From Israel to Russia to the Temple of Zeus

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Hello, and welcome to the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

This is our Saturday edition, and we're looking at continuing with the international affairs.

There's a little bit more in

Israel we want to talk about, and then also Russian ships in the Baltic.

So stay with us, and we'll be right back.

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Welcome back to the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

Victor is the Martin Anely Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marshabuski Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

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Victor, so we've got lots of international news still, and I know that we already talked about Israel on Friday, but new things have come out.

Netanyahu has said that he's turning now on the Iran-back Houthis after finishing with Hezbollah in Lebanon and with Hamas in Gaza.

And his words are, even if it takes time, the result will be the same.

And I was wondering your thought.

I really personally appreciate Netanyahu's position there.

I wish we had a leader like that, but

maybe we will in Trump.

But what are your thoughts on this?

They've had this premise that because

Hamas had sent 5,000 or 6,000 projectiles under

Israel, and then they had the October 7th

massacres, and then there was the war in Gaza.

And simultaneously, Hezbollah had sent 8,000 rockets in, they had to deal with Hezbollah, then Iran had sent 500 projectiles in and they had to deal with Iran.

They were going to be exempt and they were going to garner the terrorist headlines because they were very distant.

They were hundreds of miles, you know, way, way, way down near the Red Sea and they thought, well, the Israelis would have to refuel once or twice to get us.

They don't want to send a ballistic missile.

They have their hands full with Hamas, Hezbollah, Syria, Iran.

So we're just going to every week, a couple of days, send a projectile in there, a drone, a missile, et cetera.

And it's going to hit something.

They kill, I think, a couple of Israelis and they just keep doing it.

And then they get on their national

propaganda megaphones and they brag that they're the only

terrorist organization that Israel can't reach, even though they took out their ports.

So it was just a matter of time, and now with the Assad overthrow and Syria is in turmoil, it's no longer able to mount a defense, it's no longer able to transit Iranian goods, there is nobody to give them to.

Hamas and Hezbollah are inert, and Iran is in the target.

Anet Nyah was saying, you know what?

Now we have time to deal with you.

And what was ironic about it was, at the very moment, Mr.

Al-Houthi, or whatever whatever his name is, the erstwhile leader of the Houthis,

I don't know what you'd call them, Cabal.

They don't have the entire country.

But while he was bragging that they were hitting Israel, Israel just very quietly took out their power plants.

They took out

some of their airport facilities.

They took out infrastructure.

They went after the headquarters of Houthi people.

Many of the Houthi leaders have quietly left the capital because they're afraid that their name, their numbers up because Netanyahu's people have said, you know, we're going to go after you.

So

it's just a matter of time.

And it was kind of ironic because

Israel doesn't really make threats unless they carry them out, unlike Joe Biden.

Don't.

What are you going to say to the Iranians if they're thinking, don't.

What if you think, should Israel reply?

No, I told them don't.

How about if Russia goes, no, don't.

No, Joe, nobody listens to you.

I'm sorry.

When you say don't, that means yes.

And

they don't do that.

And they're quiet, and they're taking care of business with the Houthis.

And then think about it in a minute.

We had this conversation

two years ago.

People would have said,

wow, Israel is surrounded by Hamas,

who are deadly.

And then they've got Hezbollah.

Well, no one can deal with Hezbollah.

They're just indomitable.

And then they've got Iran, ascended under Biden.

They've got Assad that's fueling the whole thing on his end.

And then they've got the Houthis.

And then they're little tiny Israel.

And they've got a hostile administration.

Two years later, they're all been taken care of, one way or the other, or they're in the process of being taken care of.

It's quite an achievement that people don't realize.

And

there was a lot of photographs of the arsenal.

I don't know if you saw it.

The arsenal that Israel inherited from Syria.

And there were rumors

that Assad, on his way out, gave to Israeli intelligence areas where he had arms depots in fear that his enemies would find them and use them against the vestigial Russian bases there on the coast.

And there are pictures then of the explosions where Israel systematically blew up the whole weapons arsenal, both in Lebanon and in Syria.

But more importantly, they kept a lot of stuff.

And it's absolutely shocking to see it.

I mean, there's RPGs, there's machine guns.

You know what it is?

It's the antithetical version of the $50 billion that we left behind to the Taliban and Afghanistan.

Only they took it.

So here's a nice way to end this little vignette.

Joe Biden goes into Afghanistan, pulls out.

goes in when he takes over and leaves 50 to 80 billion dollars of trucks, jeeps, machine guns to terrorists.

Israel goes in under enormous criticism from Biden and they end up with a huge cash that they take from terrorists, not only taking it out of circulation, but perhaps they can find a use for it themselves.

It's just the opposite, and yet they get criticized.

They've done more for the United States security in the last 30 years

in the Middle East than anybody else.

Yeah.

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Victor, so since you mentioned Russia in that, Russia has also got its tentacles in other places, especially the Baltic and between the Baltic states and Finland.

Apparently, one of their ships has dragged an anchor across the Baltic sea floor and has disrupted a lot of energy and communication cables between Finland and the Baltic states.

Now, they don't know for sure if it was done on purpose or not, but it certainly looks like a weird, quote-unquote, accident for a ship to have.

What are your thoughts on this?

Well, I mean, they rent Chinese ships, and then

the Scandinavians and NATO people just

fly over them and take pictures.

And when they don't see an anchor visible from the top of the ship, which they are, anybody who's been on a big ship sees that they're visible.

They understand that they're somewhere else, and that somewhere else is along the bottom of the sea, and they're dragging it in areas where they think there's communication cables.

And then they sort of drift off.

In this case, the Finns have stopped the ship

and they're looking.

But the question is, what are you going to do about it?

And

I don't know what you do about it.

Russia's mad because

one of the disastrous developments was that they had always considered since the Potsdam Treaty that Austria and Finland were going to be neutral.

Neither one would have joined NATO and didn't, or the

Warsaw Pact.

And they had had a bitter experience in their conquering of the Finns in the Winter War of 1939 and 1940.

So Finland was a special case.

They just let it go.

And they said, you know, Helsinki can be sort of like Vienna, Switzerland,

Vienna, Austria, or somewhere like Geneva, Switzerland, neutral.

And then

this war and the bullying of Putin just convinced the Finns that they are going to be a NATO power.

So they joined NATO and they brought with it one of the most effective artillery forces in the whole alliance given their experience going all the way back to World War II as superb fighters.

And then Sweden followed.

So one of the things that Putin is really upset about on his right northern flank, he always had two neutral countries that were careful not to join NATO and were in fact,

in the case of Sweden especially,

left-wing and anti-American.

And that's no longer true now.

And Sweden has a very effective arms industry for pacifists.

They make pretty good arms, as do the Finns.

So I guess what I'm saying is we're not talking about putting in

countries that will not fight.

And these two countries, Finland and Sweden, are more valuable additions to NATO than a lot of the Western European.

I'd rather have Sweden or Finland easily than Belgium, for example.

And we'll see what they do, but

they're going to have to react

in some way to restore deterrence.

We'll see what Trump says when he meets Putin.

Is he going to say, you're going to stop cutting our cables of our allies, or you're going to stop this and this, and then you're going to get this?

We'll see what his art of the deal will be.

But right now,

where is Biden?

I guess he's.

Where is he?

No one knows.

No, he's at some beach.

It's Delaware.

No, is it Virgin Islands?

I can't remember.

I don't know.

It's some place.

He's at a beach.

And he's always at a beach.

And whoever is running the country, I guess it's Mr.

Blinken who's running the country.

And I think

Jake Sullivan said something the other day.

He said that we're

handing off a quiet world to Donald Trump.

Remember his, right before they went in, the killers went in on October 7th.

He said, I'm looking at my portfolio.

And the Middle East is one of the quiet.

quietest, most stable places.

And now he's saying the same thing.

You think, okay,

what did you guys do in Ukraine?

What happened in the Middle East?

What do you think the world is like with Teywa?

You've screwed up everything and you're telling it's stable because we're not quite at war yet.

God, this is going to be.

Maybe Mr.

Blinken can go back to his $5 million

mansion in Washington or his Martha Vineyard estate that he used to rent out.

I guess he used to let

Obama use it.

Yeah, and leave the rest of the country alone.

Yeah, just leave us alone.

You know, all of these people,

just as an anecdote, I was driving home yesterday on the decrepit, ossified, calcified, narrow 99, big wreck, two lanes in each direction, hasn't changed since I was a kid.

Then you got to hear Gavin Newsom gallivanting around and bragging about,

oh, we have a fund to sue Trump.

And I'm just thinking, when you came into power, I'm going on a rant now, 19 cents, I think it was, for kilowatts, which was the highest in the country.

Now it's 31 or 32 kilowatts on average.

You went, the gas tax went up, the income tax, the sales tax, and the whole country went to you-know-what.

And here you're driving, and you can't even drive.

It was like a Road Warrior.

I mean, there were just semis lined up, and then one lane for cars.

And it was a menagerie of cars.

And then everybody trying to go on the shoulder.

There was a wreck.

It was just a mess.

It didn't have to be that way because, you know, it was not too far from the Stonehenge.

It just sits there.

The 15 billion invested in the disastrous Stonehenge.

High-speed rail.

So

Blinken made me think of that because there is something here about this Brahmin, aristocratic, wealthy left-wing class.

If you think about it, the legacy of Diane Feinstein and her husband and the Pelosi's and the Newsoms,

they all are Bay Area left-wing people who never were subject to the consequences of their harebrain utopian schemes for us.

Their spouses, I think Gavin's wife had a company with business with estate.

Diane Feinstein's husband became very wealthy, Richard Bloom, with investments.

We don't need to get into the Pelosi's real estate and stock deals given her office.

Then we had Barbara Boxer.

She was hiring her son and all of this stuff.

And then we've got

Camilla Harris and Jerry Brown.

And they all had one thing in common.

They were left-wing, toothy things.

They were left-wing.

They were very wealthy.

And they all never had to drive in the 99.

like most of these poor people like myself last night.

They don't have to drive in the 99.

They don't have to fight as a common person in LAX, getting to LAX.

They don't have to worry about the crime on the streets of Stockton or Fresno or San Francisco.

I think Nancy's up in Napa, Jerry's up in Grass Valley, Barbara Boxer's down at Rancho Mirage, rest in peace, the Feinsteins, Camilla, I don't know where was she in, Hawaii?

Probably.

Yeah, I think she was in Hawaii.

This is something that really destroyed the Democratic Party.

They're all left-wing, utopian millionaires that use their offices to become billionaires or want to be billionaires.

And I think that was one of

the subtexts of the election.

They have done so much damage in the state.

Well, the left has found something else to cling on to recently.

There was an article in The Hill by Evan Davis and David Schultz, and they were arguing that Trump should be disqualified by the Electoral College because he participated in insurrection disqualifying him under the 14th Amendment.

And I know we've heard this before, but they are renewing this before the January 6th count of the Electoral College.

That is so strange because

they never, I mean,

Jack Smith had to drop all of his indictments, but he never had an indictment for an insurrection.

It was trying to, this is important, he tried to block the process of balloting.

And that's what these guys are trying to do.

They're trying to say that under the 14th Amendment, Donald Trump is a rebel Confederate general, basically.

And he tried to stage an armed insurrection.

That's what the statute implies.

No one was ever found in the Capitol, inside the Capitol, with a weapon.

If you're an insurrectionist, you don't say, I expect my people to assemble peacefully and and patriotically at the Capitol.

You'd think there's going to be a lot of people dead, like the 120 days that killed almost 40 people.

And there was none.

There was nobody killed, except

five people died.

Four of them were Trump people.

I'm getting to Ashley Babbitt, everybody.

Four people were Trump people, including Ashley Babbitt, the one person who died violently, who was lethally shot by Officer Byrd for the misdemeanor of entering a broken window.

And then Officer Sicknick died naturally the next day, tragically.

But the point I'm making is all of the violence,

the violence was in May, June, July, August, September, October of 2020.

And yet these two law professors say Donald Trump tried to stage an insurrection.

Forget about the FBI informants, we know that were there.

Forget about the deliberate efforts, according to the Capitol Police hierarchy, to not beef up security by the left.

Nancy Pelosi didn't follow up on recommendations.

And they want to say that Donald Trump, all of a sudden, who's never been charged with insurrection,

he's had a whole federal prosecutor go at him for two and a half years, but they're going to say that he's an insurrectionist.

And then what was weird is

Raskin, the representative, I think he's from Maryland, he said

that the Supreme Court

that threw out, this question came up because 16 states said that Donald Trump was an insurrectionist and alluded to the 14th Amendment that was passed, remember, after the Civil War so that people like Robert E.

Lee could not run for office or serve in the U.S.

government,

who had taken up arms against the United States and broken their oath in the military, et cetera, et cetera, either as politicians or as military officers.

So

Raskin is saying, well,

they don't need to be charged with insurrection, the people, and Donald Trump doesn't need to be charged.

I say that he's insurrection.

And he was taken off the ballot in 16 states for a while because those people and local state courts said said he was an insurrectionist.

The real reason, of course, was they were hard left and they were afraid of him.

And this is the key what I'm getting at.

And the Supreme Court's not doing their job because they've rejected all of those arguments and forced him to be on the ballot as everybody else has a right.

So therefore, we're going to need

he said, we're going to need bodyguards.

We're going to need security against these MAGA people.

And the Supreme Court, think about what he's saying.

He's saying,

we,

law professors, me, a congressperson who's taken an oath to uphold the Constitution, we do not accept the vote on November 5th.

We don't accept the popular vote and we don't do the legally

applicable vote, the Electoral College.

And therefore, we want the electors in December to vote against him.

They will not vote against him.

Hillary tried this in 2016, which was an insurrection.

So when the

electors vote for Donald Trump, we're not going to accept it.

And we want,

and that's the question, who does he want?

Where is power?

Where is the power?

He wants to stop Donald Trump from taking office.

So he thinks a left-wing judge at the federal level, the Colorado Supreme Court, who is he talking about, is going to have an injunction, and then people like him are going to have personal security details, and then they're going to ignore the Supreme Court.

This guy is an insurrectionist.

And, you know, it's funny.

There was a big fight among the left over the anger that Jack Smith couldn't charge Donald Trump with insurrection.

He charged him with disrupting a ballot process and all that stuff.

But this guy is an insurrectionist.

It's so funny for me because I remember during this time I had never questioned the election.

I had questioned the laws changing the way people balloted in 22.

But I had to sit down and go over transcripts of everything I'd said on Fox News because I had been accused by the Stanford Faculty Senate of, I guess, fomenting insurrection or not accepting the ballot.

I wonder if right now the Stanford faculty will issue a censure, because they do issue proclamations, that they're in theory censoring Representative Raskin and these two law professors for daring to, in an insurrectionary fashion, try to

nullify the results of our recent election.

I hope so, because they do it to a lot of other people.

Yeah, they sure do.

Okay, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and come back to talk a little bit about the Olympian Temple of Zeus.

Stay with us and we'll be back.

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So we'd love to have you come.

So Victor, we were on a discussion of the seven wonders of the world and so you wanted to turn this week to the Olympian Temple.

Ah, the seven ancient wonders, because there are seven natural wonders of the world.

There's seven, you know, the left comes in, seven technological,

seven green wonders.

We're talking about the Hellenistic from the Hellenistic times,

what were considered the most impressive sites in the ancient world, the ancient Western world.

And it's easy to remember them, everybody.

There's two from Greece, and we did the Colossus of Rhodes, and we're going to do the statue of Zeus.

in the Temple of Olympia at Olympia, of Olympian Zeus at Olympia.

So there's two in Egypt.

We're going to next to the lighthouse in the harbor of Alexandria, Alexandria at Pharos, and then the monumental

pyramids at Giza.

And then there's two in Turkey,

and that is the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus.

and the Haliconarsis

Mausalium, that is the tomb of Mausilus.

And then there's just one, the seventh is in Iraq

outside Baghdad at the ancient site of Babylon in the supposed and controversial hanging gardens of Babylon.

The Temple of Olympian Zeus is interesting.

If you go to Olympia today in the Altis, that is that beautiful, it's a beautiful site.

It's near the Alphaeus River, and it's well watered.

There's meadows.

There's all sorts of greenery.

And the Temple of Zeus was a, for the time, was one of the biggest temples on the mainland.

And

it wasn't as huge as some of the ones in Asia Minor would be, but it was roughly

about the same size as the Parthenon.

Not quite.

About, in other words, about

oh,

I think it was 35 meters or something, 30 meters

by 60 anyway.

But it was about about the same size as the Parthenon.

And the problem with it was it was the most spectacular temple in Greece.

And this is the problem.

Everybody wanted to go see it.

It was the largest temple in in Greece.

And it was built around,

oh, in the 570s.

Excuse me, 470s.

It was an early Doric temple.

Most of the temples in the Peloponnese tended to be Doric.

This was purely Doric.

But what had happened under Pericles, the great building program, he had built the Parthenon, the 20-year project,

which, as you remember, was finished pretty much by the 430s, 440s.

And everybody wanted to go to the Parthenon.

It was the tourist attraction.

I don't know why it wasn't one of the seven wonders of the world.

And they wanted to go...

not just for the friezes and the monumental metopes and pediments,

but also because of the Chris Elphantine statue of Athena.

Everybody, Propolis, the big protector of the city, the patron saint.

There was a pro-makos, a statue outside with a spear.

But this was huge.

It was about 38 or 39 feet tall, and she's standing inside the now of the temple itself.

Remember what Chris Elphantine means?

It means that the skin is ivory and that supposedly radiates the actual look of skin.

So they make a wood statue.

Phidias was the famous sculptor and then they plate

ivory sections on the wood arms and face and then the clothing and the accoutrements, the dress is made of gold.

And in the case of

Athens, they actually weighed the gold and that was also served as a treasury.

They knew how much gold was plated on this huge sculpture.

So the Olympians got angry.

The people, the Elians that were in charge of the Pan-Hellenic sanctuary, said, we're losing business.

So why don't we

remodel our temple?

But they said, well, you can't really change it.

It was the biggest that we knew of.

And they said, yeah, over there in...

Athens, the Parthenon, I don't know, it's 10 or 15 feet longer and 10 or 15 feet wider.

And it's getting all the traffic.

And they said, well, why don't we hire Phidias to come down here and make a statue of Zeus that's bigger?

And we'll do, it'll be really great what he'll do.

We'll put it right in the aisle of the temple and we'll make him sit down.

But sitting down, he will be taller than Athena inside the Parthenon is standing.

So I think as Strabo says, you get the impression when you walk in the temple, and he was writing writing 500 years after it was dedicated, the statue, that if the statue got up, his head would go through the roof.

It was so big.

In other words, think about it.

You wanted to make a bigger statue than

the Athenians did with Athena, but if you did, it would get too high for the ceiling, so too high for the ceiling.

So you put Zeus sitting down, and then you can make him even much bigger,

and then just sitting, he's taller sitting down than Athena is standing up.

And that projects the idea that if he were to stand up as the head of the Olympian gods, his head would break through the roof.

And so it had a traumatic effect on people who visited it because it was so huge and yet it fitted in a temple.

And I think later in Roman times, Dio Chrysostom,

the great orator,

his name I think translated,

Dio of the golden mouth, he was so eloquent.

He gave a great oration there right in front of the statue about how you portray God.

And he comes to the conclusion that you can't have an inanimate God because there's nothing to portray.

There's nobody can relate anything.

And if you're going to make it anthropomorphic, you've got to make it divine-like.

And this statue captured that because the way it was formed, and it showed you that he had the power to break through the temple, but for

mere humans, he was willing to sit here and take

worshipers who were offering to give offerings.

And how does it look?

You know it from,

we don't have any, it was dedicated around 450

BC and it it survived all the way to the 5th century AD for a thousand years and then there were various rumors that it Justinian in the sixth century or Constant people carted it off to Constantinople or during the barbarian invasions subsequently parts were

broken up because it was gold that the plating was and the the ivory.

We have on coins renditions of it, and then we have very clear

literary descriptions.

I mentioned Strabo and Dio, but we also have one by Pausanias.

And apparently it was Zeus was sitting in a throne like this, and

in his right hand he was holding a scepter.

some type of bird of prey on top of it.

And then he was holding here a

statuette or a statue of Nike,

the goddess of victory.

In other words, this was the idea that the Greeks following the Persian War had

worshipped Zeus and as a result, these warlike Greeks now were predominant in the known eastern Mediterranean and they had the, and so Zeus is pretty much unleashing the goddess.

Nikkei to reify that fact.

The other thing to remember is we know it.

I said you know it because you've all seen George Washington in that famous Horatio

Greenhow

sculpture of him where George Washington is sitting with his breast naked and he's got drapery and he's sitting like this

with the same pose as Zeus.

That was

sculpted in the I think it was in the 1830s or 40s, and it was brought to the Capitol

and

people got very upset about it.

They thought it was too bold or risque that the father of the country would be shown bare-breasted or that he was imperial and we were a democracy and yet we were trying to make our founding father into an imperial British or German type of tyrant.

And anyway, it didn't go well in the rotunda and they moved it.

And I think today, as I remember, it's in the second floor of the Smithsonian.

You can see it.

It's still still there, but that is patterned after the temple of Zeus in general and the statue of Zeus that doesn't exist anymore in there.

If you

go to Olympia, you can see some of the columns are still there, and you can see the stylobate, and you can see how large that temple was.

The other thing to remember was that that,

just a sidelight, that sculptor, Greenau,

was,

I think he was very active in the 1830s 1840s and he made two more famous sculptures and they were on the entrance to the Capitol on pediment they were on pediment on not pediments but bases as you walked in there with the stairs on one side it was called discovery and it's Christopher Columbus and he's pointing the way to America and the other was very controversial it was called Rescue and it shows an American like this he has a flintlock and he's got sort of a cap on and he's putting, he's kind of warding off a Native American who's half,

his body is half naked.

Looks like he

has a Mohican haircut or something to that effect, as I remember.

And he's got one hand pushing him away and then protecting his wife and child, and then his dog is barking.

And when that was made, people had just, they were kind of ambiguous about it.

They thought it was great.

And Greenhow himself said, well, I was trying to show how noble Native Americans were in this colossal fight that we won, thank God.

But even at the time, they thought that it was

deprecatory of Native Americans.

I think it was finished and put in the Capitol finally

for 1870s.

It was there until 1930 something.

And

they had passed legislation shortly after it was

commemorated and established that Native Americans were U.S.

citizens.

So they got angry and said, you make us,

this guy is half-dressed, he's on the ground, and the noble settler has defeated him and saved his family from him.

And that is either condescending or it's racist.

So even in the 1930s, and then the Roosevelt administration moved it.

And they put it, I think they put it in a yard, and then sometime in the 50s or 70s, I can't remember, but I remember reading that they dropped it.

I think they probably dropped it intentionally, and it shattered.

But the little dog I've seen, I think it's in the Smithsonian or the Museum of American History, yeah.

And it's the dog part survived.

But the other statue of Discovery is still there in the yard.

And I wonder if there's been ever any effort for a private collector to buy the remnants and put them back together.

But that was the American version of the statue of Zeus at Olympia.

Yeah.

Can I ask you where for the ancient sculpture of Zeus,

where did they get all this gold?

Where was the gold coming from in Greece, in other words?

Yeah, they had a lot of mines up near Amphipolis.

That's up

in Macedonia, on the borders of Macedonia.

There were gold mines up there,

and

they also traded for gold.

There was a lot of gold in Ionia,

and of course they had a lot of silver.

Ivory they had to trade for

from Africa.

They didn't have access to India at this time, so they were dealing with African elephants in Egypt.

And from what we know,

the ivory was more valuable or more, it was scarcer, the white and highly more highly prized.

So one of the

striking things about Phidias' second statue and what made it a seven wonder in the world in a way that his Athena statue did not, if you go in and look at replicas in museums, and sometimes there was a lot of replicas of the Athena statue.

But it's drapery and that was gold for the dress.

But in this case, he's naked from the Zeus has his torso showing and stomach.

That all had to be in ivory.

So, and then some of the cape was made of glass with minerals embedded in it to glitter.

So there were elements of glass embroidery.

Then he had the gold accoutrements, the scepter of the Nika statue, and some of the robes were gold.

But what was striking about it was this

white ivory.

And because the interior of the statue is made of wood,

And it would wear, especially if you go to Olympia, it's really moist, you know, it's kind of malarial because the river floods

through the sanctuary on occasion.

That was part of the duties of the stewards of the temple.

They had to have olive oil, and every day we're told, I think that's in Palestinians, wash,

smooth out all of the

dust, clean it off,

lubricate it, lubricate the statue.

I know that we have descriptions of the Olympian temple of Zeus,

but

how do, in general, archaeologists recreate what, for example, the city of Athens might have looked like?

Or even if you need something more specific, there's a stoa that they've rebuilt.

How do they know exactly what they're looking at?

I had a class when I was 20 with William Dinsmore Jr.

And his father was the great William Dinsmore, the author of a textbook on Greek architecture.

So it turns out that there is a very specific ratio of all of the architectural members of a classical temple.

Now what do I mean by that?

Once you find a piece like that of a column

And you can date the pottery around it, you have a general idea of how many

you'll know whether, if it's Doric very quickly, whether they're pointed

flutes or fillets, flat or for the ionic order, pointed or Doric.

You know how many there were around the circumference.

So you can reconstruct that.

Then you can take the width of, say, a surviving little piece of and you can estimate the ratio of width to height.

And then once you get the height,

you know if it's it's a classical Doric,

how many

given the date, if you have the pottery, you can have a pretty good idea of how many columns, what was it, was it six by eight, nine by seven as far as the columns, and then you can date the, you can, by the same type of measurement that are standardized, you can go into the freeze course, the metopes, the pediment.

So actually in one of the exams, he gave us a picture of as I recall a column and he gave us the measurements and he says give me the measurements of the entire temple

and you could you his father did that reconstructing temple some people have questioned it since then but the other thing is you have all of these style baits so the foundations say of the temple of the

You've got all of the foundations.

It's kind of like if you were going into an American downtown and they'd leveled the the whole downtown, but you saw the dimensions of each building and then you would want to construct, reconstruct them.

And how would you do that?

You would go ask pictures,

descriptions.

We don't have photographs.

So what happens when you're reconstructing a city,

you go back into literature.

So you go to Plato's Republic, just to take one example, and at one point Socrates, they're walking by the Elyssis River, and they're talking about a shrine.

Or you look at the

peripatetic geographer Pausanias, who wrote and today four large volumes on what he saw in Roman times about 30 AD.

And he describes in very clear detail

what I see at Olympia, what I saw at Delphi, what I saw at Athens.

And then we have Greek bases, and you'll see every once in a while a

most of

themes are Achilles or

the Amazons or the centaurs.

They're figures and stories from Greek mythology.

But the background in them are things like triremes and hoplite armor and temples.

And so every once in a while you'll get, and there's tens of thousands of

these pots, vases, etc., cups.

You can see particular Greek temples, and then people argue over that.

And then the other thing is these temples are made of, in the case of the Zeus temple, as I remember, it was shelly limestone.

It's limestone where you can see the shells, but on most of them, in the case of the Parthenon,

that was made of pentelic marble up from Mount Patel.

And the frieze course was the most prized of all.

white marbles was from the island of Perils, Parian marble.

But my point is that it doesn't just disintegrate.

I know that modern smoggy air will disintegrate it.

And tragically,

lime could be, I mean, the marble could be heated at great, in later times, medieval times, and turned into lime and stucco.

But not always.

So when you go and see these temples, the early archaeologists of the 19th century would go out throughout the village or through the general area.

They would look at people's private homes and look at a threshold.

They go to a church mostly and see if maybe one of the lintels or some of the columns and then they would describe them.

And

so that the temple stays there in one way or the other.

And that is when the temple collapses people carry parts away but they put them in structures.

Sometimes they use it and they destroy it.

But there are people who describe it.

There's people who painted it.

There's people who talked about it.

And you can...

We have

the most complete temples in the Greek world are on the island of Sicily, at Pacetum, for example.

But in Greece, we have two temples that are almost intact.

And one of the most famous is the temple,

we call it the Theseum, but it's really the temple to Hephaisis and the Agora.

It's one of four iconic smaller temples in the Parthenon, and they were in Attica, we know.

And there was one at Ramneus,

and one at Sunian,

and there was a temple of Aphaea.

That was at

Nemesis, it was at Ramneus, and there was another one at Aphaea.

So there were four of them, but we know one right in the Agora.

You can go in today and see what a classical Greek temple looks like.

If you're really ambitious, you can go up to Arcadia.

and you can go to

take

a nice, beautiful scenic road outside outside of Olympia and go right into the heart of the Peloponnese.

And you can go to a little town called Andritsina.

And there's a 15-mile road.

I went there when it was a dirt road.

Now I think it's paved.

But it'll go all the way in the backcountry to the Temple of Apollo at Vosai.

And that temple, except for the roof, they have a tent over it.

It was the last time I saw it, but that is completely intact, except for the roof.

Remember, the roof is wood on the inside, and

the

joist and

the structure of the roof is made of wood, and that collapses and the roof tiles fall off.

Well, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and come back to talk a little bit about news.

Stay with us.

We'll be back.

Welcome back.

So, Trump is busy in appointing heads of government, but also his advisors.

And recently he has chosen, and I hope I get his name correct here, Sriram Krishnan, who is a,

he's East Indian, but he came to the United States and is a naturalized citizen of the United States.

And he's been here since 2005.

And where Trump has appointed him is as an AI advisor because he's been involved in Microsoft and Facebook and X.

And so he's worked

on all of the big platforms.

And yet, he stirred up a lot of controversy against him to some extent from the right, but the left is loving this.

He is being criticized, or this choice is being criticized

because they are anxious or angry, I think, on the left about allowing high-skilled immigrants into the United States

and all the controversy with the open border.

And then also

Krishnan from the right has noted

he supported the Harris

campaign.

And so he has left-leaning inclinations.

There are so many fault lines, and

they're not mutually exclusive.

So the big fault line is legal versus illegal.

And so the left is for illegal immigration or we wouldn't have 50 million people that were not born in the United States, probably 30 million of them illegal.

So the left wants immigration and they do not want the prior immigration systems that were merucratic.

Remember Teddy Kennedy, I think it was in 65,

64, changed the immigration laws and put quotas on people from Australia, Europe,

and said that no longer did capital or money or education, except you can still buy your way citizenship.

But for the most part, it was family reunification or refugee status.

But the whole point of the Kennedy,

if you're disinterested in, it was to bring poor people into the United States who were not white and get it diverse and they would be constituents.

If you're really cynical, you would say that Ted Kennedy as a Catholic, and this was sort of the 19th century Rome rebellion, you know,

and Rum, that kind of nativist, racist campaign against open borders from the Irish.

But the idea was that you were going to get a lot of very poor people from Latin America who were Catholic and that would dilute the power of the old wasp white Anglo-Saxon Protestant hierarchy.

So whatever you believe is, we've had this great influx.

The right then says we've got to have immigration only.

I think everybody in the right, everybody in the middle now believes legal immigration only.

And now there's two fights over that.

The left is saying, well, wait a minute, you're deporting people who are poor

back to Central America, Vietnam, Africa, but but mostly Mexico.

And yet you're welcoming in people from India and from China and from parts of Asia because and they're skilled and they're privileged and they're wealthy.

This is

I can't quite say it's racist, but they're saying this is unfair.

And the conservatives then fire back.

No, no, no.

They're coming in with somebody who's going to make us money.

They play by the rules.

They're educated.

And they're doing it legally.

So that's that one battlefield.

Among the right, there is a secondary theater of battle, and that is the MAGA base, the Stephen Miller base, is saying, now wait a minute.

Mark Kokorian, who's a wonderful guy at the Center for Immigration Studies and others, have said,

We have 16% of the population is foreign-born, and we're getting up to about 55 million.

And whatever status they are, we are not able to intermarry, integrate, and assimilate these immigrants.

There's just too many of them.

And we don't believe anymore in it anyway.

Until we get civic education back, until we start to go to the melting pot model again and reject the salad bowl of the last 50 years, Even legal immigration is too much.

So we're bringing in all of these high-tech people from India, and we're doing it because we said they're skills and it's meritocratic, but we're forgetting things.

This is what the right is saying, the MAGA.

I'm trying to be fair to both sides.

They're saying there's more to immigration just than money and skills.

You're bringing in people who will take jobs from Americans.

And why don't we have a Marshall Plan in the schools to train people to code and do the same things that people from India are doing?

Because these are Americans.

And you are not looking at

not everybody's like Vebek

or Elon.

You're going to bring a lot of people like this AI czar who work for Harris.

They're going to be left-wing or they're not going to know American codes.

And you know, as somebody just mentioned, driving, I can tell you, if you have 28% of the California population that was not born in the United States, and you don't have a program in the schools that tries to say you're very lucky to be to this country, here's what we're going to teach you.

And this is what we learned in school.

Here is how to write a check.

This is driver training.

This is what you say to a policeman when he pulls you over.

This is what you always carry.

You carry your checkbook.

You carry your license.

You carry your proof of insurance.

You say yes, sir.

No, sir.

Yes, ma'am.

No, sir.

All of those protocols of a citizen when you deal with authority.

If you're not going to do that, and you're going to have almost a third of the population, you're going to have problems.

and they're not going to be on the same page.

So, why would we bring people more people in from India when you think that just because they know how to code or they have a skill that they're going to be completely Americanized and they're going to follow the same protocols that everybody else does right away?

You have to pay your taxes, you do not cheat on your taxes, you do not go.

You know, I just drove into town two days ago, and I can tell you

that

almost every

corner, rural corner that I pass, there is somebody opening a peddling store.

There are the people with clothes hanging out.

There are people with plants.

There are people with milkshakes.

There are people with fruit.

And they are not paying,

they are not taking credit cards and they are not paying

sales tax.

And I doubt they're paying income.

It's an all cash.

Or I can tell you that when I go to get food, I won't mention the location.

One of the most frustrating things is someone who does not speak English but starts to produce numerous electric bank transfer cards, what we used to call food stamps, and WIC cards, women, infant children cards.

I'm talking about three or four of them.

So what I'm saying is, yes, they are here, but somebody did not teach them that they should be very happy to be here and they, of all people, should be beyond reproach and they should never ever try to cheat the IRS or the state franchise board.

In other words, they should make sure that all of their transactions are reported as income and are charged sales taxes and they don't go out and work for cash for someone.

And that's, we have a huge cash economy in the San Joaquin Valley and because of the protocols of diversity, equity, inclusion, we just don't talk about it.

You know what?

If you have a bunch of people who are here illegally and they're immigrants and they want to go peddle stuff or they have mobile kitchens and they do most of their stuff in, you know, or if you have somebody who wants to work for you and only wants cash, just go ahead and pay it.

I mean, this is the underclass.

They're working hard.

At least they're not in welfare.

And you say, yeah, but you're paying 13% income tax and these people aren't.

Or you're paying 10, 12% sales tax, these people aren't.

And that's the argument, that you've got to first ensure that everybody that comes in here understands they're on the same American page.

And I don't know how this is going to end up, but the Vivak-Elon wing of the new MAGA coalition is going to be in dire conflict with the Stephen Miller.

We have enough immigrants.

Let's just let in a couple hundred thousand at most and make sure we

They're diverse.

They're from all over the world.

We're not just going to bring in people from India that are coders who are going to live in Silicon Valley and make a ton of money when we don't really understand what their feelings of America are about.

Are they going to follow the laws?

Are they going to bring their...

That's the question of assimilation and integration and American jobs.

It's kind of sad, and I think

Vivek's...

Is it Vivek or Vivek?

I think he says it's Vivek.

Vivek.

Excuse me, Vivek.

So Vivek, Vivek and Elon's argument is,

and I think this is what we really got them in trouble.

They mentioned, Vivek says something to the effect that Americans are lazy and complacent and their education system is substandard.

So when you're bringing in

eager beaver Indians who've had to

pull themselves up by the bootstraps in a very competitive and tough, impoverished society, they come over here and they have a work ethic and they do very well.

In fact, Indian American income is much higher than white.

And I think Stephen Miller and people would say,

hey, Victor, why is India India?

And America is America.

So when you bring people over here,

If you don't want to replicate India or Mexico or Vietnam or for that matter, Russia or Belgium or France, then you teach them first to completely assimilate into America.

Otherwise, you reproduce the system that they're fleeing from.

India is a mess.

I mean,

I don't mean that in a deprecatory way.

It's a democracy.

Congratulations.

It's making enormous strides.

Congratulations.

An ally of the United States, all more power to it.

It has some of the most successful and

admirable immigrants in the world, but the country itself

is impoverished.

Yeah, it is.

And it doesn't have to be.

It's impoverished not because of any foreign influence right now.

I mean, if you can argue that British colonialism at least gave them a stable system of government, and that's one of the reasons why it's democratic.

That's one of the reasons it has an English language.

It gives us enormous advantages.

But there are caste beliefs in India and certain ideas

that are not compatible with the American way.

So this is what the restrictionists, I don't want to say nativists, but but Jeremy Carl, who we had on our podcast

about the discrimination toward white people, for example, he's commented on this and said,

why is it, I'm trying to, I don't want to be unfair to him, why is it that

when you

defend the ethos that grew up in America of the founders, the white Anglo-Protestant,

Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture that created the model for the country and then

not just creating the model, but creating the ethos that allowed people who didn't look like George Washington or Alexander Hamilton or Madison or Monroe to become more Madison than Madison.

i.e.

it's not a the idea that you could be a wasp and not even look like a wasp or think like a wasp.

Why would you just bring everybody in and not acculturate them to the model?

And you would either do it on the poor side by saying, well, they're poor, so we're just going to bring them in

from the third world, or you do it from the wealthy side and say, well, we don't really care about the assimilation.

We just want their ability to make a lot of money or help our tech industry.

And what he's saying is, we've got to have people who

360 degrees 24-7 in their lives are fully American.

And we don't just, and that's a lengthy process.

So I think it's going to be

a big

fight.

And I can see that some of the reasons that Vivek and Elon were Democrats and open borders people and libertarian Wall Street Journal Chamber of Commerce people are going to come back and that's going to crystallize.

And it's one of the things I've talked about.

in a new criterion article that comes out next month that

you can't offer text all these tax cuts as we're doing and then balance the budget unless you're going to do massive, massive government cuts in spending.

And that I don't know how you can do it without looking at entitlements.

And you can't say we're not going to get in any optional wars, we don't want to waste blood and treasure.

I agree with that, but then the world is a dangerous place.

And Trump showed us the first time he had to knock heads with Soleimani, Baghdadi, the Wagner Group to restore deterrence.

So he's going to have to use some force, or people are not going to take his credibility seriously, and we're going to get either put at a disadvantage or get into an endless war.

So there's a lot of paradoxes in MAGA that people have to think, and one of them is also immigration.

You say legal immigration, legal immigration, no illegal, everybody's in agreement.

But then you say, well, we need two, two, three million legal immigrants a year.

Then you get the disagreement.

Well, Victor, we are at the end of the show.

We're on a hard break today.

I know you have other things to do, so I would like to thank our listeners for listening to the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

Thank you very much for listening.

We're going to try to have, just an announcement.

We're going to try to have Devin Nunes on again.

He's been on four or five times, but he was just appointed to the Defense Intelligence Advisory Board.

And since we've had him on last time, I think the shares of Truth Social have gone up to $37, $38.

It's almost $10 billion in market capitalization.

I only mentioned that because people said it was going to implode.

It didn't make a profit.

I don't know if it is profitable.

We'll ask him.

So there's been a lot of developments there.

But more importantly, his appointment to this intelligence board has reopened the whole questions of the steel dossier, the Nunes memo.

And I'm reading stuff that just is so incoherent.

It's like,

didn't they get the message that Christopher Steele was a total fraud?

Fusing GPS.

They didn't.

So we're going to go back and see what's going on, what's fueling this anger at his appointment.

So thank you too, Victor, for being very enjoyable today.

It's a nice weekend, so I hope everybody else enjoys it.

This is Sammy Wink and Victor Davis-Hansen, and we're signing off.

Thank you very much.