A New Year's Toast To The Old Breed

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Hoover Institute

A New Year's Toast To The Old Breed

by Victor Davis Hanson

Sunday, December 31, 2017

The late World War II combat veteran and memoirist E. B. Sledge enshrined his generation of fellow Marines as “The Old Breed” in his gripping account of the hellish battle of Okinawa. Now, most of those who fought in World War II are either dead or in their nineties.

Much has been written about the disappearance of these members of the Greatest Generation—there are now over 1,000 veterans passing away per day. Of the 16 million who at one time served in the American military during World War II, only about a half-million are still alive.

Military historians, of course, lament the loss of their first-hand recollections of battle. The collective memories of these veterans were never systematically recorded and catalogued. Yet even in haphazard fashion, their stories of dropping into Sainte-Mère-Église or surviving a sinking Liberty ship in the frigid North Atlantic have offered correctives about the war otherwise impossible to attain from the data of national archives.  

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The Fragility Of Freedom

by Milton Friedman

Thursday, December 7, 2017

Editor’s note: This essay is an excerpt of the new Hoover Press book Milton Friedman on Freedom, edited by Robert Leeson and Charles G. Palm. This essay by Friedman originally appeared in Encounter magazine in 1976.

Those of us who have been fortunate enough to be born in the United States in the twentieth century naturally take freedom for granted: it seems to us that a relatively free society is the natural state of mankind. But that is a great misconception. Freedom is very far from being the natural state of mankind; on the contrary, it is an extraordinarily unusual situation. If one looks back through history, in any place on the globe, one finds that the natural state of mankind in most periods in history has been tyranny and misery. If one looks over the globe geographically at any point in time, one finds that most of the people in the world were living in a state of tyranny and misery.

The periods and places in which there has been something approaching a free society have been few and far between. There was a small example in the 5th century, B.C., on the Peloponnesian peninsula, in Athens;    https://www.hoover.org/research/fragility-freedom

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With The Old Breed