during their hegemonic days in theScreen Writers Guild and else-where—the Radoshes go into con-siderable detail on the Communists’methods of controlling who gotwork in Hollywood and who didnot—were happy to cooperate withHUAC and to tell what they knew.A group of ten Hollywood screen-writers and directors, followingCommunist-party instructions toappear before the committee andmake a spectacle of themselves byinvoking the Fifth Amendment,ended up serving prison sentencesfor contempt of Congress. Still oth-ers f led abroad—not, of course, tothe great socialist motherland butto more comfortable climes likeMexico, England, and France,where they were often able to findproductive work.

The eventual outcome of theHUAC hearings was the creation ofa blacklist, consisting mainly of ac-tors, directors, and screenwriters,whom the studios were forbidden toemploy—although not immediate-ly, and not without a f ight. As theRadoshes show, the studio headswere not prepared simply to rollover for the committee. Whatevertheir personal politics, they were ac-customed to unquestioned author-ity in their own domain, and in gen-eral were less interested in the pol-itics of their writers than in scriptsthat would lead to success at the boxoff ice. Thus, even after they hadsupposedly buckled to political pres-sure, the studio heads continued toemploy some of the blacklisted writ-ers under fictitious names.

By the late 1960’s, the politicaland cultural tide within the Unit-ed States had turned suff icientlyfor many of the blacklisted to re-sume work under their own names.Those who had gone to prison forcontempt of Congress were reha-bilitated as martyrs to the cause ofpolitical and cultural freedom. Sub-sequent generations, ignorant ofthe historical details, and nudgedalong by such mendacious f ilms as

The Front, have all too readilybought into the myth of innocentliberals on the run; in fact, the realliberals, like Reagan, had all alongbeen on the other side of the fence.

As for those writers and f ilm-makers who had cooperated withHUAC, they would stand con-demned in the court of Hollywoodopinion. The classic example wasthe late Elia Kazan, the director ofsuch landmark Broadway playsand/or Hollywood movies as Deathof a Salesman, A Streetcar NamedDesire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Onthe Waterfront, Gentleman’s Agree-ment, Viva Zapata!, and East ofEden. As recently as 1999, a hugescandal was provoked when theboard of the Motion PictureAcademy voted to grant Kazan aspecial award for distinguishedartistic achievement. Marlon Bran-do even tried to prevent the show-ing of clips from one of Kazan’smovies in the presentation of theaward.*

It speaks volumes about the cur-rent moment in American culturethat the single afternoon Kazanspent testifying before a congres-sional committee—an afternoon,moreover, without serious conse-quences for particular Communistwriters—should be consideredenough to outweigh a lifetime ofextraordinary contribution toAmerican theater and f ilm. Butsuch, as I noted at the beginning,is the nature of Hollywood’s con-tinued enthrallment to the illiber-al Left. The Radoshes’ Red StarOver Hollywood is an indispensableaccount of how this enthrallmentcame to be.

* The f ilm critic and historian RichardSchickel begins his engrossing and authori-tative new book, Elia Kazan: A Biography(Harper Collins, 489 pp., $39.95), by revis-iting this sorry episode.

Classic

A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and

Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War

by Victor Davis HansonRandom House. 416 pp. $29.95

Reviewed byClifford Orwin

Victor Davis Hanson, whodoes not mince words, once in-

troduced himself to me as the mosthated man in the classics profession.I figured he must be exaggerating,but he wasn’t. Classicists detest Han-son for Who Killed Homer? (1998),his blistering critique of their fad-dishness and irrelevance. Proclaim-ing himself an academic populist,Hanson believes that the Greekclassics can and should matter to or-dinary people. A War Like No Oth-er is his latest effort to make themmatter.

As readers of Commentaryknow, Hanson is also a military his-torian, which helps account for hismeteoric rise as a commentatorsince 9/11. Military historians lackstatus in the academy because pro-fessors, who live in a world of talk,do not like to admit how oftenthings in the broader world are set-tled by force or the threat of it. Butthe public snaps up military histo-ry, and the prolif ic Hanson knowshow to write for it.

A War Like No Other displaysthe gifts of Hanson the historian. Itrecounts the Peloponnesian war, thegreatest conflict of Greek antiqui-ty. Just two generations after theglorious pan-Hellenic defeat of theinvading Persians, the two foremostallies in that conf lict, Athens and

[104]

Commentary November 2005

Clifford Orwin, a professor of po-litical science at the University of Toron-to, is the author of The Humanity ofThucydides (1994) and is currentlycompleting a book on the role of compas-sion in modern politics.

What are the facts?In one of the most astonishing propaganda coups ever,

a United Nations conference on racism, which took place inDurban South Africa in 2001, declared that Zionism isracism. No wonder the U.S. and Israel walked out of themeeting, which was dominated by representatives ofIslamic and Arab states and other anti-Israel forces, andwhose conclusions were predictable from the outset.

The supreme irony of thisconference was that itaccused no other nation ofracism—only Israel. In truth,Israel is perhaps the mostracially and ethnically diverseand tolerant country in theworld. More than half of Israel’s Jewish population consistsof people of color—blacks from Ethiopia and Yemen, aswell as brown-skinned people from Morocco, Iran, Syria,Egypt and Israel itself. In addition, Israel’s populationincludes more than one million Arabs, who enjoy the samecivil rights as Jewish Israelis. In Israel hate speech isbanned, and it is against the law to discriminate based onrace or religion.

In contrast, anti-Semitism—a poisonous form of racismdirected specifically against the Jewish people—is rampantin most all Islamic societies. Not only is anti-Semitismcommonplace in Muslim nations, but it is propagatedshamelessly by their leaders, in state-sponsored media, andby Muslim clergy.

For example, Malaysian Prime Minister MahathirMohamed declared in a 2003 speech to the Organization ofIslamic Conference that, “today Jews rule the world byproxy. They get others to fight and die for them.” Imagineif an American president had made a similarly sweepingand bigoted statement about blacks, Latinos or any otherrace—what a justifiable uproar, perhaps even animpeachment, would ensue. Yet there was nocondemnation by the Muslim world of Mohamed’scomments. Rather, virtually all of the conference’s Muslimleaders actually voiced their approval.

In response to a terrorist attack in Saudi Arabia in May2004, Crown Prince Abdullah declared that “Zionism isbehind [these] terrorist actions in the kingdom.” (Zionism

is the code word often used by Islamic anti-Semites forJews.) U.S. Congressman Tom Lantos called the Prince’sassertion “an outrage . . . blatant hypocrisy,” but Islamicleaders were silent. In fact, millions of Muslims still insistthat Zionists were behind the September 11 attacks on theWorld Trade Center.

Anti-Semitism is expressed so freely and ubiquitously inmost Islamic societies that no citizen can escape it. During

Ramadan in 2002, Egypt’sstate-controlled TV aired“Horseman Without a Horse,”a program based on thenotorious forgery, TheProtocols of the Elders of Zion,in which Jews allegedly use the

blood of non-Jews to make Passover matzot. In Iran, a TVseries, “Zahra’s Blue Eyes,” portrays “Zionists” kidnappingPalestinian children and harvesting their organs.

Perhaps nowhere is the hatred of Jews more virulent thanamong the Palestinians. Most perniciously, Palestinianchildren are taught in school that Jews are descended fromapes and pigs and that the most noble thing they can do isto kill Jews. Muslim clerics like Imam Ibrahim Madiras, anemployee of the Palestinian Authority, declared in a 2005television sermon, “Jews are a cancer” and later that,“Muslims will kill the Jews . . . [and] rejoice in Allah’svictory.” No surprise, then, that the 1982 doctoraldissertation of Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbasmakes the astounding claim that “Zionists” collaboratedwith the Nazis to annihilate the Jewish people in order todrive the survivors to Palestine.

Anti-Semitism and the prospects for peace: Islamic anti-Semitism permeates the Arab Middle East and creates anatmosphere in which Jews are reviled and represented assubhuman. How can the Palestinian people embrace peacewith a people represented by their religious and politicalleaders as dehumanized, evil beings? Even moreimportantly, how can Israel be expected to trust a so-calledpeace partner who expresses abject hatred and murderousintent toward Jews on a daily basis? Yet the U.S. and manyEuropean nations continue to demand that Israel makeone-sided sacrifices for peace with a people steeped inracism and committed to its destruction.

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You deserve a factual look at . . .

Racism in the Islamic WorldHow can peace prevail in the Middle East in the face of Islamic

bigotry and hate? When will moderate Muslims speak out?

For years, the U.N., led by Islamic and Arab nations and their sympathizers, has accused Israel of racism, but the worldconsistently turns a blind eye to open, seething anti-Semitism in Islamic society.

Until Islamic leaders muster the integrity to relentlessly condemn anti-Semitism (and its evil twin, anti-Zionism), we can’texpect Israel to accept a forced peace with the Palestinians. Likewise, until moderate Muslims reject racism in all forms,they can’t expect Islam to enjoy full respect as a political and spiritual force among the world’s people.

“Until Muslims reject racism in all forms,they can’t expect Islam to enjoy full

respect as a political and spiritual force.”

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Sparta, squared off against each oth-er. Each boasted powerful allies ofits own: the Spartan or Pelopon-nesian alliance dominated on land,while Athens with its maritime trib-utaries ruled the sea.

As Hanson stresses, following hisgreat source Thucydides, the warwas to prove far less glorious thandisastrous. It dragged on for 27years in all (431- 404 b.c.e.), andthe losses, both human and eco-nomic, were enormous. WhileSparta f inally won, the victoryproved empty. Neither city wouldfully recover, nor would Greece asa whole: the rise of Macedoniamarked the end of the heyday of thepolis or Greek city-state.

The Peloponnesian war offers agreat story; the problem, for Han-son as for all other modern histori-ans, is that it has already been told.Thucydides’ contemporaneous ac-count—he was born ca. 460 b.c.e.,died ca. 395, and fought in the waras a general for his native Athens—continues to dwarf all competitors.Not only is it our sole intact and re-liable literary source for the war, allothers being fragmentary, butThucydides is one of the greatestwriters of any genre ever to put quillto parchment. His profundity andintensity, his narrative and rhetori-cal brilliance, and his unique blendof analytical rigor and imaginativesympathy make his book one of themost thrilling ever written.

True, the war lasted until 404b.c.e., and Thucydides’ accountbreaks off in 411 (to be taken up byanother great historian, Xenophon).True, too, there are numerous mi-nor sources for the war, documen-tary and archeological, and 2,500years’ worth of scholars second-guessing Thucydides’ interpreta-tion. Still, Hanson appreciatesThucydides’ greatness too much toset out to rival or supersede him.

What he has chosen to do insteadis to amplify one of Thucydides’themes. His subtitle indicates hisemphasis: this is a “how they did it”book, where what they did was

bloody. Its subject is “the thousandsof ordinary Greeks who wereslaughtered for nearly three decadesfor the designs of fickle men, shift-ing alliances, and contradictorycauses.” Such deep sympathy withthe obscure victims of the violenceof war is genuinely Thucydidean,albeit only one strand among manyin Thucydides’ account. Hansonmoves it front and center.

He also adopts a different method.While Thucydides narrates the warseason by season, Hanson’s chaptersbear titles like “Terror,” “Plague,”“Armor,” “Walls,” and “Ships” (thislast, with its thorough account ofnaval warfare among the Greeks, be-ing especially vivid and evocative).Each chapter focuses on a particularepoch of the war, but also on the par-ticular aspect that dominated it. Fre-quently interrupting his narrative fora schematic treatment of a chapter’sfeatured motif, Hanson finds him-self ranging both forward and back-

ward in time for evidence, butthroughout his account he skillfullymaintains both focus and cohesion.

Two elements emerge from Han-son’s valuable treatment that arelargely missing from Thucydides.While the Greek historian assumeda reader’s acquaintance with themodes of warfare of the day, Han-son obviously cannot. So episodesthat Thucydides merely sketchesHanson painstakingly and very use-fully re-creates. The desperation ofsiege and plague, the strange inter-play of strict order and blind bloodychaos that pervaded hoplite (heavy-armed) warfare, the unsurpassed in-tricacy of the seamanship requiredof the crew of a trireme, the massivecruelty that came to dominate thetreatment of the vanquished—alltake on concreteness through Han-son’s patient accumulation of detail.

In this connection, the fact thatHanson has always been an agrari-

[107]

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an historian in addition to a militaryone serves him well, not least be-cause these two aspects of life wereclosely intertwined in ancient times.Thus, one of his f inest achieve-ments in A War Like No Other is toexplain the puzzling fact that thecombatants invaded each other’sterritory repeatedly but hardly everwith decisive effect. A practicingfarmer, Hanson conducted the rel-evant experiments himself. Burningwheat f ields and uprooting vinesand olive trees proved slow, ex-hausting, and only sporadically suc-cessful. It is no surprise, then, thatthe invaders usually retreated withtheir work of destruction unfinishedor even hardly begun.

The second way in which Han-son’s work augments that of Thucy-dides is in the richness of its statis-tics. Ancient writers often neglect-ed these, and never provided themconsistently or cumulatively. Someof Hanson’s numbers are wellgrounded, others highly conjectural;all, however, ref lect his determina-tion to leave no ancient stone un-turned in the search.

Hanson’s statistics, moreover, areanything but dry. We learn, for in-stance, that Athens’ estimated totallosses in the war were proportionateto American losses in World War IInot of 400,000, the actual Americanfigure, but of 44 million. This aloneallows us to grasp what a catastro-phe the war was—and how amazingwas the city’s recovery in the decadesthereafter. Similarly, the grievouslosses in the final and most chaoticstage of the conflict, involving yearsof major naval battles, fell heavieston the Athenian lower classes, whichsupplied the rowers, and thus alteredthe political balance within the cityfor a long time to come.

Hanson’s statistics also help tocrack some thorny riddles. Why(even apart from the hardiness of

vine, olive, and grain) did the earlySpartan invasions of Attica prove soineffectual? By reckoning the likelyacreage of the land under cultiva-tion there, Hanson shows that themanpower available to the Spartanssimply did not permit them to rav-age more than a small percentage ofit. Similarly, he calculates the vicis-situdes of public f inance on bothsides of the conflict, and the effectof these on the course and eventualoutcome of the war.

These last examples are typicallyHansonian. Where Thucydides issublime, Hanson is businesslike andprosaic. Not for him the almost bib-lical resonance of Thucydides’ con-cern with ultimate human questionsof justice and piety. He leaves bothdeep thinking and stirring elo-quence to the master, writing forreaders whose curiosity about justhow things were done in the pastmatches his own. His distinctiveachievement is to show how great acontribution this approach canmake to understanding why eventsunfolded as they did—as well as tograsping the plight of those con-demned to endure them.

There are, of course, other validapproaches to the history of the war,generating the vast secondary liter-ature to which I alluded earlier.Hanson offers many footnotes butlargely spares the reader his dis-agreements with other scholars. Ofthese the most estimable, certainlyin the English-speaking world, isDonald Kagan of Yale, who begin-ning in the late 1970’s published fourmassive volumes on the war and hasmore recently issued a condensedand revised one-volume version.

Kagan’s emphasis, unlike Han-son’s, is on diplomacy and strategy.He provides a detailed reconstruc-tion of every major episode, relyingon Thucydides where he can, cor-

recting him where he feels he must.To put it very roughly, Kagan offersa “top-down” rather than a “bot-tom-up” perspective: his is thestatesman’s viewpoint, from whichhe assesses the performance of thosewithin each city who bore the terri-ble burden of decision. Hanson’sviewpoint, as we have seen, is thatof those who bore the consequencesof those decisions.

Obviously, we need not choosebetween these contrasting and ulti-mately complementary emphases. IfKagan’s book lacks the in-the-trenches and on-the-benches detailof Hanson’s, Hanson’s lacks thecareful development of the big pic-ture of Kagan’s. No understandingof the greatness and misery of waris complete without both perspec-tives.

A War Like No Other is verymuch a post-9/11 book. Certain ofHanson’s emphases—on the role ofterror in the war, on the nature of“asymmetrical” conf lict—ref lectthis fact. His purpose, however, isnot to draw facile lessons for todayfrom these events of so long ago.He is much too careful a scholar notto maintain a wall between his his-torical efforts and his journalisticones. His appeal is to the seriousreader who shares his interest bothin this most fateful of Greek warsand in the anatomy of war as such.He evokes for us, today, the harshfates of so many ordinary men of avanished epoch, concluding with alitany of the obscurely fallen and theinjunction to remember them, for ifthe study of war and its lessons is forall of us, the f ighting of the Pelo-ponnesian war was “theirs alone.”

Last and perhaps best, Hanson’sachievement encourages us to re-turn to the masterpiece upon whichit depends. You can never be toorich or too thin, or have too manyreasons to reread Thucydides.

[108]

Commentary November 2005