Location: The Heritage Foundation's Allison Auditorium

Since September 11, 2001, it has become popular to suggest that our liberties have been gratuitously trampled upon, out of either political expediency or false worries about foreign and domestic terrorists.  In fact, while it is often difficult for an American to cite specific ways in which he is less free, it is easy, on the other hand, to identify loss of freedom of expression in the West – in a variety of media that touch on questions of Islam, from film and fiction to cartoons and papal speeches – brought on by self-censorship and fear of murderous retaliation.

Join us as author and columnist Victor Davis Hanson discusses the challenge facing the Western nation state in the present postmodern age of asymmetrical warfare, globalization, and worldwide terrorism: to ensure that its own citizens can express themselves freely without fear of violence and retribution, from enemies who are quite different from those our security forces have dealt with in the past.

Dr. Hanson has written or edited thirteen books, including Warfare and Agriculture in Classical Greece (1983); The Western Way of War (1989); The Wars of the Ancient Greeks (1999); The Soul of Battle (1999); Carnage and Culture (2001); An Autumn of War (2002); Ripples of Battle: How Wars of the Past Still Determine How We Fight, How We Live, and How We Think ( 2004), and The Immigration Solution: A Better Plan Than Today’s (2007).  He was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2007.