One of the worst ill-fitting ham-handed shoe-horned comparisons Ive ever read. There is nothing remotely similar between the war in Gaza and Shermans march across the South. A selection of the the claims and why they are basically ill-fitting: 1) Sherman welcomed the hatred he earned from the South. As if earning hatred should be a key point of policy? 2) Sherman’s rhetoric was bellicose, indeed uncouth — even as he avoided killing as many southerners as he could So what? 3) He believed that unless humiliation was a part of defeat, a tribal society of ranked hierarchies would always concoct myths to explain away failure Unless someone forgot the key policy of the Civil War was to reunite the US and force it back into a union and in doing so also free the slaves. 4) The Israeli army was eerily Shermanesque when it went into Gaza. The IDF targeted the homes of the wealthy Hamas elite How wealthy are the wealthy Hamas elite? Does VDH have any evidence, really, that most of those killed in Gaza were Wealthy? 5) Sherman accepted southern hatred, but he assumed that after he left the Deep South, civilians would start to see a logic to his devastation: The homes and property of the middle classes and poor were largely spared Israels campaign, even if its leaders are totally unfamiliar with its affects, is not encouraging the middle class and poor to like Israel in Gaza. VDH knows nothing, evidently, about Gaza anyway. 6) His brutal methods were aimed at instructing the civilian South that those who had precipitated the war surely deserved its harshest penalties This might be the only similarity. Well, 1 out of 6...why not write a whole article on this... ***Many people are fans of VDH, and I too admire his earlier books about culture and war. But this is not one of his finer pieces, he wanted to justify Israels war in Gaza through a US comparison and couldnt find one and came up with this nonsense. I have a little news for those who think Palestinians are like American Southerners: The US South had democracy after the war, albeit proscribed for a short time to some officers of the confederacy. How many Gazans will be voting in Israeli elections? 0 How many Palestinians in the West Bank? 0 So no need to compare Sherman, who sought to pacify rebellion in order to bring wayward states back into the Union, with the logic behind the war in Gaza. Find someone other model... nationalreview/article/385698/sherman-gaza-victor-davis-hanson/page/0/1
Posted on: Sun, 24 Aug 2014 15:58:55 +0000
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