The End of Everything, Victor Davis Hanson

An Uncommon Knowledge Interview with VDH

The summary of the book is quite simple. It is a detailed historical narrative of how the civilizations of Thebes, Carthage, Constantinople and Tenochtitlan (Aztecs, now Mexico City) declined and ended in annihilation.

As with all VDH books, it makes history come alive, and you will learn much from it that will give you a perspective very much lacking in our “What’s the latest?” culture. Due to the artistry of VDH, you will likely also find it enjoyable. The year Y2K is the 2024 view of “ancient history.”

What do these annihilated civilizations have in common?

Page 12:

One recurrent theme of the wartime extinction of civilizations is precisely the naivete of the targeted — a gullibility innate to humans in extremis, and especially unchecked by reality during the passions and hysteria released by war.

As Juvenal put it (p112): “Now we are suffering the evils of long peace; a luxury crueler than wars hangs over us and takes its revenge on a conquered world”.

The focus of the book is NOT on drawing the obvious parallels to our times. While the US has suffered terrible war casualties over time, only the Civil War was fought on our soil, and Pearl Harbor and 9/11 were the unique instances involving civilian casualties on our soil.

The total US military casualties for all our foreign wars are around 1.2 million. By comparison, the USSR lost 8.7 million military and 20 million civilian deaths in WWII alone.

68 of our civilians died in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. 2,977 civilians died on 9/11, so “3k” total non-Civil War civilian casualties is a decent estimate. We really can’t begin to see the asymmetry of our experiencing the reality of war to other great powers, ancient and modern.

The book makes it extremely clear that the myth of the “noble savage,” and the propaganda that Mesoamerica was somehow “superior” to current Western civilization is a dangerous lie. (The same can be said of Carthage, but to a lesser degree… their primary horror was child sacrifice, something the West is largely inured to via the modern secular sacrament of abortion.)

As Cortes’s scribe reported:

I must say that when I saw my comrades dragged up each day to the altar, and their chests struck open and their palpitating hearts drawn out, and when I saw the arms and legs of these 62 men cut off and eaten, I feared that one day they would do the same to me...

…To the Spanish mind the entire culture of the Aztecs quickly became symbolic of almost everything their church and king defined as pre-civilizational and anti-Christian: gruesome human sacrifice, cannibalism and polytheistic worship of stone idols, polygamy, and overt homosexuality to name a few …

Observing our own civilization in this “Pride” month celebrating homosexuality, infanticide, all manner of sexual perversion including pedophilia, overt Satanism, and celebratory non-judgmentalism, it appears we are either “progressing” or “regressing” to primitivism depending on which tribe you are in.

Pedophilia is not explicitly celebrated (yet), however, the grooming of children in Drag Queen Story Hours is accepted as wholesome by all save the evil “Far Right.” It is doubtful that Epstein Island is the only site for sexual abuse of children, and the rampant child trafficking across our open borders may be more lucrative to the left than the Fentanyl trade.

Cannibalism seems beyond the pale (so far). Growing up in Northern Wisconsin, Ed Gein was often brought up at nighttime teen campouts. As many horror movies show, we are fascinated by the macabre and occult.

In a declining culture devoid of morality, perhaps we oughtn't be so certain that it can’t happen here.