Need help identifying a NeoCon "historian"

[chookie]

Anyone know who this guy is?

Apparently he is very famous, and revered among the fascists among us. He has written a popular book in which he claims that all good things have been achieved by warfare.

I heard him referred to in a documentary that referred to fellow wacko Michael Ladeen.

Here's a clue -- I believe he is a Classicist -- who thesis is that Warfare and democracy go hand in hand naturally.

Thanks

[politicaholic]

1. W has a degree in history from Yale & wrote the book on chickenhawking.

Are you sure you're not refering to our own Resident Bushco?

[flordehinojos]

13. Bush has a degree in history??????????!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!??????????

you can knock me over with a feather. what sort of history did he major in?
1)Ancient History?
2)History of the MIddle Ages?
3)World War I?
2)World War II?

Did he learn anything? Did he even show up for class? Did he take any tests or was he given a degree just for being Bush?

There's a saying that goes something like this, "those who do not know history are condemned to repeat it?" and, darn, if he ain't repeating all that hitler/mussolini/fascist period...and morally, it is one thing (bad enough still) to repeat bad history out of ignorance and it is quite another (even worse) to repeat it in full knowledge of what you are doing--and if he is history major, attended classes, and took exams, bush knows full well what he is intentionally doing to the world and the United States. He is a canaille/a goon/an evil man.

[Wat_Tyler]

2. David Irving?

[chookie]

5. No

Not quite as crazy as Irving....

[jadedcherub]

3. Hmm. I wonder if you aren't talking about

Irving Kristol?

He's the so-called "godfather of neoconservativism".

That who you mean?

.jc.

[chookie]

4. definitely not him

I would have recognized him.

[Lefty48197]

12. Could it be Bill Kristol, architect of the Iraqi war victory celebration?

he's such a smart guy.

[finecraft]

6. Could it be Francis Fukuyama ?

Although not a historian, he wrote "The End Of History and The Last Man". He's a professor of International Political Economics at John Hopkins University School of International Studies.

[chookie]

9. No

This guy was of European decent.

I am thinking it MIGHT be Donald Kagan....

[proud patriot]

7. Strauss ?

[Sporadicus]

8. My First Thought: Leo Strauss n/t

[Sara Beverley]

10. Here is Leo Strauss' philosophy

http://www.alternet.org/story/15935

[Tangledog]

11. The Soul of Battle

I believe Victor Davis Hansen is the guy you're looking for.

He made a brief stir a few years ago and was gonna be the next crusader for those who think Scalia is squishy soft on decadence, but he didn't quite make it as a celebrity egghead.

[mcscajun]

14. Maybe this one: John Keegan - A History of Warfare

excerpt from the editorial review by Publishers Weekly cited on Amazon.com:

Keegan offers a refreshingly original and challenging perspective. He characterizes warriors as the protectors of civilization rather than as its enemy and maintains that warfare is "entirely a masculine activity."

[jdj]

16. that is nauseating.

and flies in the face of reality.

but good for a mental wank or two.

[jdj]

15. Well, some punk was on NPR today saying stuff like this.

But I don't remember his name.

He said that if you want your economy to thrive, get in a war, lose, and get rich nations to formulate a Marshall plan type thing and bail you out. He said the economies of Germany and Japan thrived for 25 years because of their loss of WW2, so much that the British resented it. It was on a Charlotte station, and I did a search but without his name ( and not even sure which NPR station I was listening to at work) I can't find more info.

I felt he was spinning, because he was putting a positive spin on the tsunami, saying that it was GOOD that most of the destroyed structures were NOT insured, and that wouldn't hurt the insurance industry. He was saying these countries would clean up ($$$) because of this disaster, and be better off than before. At that point I thought, 'what a sick fucker' and stopped listening.

[Tangledog]

17. The punk has a point, if

yes, if you ignore the insane amorality of his thesis. Germany was forced to rebuild its steel mills, for instance, and they were far more efficient than the ones that had been bombed out. That stripped some profits off the United States steel industry, which did not have the will to modernize to begin with. (The steel industry was the most unpopular face of big business during the Truman and Eisenhower years.) Some of the plants being closed in the Rust Belt the past few years go back to the 1920s.

But no, I can't get past the amorality of that kind of thinking. I'm just a wuss, and not forward-thinking at all.

A popular sixties novel, The Mouse that Roared by Leonard Wibberley, put a "comic" spin on the theme. A tiny nation declares war on the United States so it could get wiped out and get foreign aid. It and a couple of sequels were pretty popular then, but I never see them in used bookstores any more and they've been culled out of many libraries.