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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? 

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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........

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