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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

I'm Jack Fowler, the host, but you are here to listen to the star and namesake Victor Davis-Hanson, who is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marshabuski Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

This is one of those infamous and famous Victors Away on a Hillsdale Cruise episodes where our listeners, thank you so much, have provided us questions.

uh to uh to ask uh during this uh i think we've done four of these so um thanks very much for sending in these questions I've got four now to ask and one of them let's see I think I'll get started Victor with a question about the Greek dark ages and we'll get to that right after these important messages

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We're back with the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

Should mention

at the beginning, I forgot, Victor, you'll forgive me, that you have an official website, The Blade of Person.

Yes, it's

I can't remember anything.

I've had my long COVID,

what is it called?

I was getting better and I got the insomnia.

So I don't think.

Maybe our listeners have a secret out there, Jack.

I know you suffer from insomnia, but how do you get, I've tried everything, every quackery in the every quack, is that the word?

Quackery, quack, every quack methodology for the last four nights, and I've got no more than three hours a night.

Yeah.

Well,

alcohol is not the answer.

No, it's not.

Either it's drinking coffee after 12.

Right.

12 noon.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I don't know if I've plugged my hand into a 220 or a 120, but it feels like I'm electric all night long.

You know, something about quackery, Victor, and I don't know that it pertains exclusively to America, but I used to, for some projects, get these old magazines from the turn of the century.

And if you go to the back of the advertisements, America for 150 years has been selling all kinds of quackery with devices and medicines of

what that is.

That's really funny who said that.

When I moved here to the 1980, my 93-year-old grandmother, well, she was 89.

We took care of her for four years and my grandparent.

But the kitchen had not been changed since the 20s.

So I looked up there and here was this huge jug that said castor oil for constipation.

And then the next one was alum, A-L-L-U-M for wounds, like aluminum, I guess.

Right.

Yeah.

And then It was

Laudim,

alcohol and opiate for pain.

And then it was elderberry wine for sleep.

It had all of these things in it.

It was weird.

And I threw them all away.

I should have kept them.

I could have used the elderberry wine and the laudum or something to make me sleep.

Right.

Grandpa Munster in the basement can cut something that would

cure.

Castore, wasn't that Mussolini's form of

torture?

Didn't the fascists do that?

Did they make you take castoro?

I don't know.

I know that the Romans would

tie a person's

genitalia with rope, wire, or string, and then force them to drink wine till their bladders burst.

That was, I think that's in Tacitus or Suetonius.

It's

never underestimate the human

creativity to do horrible things to each other.

Well, Victor, we have a question from Kevin.

Could Victor discuss the causes of the Greek Dark Ages and what was responsible for the re-emergence of the Greek city-states as Greece emerged from the Dark Ages?

What are his thoughts on the quote-unquote sea peoples?

Victor.

Well, we think.

I wrote a 250,000-word book that was kind of 7,000 citations on that very

question.

It was called The Other Greeks, the Agrarian Origins of Western Civilization.

And

I spent about five years of my life on it.

When we talk the Dark Ages, we're talking about this period in Greek history roughly from 1100 BC to 800.

And we call it dark

because there was a monumental prior civilization that we call Mycenae, Mycenaean at Mycenae, and Tirins and Gla, Thebes, even.

out.

But it was a Near Eastern, it wasn't Near Eastern, it was Greek.

We know they were Greeks, but they were heavily influenced by Asiatic civilizations, Aegean civilizations, and Egypt.

By that I mean they had monumental citadels.

And we know from their writing called Linear B, mostly inventories, it was a top-heavy, redistributive pharaoh-like system in which the Wannax or the Anacs at the palace at Mycenae or the palace at Thebes or the Palace

at Pylos

directed all of the agricultural trade activity and a lot of the taxation of the subject people

were stored in and around the citadel and then given back.

It's almost like a Soviet system.

But they did have a pictograph writing called linear B, and that pictograph writing

was deciphered in 1952 by Michael Vintras.

And it was shocking because everybody thought it's not alpha, beta, gamma that appears around 750 to 720 on stone, so it's got to be non-Greek.

It must be a Semitic people, and it was Greek.

It was just that the Greeks at that time used

a different language, a written language.

They spoke Greek.

Once he translated it, most of the

tablets made sense if you knew Greek and you could translate the pictograph into

later Greek alphabet and then into English.

And then

that civilization collapsed within 50 to 60 years.

We know it was abrupt.

And there's a mythological explanation, and those are the so-called

Trojan Wars where the Greeks went over and fought the Semitic people in Troy, and bad things happened to them in the mythological tradition.

Odysseus wandered for 20 years.

Ajax committed

suicide.

Achilles was killed on the battlefield.

Menelaus and Agamemnon finally made it back.

But the idea is that that myth is a dark age creation

or an oral tradition that tries to recapture or make sense of what this Mycenaean civilization was.

In other words, if you're alive around 1100, you think, wow, something happened.

And the something was either internecine wars with Asia or the so-called sea peoples.

These are peoples that we don't know the exact racial heritage or linguistic heritage, but they appear

in hieroglyphics in Egypt, and they appear with devastation levels at Troy, Mycenae, and places in Greece where there were some type of roaming, marauding people who came through and destroyed these civilizations on the Greek mainland, probably because they were so top-heavy.

That is, they decapitated the elite, and then the people didn't know what to do, sort of like the fall of the Soviet Union or something like that.

And people like...

have written books.

Tainter,

I think, wrote a book called The Collapse of

Sophisticated Societies.

That's not the exact title, but it's something the collapse of top-heavy, centralized,

complex societies.

They're easy to destroy because nobody has the expertise.

I think we're kind of like that ourselves.

If we got rid of our elite that, you know, run the computers and the airlines, I don't think anybody would know, or the sophisticated farmers.

I don't think we would last very long.

Anyway, in this period, from 1100 to 750, population declines by about 90%.

Farming declines.

And the language of the linear B declines.

And we have very little evidence except

these poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey and the others that are lost of the Homeric cycle, corpus, they

foster and spread in an oral society and they reflect

once upon a time there were people who could do wonderful things.

They were the Olympian gods.

They were Hercules.

they were the sentimi gods.

And these

kind of like a nuclear way, you know, the novel or the movies where you wipe out everything and then you have kind of an oral culture trying to make sense of things that they can't do anymore.

So if you're walking around in, I don't know, 900 AD with, you know, herding some sheep and you see the lion gate at Mycenae that weighs 20 tons, you think, who were the people who did this?

Yes, that was Agamemnon.

And so that explains explains part of the Iliad and the Odyssey in historical terms.

Probably about 10% represents Mycenaean artifacts.

In other words, there's references to things like a silver-studded long sword or a boar's tusk helmet, which did not exist at any time in the Dark Ages we know from burials, but did exist.

in Mycenaean times, and yet it's in

the Homeric poem.

So in other words, somebody around, I don't know, eight, nine hundred who's singing this song talks about a helmet he's never seen and never will see, but he knows it's part of the archaic element that goes back way back to Never Neverland, the Mycenaean period.

And then population recovered.

And

I argued that it was agricultural, that population started to increase and

they chose a very different paradigm.

In other words, there was no central palace, and there was no capital invested in big citadels, walls, tholoi tomb.

But people began to master the Mediterranean triad of olives.

They learned how to graft two productive species, wheat.

We know that wheat and barley was, there were better species, and they

mastered viticulture.

They would graft sophisticated,

productive, more sophisticated, productive strains on wild roots.

And the result is they created a system of agrarianism, small farming, that

spread to 1,500 so-called communities.

And so by 750, 700,

the city-state,

people were

writing Greek again, but they did not, did not use the pictograph that had been lost during the Dark Ages.

They borrowed the Phoenician alphabet, added vowels, and that's that 24-character alphabet we know today as alpha to omega.

And then all of a sudden they begin to write down, because they can now write, these oral poems.

So the Iliad and the Odyssey that have transmogrified and changed, enlarged, developed over 400 years are now codified and set in writing.

Probably not too much different than the ones we, the versions we have now.

And then, of course, lyric poetry, pre-Socratic philosophy, monumental temple building,

sophisticated agriculture, hoplite warfare, very different than my, all of that starts with the city-state.

So, Western civilization is usually defined as beginning around 750 in Greece, because that's the only place

where, for the first time in history, people are writing and composing that is not textual or government or religious, but it is true literature, poems,

histories, not histories yet, philosophies.

And more importantly,

this is the first time that people are starting to experiment with government other than monarchy.

There's a broad-based oligarchies in these early cities, and soon they're going to be even more

broad-based.

And you'll start seeing terms that are equivalent to democracy.

And that's, I guess, that was what I wrote about

30 years ago.

Yeah, the book again is The Other Greeks, The Family Farm, and the Agrarian Roots of Western Civilization, which Paul Ray, I just found a review of it called A Masterpiece.

Yeah, I thought I didn't know him very well, and he wrote

a long

and nice review.

I had a lot of criticism from classicists because I

incorporated knowledge of farming as I had in warfare and agriculture.

So

I tried to explain what an early Greek farmer, why the art of pruning or grafting, and I brought anecdotes from my own experience doing that.

And a lot of people thought that was unscholarly.

And then the other problem with that book was it was intended, Adam Bellow was a good editor.

He was the editor at the Free Press, Simon Schuster.

And he wanted a more popular, smaller book.

And we kind of had back and forth over the documentation.

So we ended up kind of in a hybrid book, three types of footnotes.

At the bottom of every page, there's an asterisk with citations from Greek and Latin sources or archaeological reports or epigraphical corpuses.

And then in the

book itself, the text, there's parentheses that says Herodotus, book four, three years.

And then I have long footnotes at the end.

And that it was just trying to be a more popular book that was more scholarly than, I mean,

had more textual support than most academic books.

So it was kind of a, I don't know, an orphan book.

Well,

maybe, maybe it'll be republished again, Victor.

You never know.

You never know.

Hey, we have a very long, I think, important question

about

bicostal bicostal liberalism and it's infecting the rest of America, or is it?

And we'll get to this question right after these important messages.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

You know, at the beginning, prior to the last question I asked, I did want to make a pitch, Victor, about your website.

So the Blade of Perseus at the address is victorhanson.com.

And I want to encourage our listeners, and there are a lot of new listeners to visit.

When you go there, you'll find links to Victor's essays, weekly essays for American Greatness, his syndicated column, the archives of these podcasts, Victor's appearances on other podcasts and other shows, links to.

some of his books, and he's got a lot of books.

By the way, links to purchasing his current bestseller, The Best of Everything, and the former bestseller, but soon-to-be bestseller again out in early August, new edition of The Case for Trump.

You will also find little articles with an ultra tag on them.

And to read them, you have to subscribe.

Of course, you want to read them.

Of course, you'll subscribe.

50 bucks a year.

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So go to victorhanson.com, The Blade of Perseus,

and do sign up.

You know what I did on 4th of July for my vacation?

No, tell us.

I got book plates from the publisher.

They wanted me to sign 1,000 of them.

They're going to put in the new edition of The Case for Trump.

So I just sat at the counter and signed Victor Davis Hanson, Victor Davis Hansen, Victor Davis Hansen on 1,000 of those.

Yeah, I got contacted by the publicist asking for some advice, which I should talk to you about online.

But basically, you know, the hope and dream.

Wouldn't it be great if Victor could be at the Republican National Convention?

I think it's yeah, I don't think so.

Anyway, we have a question or statement and then a question from Matt.

And Matt writes that he was originally born and raised in Santa Rosa, which was a great town.

I grew up in the late 90s and early 2000s.

As I came into the working age, I moved and worked in Marin, specifically Mill Valley,

Tiberon, where my eyes were open to the serial, fantasied world that the elite live in.

Absolute denial and carelessness towards anyone outside of their bubble.

When I moved back to Sonoma County, I had seen that this idealism had begun to spread to even the lower middle class, including my own family.

So I moved to Clovis about seven years ago to get away from all of this.

And man, it was a breath of fresh air for a while.

And then COVID happened, as did remote working.

Home prices went up.

Conservative values went down.

My wife and I just had our first child and have now now made the very hard decision of leaving California, a place we have loved to call our home our whole entire lives.

And it is absolutely heartbreaking.

We feel this is no longer a place that wants us, unable to raise a family on a decent or what we thought was a decent income, watching it burn to the ground figuratively and metaphorically with out of control drugs, violence, homelessness, and a government that could honestly care less.

Victor, do you think that this bi-coastal two-class idealism will continue to spread inland and that it is just a matter of time until the entire country is consumed?

Or may there be sunnier days ahead?

It's a good question.

He's right that people don't want him and they don't want me and they don't want our listeners.

I quoted people directly

in The Dying Citizen.

And it was just shocking that what people say in Silicon Valley wrote after the first Trump election,

there was a person that had

a tech company, and she wrote that these people were losers.

They live in loser communities.

Get rid of them.

There was someone from India that wrote left-wing.

I just mentioned India because he said he used that in his, and it's in the dying citizen.

He said, I'm glad these people are all leaving and making way for new minorities that are smarter, better than these old, stupid white people.

And so there was a racial component to that.

I'm not sure, though.

You see, the problem with it is this bi-coastal elite is a quirk of history because they have $9 trillion in market capitalization.

Because

in a globalized world, when you do a

global,

everybody every second is doing Yahoo searches, Google searches.

They're buying earbuds.

They're buying

Mac laptops.

they're buying iPhones.

And they created a cult, very successful, very good for the country, that the entire world depended on this tech sector that was kind of

based on

free spirit in California, hippie kind of do your own thing.

And then the

brilliant pioneers in the Stanford Research Circle at Stanford University that really invented, you know, the electrical electrical engineering component of computer engineering and all of that, and then the Bay Area left-wing politics.

And I think that's coming to a close now.

I really do, because

the state is so left-wing

they wouldn't allow, as we talked about, a proposition to be on the ballot about taxes and one about crime.

And it doesn't work.

People are fleeing.

And

it's Galvin Newsom, when he debated DeSantis, of course, he just basically had to lie that California is so great.

And all DeSantis said was, well, then why are they all leaving and coming to my state?

And he couldn't answer that.

That's not true.

But it is true.

And the blue paradigm is not working.

And it's not working because it's essentially a regulatory

Soviet commissar

oversight type of, you know, we're going to tell you that there's three sexes and

we're going to put that vision on you.

We're going to tell you that

the DEI says that because you are part of the 70% oppressing class, you are going to be passed over on promotions hiring or you're going to have to accept a new foundational date.

But they don't produce anything.

Maybe the tech.

They control the institutions.

But the institutions they control are the universities and they're not teaching.

They destroy the the humanities.

They destroy social sciences.

They're infecting science now.

When I say destroy it, I'm talking about relativism, where they don't believe in a truth that everything is subject to power machinations predicated on race and exploitation.

And this Marxist binary victim-victimizer.

So they've destroyed these universities, but they don't.

What makes the country go are the people who are fracking,

the people who are horizontal drilling, the people who are trucking, the people who are farming.

People don't realize, you know, I look out my window and I look at my renter, Fermin Compost, what they do, what he does with an almond orchard.

It's every bit as sophisticated as what's going on in Silicon Valley.

I don't think anybody understands that, Jack.

They don't understand that when,

okay,

I know a big mainframe computer in 1970,

okay.

And then now we have, you know, your iPhone has more power and everybody says nobody's ever done, yeah, they have done stuff like that.

When I was growing up, it was a thousand pounds for an almond orchard to produce an acre.

And you went out there with a mallet and gunny sacks and a canvas.

And today,

it's 3,000 pounds an acre.

three times the production.

And one guy harvests 40 acres in a sophisticated machine that shakes the tree, sweeps it up.

But didn't Mike Bloomberg say you just

dropped your finger in the

productive muscular classes?

I was driving, we were driving back from the mountains today, and I was just looking at all these guys.

It's going to be 111 today in Fresno.

Most of them were Mexican-American, and they were on the top of a housing development putting shingles on.

And what I'm getting at is the muscular muscular classes that build, they find energy, they farm, they design freeway.

They're not part of the bicoastal elite.

And the bicoastal elite is a supervisory class.

I understand finance is important, insurance is law is important, media is important, tech is important.

But you need somebody else, and these somebody else people have had it.

And so when you look at the country,

you can say that Minneapolis and Seattle and Portland and Los Angeles, San Francisco and Washington and New York, Cleveland,

they don't work.

They don't work.

They're not safe.

There's homeless people around them.

People don't want to go downtown.

And when you look at their counterparts, whether the suburban areas around those areas or the rural areas or the places like Tennessee or Florida or Texas, It does work.

And it's not what Victor says, it's what people say with their feet.

We're watching the greatest migration since the post-Civil War era.

Much greater than the Oklahoma diaspora of the 1930s that came to California.

It's the reverse.

So I'm confident.

I don't like this to happen, but

when you go to Fohelman province and you want to go to Fallujah, there's a certain type of person that goes there, and he's not the techie.

He's the guy that's not signing up right now, 45,000 short.

And when

you want your

roof fixed and you want your new home, there's somebody out there working on it.

And he's even he, if you say he's Hispanic, he's had it with the Blue State bi-coastal model and will vote and reflect that, I think, 50-50.

And when you look at at truckers and they're told they have to get electric trucks, or you're told about women athletes that are so superb and

they have to compete against biological males, or when you're down on the border and you say, no, you're going to let in 10 million people, whether you like it or not.

These people have had it,

the non-bicosto elite.

It's really an incestuous tribe if you look at it.

When you look at MSNBC, just to look at the media aspect, or CNN, you see a Rachel Maddow or Nicole Wallace or Joy Reed.

It doesn't matter what race they are.

They're all the same.

And what's happening is

this class is becoming despite the Bowmans of the world, the squads of the world.

They have the same relation with the inner city, as I said before, that Nancy Pelosi and Gavin Newsom and James Comey and Anthony Fauci have with the people of East Palestine or Fresno or Bakersfield.

And I think that's very encouraging that there's a class solidarity that is emerging.

It's parallel to and incorporates but not identical with the MA movement.

And Trump has been playing this very astute.

He understands that he has a chance to do something that the Bush family, Romney, McCain never could or never attempted, and that is to make a national populist movement that transcends race

and is antithetical to the bicoastal elite.

So it's the short term, I'm pessimistic because these people are crazy and they're mean-spirited, as we see with the Biden controversies every day.

But long term, they can't make the country work.

They don't know how to do it.

They don't do the...

the nuts and bolts of it.

Civilization is fuel and food and borders and security and military and construction and assembly.

And it's not law, insurance.

That's important.

Finance, they're all important.

But,

you know,

it sounds like I forget the movie.

Gosh, it was

Joe Pesci and others, the mob movie.

It should be on the tip of my tongue, but they take over a restaurant and

what's their goal?

Yeah, good fellas.

Yeah, it was good fellas.

Yeah.

And it's just to plunder.

And they plunder their money and they don't give a rat's ass about what they're doing.

Same thing with

casino with Robert De Niro.

They go out to Vegas and they take over hotels.

Try to

squeeze them.

You only can squeeze, you know, you can only take so much fleece off the sheep.

then people leave California and then Gavin keeps telling everybody how wonderful it is.

We're a quirky state.

We're weird.

That's why we're so brilliant.

No, Gavin,

your state resembles your life.

You were well connected, but you were not wealthy.

And your entire life has been predicated on being elite to the largesse of very wealthy families that knew your family, that was well-connected, but did not have money.

And you were jump-started by the Getty Fortune and others.

Just like your state, you inherited a state.

The state inherited

brilliant.

Brilliant, brilliant contributions from dead people.

California Water Project, Freeway System,

the State College system, the UC Simp system.

And you squandered it.

You didn't do anything but destroyed it.

If it wasn't for oil, if it wasn't for the Gettys

and oil, where would Gavin Newsom be?

Yeah, I mean, I think it was Milton Friedman

riffing on Adam Smith that there's a lot of rot in the civilization.

And

by that, it means it takes a long time to destroy a market capitalist constitutional government system.

They're so wealthy and productive.

But Gavin and Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders and the squad, they're doing their best.

They've done a lot of damage, but it's hard to do.

And I don't think they're going to...

We're going to watch, I really do believe

some type of

dramatic change in November.

And I don't know how it's going to be expressed.

I think Trump is going to win and win the House.

And I think you're going to see massive riots.

You're going to see massive accusations of ballot fraud.

And

if they win, that Steve Deese had a really good rip the other day.

He said,

if the Senate

increases that razor-thin margin and they don't have mansion or cinema, they're going to pack the court they're going to bring in puerto rico and washington dc

they're going to try to get rid of the electoral college they're going to get rid of the senate filibuster right and they're going to implement the most radical i thought well we already have the most radical left agenda but this time what he's saying is they're going to have the congressional clout and then they're going to deal with the supreme court yeah baby you ain't seen nothing yet right yes absolutely that's why it's very important in november that we

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Emphasis on

voter integrity, and everybody according to their station gives money and gets out and votes.

Well, Victor, we have time for maybe one and a half questions, and we'll get to them right after this final important message.

We're back with the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

Again, I want to thank the good listeners who sent in questions that have populated these four episodes we're doing while Victor will be away on the

Hillsdale cruise this summer.

So Victor, I have a,

maybe you can keep this short.

I think that's, I don't know.

Victor, keep it an answer short.

Go ahead.

Let's give it a shot.

This one has to do with from Patrick.

I'm always looking for forgotten literary gems, and I'm a big fan of VDH's recommendations.

I was wondering what history books, history books, VDH most admires that perhaps are not very well known.

Victor, can you give a book or two suggestion here?

Well,

I tend to err on the,

you know, it's a great classic biography is Ladislaw Farago's Patton, Ordeal, and Triumph.

There's no footnotes, and it's about 400.

It's beautifully written by someone who's fair to Patton, understood his liabilities, but really that was the biography that kind of jump-started the whole patent cult of the last 40 years.

Who is that guy again?

A guy named Farago.

He died.

He was, I think he was a Hungarian immigrant, but it's a wonderful book, Ladislaus

Farrago, and it's really good.

And

the only other biography I think, though there's some coming out now, but Carl Carlo de Este, who was a very great historian.

He was a military officer, but he wrote

about 20 years ago a book called Patton, A Genius for War.

And that was

something out.

That was a more

academic book, but it was really good.

And then, of course, I have a prejudice.

I'm just thinking of this.

I think everybody should, it's a very great historian was William Prescott.

He was a 19th century guy.

I think he was born in the 18th century even.

He died, and he became blind, but

he devoted his life to history of the Spanish Spanish Empire, of Charles V and its expression in the New World.

I think he had a book about Ferdinand and Isabella, but he really concentrated on Mesoamerica.

And he wrote,

he wrote a,

he became blind, so it was very hard, but

he knew Italian, Spanish, French, and his

conquest of Mexico is absolutely brilliant.

And it was the foundation of all study of Cortez, the Aztecs.

And it's still in print.

It's a great book.

I think everybody, if you really want to, I know everybody says the decline and fall, but if you really want of the Roman Empire, if you really want to see a master stylist, maybe in the Asiatic verbose style,

you should.

you should read

Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Gibbon.

It's another 18th-century brilliant guy.

And so I,

in more modern terms, I'm sticking to military history a little bit.

The best memoir that I have read, there's two of them.

One of them is very literary, and it's called Goodbye to All That by Robert Graves about World War I.

He was in the trenches.

He was the author of a lot of historical novels like I Claudius.

He was a poet.

He translated a lot of classical texts.

He wrote a book called The Greek Myths.

It's kind of impressionistic, but it's interesting.

And Goodbye to All That is a really good memoir.

The other great memoir of World War II is E.

B.

Sledge with the Old Breed.

Everybody should read that.

It's about being on Elk, but 80% of it is on Okinawa.

and what those guys went through and what they thought.

And it's written by a professor, he became a professor of entomology, of insects.

And I think he was at the University of Alabama.

And it's very different than William Manchester's Goodbye Darkness, which is kind of ahistorical.

This is a very, it's just a brilliant book.

And I think everybody would enjoy reading it.

I, you know, I also liked a novel.

I read a long time ago.

I'm just thinking about it now called Growth of the Soil by Newt Homson, H-A-M-S-U-N.

He won the Nobel Prize, I think, in 36 or 7.

And

he was Norwegian, I think.

And the problem was that Hitler loved that book.

And it's very conservative.

And kind of

the lazy people, not the most industrials in the novel, go to America.

And the tough guys go up near the Arctic Circle where nobody wants the land and they carve out a whole existence.

And he wrote a lot of novels, Hampson did.

And he won the Nobel Prize, but he was forever stained because Hitler crowned him his favorite author.

And I don't think he was a Nazi, but

his reputation never recovered.

That was a great book.

And

I like Conrad's five or six novels.

I try to read one every four or five years, Nostromo or

Secret Agent.

Those are really well written by somebody whose language was not English, native language, Polish.

And those are just, I don't know, really, really good.

In the field of classics,

I think the best history that was ever written, as good or better than Gibbon, was George Grode A History of Greece.

He was an English banker of the 19th century, and he was the first one

to try to write a modern history where you use

the modern

Julian calendar.

You don't date by the Olympic Games or the foundation of Rome, which the ancients did and people did all the way until the 19th century.

And he footnoted.

And he was a brilliant stylist.

He was a banker, so he was a practical man.

And he wrote this 10-volume history of Greece.

And

every once in a while, when I'm looking at a very complex, you know, the

old issue, popularity of the Athenian Empire, or the financial basis of the Athenian Empire, or

the funding

of the Athenian Empire, or any of these things.

Why did Sparta win the pelvis?

You go back to that history, and he's got insights that are just stunning.

And it's a general

rule.

I have a lot of respect for modern scholarship and nonfiction, at least until, I don't know, 2000.

Not now.

These academic programs are not producing scholarship.

It's just woke,

a passing fad that will be forgotten in 20 years.

But

a lot of these scholars, you know, they taught us about the Athenian tribute list.

They taught us about epigraphy, the 20,000 documents on stone.

They've cat from the Athenian agora.

All that stuff was wonderful.

But the narrative history and making sense of it all,

those were a different generation.

Moses Finlay,

all of his books on the ancient world, even though I disagree with him as a socialist, he was a socialist.

They're very, very well-reasoned and he was a smart guy.

Russell Meggs wrote a book called The Athenian Empire, which is stunning.

Jeffrey Dayson Quais, The Origin of the Peloponnesian War, is a work of perverse genius.

He was a communist.

But

I tend to look at, I guess, nonfiction more than I do fiction.

So I try to read

a novel now and then.

I wrote one.

But

as I get older, I deal more with nonfiction.

Those are some books that people have heard the titles of, but they probably haven't actually

looked too closely at them.

If you want to read

a funny novel, I always like Kingsley Amos.

You ever read Lucky Jim?

No.

It's a great novel about how perverted and

crazy academic life is and intellectuals are in the 1950s and 60s and post-war Britain.

How phony they are.

Yeah.

I have to apologize, Victor, to you and our listeners.

I have locked in a room with a dog who's

having dreams while he's snapping.

That's you may hear a little woofing.

I know Patrick asked you for your recommendations, Victor.

And Patrick, if you go to Barnes and Noble, given everything Victor just recommended, you're probably going to be set back about $300 or $400, but that's okay.

You can go to a used bookstore.

Yeah, well, it's money, whatever it is, it's money well worth spending.

I just want to add something, Victor, if you don't mind.

Because the family of Whitaker Chambers is, my understanding, is intending to disallow the

publication of Witness when the current contract expires.

Disallow?

Disallow.

Yeah.

Well,

the apple fell very far from

the tree.

You mean they're left-wing?

Yeah.

Oh, my gosh.

Yes.

Extremely.

Oh, yeah.

And

they don't want their...

Are you talking about the grandchildren?

Yeah.

Yes.

The son is still alive, but it's one of the grandchildren that has the uh is the

they wouldn't they don't want their grand

but what they want is the what they want is their grandfather remembered this at least this one person if i could be you know i don't want to get in a lawsuit here but generally once wants his grandfather remembered as the man who was a communist at one time and and he wrote chambers wrote for um I think the publication was The Masses.

He was a beautiful writer.

I mean,

that book is very well written.

Yeah, I think it's a great history of people who want to understand what makes modern America tick.

The Hiss Chambers case is central to that.

So get it and get it before while it's still gettable.

So that's why I'd recommend the book anyway.

But I think given that looming.

He became a Christian convert, didn't he?

He was in a

was a Quaker and

then did some.

But I can see why the left hates him besides the Alger Hiss stuff.

Didn't he sort of

kind of renounce a homosexual lifestyle when he was young and then he became Christian?

And I mean,

I read,

what was the guy's name?

Weinstein?

Alan Weinstein.

Yeah, perjury.

Right.

Who set out to prove that Hiss was correct and that book that that hasn't that held up pretty well

absolutely yeah yeah

and sam tannenhaus's uh biography of chambers was also uh exceptional he really pointed that out that kind of the problem was that alger hiss was a blue-blood aristocrat very

noble looking, aristocratic.

And then

Chambers was kind of, wasn't he portly and

slovenly and everything

yeah who are you going to believe the the the harvard graduate or the or the dumpy sweaty fat guy it's funny how we're

all of that effort to

all what we saw with the soviet union all the destruction they did all the destruction that cuba did all the destruction that maduro and chavez have done and here we are with a very radical i i i know that the labor party's victory is not really predicated on the actual popular vote.

I think they got about 33% of the vote, but there were a lot of leftist parties.

And my point is that you'd think all that would be repudiated.

And indeed, in France and Eastern Europe and Italy, there are these, there's a big right-wing surge now, but you wouldn't think anybody would ever again believe

that you're going to have a mandated government, a quality of resolve, and anybody who objected objected would be declared an enemy of the people and

done away with.

And yet we're back, here we have in the United States the most left-wing government.

I think much, oh, much more left-wing than the first

and the most left-wing government prior to this government, the FDR 33,

37.

Because

those guys at least believed in national defense and deterrence.

And in the late 30s, they had the Charles, the

Vincent Naval Acts, you know what I mean?

And we were building, trying to rearm, but

we're cutting the defense budget.

We're scrambling out of Kabul.

We're selling Israel down the river.

We've got no border at all.

This is a very,

this is the most nihilistic and archistic left-wing government we've ever had right now.

And it's not Joe Biden's government, not that he's not capable of it because he was always sort of a mean-spirited guy that went with the majority of the win.

But the people behind this are something else.

And

this is why it's getting to be very, very scary.

We're going to talk about that next week on our current events.

Right.

Well,

today, and again, you're right.

Current events we'll discuss later.

This is listener questions.

But

again, in one thing, headline today, only a third of registered Democrats are patriotic.

You know, that says something profoundly troubling about part of America anyway.

Hey, Victor, we've run out

the clock.

So we'll save the other question I was going to ask for a future podcast.

And I thank, again, our listeners for doing this.

I want to recommend, again, visit Victor's website, The Blade of Perseus.

As for me, I get a lot of emails from folks that finally like, okay, Fowler, I signed up for this civil thoughts thing and I really like it.

And I think you, yeah, well, it's, it's, you know, it's harmless.

Civil thoughts every week,

a weekly email newsletter comes out every Friday, and I give 14 recommended readings.

Here's great pieces I've come across the previous week, link and an excerpt, and I think you'll like it.

Go to civilthoughts.com and sign up for it.

We're not selling you names.

Okay.

Thanks, Victor, for everything.

Thank you, folks, for listening.

We will be back soon with another episode of the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Bye-bye.

Thank you, everybody, for listening.

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