California Governors and Middle East Politics

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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

This is a special edition.

This is,

we'll call it edition one of Reader Questions that we are hosting and posing to the great 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.

Of course, we're doing these shows.

Our listeners I said reader questions, Victor, they're listener

questions.

Listeners have kindly sent in questions for Victor for him to to answer while victor will be away on uh oh various various junkets and tours and and other businessy things so we'll do um four questions for reader questions again with the reader stuff for listener questions in every episode and victor we're going to get to um Yeah, the first question is going to be about a former governor of California, and we will get to that right after these important messages.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

I should mention, Victor, we're recording this sometime in May, right around the time when your new book is out.

And congratulations to you.

Victor was number one on Amazon a couple of days before the book was actually formally released.

So that's terrific.

Victor has a website, dear listeners.

It's called The Blade of Perseus.

VictorHanson.com is the web address, and I'll tell you more about that later in this episode.

So, Victor, the first question is from Christine.

Pretty simple.

It's not even a question.

I have always wanted to hear Victor's overview of Arnold Schwarzenegger's governorship of California.

Victor, you lived through, was it two terms of Arnold?

What are your reflections on him?

Well, I started out

pleased because the alternative was Cruz Bustamonte, and

he had been from this area at times, and he was,

I thought, totally

unqualified.

So everybody was kind of surprised because, you know, he was elected in 2003,

and we had had this tradition of

we had an intervault of Jerry Brown, but we had Ronald Reagan from 66

all the way to 1974.

And then we had this interregnum of Jerry Brown from 74 to 82.

And then we got back Duke Mazian for eight years.

And then we got Pete Wilson.

So if you think about it, California, as recently as, you know, just 30 years ago, it had

24 years of Republican governance.

And then we had this little second Gray Davis interregnum, and he got in trouble because he raised the, he just,

you know, he started the great spending and he raised the licensing, not nearly as much as it is now.

But there was a recall and Arnold jumped in.

And everybody thought, wow, this is great.

And he got almost a majority of the Latino Hispanic vote.

So

he won pretty easily.

And everybody thought, wow, he had come to, when I was at the Hoover Institution as governor, he came a lot.

And he pontificated about how

Free to Choose.

You remember that movie with

I'm trying to remember the producer?

Milton Friedman.

Oh, the guy from Pennsylvania.

Yeah.

The Free to Choose people did this great interview with Milton Friedman, and that was the hero of Schwarzenegger.

And he was a movie star, Terminator, and all this.

And then there was Maria Schreiber, the Kennedy family member.

She had been an anchor woman.

But nobody really knew who he was other than he was supposedly a new Republican.

What did a new Republican mean in 2003?

That meant that while he was tough on supposedly fiscal policy and defense,

that he was pro-choice, radically so,

that he was really pro-green.

Although he did, he didn't, he wavered on the ballot on same-sex marriage.

But the point is that he was a, I don't know, we have that term anymore, Rockefeller Republican.

But that was better than the alternative.

So everybody gave him a pass.

He went up for reelection.

He won re-election.

And then

things started to happen.

He thought that his star power,

his,

I don't know what it is, his Kennedy-esque connections, all of that would see him through, and he could take on the California SEIU,

state government unions, the California CSU faculty, and he could not.

And so the last,

oh, I don't know, three or four years of his, you know, his

his um tenure he moved very far to the left and you know he had won he never won with a majority of the pop uh of the vote in 2003 but even when he was under assault he was

in 2006 when he ran he he he he won he just slaughtered the democrats he won 56 percent of the of the vote,

much more than when he was originally elected against Bustamonte.

So he understood something, is what I'm stumbling to say, Jack, is that he understood that California was changing because people were leaving it because of the Jerry Brown

years and

the influx of illegal aliens and the influx of big money tech people.

And that was the calculus that has made California and

left-wing.

And so from 2006 on, he was a left-wing governor.

He signed radical environmental legislation.

And this brought up a very, I don't know how to say this, but this brought up a very,

I guess you could say from 2008

to 2010, the last four, 2007, when he was inaugurated in his second term to the end of 2010.

He moved to the left, radically so.

And people didn't know why.

They said he failed to take on the unions.

They ran just ads against him that just slaughtered him in the public sphere, you know, with his private jet.

And he was, you know, going to make poor nurses starve to death and the health care unions, et cetera.

But as soon as he left office in 2011, as you remember, and another issue, when Obama was running and we had the Obama mania, his wife was very prominent in the Obama endorsement.

He kept mom, but he kind of winked and nodded that he was for Obama.

He didn't really say so.

But the long and the short of it, the last four years were,

he was a defeated governor.

He had given up the conservative agenda.

And then when he left in 2011, shortly after,

it was disclosed that Maria Schweiber and Arnold Schwarzenegger were separating and that he had fathered children with the housekeeper.

And there was in the rumor mills suggestions that that was not the first time that she knew about that startling revelation.

Of course, the woman involved was middle-aged

and kind of gave some details that they had had these trysts in the very, the governor's marriage bed.

It was pretty sordid.

Not quite like Stormy Daniel's, but it was kind of like that.

And the point people made was that she had known about that, and yet she did not go public with a separation until he had left office.

But in exchange for her

dutiful role as First Lady of California, that she had moved him to the left.

And I don't know to what extent that was true.

So there it is.

And I don't think, and then of course he was a never Trumper.

And he tried to take over the apprentice and failed.

And I think his cachet went way down after

the divorce.

And he was friendly.

The left didn't like him.

And the people who were conservative felt that he had betrayed the conservative cause the last four years.

And they didn't like what he had done with this illegitimate family.

And they...

They didn't really give him much credit.

I was a little bit more sympathetic because it's California and it was changing under his very eyes.

It was going left-wing every year.

And he tried to ride the back of a tiger.

And he, so he had,

you know, he was not going to be hated and just ran through a conservative agenda that the legislature was in the process of becoming radically democratic and would have vetoed.

Yeah.

I wonder if the first sign of, by the way,

I need to mention Bob Chitter.

Bob Chitter.

Yes, that's his name.

And I know Bob.

I mean, I knew him very well.

Yeah.

He ran the Free to Choose Network, folks.

I wonder if the canary in the coal mine for California politics was Dan Lundgren's defeat for governor, because he, when he was elected attorney general, and I like Dan a lot.

He was a congressman and

he played a big role in some crime legislation.

I think he had the most votes ever for any statewide candidate when he won the attorney general position.

But then Greg Davis shellacked them when he ran for governor.

Yeah, I mean, the people who were in Tennessee, as we speak, and Florida, as we speak, and Nevada and Idaho, your parents voted for Longvin, and they voted for Wilson.

But

you left because you couldn't take it anymore.

And I'm not criticizing that.

But those voters that elected Reagan and Duke Mason and Wilson are no longer here.

They're gone.

And the only chance that you'll ever see a conservative governor again is that the Hispanic population becomes, breaks away from the left-wing coastal elite.

Well, Victor, we have three more questions.

We will ask four in every one of these special episodes.

And the

second question will be about Islam.

And we will get to that right after this important message.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

And Victor, this question is from Ken.

And Ken writes, How does the current Islamic colonization of Western Europe relate and correspond to the jihad of the Middle Ages?

In the Middle Ages, they sought to destroy city walls with armies and cannon with the goals of invading, raping, pillaging, and enslaving.

Now all they have to do is move in as refugees and have twice the number of babies the current residents have.

Anyway, Victor, that's kind of a sarcasm there, but some truth is in there.

Your thoughts?

Well,

in the Middle Ages, all the way, let's say, to the 1600s,

Islam, everybody says, you know,

the Crusades failed.

Well, the Crusade just had a fraction of the manpower of the

population of the Middle East.

So they were, and they did take Jerusalem in the First Crusade, and the Crusader states stayed there for 200 years.

And afterwards, there is a Christian presence even today in Lebanon and parts of Syria and parts of Jordan and parts there were in Gaza.

They were ethnically cleansed.

Nobody talks about that out Gaza.

And

they're being ethnically cleansed, to tell you the truth, religiously cleansed out of the West Bank.

So

Christendom and the West was able to hold back the Islamic invasions of Europe.

And the Reconquista was finished in 1492.

And the Iberian Peninsula would be Christian forever, despite what bin Laden later is ran in.

The Byzantine Empire, remember, had tried to reconstitute the Roman Empire under the reign of Justinian.

And by 540,

75% of the Roman Empire was unified under Constantinople, except Gaul and parts of the Iberian Peninsula and some in Dalmatia.

And then we had, and that included North Africa.

But then in the seventh century, with the rise of Islam, all of the Atlas mountain area, seaboard from Morocco, Algeria, all the way to Libya, Egypt was

taken, and Egypt as well.

And the Arab world then is where it is now.

And then, of course, there were pressures on Constantinople.

For 900 years, they resisted Islam.

But my point is this.

Islam was a holistic movement.

It said that even though it grew up out of the Arab world, that anybody could participate if they accepted Muhammad as their divine figure, Allah,

Allah and Muhammad.

And my point I'm getting at is they did a lot of what they're doing now.

For example, the Balkans had been Christians since antiquity,

when they were part of the Roman Empire.

But when

with the fall of Constantinople and even earlier, the Ottomans went into, say, Albania and under the Dervishim,

they were able to take Christian families.

So what I'm getting at,

it wasn't just combative.

It wasn't just war.

They would go into a village and they would take a boy from each family of 10 or 11 or 9, take him back and make him a member of the Janissaries and raise him in a collective barracks where he would be a fanatic Muslim.

And then he would be a shock troop when they went into a Christian society to see this blue-eyed, blonde-haired, radical Muslim that had no memory of his heritage.

There's some scholarship that suggests that Janissaries and their former parents and people in the harem that were Christian captives were able to influence the Sultan a little bit to go easy on Christian communities.

I don't know if

that's been accepted completely.

But my point is that Albania today is a Muslim country in the heart of

the Christian Balkans, and that's because it was a deliberate policy to

bring Muslims and convert Muslims and take over demographically.

People should remember that Asia Minor,

Asia Minor had been Hellenic, and it had been Christian.

And it had been Western for over a thousand years.

It had been Hellenic for 2,000 years until the fall of Constantinople.

And then demographically, they scattered, slaughtered the Christian Greek Hellenic-speaking communities.

And within by 570, excuse me, by 1470, 1480, even the Black Sea Christian communities had all been absorbed.

The only, I have a footnote, though, is that Mr.

Erdogan wanted to squash all of the narratives that Asia Minor had been Western in Greek until the Muslim conquest of the 7th century came into

the Arab world,

but he was trying to say that the Seljuk Turks and Arabs had controlled most of Asia Minor, even despite the existence of Constantinople all the way to 1453.

So he did a

genetic testing jack of a sample population of Asia Minor.

You know what he found out?

He squashed it.

He found out that about 70%

of today's Turkish populations in central and coastal Turkey were Hellenic.

And in other words, they were the former people of the 20 million person Byzantine Empire that had been scattered, intermarried, had gone up to the hills, etc., accepted Islam, but they were still racially, ethnically Greek.

So what about the...

Colonialists here.

Yes, they were the colonialists.

Everybody should remember that when you walk by a campus and you hear somebody say settler, settler, colonialist, just stop and tell them that Israel as a Jewish entity, as a state, is mentioned in Egyptian hieroglyphics 1,200 years before Christ.

And there are no Arabs and there are no Muslims in present-day Gaza, West Bank, Israel, until

670, 680 AD.

So there was a Jewish state 1800 years

before Arabs and Muslims came into the Middle East.

So when you hear settler or go back to Poland, there are people still in Israel that can trace their rates,

their

ancestors and their race and their religion all the way back to the very beginning.

And that's such an irony to hear them called occupiers and settlers and neocolonial colonialists because so many came as well from from europe thanks for that um victor we have um

we have two more questions actually victor i think i'm going to change up um a question or two i was going to ask in a following show since what you just mentioned israel

and a one one listener had a

many would find it a troubling question and a troubling position, but one held by many, I think, related to Israel and deserves, I think, an explanation or your take on it to set things straight.

And that sounds opaque, and it is opaque, but I will unopaque it after these important messages.

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

Got two questions

left on today's special episode.

Victor, before I ask them, I do want to remind

our listeners, there are so many new listeners, that they should visit your website, The Blade of Perseus, VictorHanson.com, and they'll find links to everything you do write and so much of what you have written and archives of these podcasts and links to your other appearances and your books.

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Five bucks gets you in the door.

Discounted $50

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Victor writes two or three ultra pieces a week, again, exclusively for the blade of

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And there is a Victor Davis Hanson fan club

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Nice people, not formally tied to Victor, but good folks.

And BDH's Morning Cup, you will find that on Facebook.

So Victor, here's the question from,

what did I do with it

here, Jack?

Excuse me, as I follows things up.

Okay.

This is from Adrian.

Why do people like yourselves consider Israel to be such a wonderful ally?

Quite frankly, the USA's only dependable and true ally is England.

Whoops, I mean the UK.

The UK helps us and we help them.

From where I stand, the United States provides the majority, if not all of the assistance, where Israel provides virtually nothing in return to the United States.

Every year, the American taxpayer sends millions upon millions of dollars to Israel.

But can you explain to me if the United States is actually receiving a fair return for all of the help we provide to them.

I understand that Israel is the only democracy in that region of the world.

However, I don't believe that distinction should serve as a qualifier.

They strike me, and this is the rough thing here, they strike me as being a leech on the backside of the American taxpayer.

Obviously, I am an Anglophile, but how can I become an Israeliophile?

Victor, I believe that what Adrian has written here is certainly not my view by far, but probably the view of,

you know, not a small number of conservatives even.

What's your response to someone with that position?

Well, they're not mutually exclusive.

The idea that we support Israel and Britain, we've supported Britain in

two wars.

We came in late both, but we were the determinative factor in World War I, sent over 2 million men.

to the continent, saved the British and French armies.

They took most of the casualties, but still our late appearance was determined.

We were late in World War II, but by August 1st of 1944, when we were driving toward the German border, 80% of all troops on the Ally side were American, and we did put 12.4 million people in uniform.

And we

70 to 80% of the manpower in the Pacific theater was American, and that allowed the British to protect India and to concentrate on Burma and

to help China through Burma.

So the only time I can think that we weren't a good ally was the 1956 Suez crisis, and that was Eisenhower's doing when he did not back the French.

and the British effort to seize the Suez Canal and prevent its nationalization.

I think that was a mistake, but nevertheless, we've been a very good ally of Britain, and they've been a very good ally of ours.

So

they're not contradictory.

As far as Israel goes, our support of Israel is based on

three principles.

Number one, there's 500 million Arab Muslims.

So if we were engaging in real politique, we would just support the majority.

They have the oil, they have the population, and they can be very anti-Western and list of peace.

So we don't.

We support the only, you know, 10, almost

11 million people who, that's the only constitutional system in the entire world there.

And Turkey is the closest Muslim country in the area that is somewhat democratic, but under Erdogan, it's not.

He doesn't allow public dissent and the balloting is always questionable under his control.

So that's number one.

It is, and the

questioner's right, we support a democratic constitutional system.

Number two,

Harry Truman decided that after World War II, given that six million Jews had been gassed under the final solution, half the world's Jewry was gone, that the United States would recognize and had not, under the Roosevelt administration, had refused entry.

to thousands of Jews that were denied entry, and many of them ended up back at Treblinka and Auschwitz.

So the idea was that if the United States did not step in and recognize Israel and support it,

the Jewish people would be in danger again after the Holocaust.

And we did not arm them from 1947

all the way really to 1967.

So if you look at

the Six-Day War, they were flying

Mirage jets.

They were buying M1 carbines and Sherman tanks on the open market.

De Gaulle, remember, when they went to him before the 67 war, said, you know, we need more equipment because these people, Nasser's nuts, and we're surrounded.

And he said, you're an unfortunate, you're a tragic people with a tragic history.

And the French were done.

And everybody saw the writing on the wall that the Gulf oil fields under British petroleum were pumping on a Ramco and what was in Standard Oil.

And

the good money was with the oil and the Arabs, the numbers and the oil.

And so then after 67, this miraculous victory, the

Johnson administration said, well, wait a minute, these people are not like the Vietnamese.

When you support them, you don't have to send troops over there.

And they win.

And they're fighting a proxy war.

They're fighting a proxy war against the Soviet Union.

And we're losing a proxy war in Vietnam.

And we are basically going to lose 58,000 people in Bogdan for 10 years.

But we helped the Israelis and we haven't yet.

But look what they did in the 67 war.

They destroyed the Egyptian army supplied by the Russians.

They destroyed the Syrian army supplied by the Russians.

They beat all of their enemies and we don't have to.

And so everybody said, this is a great ally.

And so we started to supply them.

And then the 73 war came, and they were caught by surprise and they rebounded and they defeated all of the Soviet planets.

And don't believe, by the way, that Sadat kicked out all the Russians and therefore the Israelis were fooled.

They had some inkling in 73 that the

Egyptians were going to attack, and they knew that that was a ruse, that the Soviets had given what the Soviets did was give them a ton of weapons, and then they had a little psychodramatic fight, and they were supposedly kicked out, but they had given so many weapons and they still had advisors.

So that was something to fool the Israelis.

Not that they didn't eventually split, but don't buy the idea that poor Egypt was orphaned from its Soviet patron.

So then they won again.

And then we came to the idea that, number two, they were not only a constitutional state, but you could give them weapons and they would defeat

their enemies that were Soviet proxies in the Cold War.

And then number three,

given the independent rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in the 40s and 50s, along with the anti-American Baathist Party, the pan-Arabist Nasser movement, Saddam Hussein, the Assads in Syria, there grew up a anti-Western, radical,

increasingly Islamist

presence.

And it came to fruition for them on 9-11, 2000, September 11, 2001.

As an antithesis to that, there was the Jewish democratic pro-Western state.

So we continue that support, and

it cost us billions of dollars a year, two to three billion dollars a year, more this year.

However,

What Israel does is give us priceless intelligence in the region.

And when American commanders are going back and forth, and we do not have bases in Israel, we have bases everywhere else in the Middle East, but we don't have an official base in Israel.

But our

military elite and intelligence elite are part of the Israeli intelligence network, and we know a lot about

the Middle East thanks to the Israelis.

So our support is based on the idea that if we did not support them,

there would be efforts to wipe them out.

So to give the radius, 320 projectiles, cruise missiles, ballistic missiles, drones were sent to Israel.

That was the largest attack, combined missile and drone attack, in history.

And 99% of them, maybe seven or eight, made it to the target and were ineffectual.

Many didn't launch, many were malfunctioned, and the rest were shot down by whom?

The Israelis, the Americans, with some help from the British and French, and maybe the Jordanians as they went over their airspace.

So what I'm getting at is

Iran wanted to kill a lot of people.

Hamas wanted to kill a lot of people.

So there is a constant

tension in that area to kill Jews and destroy Israel.

And the reason that they can't do it is, number one, the United States arms Israel.

And number two, it has a commitment to its existence.

And other powers know that if they try to destroy it, they will come in conflict with the United States.

Is that changing?

The

listener to the podcast has a legitimate question.

Yes, it is, because

we're, you know, we're,

if you look at the Republican Party, it's rock solid, 80-20 pro-Israel.

If you look at the Democratic Party, it's not.

It's about 45% Israel, 55%, 60% anti-Israel, which reflects the new demographics,

open borders, Middle Eastern students of the Democratic Party.

But again, we protect Israel because of its unique history and its government

and

its vulnerability, and we don't want to see another Holocaust.

And then two, we found them a staunch and valuable proxy in our wars with the Soviet Union, our Cold War.

And they are a proxy, to tell you the truth, against radical Islam.

And then, number three,

they don't, it's not just one way.

They provide a lot of technology and a lot of intelligence that we appreciate.

There you have it.

So, I hope the listener can see that there's some advantages if he wants to look at this relationship purely in terms of real politique.

There are advantages.

And just on a human level, Victor, you've been to Israel several times.

You enjoy going there, don't you?

Well, put it this way.

If you go to Haifa today or Tel Aviv, and then just go to downtown Los Angeles and San Francisco and ask yourself, which is the more humane place?

So Tel Aviv is a modern city.

Haifa is an ancient city that's been modernized, the port.

And there are no homeless in terms of American homeless.

There's nobody injecting, fornicating, urinating, defecating as you walk around Haifa.

And

it's clean.

And there are no smashing grabs.

There's no carjacking.

And somebody's going to say, well, they're all the same people.

No,

it's just as multiracial as the United States.

You walk down the streets of Tel Aviv or Jerusalem or Haifa and you see black Jews, you see dark Jews, you see Jews from all over the world.

And many of them were ethnically cleansed, one million of them, after the 67 war, up until

the 73 war and after from the capitals of the Arab world.

So when everybody says, well, they're just settlers, no, a lot of them are refugees and they came from Cairo and Damascus and Beirut and Amman and Baghdad.

And they were kicked out after centuries of life in Arab countries.

And they had nowhere to go but to Israel.

And who did that?

The Arab countries.

And And who is kicking,

you know, who kicks Jews out of the Middle East?

The Arab governments do.

And there's a big difference, Jack.

When they get to Israel, they don't start waving their keys to their home in Damascus and say,

I have the right of return.

This is a disaster.

I have my whole business is still in Cairo.

I got to go back and get it.

They don't do that.

There's only one refugee group in the world that does that.

The Greeks don't do it in Cyprus, and they were treated worse than the Palestinians.

And the Germans, 13 million of them, walked out of East Prussia.

Maybe they deserved it, maybe they didn't, but they don't say today that Gdansk is my holy Danzig and my home is there.

And all of a sudden we say, well, if the Palestinians fought with the Israelis and they lost, and so...

Now all of a sudden they fled the Israelis.

Some of them were kicked out, some fled, and now they have a right of return.

Do the Greeks have a right of return to go on to Belopais, beautiful city.

I've been there.

I think they should, but nobody else does.

Do somebody that's German-speaking get to go to Konensberg and say, it's not Kalingrad, it's not Russian,

it's German.

No.

So

I think there's a very different and of course, we get a lot of it contemporary.

So when you go to these places in Israel, it's very Western and the people are Western.

And there's universities and sophisticated medicine.

One of the tragedies of October 7th, of the 20,000 that went into Israel every day, they went into a leftist kibbutz environment.

And when people were hurt,

the Jewish population of southern Israel took them to first-class medical care.

And people in the middle, in the mid, in the West Bank, can get medical care in some occasions.

It's not reciprocal.

If you're Jewish, you cannot go into Gaza before the war.

You can't.

It's Jew-free by design.

And there's 2 million Arabs in Israel today.

And Christians are leaving the West Bank because they don't feel safe.

And where are they going?

They're going to Israel for the most part.

Victor, that's a terrific answer.

Thank you.

And you mentioned Germany and Prussia, and

that's a great segue into the final question on today's episode.

And it's from Patrick.

And his question,

well, he says, a question I would love to submit for Victor

is what are his thoughts on the Allied abolition of Prussia in 1947?

Was it necessary?

Was there a real link between Nazism and the Prussian ethos?

Not necessarily.

I mean, the unification of Germany that followed the Franco-Prussian War of 1871,

the

aristocratic Eastern German, agrarian

Von

class, you know, von Kleist, von Monstein, the elite military culture and ethos did rule Germany, but it wasn't...

It wasn't Nazi-like.

It was militaristic, as we saw in 1871, and of course, under the Kaiser from 1914 to 1918.

Hitler hated the aristocratic Prussian class and he even before the World War II they had pretty much outlawed I mean Prussia ceased to exist it was incorporated under the Third Reich and the idea was that there was going to be a pan-Germanic uniform culture.

There was going to be no Saarland, no Rhineland, no Austria, no Sudetenland, no Prussia.

They were all going to be absorbed and give up their tribal affinities, their local affinities that were ancient, and become part of this new German state.

And that endured after World War II.

As far as what happened to Prussians themselves, you've got to remember what happened after World War II.

On September 1st, 1939, Germany and the Soviet Union under Stalin invaded Poland.

Poland was a creation of, as a formal state, of the Versailles Treaty, but it had existed for centuries, Polish-speaking people in their native land.

And at periods in history, Poland had reappeared and then suffered this tragic fate of unfortunately being, what, situated between Russia and Germany.

two big major powers that tried to carve it up.

But when they occupied Poland,

they divided it up.

The Soviet Union took the eastern part and Germany made it a protectorate in the West.

So they lost the war.

They went to Stalin, Churchill and Truman earlier, Roosevelt and said, okay,

now it's time to get out of Poland.

You occupied it with Hitler.

We defeated Hitler.

You're not Hitler.

And Stalin said, F you.

And that was when that famous remark surface jack, how many divisions does the Pope have?

And the argument was made that eastern and southern Poland, eastern Poland, was Roman Catholic,

Polish-speaking, for centuries, and it had been reified as a large country in 1919 under the Versailles.

And Stalin had it.

So Stalin said no.

And he began to ethnically cleanse eastern Poland,

The rump part, a sizable period, and that became Western Ukraine.

So when everybody's getting involved and tempers flare about Ukrainians and borders, you should keep in mind that one-third, one-fourth or one-third of Ukraine was a Soviet republic.

And Stalin demanded that the land that he had stolen from Poland in 1939 in league with the Nazis remain his.

So it did.

And he got rid of everybody.

And today,

Western Ukraine is what?

It's

Russian Orthodox, and it's Ukrainian and somewhat Russian-speaking.

Okay, that was over.

But

confronted with that reality, the Central Allies, the Allies,

they went to the new United Nations and they had to create a new Poland.

So where did they get what's today Poland?

They didn't get quite as much land, but they said, you know, we don't trust the Germans.

They've been at war with the French or the British or the Americans three times.

So, we're going to ethnically cleanse

East and West parts of West Prussia, and they're all going to walk back to Germany.

13 million German speakers.

So,

Danzig became Gdansk.

And as I said earlier, Konensburg became Russian Kalingrad.

And that land of Prussia then was given over to

the Russians and the Poles to compensate the Poles for what the Russians had stolen.

And nobody was going to contest Stalin in

Kalingrad because of, you know, it's close to Russia, et cetera.

And it's still Russian today.

So there was no,

the Prussian idea of Prussians and people who had that distinct aristocratic estate, Vaughan titled,

it was over after World War II, and it was because we decided that we could not contest the Soviet occupation of old Poland.

So we were going to expand Poland in a different direction at the expense of Germany because we didn't want to do it at the expense of our Soviet ally.

Well, thank you for that, Viktor.

Terrific.

Thanks for all the wisdom you shared here today.

I want to thank Christine, Ken, Patrick, and Adrian for submitting their questions.

We got an awful lot of questions from folks, and we're doing several of these episodes, so we'll get in as many as

possible.

I want to recommend again for our listeners to visit VictorHanson.com, The Blade of Perseus.

If you have yet to buy The End of Everything,

Victor's new book, um

get it go to your local bookstore online basic books is the publisher it's um as i mentioned earlier

right before the publication day number one on amazon that was terrific victor uh and uh good luck on continuing uh sales as for me jack fowler i write civil thoughts the free weekly email newsletter for the center for civil society every friday civil thoughts comes out with 14 recommended readings here are wonderful articles, important articles I've come across the previous week I think

that you might enjoy.

I give a link and an excerpt.

You go to civilthoughts.com and sign up.

All right, my friend, you were terrific.

Folks, thanks for listening, and we will be back soon with another episode of the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

Bye-bye.

Thank you very much, everybody.