RUTHFULLY YOURS

One reason many Americans don’t trust the media is because they treat every Donald Trump outburst as a Defcon 1 level threat to the survival of the republic. The latest example is the panic over Mr. Trump’s legal threat to the publisher of Michael Wolff’s book and his lament that libel laws are too weak.

Mr. Trump had his lawyer send a letter on Thursday to Henry Holt demanding that it “cease and desist” publication of Mr. Wolff’s book. This is a longstanding Trump tactic designed to underscore his claims that a book or article is false. Invariably the threat vanishes as the controversy does.

Mr. Trump tried this with us when we criticized one of his debate performances during the presidential campaign. His lawyer sent a letter threatening the Journal and the editor of these columns, in his personal and professional capacity, with a defamation suit if we didn’t apologize and retract the editorial. We ignored the letter, repeated the criticism, and Mr. Trump dropped the subject.

Mr. Wolff’s book may be partly imagined, as his work often is, but that is no reason to block publication. Unless an author has violated national security, or some contractual agreement with an agency like the CIA, no court is going to ban a book in advance of publication. The Supreme Court declared such “prior restraint” on free speech unconstitutional in the landmark Near v. Minnesota case in 1931. Henry Holt knows this and responded to Mr. Trump’s letter by moving up the publication date.

Mr. Trump’s libel lament is also familiar and feckless bluster. “Libel laws are very weak in this country. If they were strong it would be very helpful,” Mr. Trump said on Saturday at a press event, joining the queue of politicians who wish they could sue journalists.

In February 2016 as a candidate, Mr. Trump declared: “One of the things I’m going to do if I win, and I hope we do and we’re certainly leading. I’m going to open up our libel laws so when they write purposely negative and horrible and false articles, we can sue them and win lots of money.” The difference now is that he’s not even claiming he can change the libel laws; he’s merely griping about them.

Michael Wolff has done what the rest of us chump writers can only dream of: He has gotten himself and his book denounced by a sitting U.S. president on live television. That, together with a cease-and-desist letter sent from the president’s attorneys to the publisher, will ensure not only that the book makes Mr. Wolff a truckload of money but also that it gets talked about for a generation. “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House” is thus in a class with Salman Rushdie’s “Satanic Verses”—by itself a forgettable book, certainly not Mr. Rushdie’s best, but remembered forever as having provoked a death sentence from Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini.

Mr. Wolff was allowed to lurk around the White House for something like six months, presumably because someone in the first days of Donald Trump’s administration thought he would write a sympathetic account. It was an idiotic decision. Mr. Wolff is known in New York and Hollywood for his withering takedowns of popular public figures; he was only ever going to write one kind of book.

In one sense, “Fire and Fury” is a typical piece of “access journalism,” as it’s known, like many titles by Bob Woodward or, on the more gossipy side, like the “Game Change” books by Mark Halperin and John Heilemann. Mr. Wolff takes the genre to another level, and perhaps a lower level. If he has employed objective criteria for deciding what to include or exclude, it’s not clear what those criteria are. By the looks of it, he included any story, so long as it was juicy. We’re told, for instance, of Mr. Trump’s supposed method of bedding other men’s wives in his pre-presidential days; of Mr. Trump’s promise to his wife, who had no interest in being first lady, that everything was OK because he wasn’t going to win anyway; of the president’s scolding of the White House cleaning staff for picking up his shirt from the floor (“If my shirt is on the floor, it’s because I want it on the floor”); and many other such weird tales.

Former chief political strategist Steve Bannon was evidently the source of the book’s most staggering revelations—if “revelations” is the right word for the sort of titillating office gossip that Mr. Wolff reports as fact. A typical story: Mr. Bannon, in a heated argument with the president’s daughter Ivanka, called her a “liar”—with a choice modifier to go with it. This took place in front of the president. The father’s response: “I told you this is a tough town, baby.”

Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow in classics and military history at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. His background is ideal for an analysis of the Second World War. “Wars” are plural in the title because, as Hanson notes, it was fought in many different places, from Singapore to Finland, and in many different ways, on air, sea and land, with weapons ranging from side arms to atomic bombs. It was the first war which saw more civilians die than soldiers.

The book is divided topically, with chapters titled “Ideas,” “Air,” “Water,” “Earth,” “Fire,” and “People.” A complaint may be that the book is repetitive, but different aspects are looked at from different angles. The War was fought on the continents of Europe, Asia and Africa, with combatants from every continent except Antarctica. It was fought on the land, the sea and in the air, and Hanson reviews all facets. The facts he assembles are sobering: From a world population of about two billion, five hundred million people were displaced, perhaps a hundred million mobilized, and sixty million died, two thirds of whom were civilians. Seven million Jews were killed. “No other deliberate mass killings in history, before or since, whether systematic, loosely organized or spontaneous, have approached the magnitude of the Holocaust – not the Armenian genocide, the Cambodian ‘killing fields,’ or the Rwandan tribal bloodletting.”

His details are encyclopedic. In 1939, the U.S. spent one percent of GDP on defense. By 1944, forty percent of GDP was going to defense. During the war years, the U.S. produced forty billion rounds of small-arms ammunition and one billion rounds of artillery shells. In 1939, 9.5 million square feet of industrial plant space was devoted to aircraft production. By 1944, that had grown to 165 million square feet. Britain, despite being bombed, having been defeated in most every major battle during the first two years of the War and having mobilized 3.5 million men, added more ships to its fleet during the war than the entire naval production of the three major Axis powers. The Allies were more efficient manufacturers; The thousandth B-29 to roll off the production line required half the man hours as the four hundredth. With his eye for detail, we learn that in 1942, the Eastern Front was costing the Third Reich a hundred thousand dead each month. “In that year alone, the Germans lost 5,500 tanks, eight thousand guns, and a quarter million vehicles.” About three hundred thousand planes were destroyed or badly damaged during the War.

Victor Davis Hanson’s latest work, The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won, is a synthesis of existing scholarship on World War II, presented with insights from the history of warfare throughout the ages befitting the author’s expertise in the broad sweep of military history. The book is arranged topically, with sections dealing with air, naval, and land warfare as well as the ideas, weapons, economies, and people that energized, fought, fueled, and led the conflict. Hanson’s analysis of the bloodletting from 1939 to 1945 is perceptive and provocative and his exploration of counterfactuals provides plenty of material for speculation among those well-versed in the history of the war. https://amgreatness.com/2017/12/12/comprehending-the-big-lessons-of-world-war-ii/

Victor Davis Hanson, The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won (New York: Basic Books, 2017).

Hanson, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and noted classicist, makes frequent allusions to pre-modern battles and wars, illustrating how geography, tactical circumstances, and human nature weave their way throughout time. Thus we learn that the Normandy invasion “was the largest combined land and sea operation conducted since the invasion of Greece by King Xerxes of Persia in spring 480 BC,” which led to the epic battles at Thermopylae and Salamis. Hanson also explains what is different about World War II, including the racism and ideology that fueled the conflict and which led to the industrialized slaughter of millions in death camps and by starvation.

Hanson categorizes World War II as a war of machines. The book examines various aspects of long range bombing, carrier aviation, and submarine wars in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, always with an eye to determining why the Allies won and the Axis powers lost. Tiger, Panther, Sherman, and T-34 tanks; Katyusha rocket launchers and American howitzers; Lancaster and B-29 bombers; Messerschmidt, Zero, Spitfire, Hurricane, Thunderbolt, and Mustang fighters; Essex class carriers and fast battleships; the iconic M-1 rifle and Sturmgewehr 44; and other weapons are analyzed for their role in the fighting and outcome of the war. Having examined the implements of combat, Hanson pays due attention to the supreme leaders and military commanders who devised strategy and led operations, as well as the economic output of the great powers that made victory possible or defeat inevitable.

This review originally appeared in The Jewish Link of New Jersey.

Many people have likely heard the claim that Hebrew is the only
ancient language to be in active use today. While speakers of Farsi
and Chinese may disagree,Hebrew’s resurgence and resurrection may be
the linguistic equivalent of a miracle. From being a peripheral
language in far off Israel a little over a century ago, it’s now a
vibrant language spoken by millions across different continents.

In a fascinating new book, The Story of Hebrew (Princeton University
Press 978-0691153292), Dr. Lewis Glinert, professor of Hebrew Studies
at Dartmouth College, provides a history of the Hebrew language from
biblical times to today. While written by an Ivy League professor and
published by Princeton University Press, this is nonetheless a most
readable and highly engaging book.

In addition, knowledge of Hebrew is not needed to enjoy this
remarkable book. At Dartmouth, Glinert teaches a class From Genesis
to Seinfeld: Jewish Humor and its Roots. As to his dry sense of humor,
he has written an entire book about Hebrew, and aside from a few
illustrations, not used a single Hebrew character. The truth is that
this is not a book about what the Hebrew words mean. Rather it is
about what the Hebrew language has meant to the people who have
possessed it.

The book tells two stories. First, how Hebrew has been used in Jewish
life for the past 3,500 years; how it was left for dead, only to come
back. The other story is that of how Jews and Christians have
conceived of Hebrew, and invested it with a symbolic power far beyond
normal language.

A few of the many questions that Glinert addresses are: how did Hebrew
figure into the sense of identity of the Jews, how did that
relationship change with the advent of Zionism and their love affair
with the Hebrew language, what kept Hebrew from dying out completely,
and perhaps most importantly: what can its remarkable story teach
about the working of human language in general.