The End of Everything by Victor Davis Hanson
How Wars Descend into Annihilation.
The doomed, at the brink of civilizational destruction, have an attitude partly born of hubris and partly of naïveté, perhaps best summed up as "It cannot happen to us."1
— Victor Davis Hanson
The End of Everything: How Wars Descend into Annihilation by Victor Davis Hanson is not a feel good book. You won’t put this book down and think to yourself, “Wow, I feel so happy.” Like me you’ll probably think, “That was depressing…but worthwhile.”
Not being a history guy, like a couple of my friends, I skipped some sections of the book with historical information that I could not fully process. For you history buffs you’ll get a lot more out of these sections than I did or could.
That being said, I did read the entire last section on the Aztecs which I found very interesting. The other chapters were also interesting, but more in the generalities Hanson writes about than in the particulars of the historical record. This is a not a criticism of the book—it is criticism of my own lack of historical knowledge.
What happens in Hanson’s four case studies is permanent annihilation. The culture, the traditions, the peoples are, for all practical purposes, destroyed—completely. The four are:
Thebes destroyed by Alexander the Great
Carthage destroyed by Scipio Aemilianus
Constantinople destroyed by Sultan Mehmet II
Tenochtitlán destroyed Hernán Cortés
Hanson writes that “all marked the end of cultures and civilizations.”2 How could this happen? It happened with the same human attributes in the aggressors that we see today. Of those being attacked Hanson writes:
As for the targets of aggression, the old mentalities and delusions that doomed the Thebans, the Carthaginians, the Byzantines, and the Aztecs are also still very much with us, especially the last thoughts of the slaughtered: “It cannot happen here.”3
Think about people today who cannot conceive that there are evil people in the world, in our Western countries, who want to take away our freedoms, who are not only willing to imprison dissenters, but also kill them. Our history of essentially being free makes good and decent people think totalitarianism could never happen here. According to Hanson, unfortunately, that is the overall, glaring flaw of civilizations before their destruction. He goes on to list “two fatal weaknesses” of the doomed states:
First, so often their supposed “friends” or allies either joined in the destruction, or carefully kept quiet at a safe distance. And second, on the eve of the invasion the defenders were often internally squabbling and fractious, and never could really unite in the face of a common enemy.4
Think about all the doctors and nurses who have remained silent to keep their jobs while the vaccinated are still being injured and killed. Think about the FBI agents, military and police who, it appears, when push comes to shove, will follow orders to secure their own safety and salaries. The war we’re fighting is not a traditional war (at least not yet), but a war nonetheless, which may result in kinetic war consequences, which may result in the destruction of Western civilization.
We should remember that the world wars of the last century likely took more human life than all armed conflicts combined since the dawn of Western civilization twenty-five hundred years prior. And they did so with offensive weapons already obsolete, and all too familiar destructive agendas that persist today, unchanged since antiquity.5
And this:
In this regard, we should remind ourselves that we really do not know the boundaries of or the limitations to what may follow from a dispute in Ukraine, or a standoff over Taiwan, or strikes on nuclear facilities in Iran.6
The book is sobering considering the present, volatile world situation and the power and money hungry people demanding we take orders like good, little, obedient citizens. It is hard to believe that the U.S. election, one of the most important elections in our brief history, is less than a month away. If Trump is not elected, if they steal the election again, free speech will be one of the first things this administration and the globalists will attempt to eradicate. They’ve already started in California.
I recommend The End of Everything: How Wars Descend into Annihilation, particularly for you history lovers who will, I think, appreciate it and get more out of it than I did.
I’ll try to end on a high note. It does appear that many, many people are waking up to what is going on. The globalists and their leftists, useful idiots seem to have entered “desperation mode” with the collapse of candidates Biden and now Harris. They are losing. They know this. When Hillary said, “if they don’t moderate and monitor the content, we lose total control,” She was not talking to the television or studio audience, she was talking to her peeps and saying, “We’re losing control! Don’t just stand there, do something!”
We are many and our numbers are growing all over the world and we will not comply. They know this too.
Notes
Hanson, Victor Davis. The End of Everything: How Wars Descend into Annihilation. Basic Books. Kindle Edition. p. 256.
p. 5.
p. 10.
p. 42.
p. 10.
p. 287.
Lucky us. 😔😖😳🙄