Crimes, Near Crimes and Misinterpretation of Facts on WWII

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Hello, and welcome to the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

This is our Saturday episode and we look at something a little more cultural, although we're starting a new series this week for our middle segment and it will be on World War II and then we'll continue backward on wars and interpretations of wars.

So

hold on for that for the second segment and we will look first at some of the current news stories.

Donald Trump claiming you need to vote for him.

Liz Cheney saying her father

is going to vote for Harris.

That is a real shock.

And then Kamala and the Kamala accent.

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

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Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

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

You can find him at his website, victorhanson.com, and there's lots of good material on there.

And if you subscribe, even more material for you to read.

So, Victor, we have

Sean Hannity interviewed Trump last night and he Trump said in the midst of this interview,

you have to vote for me.

You cannot vote for Kamala Harris if you're sane, basically.

And I was wondering your thoughts on Trump's wise wisdom.

Well, you know.

Trump always gets better the more transparent and the more self-deprecatory and the more, and I keep going, I know people have heard this from me, but when his brother died, and he's somebody was going to try to trap him with an ambush question, and they said, Now, did you drink?

He said, Oh my god, can you imagine what I would be like?

And that was very human.

So now he's when he says,

Even if you don't like me, you should vote for me.

Yeah, that's an admission that a lot of people don't like him, and he's aware of that.

He's aware of it, yeah.

And he

and he lives with it.

So, and the point was valid.

And that was the whole essence of the Never Trump, pro-Trump debate the last nine years.

And that is, is it the message or the messenger?

And I understand the messenger is important, but does the messenger outweigh the message because of its supposed crudity?

And we've asked this question before.

And I keep...

relating this anecdote when I said to an acquaintance, I won't get very much amazed, when

this person was going on about Trump's singular crudity, I said, You know,

I don't like the idea that his daughter was arranging an affair.

I don't like the idea that he had sex with an 18-year-old virgin intern.

I don't like the idea that he exposed himself to the cabinet.

I don't like the idea that he committed oral sex.

And then this person said, See, see, you admit it.

And I said,

I just referred to FDR,

John Kennedy, LBJ,

and Bill Clinton.

Now, do you think that they has Trump done any of that while he's in the White House?

No.

So the point was

the argument that he was singularly, what, obnoxious, crude, it's not demonstrable.

I mean, there have been people in the political, I mean, Bill Clinton, think about him.

He

and so my point is

that it was never about Trump's behavior in the sense that it was so beyond the pale that no other president even approached that.

It was about his Queen's accent.

It was about his newcomer status.

It was about his bluntness.

It was about his appearance, his orange skin.

That was a cultural shocker to the bicoastal elite.

Okay.

But the message, when

you know, when you see these things, the message, the message, the message, the Never Trumpers, it was 85% what they wanted.

So if you're going to say,

I'm not going to vote for Trump because of

crude, yeah.

Well, you're saying that everything I told you all these years about the conservative movement and all my advocacy, just forget it.

Because now I'm on the other side.

And I'm going to vote against all those things.

I'm going to vote for an open border.

I'm going to vote for late-term abortions.

I'm going to vote for a weak defense budget.

I'm going to vote for an Afghanistan foreign policy.

I'm going to vote for Soros DAs.

I'm going to vote for a new agenda that includes wealth taxes and tax on unrealized income and confiscation of weapons.

I could go on forever.

So when he says, vote for me, even if you don't like me, like what he's saying to the Never Trumpers and Independents is,

I have some rough edges, but this is the agenda.

And it worked last time.

And we had low, he went out with 1.2 inflation and interest rates on home mortgages at 2.5.

And so what I'm getting at is it really is about the issues.

And if a person doesn't like Trump and they think that he's crude, Is that a reason to vote for a suicide of the country?

Because that's what we're talking about if she gets elected.

It's the most...

This isn't Bill Clinton.

It's not Al Gore.

It's not John Kerry.

It's not even, it's not Jimmy Carter.

This is something way, it's not even Obama.

This is socialism.

When she said, I'm woke and everybody should be woke and I'm a radical, she meant it.

And so

Trump is starting to see that and he's starting to understand, I think, in a really good way.

And he gave a talk on economics the other day.

It was really good.

The only question is time.

It's only got two months, 60 60 days.

And they're not going to.

I know that last time you mentioned we should talk about it, but

they're not going to talk to anybody.

And when you saw Waltz and he's sitting there and somebody comes up and asks about policy, he just got up and left.

Then somebody in another earlier campaign set up, somebody asked about Gaza, he just waved him off.

He's never said one word about anything as far as policy.

She hasn't either.

And when she does have these few moments of unscripted speech and dialogue, she's just pathetic.

And you look at everybody and you think, are they really going to get away with this?

Appointing a candidate that never won a delegate by a vote in her life, never entered a primary, and was a laughingstock of the Washington elite and Joe Biden's insurance policy that she was, as I said, another agnew that you wouldn't dream, and then suddenly telling us that she's brilliant and dynamic, but you're never going to hear her and we're going to not let you not let her talk to you in an unscripted moment and we're not going to put anything about her policies up on the website i was at pepperdine

great place i went to hillsdale then pepperdine been gone for 12 days and a student asked me

do you know where i could find her policies this is the public policy and i said if you can find them let me know because i don't think they exist and he said why

I said, because if she actually states in writing what she's going to do, somebody in one nanosecond is going to take every one of those policy statements and juxtapose it with a prior vote on her part to break a

deadlock in the Senate or a pandering to a crowd that is exact opposite of it.

So they're going to have,

here's my policy statements, and then they're going to post right next to them the exact opposite.

And so she won't post them at all.

She'll let a campaign aide say,

she didn't say she was now for fracking.

She said she was changing and she's no longer against

fracking.

And she, as I said before, it's a Palim set.

She puts something on top of another.

She didn't say that she wants to build the wall, but

she's for secure borders.

She's not against the wall, but she's got photographs with it in.

So she's trying to have both positions simultaneously, even though they're antithetical.

Yes.

And there's no press.

The press has decided Donald Trump is so culturally repugnant to us that we will do anything, even if it destroys our reputation.

We think we can get it back after the election.

So we are going to praise her to the skies and trash him and never

interview her and be humiliated by her.

She's humiliating them.

She's basically saying to the country, Dana Bash, Jory Reed, all of you people, you're just psycho fans and you won't dare.

And they'll say somebody is going to say, well, Victor, how about Fox?

Well, Trump goes on Fox

with the unscripted moments.

And you say, yes, he's, but Sean Hannity's pro-Trump.

Yes, well, go on with pro-Harris people.

Go on MSNBC.

Go on CNN with Dana, but just go on by yourself and have them throw up softball questions.

She won't even do that.

I don't think she's going to get away with it because if she were to get away with it, there's no more democracy if you just pick a candidate that had no primary votes in the middle of it and you remove

a president up for re-election, you remove him from the ballot by fiat, and then you put somebody in that you thought was incapable and then you just seclude her.

And the voters go for that?

I don't know.

We'll see.

They sure are depending on what they call low-information voters, I have a feeling.

I guess.

This strange and tacit campaign has an even stranger and more vocal supporters.

And we saw just yet today, I believe it was, that Liz Cheney came out and said her father, Dick Cheney, is going to vote for Harris.

Shocking.

I guess...

All of you listening who voted for

Bush Cheney in 2000 or 2004,

and you were told deregulation was essential, that we had to have a tough defense,

that we needed to be deterrent, that we needed tax cuts,

we needed conservative.

That was all a joke because it's on the ballot right now and he's against it.

And I have met him, I liked him,

but I'm shocked.

Because he's basically saying my personal animus to Donald Trump is such that I will renounce all the positions that I have stood for my entire life.

The other thing is,

Donald Trump, we don't really know the Donald Trump because almost everything from the Steele dossier to Robert Mueller to the first impeachment to disinformation to the alpha ping caper.

to all these trumped-up law affairs, it's all been personal.

And the media hate him.

But they did that in a small dose to Dick Cheney.

Remember, they called him Darth Vader?

Remember when he had that accidental shooting in Texas?

They tried to claim that he had done it deliberately or that he let him off.

Remember Halliburton, Halliburton?

That was the version in 2000 and 2004 of Russia, Russia, Russia.

Halliburton, Halliburton, Halliburton.

How did Dick Cheney, who was a lifeline bureaucrat, he never made more than $120,000 a year, and now he's worth

millions, maybe $100 million?

Where did he get it?

Where did he get it?

Where Where did he get it?

And he got it from the corporate world.

And so my point is that he is now in with the people that were attacking him and which that administration said to all of us Americans, vote for me and defend me against these people.

They're calling us Nazis.

Al Gore said they're digital brown shirts.

John Glenn said it's the old Nazi thing again.

Remember that?

Michael Moore, all of them,

they call them Nazis in brown shirts.

Defend us from them.

Why should we defend you from them?

That's your friends now.

That's who you are.

And that's what's so striking about it.

All because of the orange man and the crude Donald Trump from Manhattan.

And if

Liz Cheney today cited January 6th,

January 6th was a buffoonish riot.

It shouldn't have happened.

You never go into a building.

But if it was an insurrection, there was no need to lie about it.

Just let the facts speak for itself.

If you're going to investigate it, do what they have done in every single select committee.

You get your guys, and you get the opposition to pick the other member.

Pelosi wouldn't let Kevin McCarthy put people on the January 6th committee.

They erased a lot of the tapes.

They wouldn't call witnesses.

The Capitol Police would not be allowed to testify why they begged to have enforcement.

Matthew Rosenberg said he saw FBI people everywhere and it was a joke.

And then why lie and say that five law enforcement officers were killed that day when there were none?

So why do that?

You know what?

Just let the facts speak.

She said it was an armed mob.

And when she means arm, they mean people they arrested with jackknives and things.

But inside the Capitol, they never found a person inside the Capitol with a firearm.

They found firearms in cars, they've maybe had a person carrying concealed out in the grounds, like anywhere in the city.

There are people with knives, they called other stuff weapons, but when she says an armed mob, you get an image everybody's carrying an AR-15 or something.

So, and then she said he egged him on.

Well, he was reckless and he was indiscreet, but people who are going to incite a riot do not say, please assemble peacefully and patriotically at the Capitol.

You know what they say?

They say, this will not stop.

This is a movement.

It shouldn't stop.

This is going to go on.

I'm quoting her directly.

Yes, I know.

Well, speaking of Kamala, she recently has been under scrutiny for her changing accents, much like Hillary used to try to do.

But I think Kamala is even worse at it than Hillary.

And so she switched accents from Detroit, where if you ask me, it sounded like she was talking to a baby to these unions, to back to Philadelphia where she had a normal sounding voice.

So I was wondering if you had any thoughts on the chameleon.

Inauthentic people who are not sure who they are or what they stand for modulate every aspect of their personality, and that includes the banal, like their voice.

Do you remember when you said Hillary, I'm so tired.

That was in front of a black audience, but remember that in that campaign, she thought that Obama could be characterized.

Remember, she said, I think he's not a Muslim.

At least he says he's not.

So she was going to the right, she thought.

Remember, she went there and she was drinking a Boilermaker,

whiskey and beer, and then she tried to bowl because they have no authenticity.

And so...

And the other thing about Harris is that once somebody identifies a character flaw in her, she doesn't stop because it's innate.

she's not supposed to chuckle, but she still chuckles.

And she's not supposed to do a word salad and be banal, but she's had two unscripted moments about

the art of diplomacy and wash, rinse, spin cycle.

And then she's had the fragile democracy riff about democracy and democracy.

And it's the same.

It's the same thing with this fake southern voice.

So here we have an upper middle class woman who went to Hastings Law School, whose parents, 0.001% of the population have two PhDs for parents.

And she was immediately attached, that's a euphemism, to this seasoned politician over 30 years older, and he just paved her way.

And we're supposed to believe she's a little girl from Oakland that has a southern accent.

And so

there it is.

There it is.

Well, Victor, let's take a break.

And after these messages, we'll come back and talk about World War II and some of the misconceptions.

I know we started that on Friday, but there's more to that story.

And for all of you, I did promise crimes and punishments, and we will be looking at Hunter's case and his guilty plea and

the cases against Trump in our third segment.

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

We're back.

This is the Victor Davis Hansen Show, and we have our Saturday cultural.

This time, it's going to be looking at military.

And I know, Victor, you wanted to start a new series today where you are looking at warfare and some of the, I think, misconceptions of warfare.

But why don't you go ahead and introduce it?

Well, we were doing our literary survey, and we've got all the way to the 19th century.

I'm going to finish with a 20th century novel.

But I thought, what is next?

And then Tucker had this Darrell Cooper on, and it incited fury.

I was on a plane, as I said earlier in the podcast.

I got all these requests to write, so I did write something for the Free Press.

But I thought, maybe we should go back and look at all of the misimpressions of World War II and do it, you know, for several weeks.

And so the first thing is, how did World War II start?

Because it's been alleged lately that the Allies started it.

Why did Germany turn over their future to Adolf Hitler?

And why did Adolf Hitler try to serially aggrandize the Rhineland,

excuse me, the Tsar, the Rhineland, the Anschluss with Austria, the Sudetenland with Czechoslovakia, and then after promising on each occasion that was the end, he went into Poland.

And it goes back to World War I.

The central powers were Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria and some Eastern Europeans, and Germany.

And they preempted by invading France in 1914.

There were not existential differences, but there had been the Moroccan crisis and all sorts of growing tensions.

There was a dreadnought race, etc.

And

the tender box was Serbia and the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand.

Okay.

So then they have a two-flund war, and they're fighting the Tsar on one side, and they're fighting Britain and France.

And this goes on, and they think they're going to win.

They knocked the Tsar out under the Treaty of Brest-Litovics in 1918 in March, and they start sending people

frantically on trains to

the Western Front.

Not as much as they should have, because they were still greedy.

They wanted that 50 million people and one million.

They had to garrison it and patrol it.

If they had have sent a million and a half, they would have won World War I because the Americans weren't there in full strength yet.

Okay.

They were exhausted.

They were bankrupt.

The German Navy by

summer was in full revolt.

The blockade by the British fleet after the Battle of Jutland, the Germans who'd done pretty well in Jutland, they didn't go out anymore.

And they were not able to stop the embargo.

There was near starvation in World War I.

And they needed to quit.

And so they went to the Allies and they said,

we want an armistice.

And

armistice was not the right word.

Armistice means that both sides are tired.

It was really a

modulated surrender.

The Allies didn't go to Germany.

And so they said, okay,

you have two weeks to get out of the territory of Belgium and France.

And they did.

And then the Allies went, they didn't really go across the Rhine.

They kind of occupied the German Rhineland.

And they stopped.

And then the Germans said, well,

would Will Wilson get the 14 points, the 14 points about territorial determination of minority groups and

no punitive action and a League of Nations?

That's what we want.

Well, everything they had done would be antithetical to this dreamer Wilson, but they cling to it.

Okay.

So there's an armistice, and 70% of the British and the Americans go home and you've got all of 1918 and you don't start the Paris Peace Conference till January 1919 and it goes on until when?

January of 1920 and the treaty is ratified in July but here's my point

in that period they go home and they start thinking

well they didn't invade Germany and now they have a peace conference and they're blaming us for the war.

But we were in Germany.

We were in France and we were in Belgium.

And we got stopped.

And that was the great stab in the back.

And Hitler and others would soon grab on that.

Okay.

And so

the Versailles, I think it was article, was it 243?

It said that the primary cause of World War I was German and Austrian aggression, and it was.

And there were going to be reparations and all of these things.

And so so they didn't want to sign that treaty.

And they thought they didn't have to because most of the Allied troops had gone home and they had never occupied Germany and they had clung to this new

theme that they were betrayed and they didn't lose the war.

But finally they had the Weimar, what would become the Weimar Republic, was going to collapse.

So somebody had to take the poison and sign it, and they did.

As soon as they did that,

from 1920 to 1939, it was the Versailles Treaty broke us.

Well, they subverted it.

They subverted it by printing money and paying reparations off in cheap marks.

They started in the 30s under Hitler, creating the Luftwaffe.

They violated every tenet.

So why didn't the Allies enforce it?

Well, they were exhausted.

If you look at French civilians and French army dead and British, you get almost 3 million people.

And that's not counting wounded.

And then you have a Great Depression.

And they said, we are not going to rearm.

We're not even going to call a destroyer a destroyer anymore.

We're not going to talk about the Salmon or school books.

We are going to trust with this new League of Nations, global security, global governance.

And we're going to disarm.

And they went to Stanley Baldwin in the early 30s, and they said, this Hitler has taken over, and at the rate they're going to build planes, they're going to be up to us.

And he said, that's a lie.

Come on.

And of course later he said, I was misinformed.

And so Germany started to rearm.

And then as they started to rearm, they had this idea in Mein Kampf.

There were two big themes in Mein Kamp.

One was to get everybody who speaks German, regardless of their territorial boundaries, into the

Third Reich.

The first Reich was, you know, the Charlemagne, the old German Empire before it split apart.

The second was the Kaiser's, Bismarck's reunification.

And the third would be under

Adolf Hitler.

So the idea from the very beginning is: we're going to get the Rhineland on the other side of the Rhine militarized, and that's going to be formally a militarized part of Germany.

Even though it was in the German borders, it was demilitarized.

We're going to get the Saarland back.

We're going to force the Austrians who speak German German as part of the Reich.

We're going to get out of the Versailles Treaty because the Sudetenland has about 7 million Germans and they're wealthy and they're even more sophisticated than Austrians and they have industry and resources.

We're going to get them in it.

And now we're going to connect East Prussia and we're going to carve up Poland that took some of our land.

So that was there.

And why didn't they stop it?

Because somebody had to put the bell on the cat.

All the mice said, we need to bell the cat so we know when he's coming, but nobody wanted to step forward.

They had disarmed.

In 1939,

they made a pact with the Soviet Union, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.

And Hitler had said in Mein Kamp, and Ludendorff and Hidenberg had said,

we lost World War I because we had two fronts.

They only had one.

And we had two.

We're never, ever going to do that again.

And the next war we have, Hitler said, we're only going to have one front.

Forget whether he followed his own advice.

But he could not turn his attention to readdressing the verdict of World War I in the West until he had a safe buffer in the East.

A lot of this revisionism that came out this week about Hitler really didn't want to invade France, he always wanted to do that.

But he did not want to do that if Stalin was going to replay the role of the Tsars.

So they cut this deal.

Everybody thought, this is impossible.

Nazis and communists won't come together.

They did.

Once he did that, all of Russia was a collusionary collaborationist power.

He did that

seven days before the war.

In the meantime, France

and Britain were frantically now trying to catch up.

And the irony and the tragedy was, if you look at what the French and the British were doing in 37, 38, 39, and 1940, the

Del Watt, I think it's called, the French Air Force

premier fighter.

And if you look at the Super Marines Spitfire, and if you

look at the quality of French tanks,

the Char B tank, they were better than Germany.

They had more men on the Western Front than France did before the British sent 300,000.

So they could have stopped him.

But they were so

20 years of appeasement and saying, I'm not going to fight, let's not do this, let's not rearm, we want to spend it on social programs, we don't want to offend Germany, and we kind of feel guilty.

John Maynard Keynes said that we were, you know, it was a Carthaginian peace.

So they were appeasing.

And the more they appeased, the more that Hitler, and this is what was so interesting in this current controversy by Darrell Cooper when he said

that the Allies had prompted the war and Neville Chamberlain had been treated badly by Churchill.

Churchill bought him into the war cabinet after Churchill was made prime minister.

But

after he did all of that, and he went to Munich, Chamberlain, and

he just handed them the entire country of Czechoslovakia and the Skoda Armsburg.

And then, as I said, he called him a worm.

And he was already thinking about going into Poland.

And so there was appeasement.

And here in the United States, Carl Vinson was saying, we've got to make a Navy, we've got to make a Navy, we've got to make a Navy.

I've looked at the Japanese fleet, I can see what the German shipbuilding program.

And that southern segregationist,

not a very good guy in other aspects, but the three Carl Vinson naval acts created the modern U.S.

Navy.

So when the war broke out, we were within nine months of deploying new battleships, carriers.

All had been improved in the 30s.

But we were completely disarmed and we were isolationists and the attitude was,

we sent two million people over there and we saved France and Britain and they never paid us the reparations back and they got paid and now we're in the Depression and we've lost all these people and don't you think the Germans and the French and the British would would have peace?

And then there was another issue.

Who was against rearmament in the United States?

We had enormous Irish population and we had enormous German-American population.

And when the Versailles Treaty came and we were supposed to participate in it and Wilson had crafted it, they were opposed

to the treaty because they were pro-German.

And so there was a lot of sentiment that the British Empire, Revolutionary War, they're not really our spiritual forefathers.

Whatever the particular weight of all of those factors was, we were isolationist.

And all we had to do is say, guarantee, when Britain and France said we guarantee the territorial integrity of Poland,

the United States says we don't want to come in again, but we will too.

And had been armed, the war wouldn't have brought up.

So what was the cause?

It was, as I said before, collusion, isolationism,

and appeasement.

And then what really got me angry when I read this longer exegesis by Darrell Cooper and some posts, they think that the

Versailles Treaty was punitive and caused World War II because it made the Germans feel guilty.

They didn't follow any of the tenets.

They broke the disarmament clauses.

They paid the reparations back in worthless money.

They violated the Rhineland de militarization.

They violated the Anschluss clause.

They broke everything.

And these same people that these people right now in the United States are defending, these same Germans,

what they did was

they went into Russia in 1918 to end World War I and they had this treaty, the Brest-Latovitz.

They made the broke Russian government that had just suffered this horrific revolution, they made them pay billions in reparations.

They took, as I said, a million square miles.

It was the most punitive.

And then

when it leaked out, one of the reasons the Allies were so galvanized in World War I is it leaked out that the Kaiser wasn't just going to punish France, it was going to go all the way to the Atlantic Ocean.

And they were going to carve off all the way from Dunkirk all the way to the Spanish border.

And they were going to cede that to Germany so it had its rightful place, it said, on the Atlantic Ocean for U-boats.

And that's why Hitler was so obsessed with getting France.

One of the reasons he wanted those Atlantic ports.

And the Kaiser almost got them.

And then they wanted to destroy Belgium.

So my point is, how can you argue that what the Allies made Germany sign was in any way punitive when Germany itself had created the most punitive

so-called treaty with the Russians and had wanted to be even harder on the French.

And my gosh, if you look at the treaty of 1871 that ended the Franco-Prussian War, and you look at the terms that Bismarck put on France.

They lost all of the Alsace-Lorraine and they had billions of francs they had to pay back in bullion, no printing.

And we can go into the World War II, but we don't have time,

what we did to the Germans a second time.

So this is a, let me just sum up.

Germany went to war because it figured that

it had really won World War I because it had knocked out Russia and it was in France and Belgium and they promulgated a great lie that they were on the offensive, not that they were starving, not they were bankrupt, not they were begging for an armistice because they were shortly going to be overwhelmed by two million Americans plus renewed French and British troops.

The Versailles Treaty was not the cause of World War II, at least the way that these revisionists think.

It may have been because it was too lax and it combined the worst of both elements.

It talked tough and it was weak.

And that infuriated Germans.

They even stormed the Reichstag when they heard about it.

But they didn't ever face the consequences of it.

So it was too soft.

And that was an idea.

And then third,

There had been, and finally, there had been a long tradition in German philosophical, if we can call it, that, of Nietzsche, Hegel, Oswald, Spengler.

And I mentioned that before, that we were the pure race on the other side of the Danube and the Rhine that had never been assimilated.

The Roman Empire that had prompted Italy and then France and Britain and parts of Eastern Europe, they were Mongols.

They lost their blood and soil Italian essence, but they never got across the Rhine.

They never got across the Danube.

We are the only Aryan, pure-blooded

people in Europe that are tied to a pristine soil that has never been invaded, occupied.

We are the Goths, the Viscos, the Vandals,

the Huns.

We are a pure white

Aryan race.

And we have manifest.

If we can combine,

then we have to have Lebensraum.

We have to have room because we're superior and we deserve to take what we get.

I'm just quoting almost verbatim Mein Kamp, who written, I shouldn't say written, he dictated it while in jail.

To Rudolf Hess.

Rudolf Hess and there was an earlier person too,

Clerks, in 1923 and 4.

I think it came out in 26 and 2.

But it's just a rambling mess.

But in it, he outlines exactly what they're going to do.

And he says that the Jews are synonymous with communism, and he's going to go in.

He doesn't want to go to Ma.

He doesn't want to go into the Asiatic areas, the Caspian Sea.

He doesn't want to go into Siberia.

He wants what he claims is Europe, the ancestral home of Germanic, the Volga, German, all this stuff.

And he wants to take them back and he wants to slaughter and depopulate and then settle it.

Even in table talk, his nightly transcriptions of his insane rantings during the war, he wants a superhighway to Crimea

right through.

Okay,

so when these revisionists this week said,

Well,

the only reason prisoners die, they were surprised that they caught two million of them.

They were so successful.

And then there's this other fellow who will remain nameless.

He this week wrote in support of that interviewer.

He said, well, what would you people do if you were losing and you were starving and you were out of fuel and you put the Japanese in camps?

Then they would all die.

And so now you're judging the Germans because they allowed Russians to die.

No, because nobody in the United States government published a manifesto saying it's our job to take all the Japanese and Asians and put them on camps and starve them to death.

Dummy.

They didn't do that.

And they paid reparations for them under the Reagan administration.

I can tell you, I'm looking out my window now at former Japanese farms and there were local farmers, not all of them, but a lot of local farmers said, these are our friends.

And they took the land and farmed it and put the profits in a trust account so when they came out of Manzanara, they could get it back.

And I can, I have the Selma Enterprise in 1937 when my mother was student body president and she rounded up all of the local farms to, and Lowell Prout was the editor and tried to stop it.

So there was a huge debate over it.

And who did it?

Some right-wing nut?

No.

It was Earl Warren, who was the Attorney General of the United States, and the McClatchy Papers, who were the liberal Sacramento, Fresno, Modesto B.

And who signed it?

FDR.

And so there was a lot of hostility.

And when it was all over,

were any Japanese starved?

And they said, he said, well, if we were starving and we didn't have oil, but

the difference is, in 1941 and June, Ukraine was wealthy.

They had food.

Greece was wealthy.

Greeks starved.

Why did Greeks starve?

Because when they occupied Greece, they stole all the food.

They had a million people starve by deliberation.

Why?

So they could feed army groups south from the Greek agricultural sector.

When they went into Ukraine, they stripped everything they could.

They were locusts.

This is exactly what Halder said in his diary.

It's exactly what Himmler said.

It's exactly what Goering said.

It's exactly...

It was pre-planned.

that you're not going to spend time and money on prisoners because you're killing commissars and you're killing Jews and you're killing Russian Red Army soldiers and you're going to shoot on site a commissar.

Okay.

But to compare that with the United States and then say, well,

You people just, and this latest person who will remain unknown, said, well, you people just focus on the Holocaust and the dead prisoners

and that means that you can excuse all the terror that you did because you put people in camps.

Think of the logic.

You made a terrible mistake that was very controversial at the time during a period of panic and you put people in Mono County and high altitude camps that were not anything like, I mean they were not a vacation, but they were not like Russian POW camps in Ukraine in 1941.

And then when they you allowed anybody to go out who would fight in the European theater and

hundreds if not thousands of Japanese Americans were very brave in the Italian campaign.

And then, when it's all over, you're saying that you can't condemn Germany for deliberately starving in a pre-planned fashion two million prisoners because you put Japanese Americans in camps, and you're just the same, you're the moral equivalent.

And let me just finish because we're going to go into World War II and we're going to talk about the outbreak and what happened to Poland and what was the Soviet Union's role.

But I'll just give a little foretext.

In the Tucker guest and this other guest that another

quote-unquote historian, they said, and then you made a pact with Stalin and he killed more people at that time.

And he did kill.

He killed 20 million people during the Great Famine.

But the point was simply this.

The Americans are not in the war, and Britain's all by itself.

And Hitler is...

He's already killed people with MS, he's killed disabled people, he's put homosexuals, he's put put everybody in camps, he's gone into Poland, he's started civilian bombing, he's rounded up Jews and shot them on the street, he's bombing Rotterdam, he's introduced terror bombing, not by the way the Allies, Germany did, and then

he's done all of that.

And these revisionist historians say, yes, but you made a deal with Stalin.

And no, they didn't make a deal with Stalin.

They didn't say, hey, Hitler, would you please attack Stalin?

They said the following, it's not going to last because one's a cutthroat and the other's a cutthroat and cutthroats don't chase it.

But when one attacks the other, we don't really, I mean, they hated them both.

But Hitler attacked Stalin and they said to themselves, if we arm the Russians

and be given Russian territory, they're going to waste out the entire Wehrmacht.

And that's exactly what happened.

And then as soon as the war was over, people understood, not Alger Hiss and that bunch, bunch, the Roosevelt State Department, but sober people like Harry Truman and the Democratic Party and the Republican Party said, as soon as this war is over, we've got Stalin and we're going to have to deal with him.

And it was a terrible thing the United States had to do because suddenly this monstrosity, Stalin, that killed three out of every four Germans and saved millions of American lives, but was breaking every accord in Eastern Europe, killing people, a complete butcher.

We then had to flip and say, he is now the enemy, and the communist Chinese are now the enemy three years later.

And they were saying, no, we're fighting fascism, and now you guys are fascist, and guess who you're helping?

You rebuilt fascist Japan, you rebuilt fascist Italy, and you rebuilt fascist Germany, and we had to live with that for 50 years.

Every National Liberation Front said, the Russians and the Chinese fought the right guys in World War II, but then you did too, but then you flipped and joined them.

I can remember being at the Hoover Institution in 2004, and there were four visiting Chinese scholars, and a high official of Hoover said, Victor, I want you to go talk to them.

They're historians.

So I sat down and this man said, this Chinese visitor said, I'm not going to talk to you because you're a megaphone for the Japanese militarist government of 1945.

I said, what?

And he said, the government is unchanged.

They killed 16 million Chinese, and you've written a column that's favorable to Japan.

We don't talk to you.

And you are fascists, and the Americans joined the Japanese.

I said, no, they gave land reform women the right to vote, a democracy, and we tried to do that with your country, and you communists took over, and then you butchered 70 million people more than any other butcher in history.

So, what I'm getting at is I think we have to be analytical and cite the exact evidence and the sequence of events and kind of, because World War II now has become a political football

and people are using it.

I think the last thing I'll say, because I'm talking a little bit too long, but the last thing to remember is why is World War II coming up now?

And I think it has something to do with frustration.

on the right with Ukraine or the open border and people are saying, here we are.

And I can understand that.

We're intervening.

And the locus classicis of intervention abroad was World War II, but it's not the same.

It was an existential war that threatened us.

Ukraine doesn't threaten us.

And so,

in any case, next time we'll talk about the first year of the war in 1939, it's pretty fascinating, the Finland, the Winter War, and things.

But I think we can go through it in about 10 weeks.

I think it'll be pretty interesting.

And I'm also teaching a class on it right now at Pepperdine through Zoom and a few in-person appearances.

So you'll be more than ready for it.

I hope so.

And we are...

Are we really going to do the 20th century novel first next week?

Yes, we're going to talk about...

I was thinking I'd like to talk about an author who is underappreciated, and maybe either John Dos Passos or Thomas Wolfe

or

Joseph Conrad.

We don't read those as much as we used to.

No.

And they're brilliant writers, so I'll pick one.

Okay.

Well, let's go to a break and then we'll come back and talk a little bit about the crimes of Hunter Biden and the cases against Trump.

Stay with us and we'll be back.

Welcome back.

You can find Victor at X.

His handle is at VD Hansen and on Facebook with Hansen's Morning Cup.

So come join us there as well as the website.

The website address is victorhanson.com and it's named the Blade of Perseus.

So you are at the right place when you've arrived at the Blade of Perseus.

So Victor Hunter has agreed to plead guilty.

It's kind of a little bit

vague or clouded because they say he's trying to take an Alford plea, which is to maintain his innocence of the charges, but take the punishment anyway.

And so the guilty verdict and so I was wondering what your thoughts are on the

I think everybody's outraged because we have to put this in the larger context it was just two years ago that they had railroaded the DOJ and Hunter's lawyers were threatening to call his dad to testify unless they cut a deal so Mary Garland's DOJ even though there were whistleblowers from the IRS that testified chapter and verse that he knowingly took millions of dollars and that he was trying to run out the clock to use the statue of limitations on past income.

And there was all that incriminating evidence from the Russian disinformation laptop.

And yet this judge was very bold and said, wait a minute, I've never seen anything like this.

We can't let Hunter off.

And then he was fighting these charges.

And then today, or is it this week, he says,

I'm pleading guilty.

You're pleading guilty.

And then he gives this long little soloquy.

I'm so sorry.

I've caused so much problems for my family.

I'm so...

I just paid late and I knew what I was doing, but I was drug-addled, you see.

These were rough times I was going through, but I put my family into so much embarrassment.

Has he ever said that before?

I haven't heard him.

No.

And he said, I don't want to put them through anything else, so I'm pleading guilty.

Now, why do you think he did that?

I think he did it for the following reasons, that his father had sworn to the nation that he was not going to pardon Hunter.

And he was in a re-election campaign.

And it looked like Hunter's trial was going to be taking place during the campaign.

And so he said to himself, as much as he can think to himself, Joe Bye, if I pardon him, or if I even don't say that I won't pardon him, I'm in big electoral trouble.

So I'm going to announce in a virtue signaling fashion that I will never pardon Hunter.

Then they had a coup and removed Joe Biden.

Joe Biden doesn't care anymore.

If he knows where he is, he has been on vacation or he has a two-hour work day and he just thinks to himself, I've got September, October, November, December, January 20th.

I've got about five months.

I'm just going to cruise.

And you know what?

If Hunter's sentenced, and I'll try to use use all my influence in the DOJ so he's not sentenced until after the election.

But whether he's sentenced after the election or before the election, I'm going to pardon him once he's sentenced and once I know that.

Because what are people going to do?

Joe, you can't run.

You're destroying your political future at 82.

I don't care anymore, he's saying to himself.

And if somebody says, well, if you're going to pardon him and lie to the American people and break your promise, can't you just wait until the election is over so you don't hurt Camel's prospects?

And he's thinking, hmm,

yes, kind of, but maybe that would be a way to get back at all these people, is to pardon a hunter right when Camel is up for

election.

So we'll see.

But this is all fake and stage.

He's going to pardon him.

And by the way, I made a prediction.

And who was the person,

somebody wrote something about me when I said

that Gavin Newsom would never sign that $150,000 illegal alien down payment on homes.

Remember that?

That was my, yeah, we were talking about that.

And he said, Victor, you're a bad prognosticator.

You don't know Cal.

He didn't sign it.

He vetoed it.

I knew he wouldn't because he's dead if he does that.

He's so snarky when he was at the convention.

He said, I'm supposed to say this, that it was a fair and open selection.

He's out picking trash in the California aqueduct.

The next thing he did, or the prior thing he did, they had all this reparations set up, and he went to the

African American members of the state legislature and said, kill it, kill it, kill it.

Put it table because I don't want to veto it.

I'm going to veto it because I'll have no political future if I don't.

And it never came to his desk.

So he is really angry, apparently.

And you know what he's hoping for, that she not just loses, but blows up everything.

And then he's going to step in and say, I think we should have had, as I told you, an open convention.

Not that I wanted to run, but we must be fair and transparent.

And we must not have a candidate that we try to seclude, whether it be Joe Biden or whether it be Kamala Harris.

What we need is a candidate who's willing to go on TV with Ron DeSantis, mono to mano.

And that's what Gavin Newsom has always done.

And he has a point, doesn't he?

He's so slick that for 20 minutes he can repeat every can memorized

lying.

If he could only debate for 15 or 20 minutes, he would win every debate.

But after 15 or 20 minutes, his memory and his prep is all exhausted, and he has to come up with his brain.

And it's not much different than Kamala Harris's.

He can't analyze.

And that was like watching the hare and the tortoise with DeSatis and Newsom.

He came out like a jackrabbit, jumping all around, and the tortoise was going, what is this?

And then the little tortoise kept creeping along.

Well, everybody's leaving California, and this is our tax rate, and this is yours, and this is our budget surplus, this is your deficit.

And the little tortoise just walked right over him to the finish.

Well, Newsom is also planning,

he's trying to make a trail for himself because he just signed 10 laws into cracking down on retail theft, too.

Retail.

Nothing like a good thing.

What is it with a Democrat?

I don't understand the left.

It's sort of what this

Scottish, Hiberian, Scott Irish, but it was an ancient person, said to, it's quoted in Tacitus' annual

Agricola when he says, you Romans make a desert and you call it peace.

The Democrats make the world, their administration a desert.

And they call it success.

I mean, he has ruined California.

He allowed, he was all for the $950 exemption for looting.

It would be just a minor misdemeanor.

It would be enforced.

He didn't want to do anything.

He gave $10 billion to stop homeless.

They just gave it away or they

absconded with it.

And then all of a sudden, it's reckoning time.

And they feel they have no political future because what they've done is so destructive, suicidal, that people don't want it.

So then they have to mimic MAGA or mimic conservatives.

So then you're going out there and say, we're going to get rid of the homeless.

We're not going to.

Legal is legal and illegal.

And it's just

a temporary

cycle in their political odyssey, which is always going to be for collectivism and big government and,

you know, a war on the individual.

And now Camilla Harris is doing it.

Joe Biden did it in 2020.

Good old Joe Biden.

The whole campaign, it was Mr.

Moderate.

And then we found out what it really was.

Yeah.

Well, we need to get to the Trump cases.

I'm interested in your take because we've had new

news coming out from Chuntkin, who is trying to schedule the new case that Jack Smith is bringing against Donald Trump.

And she's trying to get it into

before the cam or before the election so that Jack Smith can put evidence out into the public that will be damning.

And then the Bragg case, just today, Murshawn said he's not going to sentence him until after the election.

And so that seems like a concession, but I doubt it.

I think it's a princess.

Murshawn is not a man of principle, believe me.

When he said that,

Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer and Hikem Jeffrey called him up and they said, look, Judge,

we want to put the SOB in prison.

But we put him in prison.

Every time we do, if we do that, every time we went after him, his polls got up.

So we're afraid that if you sentence him for a year in jail, that he's going to be a cause-salib, a martyr.

So can you just postpone it?

So,

and think of the advantages, Judge.

If he loses,

you can postpone it to the after the election, and then will you get your wildest dreams.

I think Jonathan Turley said they'll put him in the wood chipper.

That's what they're going to do if Trump loses.

I'm not laughing.

This judge will put him away forever, and they'll think there's no mega left.

We can do whatever.

And if he wins, we can do just what Robert Mueller, we can kidnap 22 months of his administration and ruin it.

So they're saying, don't do it, judge, because we're perfectly willing and happy to have you warp the justice system and destroy jurisprudence and put him in and get him off the, but it will backfire.

It's not in our interest.

So that's what it is.

And then there was, I guess it was Stephen Crowder, had a kind of a James O'Keefe-like ambush interview with the spokesman for

the federal attorneys in the lower district of Manhattan, prosecutors.

And they got this guy at a bar, and you always have a pretty woman.

I'm not being sexist, but apparently she taped him.

And he said, it's a joke.

Alvin Bragg doesn't know what he's doing.

None of this, we all know it's not serious.

It was all trumped up.

It's a farce.

We should never let these local prosecutors get away with it.

This is just a joke.

And so, and then he said,

I was trying to impress somebody in a new acquaintance I met, and so I kind of exaggerated.

But he didn't deny that he said it.

And then we get to the third question of Jack Smith.

The DOJ had an informal rule that I think it was 60 days or maybe it was 90 days before,

90 days before an election.

You're not supposed to prosecute a major political figure, a senator or a vice president, president.

That's exactly what they're doing.

And then remember, as we've talked about before, there was a statute, the special prosecutor, special counsel statute, it ran out.

And then the judges on the Supreme Court, I think, have ruled that if you're going to have a special prosecutor that's not subject to DOJ control, that has to be by statute.

And that's why the Democrats, when they got Robert Mueller, they went to Congress.

And he was approved.

I don't know why he was approved, but he was.

But nobody ever voted on Jack Smith.

So he is veritably not a special prosecutor.

His status, he doesn't have an official title in the DOJ.

They say he's a special prosecutor, but there's no law that legitimizes what he's doing.

He's really a member of Eric Garden, Eric Garden's team.

And if people say, well, I don't think that's right, Victor, ask yourself why Jack Smith, the special prosecutor, has met with people in the

Biden administration after he was appointed.

We know that there's been communication.

We know that Fannie Willis's

Nathan Wade had gone to the White House on one occasion and met the White House counsel again on another occasion.

And he billed them.

That's what I kind of liked about it.

He billed them for his collusion.

And then, of course, we have the third-ranking federal attorney in Merritt Gardland's DOJ that finally said, I am the third most powerful attorney in the United States in the sense of working for the federal government.

With the unlimited resources of the United States, I can do anything.

But I think I'm going to go to that little New York prosecutor's office, that local one in Alvin Bragg, because he's so brilliant.

And I'm going to go help him go after Donald Trump.

So you can see what I'm getting at.

And then we had

Biden all during 2022 in murder of the cathedral, you know, Henry II, Samuel.

Thomas of Beckett style.

Who will relieve me of this person?

And he was saying, where are the indictments?

Where are the indictments?

There's no consequences.

That was reported, he kept saying, and they raided his Mar-Lago very quickly afterwards.

The whole thing is just,

it's really an embarrassment to the United States.

I hope we can stop it before we're...

Isn't in addition those charges that Alvin Bragg brought against Trump,

that Hillary and Obama had similar charges, and they just charged him a fine for not putting the rights.

I think they've

fined Obama $325,000 three or four years later.

He didn't report income from all these donors.

He

did them.

And then Hillary Clinton was fined well over $150,000 because she hired a foreign national, which is illegal to work on her campaign.

And then she paid Christopher Steele through three paywalls of the DNC, as I said, Perkins-Coey and Fusion GPS.

And then

she didn't report it as a campaign expense.

That's exactly what he was doing, getting dirt as OPPO research.

And they didn't throw it in.

No, it was never sent.

We're not even talking about destroying

a federal subpoena that says that all communication devices and

text and emails shall be turned over to the FBI, and she just destroyed, I don't know, 30,000 of them.

And they took a hammer and destroyed the hard drives.

They didn't do anything to.

The weird thing about all this lawfare, for each particular case, there's an exact parallel of exposure.

For Jack Smith and Mar-Lago,

I know they had to rearrange all the files.

It looked like Trump was all sloppy.

Remember the FBI took a picture of all the scatter, but they did that.

There was Joe Biden, and since he was a senator, he was taking out classified information.

They weren't as insecure places as

Trump's Mar-Lago.

They were a garage, they were an office, they were a university.

He did it much longer.

He disclosed these classified informations to his ghostwriter, who then destroyed the tapes when they were under subpoena and said, I didn't want them hacked.

And Robert Hur let him go.

Robert Hurr found him culpable, but he said he can't.

He's an old man with a poor memory.

So

it was a joke.

And then they go after Trump.

And the same thing with...

so-called campaign interference that Trump calls up and says, I need to find, he didn't say create those votes, they said, I need to find the 10,000 or whatever votes.

That's what everybody, all these candidates call up the registrar.

We want to ran, we count because there's voiding, you miss it, they do that all the time.

So the whole thing, there were easily, you know, and then election denialism he's trying to subvert because he was

What did he think Stacey Abrams was doing?

She was going all over the state of Georgia saying that she was the actual governor and she had been robbed.

And the election, she was alleging fraud for over two years.

And when they said that

Jack Smith, half of his federal writs right now are not just the campaign documents, but quote-unquote insurrection on January 6th.

But my gosh, right in the middle of trying to storm all these iconic places in Washington and defacing them and all this May, June, July violence, and then she gets on a national television and say, these are not going to stop there this is a movement they shouldn't stop it's going to go all the way to election day it's not going to stop compare that to to

demonstrate you know assembled peacefully and patriotic so what I'm getting at for each one of the so-called criminal exposures of Donald Trump there was one exactly the same or more egregious and that's what's so scary right now because and you can see they know that because they're already starting to write articles if Donald Trump is elected he's got a plan to fire all the federal attorneys that have political appointments.

And we've got to make sure these are not political appointments.

Maybe we can institutionalize these positions and recalibrate them as civil service.

They're talking about that because they know what they would do if they were Trump and they got that opportunity to do to them because they know themselves so well.

No, they know that if he gets in, he'll do what's right and that is to get rid of those people out of their positions.

They're abusing their power.

Yeah, but they know what they've done.

They know what they've done.

They know that we don't know all they've done.

And they think, my God, we have done stuff that has never been dreamed of.

And if the Republicans did that and we were coming into power, we would go after those guys like you wouldn't believe.

So they must think exactly like us.

Yep.

There's more on

crimes and misdemeanors, of course, that we could go into with illegal immigrants and especially a lot of crime with illegal immigrants.

But we'll let you and Jack do that in your next episode because we are at the end of this one.

Oh, we are.

So thank you so much for your time today and you were just wonderful.

Well thank you.

I've been gone from the farm.

I was in Hillsdale for I think eight days and then I was at

Pepperdine.

Both beautiful campuses, both traditional education.

and both atolls in the storm.

Which they sure are and they probably are really actually educating students rather than.

And they're both run by wonderful presents, Larry Arn at Hillsdale and the School of Public Policy, Pete Peterson at Pepperdine.

They're very lucky to have those people in command.

Moon, we'd like to thank our listeners as well.

We wouldn't be here without you.

So thanks so much for listening to us today.

And thank you, everybody.

I really appreciate it.

This is the Victor Davis-Hansen Show, Sammy Wink and Victor Davis-Hansen signing off.