War Gaming Operation Downfall: What If We Invaded Japan? And other listener questions

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has to do with

the invasion of Japan.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen show.

Victor, pretty interesting question.

Maybe it's too big of a question.

I don't know.

But, you know, your brain is so big, I think it can grab around these things.

Dave asks: how would you,

wargame as a verb, how would you, Victor, war game Operation Downfall, the final invasion of the Japanese home islands?

Is that wargameable, Victor?

Well, they did war game it.

And remember,

as we headed into

August

of 1945,

the operative plan, because I mean, even Curtis LeMay, based in the Marianas, was not aware of the Manhattan Project.

And he understood that there was a special weapon that was going in that composite squadron that was training on Tenyon.

And my father was about 500 yards away from it at times in his B-29, but

he wasn't quite sure what the type of weapon it was.

So So

they had alternate plans to take the Japanese mainland.

They called it, as the reader or the letter mentioned, Operation Downfall.

And it was two components.

As I remember, it was Operation

Olympia, and that

the Olympic operation was to go into Kyosho, the southern island.

And the idea was to take it.

They had about a million men committed to it, and then set up air bases that were even closer than the 370 or so miles from Okinawa at Kyushu.

And that was going to be in November of 1945.

And then the second and major part was Operation Coronet.

And that was to take Honshu, the main island where Tokyo was.

And that was going to happen in the spring of 1946.

And the Americans had allotted

about 3 million people.

It would have been, Jack, the largest amphibious landing, much bigger, much bigger, just dwarfed D-Day.

And we should remember at this time that at Okinawa, which was only 370 miles away,

they were transferring B-17s, B-24s, even the British Lancasters were on their way.

And the idea was that you had 10,000 idle bombers from the European front that would augment new B-29 bases as well as the ones in

the Marianas, which were 1,600 miles away.

So the idea was that Millamey is going to have this huge bomber fleet to offer support and then fighter support.

But the problem was that the Japanese had 7,000 kalmikazes

and they had an army of about 3,000

excuse me, about 3 million

that was almost the same size as the amphibious landing, and they were going to be dug in, and they would know the terrain.

And apparently

they would be equipped, even though LeMay had been bombing from March 1945, the Japanese mainland with the fire rates.

And in addition to that, they might have had a civilian, I mean, they were even talking about equipping women with javelins.

I mean, it was it was a desperate ploy.

They were going to get 20 million civilian militia to augment the 3 million of the Japanese Imperial Army.

And they still had millions overseas in places like China.

And they had staged a very successful invasion

of certain frontier parts of China as late as

August and late summer of 1944.

So the Japanese army was not beat.

And then, of course,

Had we landed, they were using the figures, Jack, at Okinawa, where we had

had 37 ships attacked, and I think we lost 16, 5,000 sailors.

Total dead was well over 12,000, and the dead, wounded, and missing were

about

50,000 in the most costly campaign of the entire Pacific theater.

And this

was all kamikaze-related.

Yes, kamikazes in full force.

And this was used to war game, as the letter suggests, the letter writer, to amplify if you had

300 to 400,000 on Marines, Army, naval personnel, and you lost 50,000 casualties, what would be the ratio based on Okinawa when you put 3 million in there?

And they came up with that often quoted and disputed figure of a million dead, wounded, and missing.

That it might be,

and I don't know quite what they mean by that, but

the Okinawans had had some ambivalent relationship with the Japanese.

They were Japanese, but not completely Japanese in the view of the Japanese.

But the Japanese, there was a sense that the Japanese homeland was so much bigger and people would be dug in so much more

effectively on the homeland than they were on Okinawa, and they would fight far more fiercely for the emperor, that the casualties would be much more.

So it was going to be a disaster.

And I think

the more people read about

either the alternative plan of LeMay, Curtis LeMay, to bomb conventionally with a monstrous fleet of anywhere from 10,000 to 12,000 bombers, maybe a mission a day.

And this invasion, the other third alternative of the atomic bombs was humane

because it shocked them into surrender.

And by the way, everybody says, well, why didn't they just drop a bomb in Tokyo Bay?

Well, first of all,

they had no idea where the plutonium bomb would work.

It never

had been demonstrated.

And the uranium bomb, because of the firing mechanism, was very unstable.

And it could go off once it was armed.

And so they weren't quite sure that either one of them would work as planned from dropping on the target.

And as you know, the boxcar, the plutonium bomb plane had some, they went to the tertiary target and they landed with very little gas.

They almost crashed.

And so there were not a lot of atomic bombs is what I'm saying.

And the idea was if you waste one as a demonstration and it doesn't work,

And then maybe they sort of work or sort of not, then you're going to be out of bombs.

They wouldn't have had another deliverable bomb, I think,

until six months later.

Well, there was an act, you know, there was the first bomb, and that didn't make Japan capitulate until the second one.

It didn't register.

And although the uranium bomb, I mean, the plutonium bomb, in theory, would have achieved a higher kiloton tonnage.

As I recall, the

and they've downgraded both of them from 20 kilotons.

I think the Hiroshima bomb

had the equivalent of 18 kilotons and the plutonium bomb, because it was not

bombed in a conducive atmosphere like the Hiroshima, it was about 16

kilotons of dynamite,

the equivalent.

Did Operation Downfall, I'm sure that's the correct title for it, did it include British troops, Chinese?

I assume it didn't include Russians or did it?

It did.

Well, not the invasion, you see, because

at the Yalta and Potsdam

agreements,

the Americans were angry at the Soviets, and that anger grew more and more after Ibojima in February and Okinawa, April, May, June of 1945, because

The Russians, for all their talk of killing one out of every three soldiers of the Wehrmacht, was accurate, but they fought a one-dimensional war.

By that I mean they did not engage in strategic bombing, which cost the British and the Americans 80,000 dead.

And they did not engage in an anti-submarine attempt as the British did and the Americans with destroyers.

And they did not fight on the high seas.

against the Italians and the Mediterranean like the British did.

And they did not invade Italy or North Africa to knock Italy out of the war.

It least sent almost 160,000 soldiers

on the Russian front.

And they completely didn't lift a finger in the Pacific theater.

In fact, they signed a non-aggression pact with Japan in April of 1941, right before the invasion by the Germans.

And so you had this Orwellian situation less than a year later where you had, under the auspices of Lynn Lease that had been going on since June, July of 1941 from West Coast ports.

So think of this, Jack, you had ports

that were sending ships, Liberty ships, and then later Freedom ships.

You were sending them from Seattle, Portland, and Oakland and San Diego, and they were going across the Pacific.

to reach ports

in

the west part of Russia, Vladislavic, and they were going by occupied Japanese islands and Japanese waters, and they were being waved on.

And these same Japanese forces were killing Americans.

So here we had this situation in which America was sending millions of dollars of vital war support to our ally, Russia, who was allowed to go through Japanese waters under their own private deal with the Japanese while they were killing us.

Can you imagine that?

We're helping the Russians Russians, and they're indirectly helping our enemies.

And

the people should remember in World War II that the British were the first Perk people to go to war, and they were the last people.

They were the only major of the six belligerents who fought on the first day of war and fought on the last day of war.

And

the Russians violated every agreement with their allies, and they kept every agreement with our enemies.

They did not break the Molotov-Ribbent.

They were helping Germany fuel the blitz against Britain to the very day of the invasion in June of 1941.

And they never,

not until the very end of the war, did they break their non-aggression pact.

So then we put pressure on them and we said,

when Germany falls, and it looks like they're going to fall in May and afterwards at Potsdam after the end, we said, you've got to help us in Asia.

That was a critical mistake because our diplomatic and military people didn't realize or didn't coordinate that the Manhattan Project was on schedule to produce a bomb.

And more importantly, the Japanese Empire was spent.

And we were inviting the Russians in to go into North Korea and occupy it, which they they did with disastrous consequences just five years later.

And they were going to take opportune islands, Sakhalin Islands, as they did from Japan, and they were going to get into Manchuria, etc.

And they were going to be directly involved in ensuring

Mao Zotang won the Chinese Communist War.

And we didn't need them at that point.

But nevertheless, we invited them in.

So the idea of the invasion of Japan,

the Soviets were going to occupy areas around

the Japanese Empire and close them off.

They wouldn't be able to communicate with the Koreas.

We had some troops in South Korea.

We were going to go in and occupy, but they were going into North Korea and they were going into Manchuria and they were going to take the Sakhalin Islands.

They even had to get the landing craft from us.

And then

We had a tripart command.

We always had a problem in the Pacific because the naval forces were not coordinated with the land forces.

So Douglas MacArthur was commander-in-chief of the Asia-Pacific,

and the Philippines, etc., New Guinea, that area.

And Nimitz was in charge of the islands on the ascendant approach to Japan.

And then they traded off resources so that one offensive didn't conflict with the next.

And then we had Lord Mountbatten was in charge of all British forces in protecting India in Burma and helping to supply China.

And so we were going to have a tripart British Anglo command of MacArthur, Nimitz and

Mountblotten.

And that was,

I don't think it was going to work too well.

It didn't work necessarily too well with Ike as supreme commander in the European theater because

he almost threatened to resign once when Monty got on his hind legs and started trying to appropriate the American Army group under Bradley.

So it would have been very tense.

And the British did a lot.

I mean

the British were interested in the Pacific after losing Singapore.

They were interested in preserving India.

and stopping.

And the Japanese went into India almost and

they directly threatened India.

And they were at Singapore, they were able to enlist

a number of Sikh and Indian troops that surrendered on their side, the Japanese were.

And they had this crazy bose,

Indian nationalist that was pro-Japanese.

So the British were terrified that they were going to lose their colonial possessions in Asia.

And so we allowed them to

defend India and to help out in China vis-a-vis Burma.

And they did a very good job.

They had a brilliant commander, General Slim,

Australian.

But New Zealand, they're Australian, both maybe.

And then we concentrated on destroying the Japanese mainland.

And that was our task, was to use air power, to bomb it, and then to island hop up to Japan.

And we had this fight between two strategies, the MacArthur going around, Cartwheel, going around New Guinea, et cetera, and then ending up in the Philippines, and I guess eventually with Formosa.

And we were going, and Nimitz to just hop all the way, you know, Pele Lou, and then you were going to go in to the Marianas, and then you were going to get Iwo and Okinawa, and then on to the mainland.

And they never really coordinated any of this together.

So I don't know which was the more effective, but I don't think we really, in a cost-to-benefit analysis, what we paid as a price and what the Philippine people paid the price, it might have been better to sidestep the Philippines and let it be like Singapore, die on the vine, cut it off,

because it was a bloody mess.

And so was Okinawa, though.

And Okinawa was a disaster.

That was my, where my namesake was killed on May 19th on Sugarloaf Hill, last day of the battle.

So my family, I always grew up with my grandfather, you know, telling me that

that was the When his commanding officer wrote a letter, you know, to the family,

he wrote me a letter because i wrote about this in 2003 and he was still alive the command he was 95 and he said i wrote him a note and he was very friendly and he sent the ring that they cut off the finger of my uncle and the point i'm making was uh

he said that he tried to give the ring back, but when he got to San Diego after the war, a guy with a thick Swedish accent said, no, I'm done with the Marines, and he didn't want to talk to him.

They were very bitter about the Marine Corps, because if you look at that campaign, the Marines were placed under the direction of

a

Simon Bolivar Buckner, who was an Army commander, and

they begged to have amphibious encirclements behind the lines of the Japanese landings.

around the backside of the Shuri lines and said the Army ordered them to go right through it.

And that's where they got killed.

They destroyed the 6th and 1st Marine Division, essentially, made the 6th Marine Division combat ineffective.

That was supposed to be some kind of super division where the old breed of the 1st Division, half of it, was going to train people with college degrees and fresh new troops, and they were going to go to Guadalcanal and make a super island division that incorporated all of the lessons from Iwo and the Marianas and

Pele Lou and etc.

Stuff you read about part in the old breed by E.B.

Sledge.

And then they were going to work wonders and they did for the first two months.

And then they hit the Shuri Line and

it was a disaster.

Sounds like 90%

at Fredericksburg.

They destroyed the division.

It was rendered combat ineffective.

They had

80, 90% of missing, wounded, and killed.

And,

you know, I have a very moving letter from the officer who saw Victor Hansen killed.

He was up on the top and he was shot in the leg and one of his friends tried to go

drag him back and

they killed that fellow.

So they had to, he just bled to death during the night.

And

they couldn't get to him.

But that our family, as I understand, I never met him, of course, but I got all of his stuff.

So I got his baseball bat, his baseball hat, his cleat, his briefcase, a couple of his ties, his suit.

When I was a kid, and I wore them,

you know, I thought that we didn't have money for a briefcase.

It was a beautiful briefcase, and we had a big Louisville slugger that we used and

baseball mitt and stuff.

But

it was Okinawa was a disaster.

And it was dreamed up in the Fairmont Hotel.

I think it was

down Union Square

in San Francisco.

But it was a bad idea the way they planned it.

Well, Victor, I'm

this powerful stuff you just recounted there, obviously.

You did raise, and I apologize at this noise in the background, by the way, listeners, but the plumbers are here.

You know, these we deal with the realities when we're recording our podcast, Victor.

Well, Spotty and Spike and Sport are, and they're on their good behavior.

Well, that's good.

At least they're not biting you.

You did raise the

Soviets

abrogating all their promises to the good guys and keeping all their commitments to the bad guys.

And I think that's a good jumping off point for a question about

Adolf Hitler as a quote-unquote right-winger.

And we'll get your thoughts on a question from G.

I don't have a first name.

Maybe it's George, but G.

Right after these important messages.

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Victor,

G,

period, it was just an initial writes.

I'm what most people would call right-wing, conservative first.

And I don't feel like a fascist.

Was Hitler a quote-unquote right-wing fascist?

I hear this often and would love Victor's historical take on this left-leaning talking point.

Victor, I'm always shocked that the thing called,

you know, national socialism is somehow conservative.

Your thoughts, Victor.

Well, it's national socialism.

So the original roots of the Nazi Party were

socialists.

They came out of World War I,

and they blamed the industrial class and the aristocrats for selling out the German soldier in the field as well as the Jews, of course.

They blamed them.

But it was a national socialism.

What the national was inserted was to distinguish them from the communists or the Soviets and who were ultra-socialists.

In other words, the common turn and the idea of a worldwide communist revolution.

And of course,

the Nazis' party was, it was a national so that only Germans could participate and Germans would be socialist.

And so they spent during the Depression when Hitler assumed power in 33, they actually weathered the Depression, as did Mussolini, better than we did in the United States and better than

than than

Europe did, Britain included.

Partly it was because

they did

Keynesian, excuse me, they did Keynesian economic theory better than we did, which was pretty much bankrupt in peacetime.

But when you have a depression and you have a lack of liquidity, you need liquidity in the system.

And they did that, but not so much through, you know, just make-work programs, but...

building infrastructure that would increase productivity.

And that's things like the famous autobahns and

overpasses and rail lines and community industrial parks and things like that.

So they did very well.

That's what was the source of their popularity.

But if you look at the particular background of people in the university system that became arch Nazis, just to take Goebbels, the propaganda minister, or Ribbentrop, the Dunz diplomat, they had strong leftist leanings.

They were socialist communists.

If you look at the brown shirts that were liquidated by Hitler, they were completely socialist.

And the idea that one of the reasons that Hitler had them liquidated wasn't just that they were claimants and they

may have tried to knock off the Nazis, but

they were considered too far left

for

the German people who were innately, Hitler felt conservative and wanted a socialist paragraph, a

paradigm that would only be German, that would be unique to the German experience.

And they were very much opposed to international communism or socialism.

So, you know,

I think they were called the Sturm

Teilhung.

They were different, the Sturm Division, the SA.

And they were far more left-wing and far more, I guess you'd call them, them, willing to take risk and they were kind of thugs.

And Hitler, this is kind of crazy to say this, that they were too much for Hitler.

But

that was the idea that somebody, they were, you know, remember they were

wiped out in the Night of the Long Lives.

Right.

And they were, I guess that the SA was considered more or less

I don't know what we would call them, thugs, criminals.

There was a strong homosexual element among the leadership, and so they were purged.

Eric Rohm, remember, he was the one that sat in a cell and he was Hitler's best friend.

He had recruited Hitler and they had him shot.

Yeah.

No favors go unpunished.

So, all right.

Well, Victor, I have another question from,

let's see, which one should we take here?

From Craig.

Craig writes, please ask Victor to spend some time discussing the idea idea that Islam is the only major religion not to have experienced a reformation or enlightenment.

To me, Islam seems to be more of a political construct than a religion, and as such, incompatible with Western democracy.

I think there's two separate things there,

Victor, and I.

You know many things.

Well, I mean, I think it's fair that you can take this on, even though you're not a theologian, but go ahead.

Well, we've got to remember that Christianity, although it developed in the Middle East, the Middle East was part of the Roman Empire.

And so almost immediately

after the death of Jesus, when there was a need for exegesis, an explanation, when would he return?

If you believe in Jesus Christ, but you're not baptized, what happens to you?

If your child dies in birth, does she go to hell?

Is there a purgatory?

All of these concepts were nebulous, but they, for the

explanation of the dogma, I don't mean that in the negative sense, but of the corpus of Christian thought, they turned to

Roman and Greek institutions.

So when you have somebody like Jerome or Augustine, these people are trained in classical methods of dialectic, of explication, of prose,

and they started to craft an explanation of what they thought Jesus meant through the apostles' direct testimonies.

And they came up in a lot of things drawing on what we call Neoplatonism.

And that meant the idea that Plato and some of the Greek philosophers, many of them in fact, had seen a duality, that the soul was the song and the body was the violin, so to speak, and that just because the violin didn't exist, the song was there and it was manifested in the flesh when it had a musical instrument, to use the Socratic image.

Okay, so

that also brought in the enlightenment.

So Christian church fathers were schooled in the idea that they would be challenged, they had to explain.

the death, the resurrection, the immaculate conception, all of these ideas, it was not enough to say, you either believe what we say or we're going to kill you.

So there was

an enlightenment.

And that enlightenment at times was fused with Christianity.

And at times, the Second Enlightenment,

it was a rival dogma to Christianity.

It was secular in nature.

By the 18th century, the Enlightenment was often secular and agnostic, if not atheist.

So what am I getting at?

Islam was out of bounds.

It did not have that tradition.

It's true that there were Islamic scholars that copied texts, in some cases kept alive some obscure works of pseudo-Aristotle and Aristotle, etc.

However,

a lot of some of the architecture, I'll say I want to be very careful, the architecture of Islam, some of it came from the Old and New Testaments that predated it.

So certain

prophets in the Jewish tradition and Jesus in the Christian tradition are in the Quran as prophets that forecast the rise of the true Messiah, which is not Christ, but Muhammad.

And the true God is Allah.

But a lot of it is

pasted and glued from prior Christian and Judeo traditions, and then it's got an element that reflects a non-Western code.

So it doesn't have

the Sermon on the Mount, turn the other cheek ideology, and it doesn't have

the idea that if you confess, you can still have eternity, even to the last moment on the cross before you die, in the case of those who were crucified with one of them who was crucified with Jesus.

And it doesn't have a philosophical tradition to augment.

And so it's more absolutist.

Bernard Lewis, who spent his life somewhat approaching Islam through Turkey rather than the Arab world,

and who was very fair in his interpretation of Islam, pointed that out, that there had not been a reformation which forced the traditional Islamic corpus or body of thought to be more assertive.

In the case of Christianity, In the late 15th and early century, the rise of Protestantism forced the Catholic Church or the Christian Church at that time, later to become known generically as Catholic.

It forced it into a counter-reformation.

And that could constitute everything from, as you know, having cathedrals that were no longer dark, but

blue and white and airy and

uplifting to rival Protestantism and to have the Jesuits and new Christian orders to go out and to convert people

and to

start to address penances and exemptions and things like that that had been sold in the Christian church.

So

the sense was that the Protestant Reformation not only gave a different view of Christianity, but it helped the traditional view improve itself and get closer to its original mission.

And that had not happened in Islam.

It has not happened.

And, you know, Sufis and people, there's a schism between Shia and Sunni, but it's not one over

an enlightenment that tries to suggest that

the secular world has a realm of authority, and then there's the divine world or the religious world.

And so

if you're in Istanbul and you make a beautiful lighthouse, it's not going to be incorporated necessarily into the Islamic doctrine.

It's going to be seen as a challenge to the wisdom of Muhammad, and that tends to repress things.

Same thing about interest, charging interest in formative Industrial Revolution.

So there are certain elements in Islam that tended to suppress material progress, and that there's no emancipation of women.

And that had been true in the classical tradition that was adopted by the church.

So there weren't.

elements that could be further developed into an enlightened society in the way that happened in the West.

Then finally, the West was able to live with Christianity and the Enlightenment.

I think today we've gone too far and the Enlightenment is Western civilization in the negative sense of you can rationalize almost anything and there's no element left in the human experience for faith or mystery or, you know,

if we can't prove it in science, it doesn't exist.

As if if I finish this broadcast and I get in my car and I get in a wreck, I don't think science is going to tell me.

It's going to tell me, you know, somebody was drunk or I ran a stop sign or something, but it doesn't tell me why that happened to me at that particular time.

That's something, there's the unfathomable that has a role for religion.

And in Islam, that role is everything.

But in Christianity, it's balanced with the forces of reason.

And reasons are employed for religious purposes.

Well, I'm glad you mentioned Bernard Lewis because it was a great honor to know know him.

And one of my favorite national review cruise memories is a panel with you and Professor Lewis on the same panel.

And it was just...

I got to know him.

I went down a couple of times to Princeton and had lunch with him.

And I'm trying to remember his partner who was

Muncie Churchill.

She was a wonderful person.

I love Muncie.

She was very protective of him.

And he was a scholar that had been known.

I mean, all during the 50s and 60s, he wrote for things like Horizon Magazine of the 1960s.

And then after 9-11, he became very, very famous.

He had that pre-9-11 article, What Went Wrong.

That was about the lack of

a

counter-enlightenment force in Islam that might have helped it.

And that thing took off after 9-11.

And then he became kind of the spokesman in the Anglo-speaking countries to explain Islam to everybody else.

And that got him a lot of criticism because

he was not an expert in

Arabic and the Arab world, but more the Ottoman world.

And he was very blunt.

You know, he said that the Shia had a nihilistic view and that you should take very seriously their threats to Israel.

that they were perfectly willing to destroy Israel and half of Iran

if you, because they had an apocalyptic view of the missing Imam and all that stuff.

And that got the, he drew the ire of, even though he was a liberal, he drew the ire and was called a neoconservative

Bushite and stuff like that.

Yeah.

Well, he was also very,

he just had something about him that Junice Kwa, listening to him, you're just mesmerizing his delivery and cadence and just the sheer brilliance he had.

And he, he, uh

yeah he he was trained as a british intellectual and um

there was something about his voice his diction

and um

everything about him exuded authority and

i think he lived to be what

over 100 102

oh yeah and he was still was it was he how old he was on the national i remember oh he was in his late 90s yeah yeah he was in he and he, I made sure he had his

particular bottle of scotch in his room.

He did not, he was not doddering in any way, shape, or form.

Well, anyway, Victor, we have time for one more question.

And you mentioned Iran, and this question will be about Iran, and we'll get to it right after these final important messages.

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

Victor Brent writes, my suggestion for a topic is for Victor's take on how the Shah of Iran was pushed out of power.

I've read Western media played a part in that.

I consider it one of Carter's failures, but interested in what Victor has to say about it.

Iran continues to be a bad actor almost 50 years later.

I think bad actor is putting it nicely.

Victor, any thoughts about how the Shah of Iran got unshod?

Well, I mean,

there was a sense in the late 70s with his anniversary of the Persian Empire big celebration, and he was courting Western influences.

He had hundreds of thousands of Western advisors that were trying to do everything from create a social security system to

sell him F-14s.

And

he had taken on the mantle in two vital ways for the United States.

Three vital ways.

One is he kept telling the United States that

he was under enormous pressure, remember, from the Carter administration, even before he became ill, to liberalize and to become a constitutional system.

I don't think that would have happened.

There was nothing in Persian tradition going back to Herodotus that suggested it could.

But there was pressure on him to liberalize.

The problem was

liberalizing offended the Khomeiniite

Shia clerics.

And so the more that he listened to us by emancipating women and

trying to get rid of what was a de facto caste system and veering away from Islam and not paying the huge subsidies he did to the imams and

suggesting that after the 1973 Yom Kippur war, that he would supply oil.

He did it because

he got filthy rich during the embargo, but the Arab OPEC members had boycotted a member of the United States, and he sold oil, even though it was fungible.

And he made it clear that he had no intrinsic reason to dislike Israel.

And so he did not join in the Arab Muslim coalition.

That's kind of ironic given that Iran today is the foremost Israeli hater in the world.

But what I'm getting at is that he got cancer

and he spent a lot of money and the family, the the Pavlovi, there were elements in it that were corrupt and he westernized.

And everybody today at the time thought he was just, you know,

he was, everybody was dressing in Western clothes and it was decadent and he sold out to the West.

But he actually was westernizing in ways that were even far more dangerous to him.

And, as I said, he was allowing women to be emancipated.

He didn't really have strong views about gays.

He was willing to let things westernize, and he thought that would be a good thing.

And he was going to be especially powerful in America's friend.

He was armed to the teeth, which explains why Iran was kind of formidable for the next decade after his death, given the arsenal that they moved.

And so

once the

campuses

erupted, and these were, remember the original revolution against the Shah was not necessarily Khomeini alone.

He was in France and he was sending cassette tapes and all that, but there was the Gotsbari and the Bonnie Sadar, I guess you'd call them European socialist types.

These were the emerging middle class that rather than show gratitude for the modernization and liberalization of the Shah,

the more freedom they got, the more they hated it because they wanted more.

And so when they were the people out in the streets, not the Imams, and so they got rid of

the Shah.

And then the Imams and Khomeini's people, who were the rural people and the uneducated and the hyper-religious, they hijacked that revolution.

And then

there have been two waves of immigration.

So if you meet somebody who left, let's say, Iran in 1978, 79 and 80, they tend to be very conservative Iranian Americans.

They were supporters of the Shah.

Many of them were Jewish.

They live in Los Angeles or large cities.

And they're very pro-American.

And they got out because they understood what was going to happen.

If you look at the second wave, these were the people who stayed on with Khomeini, like Boni Sauter and people, and they were assuming that the Imams then would recede to a, and they would give them a privileged religious role in the new European-like socialist government.

And that was what their plans.

And they were probably quasi-communists as well.

And the far, far, far-right Khomeinias turned on them.

And they had the army, and they had the military, the Navy, the Air Force, and they had the Secret Service they'd inherit from the Shah.

And they liquidated.

They killed Ghostbotty, remember?

And I think Bonnie Sauter had to flee for his life.

And that second wave, these were people who overthrew the Shah,

and about a million of them then fled.

These were the upper, upper middle class in academia, in the media, in

some of the highest government bureaus,

and they fled.

And a lot of them fled to the United States, and they were left-wing.

And so today, if you see, I'm just saying something going out there.

I'm not going to give you data that says it has to be completely true.

I'm just saying my observation is, but I probably in my life met five or 600 Iranian Americans.

And I can tell you

in 90% of the cases, I will say to them, I bet you left before the Shah or right,

because they're conservative and they are in private enterprise.

And if I say somebody afterwards, I say, I bet you fled Khomeini, I can tell you they're very liberal.

And they're in the university or the media or politics or

foundations or they work for government.

And they still blame the United States.

If you talk to them, they cannot finish a sentence without talking about Mossadegh, Mossadegh, the 1953 revolution where the British Petroleum and the CIA destroyed.

It's not quite as simplistic as they say, because I don't think that Mossadegh was a constitutionalist.

But nevertheless, they have grievances against their host when they arrived here, and they're still

quite...

You could see in Dearborn when they were, it wasn't just all Arabs, there were people who were praising Khomeini, and those were second-generation Iranians, Iranian Americans.

Yeah.

So there's two types of,

there's a liberal and a conservative Iranian, second and third generation American.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, I thank you for that and for all the wisdom you shared for

all the answers you've given.

Dave, G, Craig, and Brent to their questions.

We

thank them for submitting them and many others.

And we will get to as many as possible as we record the series of podcasts.

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Victor Davis Hansen, well, excuse me, VictorHanson.com.

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Go get his book.

Victor, you've been terrific.

I thank you for all, again, for all the wisdom you shared.

Thanks, everyone, for listening.

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

Bye-bye.

Thank you, everybody, for listening.