Today on Uncommon Knowledge, I place before my guests, Victor Davis Hanson and Christopher Hitchens, a couple of quotations.
First, the words of historian Niall Ferguson, who this summer hosted a PBS television series about World War II entitled The War of the World (the series was based on Ferguson’s book of the same title). Ferguson asserts that the Allies “adopted the most brutal tactics of those they were fighting.” The “principal beneficiary” of the war, Ferguson further contends,
was…Stalin’s Soviet Union….The wartime alliance with Stalin, for all its inevitability and strategic rationality, was nevertheless an authentically Faustian pact….[T]he victory of 1945 was a tainted victory—if indeed it was a victory at all.
Next I offer Hanson and Hitch the words of Rush Limbaugh:
Now we’ve got this revisionist historian trying to say that we’re no better…than…the people we beat, because we were using the same totalitarian tactics….This is…a latest example of [the] attempt to convince as many Americans as possible that…the United States…is…no better than any of the worst despots and mass murderers that have ever lived….Thank you, PBS.
Who, I ask, demonstrates the surer grasp of world history? The Harvard professor, Niall Ferguson? Or the Doctor of Advanced Conservative Studies, El Rushbo?
Watch Hanson and Hitch reply.