The following is an excerpt from my speech in Los Angeles last month at an event hosted by the American Freedom Alliance and the David Horowitz Freedom Center. The proximate cause was a book-signing event for my latest work of military history, A Rage to Conquer, the second in a series of three books for St. Martin's Press that began with the bestselling Last Stands and will conclude a couple years hence with The Wrath of God. The current book, subtitled "Twelve Battles That Changed the Course of Western History," examines warfare from the Trojan War (celebrated in Homer's Iliad) up through World War II, and concludes with what has become the most controversial aspect of the work, an examination of America's loss of warfighting will and skill over the past 75 years and the catastrophic failure of George W. Bush's "War on Terror."
As my regular readers know by now, the subject of this excerpt is not only things military, but also things artistic, historical, musical, and poetic -- in other words, the context in which the various commanders (in this case, Napoleon) undertook their great enterprises. I hope you find it both challenging and interesting.
Article tags: Austerlitz, Byron, Goethe, Liszt, Napoleon
