Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness and the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He is an American military historian, columnist, a former classics professor, and scholar of ancient warfare. ….
When ideologues demand power but cannot achieve it politically because they are cruel ideologues, expect more of their insanity to follow.
“Madness! Madness . . . madness!” — The Bridge on the River Kwai
With that exclamation, director David Lean ended his epic film about a dutiful but vainglorious British officer who sought to display to his Japanese captors superior British discipline and morale in a prisoner of war camp. As proof of British engineering superiority, he pursues his agendas by ordering his POWs to build for their Japanese captors a strategic bridge that otherwise they could not have built—only to try to destroy the efforts of fellow Allied soldiers sent to blow-up his masterpiece. For the delusional ideologue, reality must never intrude.
So it is now. When the rock of green and woke ideology hits the hard place of reality, sheer madness always results. …