Another insightful article by Victor Davis Hanson.
I find him an antidote to the historically ignorant folks who seem in charge of much of this nation and its institutions.
I excerpt a bit of the article to show how humans live in times of relative safety versus relative danger.
The wheel does not always turn in the direction of progress. When it reverses itself, multitudes die and ways of life crumble.
http://pajamasmedia.com/victordavishanson/more-mediterrnean-thoughts-ancient-and-modern/?print=1Rhodes
Millions of Euros have transformed Rhodes into a sort of Frankish and Venetian Disneyland. The medieval city has been completely rebuilt, or almost rebuilt—turrets, walls, streets, arches, courtyards—into a fascinating citadel as it might have appeared around 1500 or so. I visited in 1973, 1974, and 1988, and it has since invested more money in the last twenty years into infrastructure than during the prior 100. But then the story of Greece itself the last thirty years is the gargantuan influx of Euro money, both before and after the Olympics, that make it unrecognizable from my first visit at 20 in September 1973—an awful year of war in the Middle East, furor over American resupply of Israel, of oil embargos, a preliminary coup that removed George Papadopoulos, brought in the more sinister Ioannides, and the shoot-out at the Polytechnion.
One does not see medieval homesteads in the interior anywhere in Greece as was common during the classical period. Indeed Rhodes of the Middle Ages—tons of stone ramparts guarding a stone central fortress with crowded brick and stone homes within—was not the Rhodes of 400 B.C. with plentiful small poleis and surrounding homestead farms.
Piracy and Ottomanism meant that enemy galleys could appear on the horizon without warning and land within hours to rape, murder, kidnap, and pillage. The pattern of settlement of Rhodes is a testament to that fact. Houses are built fortress-like. Streets are labyrinths, and secondary lines of defense, as trapped invaders might be pelted from top stories of shuttered homes, citizens safe behind massive doors, or at least safe enough to jump above across narrow pathway-like streets or to escape through subterranean tunnels.
Throughout the Mediterranean antiquities of the 14th-18th centuries, the story is the same: fears of security, inadequate defense, and constant anxiety trump the ease and economy of living among the fields. Commuting peasants attached to lords who provide security for exploitation, not yeomen homestead farmers of the classical past, are more characteristic of the countryside
One way of learning history without texts is simply to wander the ancient countryside and observe: when there are scattered towns and homesteads, life is good; when not, life is tenuous and development retarded. Standing on the ramparts of Rhodes, I could not think of a scarier thing than hearing a shout from a watchman that seaborne raiders have appeared out of nowhere and the gates were closing to prevent catastrophe.
We in the United States have not seen such insecurity since the Civil War and especially the bloody killing in Kansas and Missouri, other than a few range wars in the late nineteenth-century West. But
history is not always progressive, and without good government, national unity, and viable defense, the world returns to the status of the 15th-century Aegean. Almost every island out here has an impressive Frankish fort, beefed up by the Venetians—and ultimately sacked by the Turks.
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In the last 2500 years these waters and landscapes have never witnessed a 60-year long period of tranquility and prosperity as we see in the present.
What keeps things in order for cruise and commerce ships; what prevents piracy, Greek-Turkish shoot-outs, new Russian belligerence, and Islamic suicide USS Cole-like attacks?
NATO ships and American leadership. Take that away and we’d be back to 1941, 1915, 1571, and 404 B.C. in a few years. We should remember that as we go into $2 trillion debt this year, since very soon this administration will by needs either raise taxes on the middle class or slash the military budget in late 1940s style.
