I do not mean just Harvard, Princeton, and Yale, but the entire concept of high-priced elite schools like a Stanford, Duke, or Columbia as well. We know a BA from such institutions does not ipso facto any longer, as it once may well have, guarantee knowledge or competence. We know the race/class/gender craze has watered down the curriculum, and ensured therapy and empathy trump recall of facts and adherence to the inductive method.
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5) The “Middle East” is a Fraud
Why do we beat ourselves up over Israel and the Palestinians? Why not occupied Cyprus? Or the Kuriles? Or South Ossetia? Or the divided city of Nicosia? Is there a “Falklands Question”?
Why are not Germans blowing themselves up in Gdansk, the former East Prussia, the Alsace, or old Silesia to recover “lost” land?
Were there no Israeli-Arab wars before the “occupation” of 1967? Does anyone think that, should the West Bank simply take a 30-year break from the violence, emulate Western business and government, draw in Gulf capital, a few thousands acres here or there would then be still be relevant?
Tags: Affirmative Action, Illegal Immigration, Iraq, Middle East, Victor Davis Hanson
