Introduction: To Die For

0.     One of the most celebrated wars in history, that of the Greeks versus the Trojans recounted in Homer’s Iliad, was fought over a woman.

0.     “Above all, any prince or republic that wants to prevail must have armed forces that are its own in every possible way,” writes the Italian-born Angelo Codevilla in the introduction to his translation and annotation of The Prince. “Soldiers and citizens must be one and the same. The prince, or the republic’s leading men, must command the troops personally and must do whatever it takes to keep the troops happy and devoted. The foundation of political power is the willingness of an army to fight and win. Nothing substitutes for that.” Certainly not, the modern reader might observe, “soft power,” which neither frightens nor convinces anybody.

0.     Victor Davis Hanson, Carnage and Culture (Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group), Kindle Edition.

0.     In my own personal experience in the Soviet Union between April 1986 and the summer of 1991, nearly every young woman was a trollop and every man corruptible, as if the Cold War had already been lost.

0.     Consider, for example, the Soviet female flyers and sharpshooters on the Eastern Front in World War II.

0.     It seems that politics has made for strange bedfellows throughout human history.

0.     The Romans took a particularly dim view of pusillanimity.

0.     One of the bloodiest wars in history, largely fought in what is now Germany, the Thirty Years’ War resulted in the deaths of an estimated eight million people. Atrocities against civilians—especially by the Croatian cavalry fighting on the side of the Catholic League—shocked all Europe by their brutality.

0.     Historically, China is a nonhegemonic power regarding the West. It has been defeated many times by its neighbors—Japan conquered it twice in the 1930s—and yet, like Russia, China relies on its sheer intractable size to preserve its fundamental national character.

0.   At the Battle of Salamis, watching his fleet being destroyed, Xerxes was thrilled by the performance of his Greek ally, Queen Artemisia of Halicarnassus, exclaiming: “My men have turned into women, my women into men!” But such women were, and are today, extremely rare.

0.   As Jefferson phrased it in the American Declaration of Independence.

0.   Many on the modern left deny that such a thing exists. For an analysis of cultural Marxism, and how to combat its pernicious influence, please see my books: The Devil’s Pleasure Palace (2015) and its sequel, The Fiery Angel (2018), both from Encounter Books.

0.   In 476, the Pannonian-born barbarian, Odoacer, deposed the fifteen-year-old boy, whose reign lasted less than a year.

0.   “Dictator” was a constitutional provision in Roman government, conferring absolute power in a military emergency for a maximum term of six months upon the magister populi, who commanded the army; his deputy, who commanded the cavalry, was called the master of the horse, or magister equitum. Caesar took advantage of this provision to effectively overthrow the Republic.

0.   “What an artist dies in me!” the most dissolute and cowardly of the first five emperors exclaimed as his freed slave killed him in 68 A.D.

0.   The poet Robert Frost’s famous definition of a “liberal.”

0.   A quotation often erroneously attributed to Benjamin Franklin.

0.   The hidden religious origins of many of the battles treated in this book will surprise those modern readers who think largely in secular terms.

0.   See Extract 1 at the end of this book.

0.   Western notions of private property, especially land, animate much of military history. As we shall see in Chapter XII, the communist Soviet Union temporarily forsook atheism for nationalism during the Second World War.

0.   A term employed by the late British polymath Jonathan Miller in his book Subsequent Performances (Faber and Faber, 1986): “The amplitude of Shakespeare’s imagination admits so many possible interpretations that his work has enjoyed an extraordinary afterlife unforeseeable by the author at the time of writing.”

0.   See Chapter II.

0.   A concept originating with Trotsky that is itself a hallmark of cultural Marxism.

0.   In Wagner’s opera Die Walküre, the second in The Ring of the Nibelung saga, Wotan is called Wälse, and his children the Wälsungs, reflecting the word’s Nordic roots.