Today on Uncommon Knowledge, Victor Davis Hanson, Hoover Fellow and author of the new book, Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern. Served up daily death tallies from the Iraq War, present-day Americans, Hanson argues, became convinced that they were unique in experiencing a plagued by faulty intelligence and ineffective tactics. They failed to understand the tragic nature of war because they had never come to understand the tragic nature of life itself.

By contrast with Americans today, Americans of the WWII generation had a tragic sense. They were people who had come out of the Depression. When they ate meat, they knew it came from a cow and it was a bloody mess to get them that. They knew when they flushed a toilet it went somewhere. They knew all of these terrible things about life – that it was nasty, brutish, solitary, and short.

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