Victor Davis Hanson: Europe Lost Two World Wars—And America Inherited Its Self-Hatred

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words” from Daily Signal senior contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to Victor Davis Hanson’s own YouTube channel to watch past episodes.

Sami Winc: “It seems to me that postmodernism or French philosophy instilled in my sons the notion of oppressed-oppressor. Rationality is a construct of the oppressor, etc. I have a son who is a socialist based on postmodernism. My son said it has been taught since grade school, with an emphasis on collectivism. It is my impression that the self-hatred of the West is a direct result of postmodernist philosophy. 

Where have I misinterpreted history?”  

Victor Davis Hanson: You haven’t. You haven’t. I’ve talked many times about the awful triad of postmodern critics and philosophers. Besides [Jean-Paul] Sartre, the three were [Jacques] Lacan, [Jacques] Derrida and Michel Foucault. He was the biggest booster of [Ayatollah] Khomeini, and he was very influential in French cultural life. 

And one of the reasons that France offered Khomeini a haven and allowed his cassettes to stir up trouble was not just because they thought, stupidly, that the socialist-Islamist alliance would be French-generated, and then, once Khomeini took over, the socialists would knock him off, and then they would invite the French in to have an oil concession, etc. 

But where did the postmodernists come from? I’m talking about not the symptoms but the causes. What caused people, especially in France and not Britain, and to a lesser degree in Germany? What was the prompt? And why didn’t the English? Why didn’t the Americans? 

We imported that. And yes, I was a visiting professor at Stanford University in ’91 and ’92, and the entire classics department that I had been trained at 15 years earlier had some of the best philologists in the world. 

They were Austrian, they were German, they were French, but mostly British. There were some Americans. And they taught us how to write in Latin and Greek. We had to be able to sight-read in Latin and Greek, archaeology, numismatics, epigraphy, all the associated papyrology. 

But what happened when this new group came in and said, “There are no facts. We’re going to study Foucault. We’re going to study Derrida. We’re going to see who’s the feminist hero and who’s the evil male in every Greek text”? 

That came from France, and it took over. And if you look at the dissertations in America in literature from 1985 to 2000, there are things in my field like the sexual ambiguity of the Dionysus cult in Asia Minor, or the transsexuality of this, or the construction of manhood, or the poetics of toxic masculinity in “The Iliad.” 

It’s all worthless. There were scholars in Germany from 1933 to ’45, and you can read their articles and some of their books, and they really canonized the Spartans, and they defended the helots, the lesser, and they used terms like Übermenschen and Untermenschen. 

And they said the nice things about Greece were that there was a militarily pure race, the Spartan. 

And basically, it was code that the Messenians and people like them were natural slaves, like Jews. Everything is discredited now. Nobody would ever quote any of that stuff. It was so bankrupt. It destroyed German scholarship for years. The same thing happened with the ’80s and ’90s, and now it’s starting to die out. 

And where did it come from? It came from the shame of defeat. So the first symptom was after World War I. There were almost a million French casualties at Verdun. When you take the whole campaign, it was almost a year long. And when it bled out Frenchmen, that prompted modernism. 

What is modernism? It means in art, what you see on the canvas, or what the painter or the sculptor—it’s not what the eye sees. 

It’s impressionistic. Sometimes it can be good, you know, like Renoir or Cézanne, but mostly it’s abstract and terrible. 

Or I say, “See Spot run,” and then I just break it up. “See. Spot. Run.” “See Spot run,” and break up the sentence, and that’s a poem. 

Or I won’t use the word for urination, but “urination Christ,” or you urinate on something to shock people. 

That is postmodern. So modernism destroyed classicism and traditionalism, and it came out of the shame and losses of World War I, originally in Germany and the French sacrifice. 

It got into postmodernism, started in the late ’40s and ’50s, Sartre and all. [Albert] Camus was—he turned on it. He didn’t want any of it. 

And my point is that it didn’t emerge in the United States. Our GIs came home triumphant. They went to school. The American economy exploded. 

What happened in France? The French army was the bulwark of Europe. If you read what [Winston] Churchill was saying, with the RAF and the British Navy and the bulwark of France, the 3 million-man army that had a higher participation per capita than Germany did at the time, which had better tanks than Germany and had some fighters that were better, all of it would stand like it did in World War I. 

It collapsed from May 10 to June 23. It crumbled, and it was occupied and humiliated, and France lost the war. 

And the worst part about it was the people who bailed them out and saved France were the British, who took in [Charles] de Gaulle and had a government in exile, and the hickey, white-trashy Americans. 

And they came over, and they liberated France, the British and—and then what happened? 

France was going to be still an imperial power, and they lost Southeast Asia, Vietnam, and they lost their African possessions, Chad and what—and then the crown jewel of the French Empire was Algeria. 

The pieds-noirs, they were brilliant French farmers and businesspeople. They had created a prosperous Algeria. You may have said that it would have been possible had they divided the country because they had about a 70% French population of about 1.5 million people. 

But no, de Gaulle said it’s not worth it, and he gave up Algeria. They quit the Algerian War, and not only did the pieds-noirs flee and abandon Algeria, but more importantly, over the next two or three or five years, about a million Algerians followed them into France. 

So my point being, when you combine the humiliation of losing the war so quickly and in such—you know, read Marc Bloch, “Strange Defeat.” Bloch tells you exactly why. 

When you’re in 1925 and you don’t want to talk about “They shall not pass,” and Verdun is not in the textbooks, or if you’re in Holland and you’re trying to rename “destroyer” so they don’t—the word for destroyer because it sounds too warlike. 

You can see that the people who won World War I did not want to fight World War II to save themselves, and the people who lost World War I, the Germans, really did. 

And then it spread in Germany because Germany was not just defeated in two wars, but in the second war, it was occupied and humiliated and dependent on the Americans. 

And so what does that do? It said, “There are no facts. It’s all socially constructed. There is no good, there is no bad, there’s no reality, there’s no such thing as classical art.” 

It’s to the degree that you have great literature or art because you have “standards,” and you can say that Michelangelo’s David is more beautiful than Victor making a clay figurine because it has perfect bodily proportions. 

That is just an elite, capitalist, white, male, Christian, arbitrary set of criteria, aesthetics. 

And who is to say that a person in the Amazon jungle who has representational art or impressionist art—in other words, he gets a clay figurine, he puts two eyes on it, and he makes it in five minutes—that’s just as good. 

You’re biased. That is what it is. 

Or novels. Why does a novel have to have a hero? Why does a novel have to have bad—why don’t you have an antihero? Why don’t—everybody is bad, or everything about the West is always going to be bad. 

And that reflects the humiliation in Europe of World War II, of destroying European culture within 21 years. 

The war to end all wars and the Versailles Treaty, 19 years later, you’ve got a war, 20 years later. And that’s the problem with postmodernism. 

So yes, the questioner is absolutely right. His son was nursed on postmodernism. 

How does that sophisticated literary and philosophical criticism filter down through K-12? 

Very easily. It goes into the school of education, and they tell you there is no good, there is no evil, there are no standards, and it’s all arbitrary. 

So if you have students from the inner city, and they don’t speak English very well, then you call it Black English. And you don’t think they speak well, but they don’t think you speak well because their grammar is just as important as yours. 

Or a teacher says —I can give you one example, and I’ll shut up. 

I was teaching a class in Sophocles, and we had a new education building at Cal State. And I won’t mention it, but the secretary didn’t like me very much because I got a grant to do research, and she took my grantee and hired her to help her do her research work. 

So finally, I would come in. I said, “You were supposed to search six texts in Greek. Well, you didn’t do it.” 

She goes—well, I’ll just make a name, Jane Doe. 

“Well, Jane Doe said that you don’t need me, so she …” 

And so I went to her and I said, “I had $8,000. I applied against 50 people. I won this grant from a foundation, and I’m just trying to have her help me write—to check my sources and things.” 

She goes, “I don’t care.” 

The next thing I knew, I was in the lab school. The lab school was like an archaic little room where the bathrooms didn’t work. And I had the worst times, you know, 8 in the morning or 9 at night or something. 

And so the point that I’m making is that I was finally in a new building. 

She retired, and they gave me a nice classroom, and unfortunately, it was in the education building. 

So I was lecturing about Sophocles’ Ajax and the hero Ajax and what early Sophocles’ grammar and syntax were like compared to later, one of his later plays, like Oedipus at Colonus. 

Anyway, we hear this noise, and I can’t repeat it. 

It was the N-word, despicable, white trash, Okie, gringo and then the F-word. 

OK. So I get out. I thought it was some kind of mob. I go in there, and it isn’t. 

There’s the wall, on each side of the wall, the corridor. There were students in an education class, and the professor said, “Can I help you?” 

I said, “Yeah, I can’t hear a thing.” 

She goes, “Well, we’re just teaching about what happens when you have power and how you exercise it.” 

Well, I said, “Well, who has the power?” 

She said, “The people screaming.” 

So I said, “Well, who’s going down the gauntlet?” 

Because there were people down, and they were students. They didn’t have enough black students, so they had little placards, “black,” and they had a lot of Hispanic students, and then people were yelling all these epithets so that they would see what the world was really like, that you could see racism. 

And I said, “You’re creating this. I have never heard these words spoken in my life, and I live in a 90% Hispanic community. You are generating this.” 

She said, “No, because these are oppressors, and we have to know how to deal with them.” 

I said, “You created them out of nothing. They don’t even exist, so you have such a small supply of oppressors and such a great pool of oppressed that you have to create them, and they have to have name tags.” 

I started arguing with her, and she goes, “I’m going to file a complaint.” 

I said, “You’re disrupting my class. We can’t hear because you’re shouting the worst words. If any of my students said that, they would be expelled.” 

And that was the first time I really saw that binary, the postmodern, that the world is divided between the oppressed and the oppressors. 

That comes from Marx through postmodernism. Into the classroom next door to you. 

Into the classroom, and then that was the education building. 

That’s my long-winded circumlocution, that those people who were yelling that, they weren’t undergraduates. They were teaching credential students. 

And then they would go out and teach K-12. 

Yes. And they would tell students, “Well, you are a victim, and we’re not going to apply the standards to you.” 

So if student one comes in 20 minutes late, they’ll say, “It’s OK. It doesn’t really matter whether you come in late because you are a victim, and you do not have to follow white power structures that stress punctuality and attendance.” 

And you can see where it went downhill. And then all of a sudden, nobody was coming in on time. 

And nobody knew how to speak proper English. And nobody ever studied Latin, and nobody ever—and the grades were all inflated. 

And everybody was enmeshed in this imaginary world of oppressor and oppressed. 

I would get students, and I would have them in humanities courses or history classes. 

They’d come in and say, “Professor Hanson, could you write a—I want to get a master’s. Could you write a recommendation?” 

They weren’t my students in classics. I had them in the GE, and they would show their transcript, and it would be like 3.8. 

Sami Winc: Wow. 

Victor Davis Hanson: And then I’d say, “But you have to take the SAT.” 

And they’d come back and say, “I got a really good score.” 

I said, “What is it?” 

“510.” 

I said, “510? It’s about the 70th percentile. To go to the type of schools that you think you deserve to get in,” because they were very confident, “you need about 740 minimum or 700 in verbal and analytics.” 

“Well, I got almost all A’s.” 

I said, “I know, but your A’s aren’t worth anything because they were given for criteria other than excellence.” 

And they said, “Well, I did all the work.” 

I said, “The work was not rigorous, and the teachers graded on criteria other than merit, and they didn’t do you a service. And if you would take Latin, and you would get the actual grade that you deserved, if you didn’t get high enough grades and you really wanted, and you did, and I felt you did have aptitude, I will spend three hours a week with you, and I will tutor you.” 

And at one point in 1995, I had 19 independent studies of two hours a week. My whole life was giving people independent studies. 

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