East vs West
...whether you are Alexander the Great with 50,000 men and you're on the Indus River; in a way that a Persian empire of a million square miles and 70 million subjects could not destroy Athens; or whether you are Caesar, or Crassus, and you are exercising power in the Tigris and Euphrates Valleys... or in the case of Xenophon and The Ten Thousand you are at Cunaxa... or you are at Arbella, which is the modern-day Erbul, where Alexander the Great destroyed the imperial army of Xerxes.
Victor Davis Hanson has published a three part (one, two, three) transcription of a talk he gave recently at the University of Oregon on the topic of Western military dominance. I've written about Hanson as a hardliner before and although I don't agree with him on everything, I'm a sucker for military history and grandiosity. I also respect him as a polymath; he is, after all, a classicist, writer, farmer, and university professor.
There are a few places in his talk where he departs from the tone that American religious conservatives1 find soothing including one of his beginning premises, a remarkable statement:
"... history is amoral; it doesn't really care."
Even if you can't embrace all his assertions, a man who can evoke Aeschylus, Alexander the Great, Cortés, Napoleon, and Zulus in the span of a few pages is worth the curiosity.
1Most of whom, like Napoleon1a, attribute their empire to an act of God.
1aCheck out the Imperial Catechism of Napoleon I.
9:14:52 PM 
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