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Hello, and welcome to the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

This is the weekend edition, and we always do something a little cultural.

This weekend, we have medieval literature, Beowulf, and the song of Roland on the agenda for the center part of this.

And we'll look at a few news stories first.

We've got Putin and Xi Xi telling us that nuclear weapons shouldn't ever be an option.

And the Iranian president has died in a helicopter crash.

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

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We're back.

This is the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

You can find Victor at his social media at VD Hansen on X and Hansen's Morning Cup on Facebook.

So come join him there.

Victor is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne, and Marcia Buskey Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

Victor, so there's been a lot going on in the news and I wanted to talk a little bit about the strange sort of warning, I guess, I'm not sure what you make of it, of Putin and the Chinese Premier Xi saying that the nuclear weapons shouldn't ever be an option.

What do you think that's all about?

Yes, they said they should never be used.

Well, it was a one-sentence communique.

So here is Putin meeting Chi.

And

the weird thing about it, ask yourself who has threatened to use nuclear weapons.

It's been at the end of everything, this book that I wrote that just came out last week, I chronicle in the epilogue all the people who threaten.

It's Medeved, the Russian former president.

It's Russian generals.

It's Russian media figures.

And what do they do?

They threaten England.

They threatened

Ukraine, both with tactical and strategic weapons.

Who else threatens nuclear weapons?

Well, it's Chinese generals.

They threaten to nuke Japan.

I know that because I have that in my book in the epilogue and the Chinese publisher who's been very nice to me with the Second World Wars, told me, as I think I said in the podcast, take that out or we're not going to allow it to be produced in China.

So I couldn't take it out, obviously.

Instead, I sent them nine more examples of Chinese military officials threatening to use nuclear weapons.

And then who else has used them?

Who's threatened them?

Well, we know who's threatened them.

It's Iran.

And who is Iran?

It's part of this tripartite alliance.

So can you take them at face value?

No.

They are the ones.

What we have here is, we're going to threaten you with nuclear weapons all the time, but we don't think they should ever be used.

And of course you can't win a nuclear war.

Of course you can't.

So, why are they stating the obvious when they break their own cannons?

And why are they stating it now?

And the answer is they feel

that, I don't know if it's correct or not, a lot of people in the United States and the Western world are pessimistic about Ukraine's chances of reclaiming the land that was taken after 2022, February 24, but

there's a perception that Russia is making progress and it may threaten other nations.

And the only way an outclassed West in conventional arms could deter them would be to resort to nuclear threats.

So they're saying, we don't want any nuclear threats.

We threaten all the time, but let's just quit because we're winning now.

Same thing with Taiwan.

All of a sudden, during the Biden administration, Qi starts threatening Taiwan all the time.

He didn't do it during Trump, but now he's threatening.

And he feels that he's got the Spratley Island bases, he's got the South China Sea militarized, and he's starting to think, I can take Taiwan.

As Joe Biden would say, I can take Taiwan.

I can take it.

And the only way they could stop it is to threaten nuclear weapons.

And I'm building nuclear weapons three times as fast as they are.

But they've got 6,500, and I've only got 1,500.

So

that's why they're doing it.

And I wrote about this, and it's odd.

You know, before this came out, I wrote about in the epilogue about all the people who threatened to use nuclear weapons.

And there's some typical reactions to them.

They're just bluffing.

Don't pay any attention.

That's what people said on the eve of the Third Punic War.

The Romans are bluffing.

They wouldn't destroy Carthage.

Cortez cannot destroy Tenochtitlan.

Mehmet will never take Constantinople.

He can't do it, and he wouldn't do it.

The inconceivable can be very real very quickly.

We should also keep in mind this.

There are probably 10 nuclear powers to my count.

Okay?

There's only five of them that are democratic.

There's the U.S., one,

France, two,

Britain, three,

India, four, and Israel, five.

Now they are balanced by five illiberal regimes that have nuclear weapons.

There's Russia, dictatorship.

Two, China, dictatorship.

For all practical purposes, Pakistan, a dictatorship that has phony elections.

Three.

And then you have, I think we can count Iran,

right?

Yeah.

So you have Pakistan, China, India.

I say

North Korea.

Yes, so you have Russia, China, North Korea, Pakistan, and I think Iran, five.

So you have a world in which half of the nuclear powers are illiberal and not accountable to any checks on their power.

So we should be very careful about what they say.

I'm glad they said they were going to rule out nuclear weapons, but they only said it for one reason, that they have confidence in their conventional forces defeating Western-backed powers.

That's what they powers that are backed by the West, like Taiwan or Ukraine.

Yeah.

Well, speaking of Iran, just recently and on Sunday,

last Sunday, the

Iranian president apparently died in a helicopter crash, along with his, I think, Secretary of Defense,

Ibran Him.

I'm going to butcher this name, Raci.

And he's also been called, according to the

butcher of Iran.

He was a butcher.

He killed thousands of people in the 80s.

And he's a Holocaust denier as well.

He's a horrible person.

Yeah.

Of course,

most of the Europeans sent their condolences, sort of like saying,

wow, Hitler killed himself.

We're so sorry.

Yeah.

You know.

So he's.

And of course, people in the Muslim world blame the Israelis.

Israelis didn't say anything.

As if they have what?

Some sophisticated type of electronics that can block the navigation system?

No.

I think more likely it was rainy, it's difficult terrain, there was zero visibility and fog, and it's an Iranian-maintained helicopter and an Iranian piloted helicopter.

Put all that together and it's very dangerous.

But,

you know,

what do you say about it?

He's the most hated man in Iran, apparently, given what there's thousands of relatives of people that he butchered for the crime of not being sufficiently Islamic or criticizing the regime or having an uncle or a third cousin who worked for the Shah.

Yeah.

So it sounds like a lot of people are not very unhappy about this.

I don't think anybody's unhappy unless they're a beneficiary of his terror.

Yeah.

All right.

Well, another news story is Robert Menendez, who we all know had gold bars in his closet, et cetera, is

currently on trial, and so it's moving along, and it's a corruption trial.

The husband and the wife seem to be turning against each other.

I've never seen a piece of gold in my hand.

It's always been in the museum.

So there is an infatuation with it, gold fever.

He had gold fever.

He had these little bars.

But what was interesting about that was what he said.

And apparently, first of all, he had this ridiculous wife that was what

50 or 30 years, 25 years or something younger, from a Lebanese Armenian woman, who wore these outrageous outfits that were more appropriate to someone 20.

And so, and then they have that ridiculous tape where he is at the Taj Mas

Hall when he's on his knees begging her to marry him.

Yeah.

It was just ridiculous.

So he was

in love,

you know.

Don't laugh, Victor.

There might be such thing as love.

I'm not laughing.

I'm just saying that if

I were 73 or four and I was in love with a 50-year-old grifter, I hope somebody would say, what the blank are you doing?

And the point I'm making is they were, he was always a grifter.

It is true that he's the head,

he was the head of the Senate Foreign Relations.

I think he stepped down after his last scandal.

And he was pro-Israel, right?

I think that was because he had a large Jewish constituency in New Jersey.

So

when he was too vocal about, he was vocal about illegal immigration, then the Democratic DOG focuses on him.

There's a lot to focus on.

So

you have to balance these things.

Was it political that he didn't toe the Democratic line?

Yes, Just like the congressman, was it Garcia that they're after

in Texas, who was worried about open borders?

Yes, but was he corrupt utterly?

Well, what was fascinating was what he said.

He said, it's a Cuban thing.

Cubans have gold because we were exiled and we had to take things with us or we couldn't trust banks.

I've met a lot of Cuban people.

I don't think that they have any more or less attraction to gold bars than anybody else in their suits.

And it reminds me of this horrible tribalism that's we

taking over the United States.

You remember Fanny Willis and her ex-Black Panther dad, when she couldn't account for all the cash that she supposedly paid Nathan Wade so that he didn't use funds for their junkets, she paid him back.

And they asked, how much money did you have?

Well, I had $28,000.

There was no record of it.

In cash at her house.

Yes.

And then the father testified.

It's a black thing.

Black people, you know, have been so victimized that they need cash.

I know a lot of black people.

I don't find them any more or less fixated on cash.

But this tribalism is the refuge

of a scoundrel.

The last refuge of a scandal is tribalism.

When you get caught, You immediately, your little brain goes, to what degree am I non-white?

If I'm non-white, these stupid white bicoastal elites, I can make them feel guilty, virtual signal to their opponents, and maybe I can weasel out of my culpability.

And they do it all the time.

So now

we have these new rules that if you're Cuban, you love gold bars sewed in your jacket or something.

And if you're black, you can take a bunch of cash out because you were a victim.

And that's where we are.

It's not tax evasion, huh?

Well, how can you go into court and testify that you paid Nathan Wade for every dime that he spent?

And A, you have no receipts from him, that you gave him cash, and B, you cannot coordinate the cash that you took out of the ATM with any figure that you purportedly paid him.

You just say you had a lot of cash.

So you tell me.

Yeah, in the case of Fannie Willis, it's just evasion.

It didn't have anything to do with taxes.

So when a senator gets caught and his suit is full of gold bars, he says, it's because my culture, we just, we have no recourse.

We have to use gold.

So I guess he pays his rent and he goes to restaurants, pulls out a gold bar.

Is that what he does?

He also said it's a Lebanese thing.

Apparently, his wife must be Lebanese.

She said that too.

And he said, she said that too.

We give gifts of gold.

Yes, she said that too.

It's a Lebanese-Armenian thing, she said.

I know a lot of Lebanese-Armenians, believe it or not, in the Fresno area.

I've never met one who said that

our culture puts a high premium on putting gold bars in our suits.

It just doesn't happen.

Or in our purse, it doesn't happen.

The last thing about that case is they're turning against each other, Victor.

Love

goes so far.

Compare it to like Michael Cohen.

Loyalty goes too far, only so far.

All right, let's go ahead and take a break and come back and talk about Beowulf and Song of Roland.

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Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

And this is our middle segment where we talk about literature this time.

And it is the tale of Beowulf, a hero that kills a monster, a medieval tale, and then Song of Roland, where we see the conflict between Muslims and Christians, and probably the age of the beginning of those conflicts.

And so a piece of work that looks at it very early on.

So, Victor, go ahead.

What is it?

So, we were going from Homer, the beginning of Western civilization, to classical literature, and we ended up last time

with a brief excursus on these two

historians of the late empire and the Byzantine Empire, Procopius and

Ammianus Marcellinus.

And so now we're into post-Western Empire, and still the Byzantines.

are still in existence, but we're starting to see the beginning of the medieval world.

That is, the period after the Dark Ages, say

from 500 AD in the West to 800.

And we're starting to see the re-emergence of oral poetry that's being written down.

And one of the best examples, of course, is Beowulf.

It's written down in Old English.

Nobody really knows when it was actually composed orally, just as in the case is true of Homer.

So Homer, as we talked about, it was an oral poem that might might have had Mycenaean roots.

There's grammatical constructs and there's vocabulary that are

Arcadian, Cypriot, that may resemble the Mycenaean dialect.

But then it grew like a snowball during the Dark Ages.

Okay, the same thing happened with Beowulf.

And at one point it was written down in the 11th century, maybe.

And it's a verse poem of, I don't know, 3,800 lines.

And the plot is it's revenge and heroic sacrifice.

And Beowulf is

obligated to help his Danish ally.

Because they have a monster,

Grendel.

You know what's funny is that they never really tell you who or what the monster is.

He just is.

He's awful and he's killing people and he's big.

I think there's a line or two as I recall.

I used to teach Beowulf in the history of Western lit,

but he's described as, I think, a biblical Cain-like figure.

He's a huge man, a trollish man, and he's got enormous strength.

And then Beowulf kills him and becomes a hero to his host.

And then his mother

resumes the killing spree.

And I guess she's a large anthropod, I guess,

a woman that looks like a woman, but huge and ugly and mean.

And he kills her, and he becomes a hero.

And then he goes back

to,

he goes back home, and for 50 years, he's, because of these great deeds, he's king, and then there's a dragon.

And the dragon is disturbed by gold that was taken, supposedly.

And then he fights the dragon, and he dies.

The reason that this is important is...

Well, there's a lot of reasons, but one of the things for contemporary

listeners is J.R.

Tokian, the great author of The Lord of the Rings, was of course an

Old English and Middle English scholar.

And he was heavily influenced

by the song of Roland,

Roland, if you say it, the old French poem we're going to get to in a second, and Beowulf and Sir Gawain, Gawain,

and the Green Knight.

And so in this

tale of Beowulf at the end, he goes in and fights this dragon.

And I think if you look at the description in Beowulf and Smog the Dragon and treasure and gold and dragons, it's where he gets the inspiration for

the lonely mountain and Smog has taken over and the Battle of the Five Armies that occur in the Hobbit.

And then there's some references in Lord of the Rings.

The second poem is another, it's a little longer, the Song of Roland, and it's about Charlemagne's entrance into Spain during the early parts of the Reconquista,

Zaragoza,

the siege of Zaragoza, and then their retreat back into the borderlands of Spain and France, and they are attacked, is it Marcel,

the Arab conqueror, and they're pursued, and there's a bloody fight.

And Roland,

who I think, as I remember, is Charlemagne's nephew,

volunteered.

You know, when you've taught that once, and it didn't go over well, it's a little bit harder than Beowulf.

And then he goes back and fights with his men, the rear guard, and they're slaughtered.

But Charlemagne gets out.

And then when he comes upon the battlefield, he sees them, and then I think the angels take him up to heaven.

And it's about Christian sacrifice

and the war against Islam.

Remember, Bin Laden said that

he said that El and Dulus and Lu and Toulouse was still Muslim, that is, Spain.

But the Reconquista, remember, is going to go on for another 700 years after this.

It's not going to be completely non-Muslim until 1492

and the end of the Reconquista.

Sir Gauguin and the Green Knight is much later, but it's again, it's a verse poem written written down somewhere either in the 14th or 15th century but it too was part of an oral tradition that may have dated back to the early early English and the tales that surrounded King Arthur and the round table and it's about an and it's it's a it's a story that has

examples in other cultures of a

so the heroes around Arthur are dining and this guy breaks in and he's weird looking.

He's all green.

His skin is green as I remember.

He's got a green shield and axe and he says, I

anybody want to cut my head off, I'll do it, cut your head, but you have to let me cut your head off any year.

And so Wayne is not yet a full knight of the roundtable.

He volunteers, he cuts the head off, and guess what?

The green monster, whatever he is.

I don't know why he's green.

Some medieval,

you know, there's some medievals, I remember, tapestries that have the devil not as red, but green.

Green is, I know when I was in Eric White, excuse me, I shouldn't mention my grammar school, I was one of, I think, five non-Hispanic students, and they would come out of catechism, and then they, there were five of us that were Protestant in the whole

four to sixth grade.

It was really weird.

But

we would get into arguments because they would tell us the devils were green.

And we said, no, the devils are red.

And we'd talk about cartoons and Caspar the Ghost and all this.

And they'd say, no, they're green.

Our nun told us that.

We get into arguments.

So I remember that of folklore.

But there is some support for that.

And the early church, they believe that satanic, but the night is not necessarily satanic.

So then the year comes up, and he's got to go find him to his castle, and he stops right before he gets there, and he sees someone else,

a baron.

And he says, says, Would you like to hunt with me?

Da-da-da-da-da.

As I remember, there's different variations, but basically, he says, Each day we'll give each other a gift.

And there's no, so he gives him, you know, nice things, a ring, or.

But his wife is very, very

voluptuous and makes passes at night to Gwain.

And he resists.

So

he, I think he kisses them on the cheek,

but he doesn't really,

he doesn't succumb, but he does get a little embrace on the third night.

He doesn't want to commit adultery or fornication.

But he doesn't tell the master of the house what he did.

Well, the master of the house is the green knight.

So then he reveals himself and

he

is going to chop his head.

He puts his head down, so that's good because he says I was going to honor his knightly vows that he would be willing to come back in a year.

He did voluntarily.

So he puts his neck down and he just nicks it.

And then he reveals himself and says,

I am the Green Knight.

I'm not the master of the house.

And you were 99.9, basically, I'm a mad limbing, but you were compliant.

You came here, you offered your neck according to the agreement.

And each night that

this witch, who poses my wife, I guess,

said that that

it was her trick to cook this whole thing up.

Maybe it was Israeli wife, I can't quite remember.

But each night that you embraced her, whatever you did with her was innocent, except the third night you kind of kissed her, but you didn't kiss me to show you what the gift was that you were given.

But that's close enough.

And then he's...

He's redeemed and he becomes then later part of the round table.

But the moral of the story is that there are people who are willing to live by their promises and are willing to sacrifice themselves.

And when they're in the court of Arthur, when a stranger comes in with an axe, they're the first to volunteer to go confront the person and kill him.

And then when they find out they can't kill him, they don't weasel out, but they're willing to be killed in turn.

And then when they're seduced,

they are

chivalrous in the sense that they can resist seduction, they can resist lying, they can resist breaking their promise.

And this all has a taint of Christian morality in the

Middle English world,

just like the song of Roland and Beowulf.

It's all, again, the hero is tested to see if he'll live up to his vows, if he has heroic capabilities.

And usually those are defined as martial capabilities.

And then if he's honest and speaks truly, then he's rewarded in some fashion.

That's interesting because Christianity is at odds with warfare and warring in many ways.

I mean, we just recently heard our pope say that the West needs to disarm or something to that effect, right?

But it always was.

And so,

what are your reflections from these actual poems in this early Christian period about that relationship with warfare?

Well,

Gibbon, you know, one of the subtexts of Gibbon's decline and fall of the Roman Empire, and remember, it goes all the way to the Byzantine period, so it's kind of contradictory when he says that Christian

temperance or the golden rule or turn the other cheek or blessed are the meek and the poor, or the temple of, you know, Sermon on the Mount.

That is not conducive to protect the Roman Empire, given the array of enemies.

And so therefore,

the large landowning church and the intrusion, absorption of pagan culture by Christianity unfortunately emasculated it.

Well, if it emasculated, he's got to explain why Byzantines then lasted for a thousand years plus.

And what I'm trying to get at is during the Dark Ages and the early, say, especially with the rise of

is it the Perrain thesis?

I'm trying to, Henry Perrain?

Yeah, Yeah, Perrain, P-I-E-R-R-E.

He was a great French historian.

He tried to make an argument that the

Western civilization as it grew out of the Roman Empire could be defined by one attribute, opposition to the Islamic conquest.

Islam came out of nowhere, and within 200 years it had taken the entire Byzantine empires and the Vandals

that the Byzantine had routed, and there were remnants there, but it took the entire

Maghreb, all of North Africa, and it took all of the Holy Land,

and it took all of the eastern territory of

the much of the, and it converted the Persians eventually.

And to explain all of that, Christianity and to survive developed a crusader mentality, later a crusader, but even then the Byzantines fought the Muslims.

They lost Egypt, but they kept them at bay in the 700 and 800s.

And they created a new ethos that you could be given permission, you could pay penance, you could have

all sorts of contractual agreements.

The people who were on the walls of Constantinople in their last hours, they were all willing to take penance for killing people.

Again, that's a very different incentive than the people below who were encouraged to kill people and get 72 virgins in heaven.

So

Christianity adapted.

However,

it has a burden Western civilization because it's combining two

strains, a secular and a religious strain that

encourage passivity and self-criticism that can result in self-nihilism and self-loathing.

By that I mean if you look at the classical tradition of constitutional government, free speech, self-critique, it's so wonderful, it's our best tradition.

But you look at the

mayhem and the chaos of the Athenian assembly, or when you read about what Tacitus has to say about his own culture, or what Petronius says Roman culture was, the greatest criticism of the Greeks and the Romans, and the greatest criticism of the Europeans and the Americans come from Americans.

When you combine that secular tradition with Christianity that's still,

going back to its roots, is pacifistic and suggests it's wrong to kill, thou shalt not kill, and you're dealing with someone like radical Islam,

it's a problem.

And

people have discussed it for 2,000 years about how to temper criticism to make it constructive criticism rather than destructive.

criticism and how to

adopt the Old and New Testaments so that they're complementary.

It's interesting that, given the tradition of the Christians, that it is as such about warfare, and the Muslim tradition, which accepts warfare as necessary to the conquest and the achievement of Islam, that the Western world has developed military techniques that far surpass.

I mean, we see it with Israel and Iran today.

The six missiles that made it into Israel out of 300 versus the six I think that the Israelis sent into Iran, all of which hit their point, right?

So we see that the Western tradition in military is much more

sophisticated, even though it has that Christian element that

puts the brakes on it.

What do you think explains that?

It just the intellectual tradition is much more open and inquiring, or is there something more to it?

There's restriction.

You mean why the West is the embryo of technological development and superior science?

It's because there's no

institutional or religious break on

the limits of inquiry or where you explore.

So if you're going to make a lighthouse, I'm taking kind of a I think I recall this from what went wrong in Bernard Lewis's book.

But let's say you make a lighthouse

in 15th, or no, excuse me, 17th century Istanbul,

and it's really majestic.

Someone is going to say that you're challenging Allah, that you think you're better than God, or that this is against a religious precept.

If they do that in the Western world, there's a pushback that the church doesn't have its, render unto Caesar what's Caesar's.

And so it limits itself.

It's not as holistic, in other words.

Sure, they burn witches and and they get into the Inquisition, but these are not representative of the continuity of religion.

And so when you're in the West and you look at the breaks upon

speculation, inquiry, theory,

research,

they're there.

The government can stop you and say you can't say that.

Religion can say you're going to go to hell or you think you're better than God,

etc.

But not to the same degree as in China, not to the same degree as you're in the Islamic world.

It's more just

knowledge ars grata artas, art for art's sake.

There's something, that's kind of the duality of the Enlightenment.

And the Enlightenment is not just the 17th, 18th, and 19th century Enlightenment in Europe, France, and Britain, Scotland.

It's the early Enlightenment in fifth century Athens.

And what do I mean by that?

There's no baggage in the West.

It just pursues knowledge and reason for its sake.

And it can be nihilistic, it can be anti-religious, it can be used for bad purposes.

But ultimately, it renders more development and knowledge.

How you develop, handle nuclear weapons or chemical weapons or AI, that's a whole nother question.

Because it can be very destructive.

When a Western power fights another Western power, you better be careful.

In the first year of the Civil War,

more Americans killed each other than had been lost in the entire two centuries of Native American fighting and would be.

Probably more people got killed at Antietam

than all of the who were lost to Native Americans, just because of the use of technology.

And when the Native Americans had some parody, it was because they took American technology and

they were sold it.

If you look at the Western tradition of military thinking, you go to Aeneas Tacticus.

He wrote a treatise in the

early 380s.

We don't know who did it.

It was probably an Arcadian general.

And he wrote something called

On the Defense of Fortified Positions: How You Protect a City.

And you read it, and it's empirical.

Here's how you can take a city: you go over,

you go through, or you go under.

And let's talk about how you go over and under

and through.

You go to the same time in China, Sun Tzu, brilliant military thinker,

but it's embedded with the hot and the cold, the yin and the yang.

It's a philosophical, so you don't quite get just pure military logic.

You have a whole embedded philosophy that affects it.

You don't have that in the West.

You can create gunpowder, but

what do you do with gunpowder in China?

It's for fireworks or ceremonial occasions or primitive guns.

As soon as it gets to the West, you get a race between and you get market capitalism.

You get

I'm going to have corn powder.

I'm going to have smokeless powder.

I'm going to have flintlocks.

I'm going to have percussions.

I'm going to have flintlocks, everything.

It just never stops.

That intellectual inquiry and the profit-making that's part of the capitalist system.

So that's part of the reason that the West is so much more advanced

and it's much more dangerous and deadly.

And that's why if you look at China, why do the Chinese uniforms, I mean, they all hate the West.

Why does China, if you look at their generals, they're just copied from American uniforms.

If you look at the breakdown of their armies, they're basically divisions and

brigades and battalions and companies.

They have epaulets.

When you look at their rockets,

why don't they say, we don't want anything to do with your blank, blank West.

We're going to make a different rocket.

Maybe they could look like a soccer ball or something, right?

But they don't.

They always emulate Western science.

And so does Iran.

Iran says they hate the Great Satan, the Great Satan, the Great Satan, the Great Satan.

And they try to send everybody over here before, you know.

and they try to use espionage.

They try to get all of our technology.

They're still flying F-14s that we sold to Shah.

They haven't improved on them.

Why don't they have the sophisticated Iranian jet industry?

They have drones, but most of the technology from the drones was stolen from us or stupidly sold to them.

So

that's the burden of the West.

It's so self-critical, but it has no breaks on where knowledge is free to roam.

And the scary thing about it is, it's based on a meritocracy, you know, fortified with Christian empathy and forgiveness.

And that was the success of it.

But

you go in reverse and you get rid of the Judeo-Christian tradition of sympathy and kindness and forgiveness.

And at the same time, you put breaks on classical traditions of learning and the Enlightenment.

And you've got a mess on your hand.

I'm not saying you have Francis Ford Copulous Metropolis.

I haven't seen it yet.

But we're in the United States right now, and our most elite universities that have been the engine of scientific development and progress, the STEM

curricula, the engineering schools, the medical schools, etc.

They are captured by this university system.

And we know there's no Judeo-Christian kindness in this system.

They have no problem with lying, with plagiarism, with doxing, with cancel culture.

And we know they're putting breaks on inquiry.

When you have the three

college presidents of Harvard, MIT, and Pennsylvania under oath,

And we know that in every one of those cases, if you stood up on campus and said, I think that affirmative action is racist and it's stupid and it's controversial, you would be in big trouble.

Or if you said, there are only two biological sexes, or

if you said, I believe, and you said in class, that an eighth or ninth month abortion is murder,

you would be dead.

And yet they went before Congress and said they couldn't stop people mouthing hateful post-October 7th anti-Semitic venom because they believed in free speech.

They were lying.

They were basically saying, you can say anything on our campus as long as it's attacking white people and Jews.

Anybody else, we don't believe in the First Amendment.

And I can tell you that after George Floyd and after COVID, we took a big hit.

Because if you were an in-we had Dr.

Stephen Quay on here, and he talked about

the genetic sequencing of the SARS virus, COVID-19 virus.

And he pretty much laid it out that very early on people like him knew that it was an engineered gain of function virus that probably, and you can't say that, you couldn't say that.

You couldn't say that until about six months ago.

If you were Scott Atlas and Jay Bachar, you couldn't say that the lockdown had no

empirically, it had no evidence that it saved lives compared to the damage that it did that was non-COVID related.

Suicide, spousal abuse, economic ruin, you name it, lack of immunity because people were put away from other people.

So

we are getting into a very dangerous territory where we are restricting where information and knowledge and inquiry can go.

And now it is the left that's doing it.

And it's saying that we have this diversity, equity, inclusion, and sexual orientation, and sexual identity, and abortion, and global warming.

If you're at a major university, and we have some people at Hoover who are very courageous and who basically say the planet is gradually heating up in many places to the degree that it is different than has happened in the past 5,000 years

because of carbon fuels or carbon emissions.

We can't tell because we don't have an accurate record that goes back enough without relying on computer simulations and modeling.

And so it could be that

human post-Industrial Revolution activity is warming up the planet, but we can't prove it.

But more importantly,

Even according to the most pessimistic models, the increase in temperature is livable, survivable, unlike what people say, and the efforts by governments to suppress it, especially in the West, would cause more economic

mayhem and death

than an increase of

one degree or not, especially given what India and China are doing.

So you can't say that.

You can't say that.

And as I said, I don't want to be self-infatuated or self-obsessed, but right after COVID, I wrote some very reasonable articles saying these are the evidence, this is the evidence and the data presented for the pangolin and

the bat exegesis, and this is the Wuhan level 4, soon to be operated by the PLA.

Destroy the evidence.

And it's very likely it was an engineered box.

And I quoted people.

And I think it was it

I'm trying to remember the New York, Nicholas Wade, was he the New York Times science writer that was basically fired for writing that?

Brilliant guy.

And so that's what's really scary about it.

And when Scott Atlas got up very courageously and said, stop.

Don't shut down the entire United States.

These children are never going to recover those two lost years.

You are destroying the economic system of the United States.

There's going to be millions of people who did not get their PSA test or their breast scan or their cardiology treadmill test and they're going to die and don't do this.

And then they censored him and tried to take away his medical license.

And then in the West, you know, Fauci.

There's an article about Fauci today.

And it's basically

the guy had no, he never was a practicing physician.

He never really was a widely published researcher.

He just went right out of medical school, right into becoming a bureaucrat.

And he lied repeatedly.

And now we know that former associates basically say, yeah, there was gain of function research.

And yeah,

we funded it via his buddy, Peter Dossick, that he said he didn't know very well.

He knew him pretty well.

And yeah, yeah, yeah, it came from the lab.

But that's not what Fauci told us.

He was trying to suppress that.

So my point is that

You've got to be very, very careful with this new censorship because

it is contrary to what in the past has made the West preeminent.

And when you start doing the Comissar system on diversity, equity, inclusion, just what we're talking about, if you say that he's not responsible for the gold bars taking bribes in his suit because he's following a Cuban tradition, or his wife is not responsible because she's following a golden tradition in Lebanon.

Or Fanny Willis is not responsible because black people get a pass because they have to resort to cash, then you're in real trouble.

And you can see it in the judicial system.

What everyone says about Donald Trump, he's crude, yes, all that.

No one believes that if he had just said, I'm not going to run for office, he would have been indicted in any of these things.

No one believes that anybody has been indicted for these crimes prior to him.

Real estate assets for a successful loan.

Minor misdemeanor of bookkeeping bootstrapped onto a federal election.

Jack Smith insurrection and taking, doing what Joe Biden did, you know, what all the presidents do, fight over classified documents, or Fannie Willis, what a lot of people do when they call and say, I know there's votes there, find them.

And so when you're using the judicial system in non-empirical fashion, just to go out and destroy somebody,

you're tampering with this whole Enlightenment system,

not to mention the Judeo-Christian system.

And I'm really worried about it because ultimately, I shouldn't say ultimately, very quickly, when you destroy meritocracy and free inquiry, you get what you're looking at on television, the optics of those spoiled brat kids that are mouthing Hitlerian, go back to Poland, river to the sea,

October we're going to have 10, 20, 100 October 7th, October 7th every day now.

That's pure Hitlerian.

And when you look at, when they interview those kids,

what does

the Greenline, what is Palace?

They don't know.

They're ignorant.

They've just been nursed on these studies courses.

They have no empirical knowledge.

And then when they leave, and you see what they did to their own university, fouling their nest, the trash, the pigsties, and the epithets they've shouted at brave middle-class cops, and the way that they expect these largely people of color janitors to go put plastic gloves and go in and clean up after them like they have dirty diapers, and they have nothing but disdain, then you've created a really monstrous environment where you've got spoiled, rich kids from the Middle East.

and the bi-coastal elite mostly

and they don't know anything but they do believe in censorship.

They have no religious or moral bearings because after October 7th, they were cheering on mass murder, beheading, mutilation.

And so what we need to do is bring back the Enlightenment and let inquiry go where it must, but guide it with a Judeo-Christian morality and humility.

But when you get rid of both of those, you're going to get into third world status very quickly, and we are now.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, I'm glad that we got into warfare because it is Memorial Day this weekend.

And so after we come back from this break, let's talk a little bit about Memorial Day and what there is to remember.

Stay with us.

Welcome back to the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

We are a subsidiary, I guess, or produced by the John Solomon Just the News site.

So please go to John Solomon's site.

It's called Just the News, and he is an investigative reporter, so there's lots on the DC corridor in particular, and so obviously our politics.

Victor, so it's Memorial Day, and I do have a question.

I know it's in memory of our warriors, and I was hoping, because I'm always a little bit confused about Patton's role after the D-Day operation.

And I was wondering, by way of talking about what there is to remember, maybe you could answer the question for me.

What exactly

happened with him what did he what did he do and what did the um his leaders expect him to do

well i mean even people who were critical of him carlo de Este's patton a genius for war or Ladislaw Farago's ordeal and triumph patton they understood that he was a an authentic military genius.

He just was.

I mean he may have been on hinge.

He believed in reincarnation.

He believed in all sorts of masculine virtues.

He may have been an adulterer.

He may have been in a rich, rich, rich old family.

His grandfather died in the Civil War.

But

he came out of World War I with a wound.

He was on the cutting edge of armor.

So during the dry years of the 20s and 30s, He was fundamental in making sure the United States had an armor component.

Okay.

So when he was nearing 60, the war broke out, and he was the logical person to head the first major counterattack.

And that was in November 1942, when we took an army

all the way from the East Coast and went into Morocco, Algeria, and landed it and met up with Montgomery, who was very slow, and we destroyed the Vichy government.

and flipped it and we

went on to expel the next year Rommel's, he wasn't there any longer, but a quarter million Germans.

Okay, so the next step was to go to Sicily.

Again, he's the most renowned, best, authentic military genius.

The Germans are following him.

They land in Sicily.

It's Montgomery, Montgomery.

Eisenhower was so scared of keeping the coalition together that as the ratio radically shifted from from one to one to one to two to one to three to one to four to one to five, I'm talking about the number of British troops versus Americans.

After all, we had 150 million people.

Britain had 60 million.

And they were spread all over the world.

So my point is that

Eisenhower still let Montgomery be preeminent again in the Sicilian.

And he was a slow coach.

He was a very brilliant set-piece guy, but not on the counter-attack.

He was not a, what the British call a thruster.

So Patton goes to Palermo and he goes around the long way and he gets to the Straits of Messina before Montgomery.

And so he's now world famous.

Conquered Sicily, conquered North Africa.

Brilliant.

Outsmarted the so-called Blitzkrieg generals, Rommel, all the rest.

His critics say, well,

he doesn't have to fight like the Russians do against the Wehrmacht, maybe in Russia, whatever.

But he slapped two soldiers.

And

one of them had malaria, one of them had shell shock.

He went into a hospital, he saw these two people, said, What's wrong with you?

You don't look sick.

You don't have a wound.

They said, I can't take it any longer.

One of them had a fever.

So he just slapped him.

Get out of here.

And then the other, he did it two weeks.

They suppressed it.

It got out the

and so what did they do?

They wanted to send him home.

Bradley was his subordinate, Omar Bradley, two-star subordinate.

Okay.

Bradley then becomes superior to Patton.

Eisenhower, who says he knew,

he was a subordinate of Patton in the peacetime army.

He was lower rank, younger.

Eisenhower, everybody says Eisenhower saved, they didn't.

Bradley and Eisenhower did not like Patton.

They may not have been in a position to fire him, but they put him on ice for a year.

The person who saved him were two people.

George Marshall said, whether you like it or not, this man is necessary to get to Berlin.

And FDR, people criticize FDR.

They should not criticize his conduct of the war.

He wrote Patton private letters and said, I'm your biggest fan.

But for one year,

from

July of 1943 to he was persona non grata.

He had no command.

They just stuck him in Sicily.

And then they dreamed up this idea that when you look at the channel, the 26 miles from Dover to Calais, that that's the obvious place to land.

And it's the shortest route right through into the Ruhr, the industrial 500 miles.

So obviously the Germans think everybody in history goes to Dover there.

So that's what they're going to do.

So they put patton there.

Think about the logic of this.

We have the most brilliant brilliant general in the world.

He is the most audacious.

You need him to get off those beaches and break out because we don't want a gallipoli-like situation.

And they know we're going to come at Calais, but we're not.

We're going to go way to the south at Normandy, where there's, you know, 60 miles of room, 70 miles from Portsmouth.

But we're going to make them think that we're going to go to Calais so they will not release the panzer divisions.

And we're going to call it Army Group Patton.

And we're going to send fake communiques, we're going to let their spies that we have captured send fake communiques to Berlin about all the

muster in England for Army Group Patton who's going to land at Calais.

And it was wildly successful.

So when we hit Normandy, Hitler did not release four Panzer divisions.

Should have released them in five hours.

He was asleep.

He would not let Rommel have them.

And had they had them it might have been touch and go so where is Patton he's not there

he's not there in June 6th he's not there in any of June he's trying to tell them you know

you should listen to me this is how you break out I know I landed in North Africa I know I landed in Sicily you don't stay in the beach there's hedgerows I was here in World War I

There's hedgerows.

You got to break out.

Don't just go back to these peninsula.

Well, they were, first of all, they were paranoid.

They did not have ports.

They didn't know whether the mulberries, one was destroyed very quickly, but they didn't know how well that would work.

And they didn't know they could land stuff right on the beach with LSTs.

They could.

And they couldn't get Antwerp.

They couldn't get Cherbourg.

They couldn't get Brest,

couldn't get

any of them.

They were called fortress,

Atlantic fortresses.

Hitler put almost 200,000 people in these fortresses.

It was stupid.

They were isolated and surrounded, and they never could help.

But they stopped the port.

So Patton, when they finally came in at the end of July, he was supposed to go to the Cotenen Peninsula and take a port.

What did he do?

He said to Wood, you take the port, but I'm not going to go west.

I'm going to go east where the Germans are.

And he had the longest, remember,

there were three British and Canadian beaches to the north and then two to the south.

And Utah and Omaha were the farthest from the

center of Germany.

And

as a result, Patton was not designated as the central thruster because he was the farthest away and he would go into Bavaria and Czechoslovakia.

Mani was right at the north of the landings and he had the shortest route and trajectory.

Nevertheless, once the Third Army was activated at the end of July, and Bradley, to his credit, had Operation Coba, where they took in B-17s and blasted a hole, and they broke out around the 1st of August, and he was activated, and he went nuts 30 miles a day, and he got up to the fillets.

And guess what?

Hitler kept saying, the more Patton is surrounding us, we'll go straight ahead and cut him off.

But he didn't realize that the First Army under Hodges was pretty well prepared for that.

And so the point I'm making is he had them completely surrounded.

I'm talking about a quarter million men.

Every German division that was active was surrounded.

By patent.

By Patton.

But he was only half.

He had to close the gap.

And that would require portions of the American Army under Hodges and Montgomery to go halfway at fillets, meet him at Fillet's.

And Bradley said,

Well,

I'd rather have a

bruised shoulder than a broken neck.

If you plug the bottle, it's going to explode.

So they let him out.

Well, they didn't let them out.

They just didn't close it.

Monty was not, he's not that type of general.

So Patton's waiting here.

Close it, close it, close it.

And then,

you know, they killed 10,000 Germans.

They bombed them.

It was slaughter.

And they destroyed those divisions.

But

a lot of them got out, and some of them went up to Arnheim under General Model that had escaped and were re-outfitted.

And they stopped the entire, you know, that debacle called

Operation Market Garden, the Bridge Too Far campaign.

So then he tried to make another loop, and he did.

And he got in, he was the person he sent, and he was very magnanimous for such a Trumpian, magnanimous.

You know.

Everybody said he was a megalomaniac, but he allowed the French soldiers, he had about 50,000, and they were brilliant.

General Leclerc and an armored division, he allowed them to go into Paris.

Why he came around the shoulder.

And on August 17, 18, they took Paris.

And then, given that Army Group West was shattered for a brief period, at the end of August into early September, the Germans were running back toward Germany to regroup.

And it was wide open.

And so he was going 20 miles a day.

And then

by the first week in September, the Normandy campaign was officially over once they took Paris.

But he was raring to go.

And they said,

well, you're too far from Berlin.

And you're not...

designated in the Schaeffe plan,

the supreme headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Force.

You're not there.

It's Mani.

And we don't have supplies for a single thrust.

Mani always said you had to have, for a combined thrust all down the line.

We have to just favor

one fist.

And it should be me.

And that's what he convinced Ike to back this insane program of

skipping over the tributaries of the market garden campaign.

We've talked about that.

It was insane.

If you go there today, the road is just a tank trap.

And they never got to Arnheim.

They never got to Arnheim until the end of the war.

And they never took the harbor of Antwerp for another month.

So they had no supplies.

So he was just sitting there.

They didn't give supplies to Patton at the time.

No, to cut him off.

They said that

he's not part of the plan.

So he sat out of Metz and he had no gasoline.

And they really didn't equip him until December.

And he said, to show you what his genius was, he said

he had some brilliant intelligence officers, and they said there's radio silence on the part of the Germans.

This is unusual.

And we're headed for a week to 10 days of complete snow and zero visibility.

And we can't trace where these German panzer divisions are.

We don't find prisoners.

They're quiet.

There's no air reconnaissance.

And they said that we've got two green divisions in the First Army, and we're going to attack.

And Patton said, I know what they're going to do.

They're going to have an assault.

Everybody thinks they're completely lost the war, but they've been hoarding a quarter million man army.

Of course, he was right.

They broke through and destroyed two American divisions.

They were on their way to the Meuse River and cut the British from the Americans.

And they thought they could get stocks of American gasoline.

They got some.

And he looked at a map and he said, there's a place to stop him at Baston.

But he was 100 miles away.

So he met at Verdun with Bradley and his finest moment, you know, Monty didn't show up.

But Ike said, what are we going to do?

They've punched a hole in our line.

They've destroyed two divisions.

We're trying to get the 101st.

They've got tigers and panthers.

And

Patton said, In 24 hours, I can deploy three divisions.

That's 50,000 men, armored divisions, and infantry.

And they said, George, just shut the blank up.

You can't do that.

You can't take an army that's going completely east and pivot it and make a 90-degree angle in the middle of the winter over poor roads and get there to save Best.

He said, I've already planned it.

I knew this was going to happen.

I knew why you were going to call me here.

So he went out to the phone, he gave a code.

before he even got back to the headquarters, and they did.

And they, five, six days later, they saved Baston.

And at that point, finally, the market garden was over and they resupplied him.

And Montgomery said, I'm going to get across.

I have a million men.

We're going to do the methodical crossing of the Rhine.

We're going to have paratroopers bigger than D-Day.

We're going to have level bombers fight.

And it was just a spectacular celebration to get across the Rhine.

But the First Army saw the Ramogan Bridge that hadn't been destroyed.

And they said, we'll just go across right now on our own.

And Patton said, Well, I've already gone across.

I snuck over last night.

And so the Americans were already over there, and the Germans were looking at Montgomery, and he did the same thing.

From March and April, he just made a big circle and he trapped another 300 or 400,000 people.

People criticized him.

They said, well, he was just fighting losing Germans.

No, he wasn't.

Not at fillets, not

around Paris.

And

when it all ended up, he'd captured

a million German soldiers.

And the Germans, if you look at what Germans said, Liddell Hart, the other side of the hill, and you have transcripts from some of the people who were in captivity, it was unanimous.

And that's why they said, why did you fall for this fake idea that we were going to line at Cain?

And they said something to the effect, Well, why would you take your most valuable general and not use him, but use him as a decoy?

Because no matter what we did, if he had been there, you would have broken out.

So it was, and then of course in December he got in an accident, a freak accident.

His driver, Mims, was not there.

He had a new driver, and he had just a minor little accident.

No one else in the car was hurt, but he snapped his head and snapped his spinal cord.

That's sad.

And he had to put hooks on his head, and he sat there for 17 days in agony.

His wife almost got killed with a neurosurgeon.

She had to fly in the fog and rain and snow on a prop plane of the DC-3 all the way from the United States.

And she got there before he died.

Wow.

And he had already gone home.

He had already gone home after World War II.

He wanted to go to the Pacific, and MacArthur wanted nothing to do with him.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no.

You're not going to be in the invasion of Japan.

We don't want guys like you.

So he went home and he was treated as a hero at the L.A.

Coliseum, old family from Pasadena.

He went back.

They made him, they demoted him because he mouthed off about, he said things like, the Russians are as dangerous as Hitler and now we've empowered them.

We didn't mean to, but we did, so we've got to rebuild Germany and get these Germans and help us to repel the, well, you can't say that.

He was absolutely right again.

He said, you know, the war started in 1939 about dictatorship in Eastern Europe.

We got rid of one dictatorship and then we invited another one in worse.

And so that was all politically incorrect.

So they sacked him.

He went hunting.

He was going to go home to the United States the next day.

And he would have been

and he was killed.

And of course, conspiracy theories then grew up.

Well, you know, he had a new driver and they deliberately did the, and I don't think so.

But the point I'm making is that

he was a Trumpian figure that he didn't get credit for his achievements because of his personality.

And he was over the top in his expression.

But he was an authentic military genius.

He had a sixth sense.

He knew exactly what was going to happen at the Battle of the Bolshev before it happened.

He knew exactly how to break out and how you could trap the the Army Group West of the Germans.

He knew exactly when you could take Paris.

And

he was not fully appreciated.

That was the one criticism you could have of Eisenhower, that he was a very good organizer and conciliator and an allied general, but

he had under his command an absolutely brilliant, if not erratic, mind, and he didn't fully use him.

And he lost a year of his service, and a lot of people died because of that.

If he had been allowed to be in the planning of D-Day and what you do on day two, three, four, five,

it would have been very different, I think.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, thank you so much for that memory on Memorial Day.

What a fascinating character.

I'm glad I asked the question.

I hope our listeners are glad too.

I have a comment from last

from one of your podcasts, and it says, Vis-a-vis Brandon Johnson.

It is not a matter of him hating Chicago.

I read that he is or was further to the left than Lori Lightfoot.

And as we all know, lefties just got a, got it, just gotta left.

Did I say he hated Chicago?

No, but well, I don't remember, but maybe you did, because this is

they do hate what they destroy.

Yeah.

But they never,

if I did say that, what I meant, and that's a logical thing to say, I don't recall it, but I could have,

is that he hated what made Chicago work.

He hated the business sector.

He hated the police.

He hated minorities who did not

think that their tribal affiliations were their only means of identification, that they were assimilationists.

He hated everything that made Chicago great.

And he was going to destroy it.

So he did.

They got a DA that let everybody out.

He welcomed in thousands of illegal aliens.

He attacked the police.

And he created,

you know, he exaggerated racial differences.

He did everything, and you got what you got now.

So all these people that do this hate something,

and what they hate is a traditional America that was working.

That's what the people.

Mr.

Mayorkis hates

a certain view of America.

And that view of America is one with secure borders, a melting pot, because it doesn't reward people for anything other than their merit and their achievement.

And he's an immigrant himself, Mayorkas, Cuban.

So

in his view,

I hate this country that I came to.

Under no circumstances would I be denied entry.

It's like these Palestinian students.

I hate this country that I died to get over here and I've got this fellowship, but death to America.

At some point, there's a shelf life to that, and people get very upset about it.

I know I do.

I'm getting tired of it.

Tired of turning on the TV and seeing death to America, death to America, genocide,

river to the sea, go back to Poland.

It's so funny about those universities.

You could get on a megaphone and you could say to a Jewish student, go back to Poland.

They did it.

That's a big new chant.

Go back to Poland.

Now, why did they pick Poland?

These kids have never been to Poland.

There's not a Jewish kid at any of those universities that's been to Poland.

His family hasn't been to Poland if he was from Poland in three generations.

They say it because they don't know much about the death camps, but they have a general fuzzy feeling that Auschwitz was in Poland.

Get back to the camps.

If you were a Jewish student and you just said go back to Gaza, not eliminationist rhetoric, just go back home, not go to a gas chamber, just say go back to Gaza, you would be probably expelled for saying that.

That's how sick these people are.

They really are deranged.

Yeah.

And they're hateful.

And, you know, we have to heal the wounds, but to heal the wounds, you've got to identify what these people are doing.

Yeah.

Yeah, no obfuscating anymore as they've been doing.

The left always obfuscates.

Well, thank you very much, Victor, for all that you have talked about this time around.

A wide range of topics.

I know.

I was trying to think how.

I was really prepared, so I'm sure that there's Beowulf scholars that say, Victor, Victor, Victor, you missed the dating or something.

Well, I'm glad that so much of what we talked about was on war since this is Memorial Weekend, and we hope that everybody enjoys Memorial Weekend.

Thank you, everybody, for listening.

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