Modern Epidemiology, Ancient History

Flu season is here and COVID cases are still climbing across the country.

When people start getting sick, medications disappear fast.

And that's why we trust All Family Pharmacy.

They help you prepare before it's too late.

Right now, they've dropped prices on ivermectin and mabenzazole by 25%.

Plus, you can save an extra 10% with the code VICTR10.

You'll also get 10% off antibiotics, antivirals, hydroxychloroquine, and more of the medications you actually want on hand.

Whether you're fighting off a cold, protecting your family from flu season, or staying ready in case COVID makes its way into your home, having a few months' supply brings peace of mind and control.

They work with licensed doctors who review your order online, write the prescriptions, and ship your meds straight to your door.

Go to allfamilypharmacy.com/slash Victor and use the code Victor10 today.

Hello, and welcome to the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

This is our weekend episode, so we will look at things cultural and we have a special guest this week.

Dr.

Stephen Quay has returned to talk a little bit more about COVID and pandemics.

So we will hear him first and then Victor will turn to his historical discussion and this week as we promised it will be historian so we'll be looking at Herodotus, Thucydides and Xenophon in the Greek tradition.

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

If you're a homeowner, you need to listen to this.

In today's AI and cyber world, scammers are stealing your home titles, and your equity is the target.

Here's how it works: criminals forge your signature on one document, use a fake notary stamp, pay a small fee with your county, and just like that, your home title has been transferred out of your name.

Then they take out loans using your equity and even sell your property, and you won't even know what's happened until you get a collection or foreclosure notice.

So, when was the last time you checked on your home title?

If your answer is never, you need to do something about it right now.

And that's why we've partnered with Home Title Lock so you can find out today if you're already a victim.

Go to hometitalock.com/slash victor to get a free title history report and a free trial of their million-dollar triple lock protection.

That's 24-7 monitoring of your title, urgent alerts to any changes, and if fraud does happen, they'll spend up to $1 million to fix it.

Please, please, don't be a victim.

Protect your equity today.

That's home titlelock.com slash Victor.

Welcome back.

I would like to remind everybody that Victor is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marshabuski Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

We would like to welcome Dr.

Stephen Kway and I'm going to hand it over to Victor at this point.

Thank you, Sammy.

And we're going to make a big transition from classical Greek historians to return of one of our favorite guests, Dr.

Stephen Kway.

Remember, he has given some miraculous and revealing interviews with us about the origins of COVID and and the long story of its development in China and no doubt at the lab.

And since I've talked to him last,

there's been some new developments, and no one is better qualified than Stephen to talk about.

He's got a PhD and MD from the University of Michigan.

He was on the

faculty at Stanford Law School.

He started six biopharmaceutical companies.

And

I was always amazed about your current

Seattle-based therapeutics called Atasa, which is out of ⁇ it's a Persian name out of the Tex of Herodotus for

Xerxes' mother, isn't it?

It absolutely was.

And

she was the first woman in recorded history with breast cancer.

Yeah, it's in the text of Herodotus, as I remember.

Exactly.

That was the basis for picking that name.

Yeah.

So anytime you see that combination of theta, theta, or sigma, sigma, and this, it can't be be a greek word so there's not and so i you know it's a foreign word but uh

so

you've you've been busy stephen with the freedom of information act new information since i talked to you last and since our listeners heard you so what what's what's new what what has changed if anything the story of the the origins of covid and the people involved who haven't been quite candid and transparent about it.

Yeah.

So, and just to be absolutely clear, Victor, so I want to update everyone on the origin and why it

likely came from this laboratory.

But I do want to pivot because this, I want to get, I want to show why this topic, to me, is important for the election coming up this fall, why I think there's an unclaimed issue that I want to bring up.

And

maybe if enough of

your listeners contact enough of their congressmen or things, it could become an important issue because I think it's really critical.

Well, Well, I'll be sure, I'm looking at some of my notes and I'll be sure to bring it up, but I want you here to

I've read some notes about what you're going to say, but I want you to explain it so I can better articulate it to

people that I come in contact with.

Absolutely, Victor.

So let's frame it.

So we've known for about a year that a grant proposal by four scientists, two American, two Chinese, four scientists,

looked like it predicted that, you know, if you followed followed this grant proposal, you start with a bat virus, you add a furin cleavage site, which is a fancy thing that cuts the spike, and you grow it on human cells, you're going to get a virus that transmits very quickly in humans and has features that have never been seen in nature.

So we've known that for about a year.

What the latest FOIA

release showed us was some details that kind of

puts the nail in the coffin on that.

Here's why.

The original proposal said that the synthetic virus was going to be made in North Carolina, not in China.

And of course, so the people that were supporting a natural spillover said, well, look, the virus came from China.

The grant said it was going to come from the U.S.

And so that's obviously a problem.

Are we talking about 2019?

What's the time frame here, Steve?

So this grant proposal was 2018 to the Department of Defense.

So

they wanted to make this virus synthetically, spray it in caves to immunize.

I mean, it's pretty crazy science.

And as I like to say, the Department of Defense, who brought us, you know, Agent Orange during the Vietnam War, thought this was too risky.

And so they didn't fund this work.

But, you know, being a faculty member at Stanford Medical School and all of that, you know very clearly when you write a grant proposal, you probably already have done some of the work and you're probably likely to do it whether it's funded or not.

You'll find a way to get it done after you go all to the creativity of writing the the grant, you just want to finish the project.

So the grant said in 2018 they were going to do the work in the U.S.

and make the virus in North Carolina.

Well,

what came out were the drafts of the grant.

So the scientists are sending it back and forth.

They're putting marginal comments in there.

And one of the U.S.

scientists, this is Peter Dasek from the New York City-based EcoHealth Alliance, said in the margins, say, hey, look, we will tell the Department of Defense we'll do this in the U.S.

But once the money comes in, we can shift the synthetic work to China because it can go faster there.

They have lower biosafety standards.

They're talking about how good this is going to be.

Yeah, just think about that.

And Ralph Barrick says, well, if U.S.

virologists knew we were going to do it in China this way, they would freak out.

And then he actually uses the, we would freak out.

This is all on documents from the Freedom of Information.

Correct.

Correct.

Wow.

Wow.

Okay.

So then

they propose this stuff.

They don't get the DOD to do it, but they go ahead anyway?

Well,

that's what the presumption is.

But now, so

the defense that the grant couldn't have been how the virus was made, because the grant said it was going to happen in North Carolina, we now know that's a false statement.

We now know that's a completely false statement.

And

the other FOIA release was around

the first sequence of the virus that was ever submitted to a database.

So there's something called Gene Bank, so GEN Bank,

and it's run by the NIH.

And so all scientists around the world upload genetic sequences 24-7

for any sort of research you're doing.

And so what we found out was that on December 28th, 2019, so this is quite old, the first sequence was uploaded by a scientist in China, and then three weeks later he took it down before it became public.

So the world could have known on December 28th what the virus sequence was.

So you're talking about the SARS virus that caused, that later was revealed to cause COVID-19.

That's right.

That's exactly right.

And so he had the right a Chinese scientist had uploaded it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That was a dangerous thing for him to do, probably.

Well, it was, and then he probably got called out and he brought it down.

So

two interesting facts about that scientist.

Number one, he worked at a PLA-affiliated hospital.

So

he's doing, you know, quote, civilian research, but he's doing it at a military hospital.

And they have a long-standing practice of military-civilian fusion in their research.

So that's, that's,

we knew that, and that's what would be expected.

But of all the organizations, this is like Casablanca, of all the organizations in the world that he could have been affiliated with, he was a grantee from EcoHealth Alliance.

So

Francis Collins and then...

Was EcoHealth Alliance getting

money from the NIH or the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases under Fauci's direction?

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

So, you know, to put a fine point on it, Francis Collins and the NIH gave money to

NIAID run by

Fauci, who gave money to EcoF Alliance in New York, who gave money to China.

And so

the groups that planned to make this virus in 2018 also included the first people who ever saw the sequence, okay,

on December 28th.

Now,

the thing, so what I did was I tried to put myself in the position of, okay, I'm one of those four scientists.

I've written a grant to do, to put a furine cleavage site in, to put this fancy clipping spot, and I'm going to grow it an animal so I know it's going to transmit human to human.

I write this grant, and then I, you know, let's say I don't do the work, but it took me 10 minutes with the sequence from December 28th and some programs that you have on your computer to study genomes, to study genetics.

It took me 10 minutes to show that this virus had the furin cleavage site, had this clipping site, and would transmit rapidly from humans to humans.

So I would know on December 28th

that this virus was going to jump human to human very easily and would probably cause an epidemic or pandemic.

So you were able to do that in the present.

What prevented people from doing that at the critical time that would have staved off the virus?

Is that the fact that they didn't have this Freedom of Information Act information?

So they couldn't download it and they didn't do what you did?

So

the most of the world,

again,

if you know there's something,

you know there's a Furin sites you're looking for, if you know you're looking for how good is it at human-to-human transmission, you use a particular set of programs and you can get that information in 10 minutes.

If you're just seeing this new virus,

you know, de novo,

it's not going to occur to you to do that.

And this is the fundamental flaw that I think

is most important for your listeners to understand.

Since

what's the first plague?

Is it the Anton in 165 AD?

It's something like that.

So every

jump of a virus or a pathogen to humans has been a slow, slow process.

So, you know, if you're an infectious disease doctor and you have this person with a brand new virus, okay, it's bad, and this person might die, or they might not die.

But the one thing you're not going to think of is

I'm not going to worry about human-to-human transmission because this is just appearing in humans.

It's going to take it months or years to adapt.

SARS-1 took five months to go from infecting humans occasionally to being an epidemic.

MERS has been jumping from camels to humans for a decade.

It still hasn't perfected human-to-human transmission.

So

you're teaching in medical school, all of your ground, your decades of information is there will not be human-to-human transmission.

And so we will build our policies around the fact that we're going to have weeks or months or even years before we have to worry about that.

WHO said mid-January, there's no evidence of human-to-human transmission.

Finally, by February, they were saying, you know, it looks like human-to-human transmission is occurring.

Okay.

So again,

why is that important?

And what would you do?

Well, look at it.

If I'm one of those four scientists who predicted I was, you know, I was going to make a virus that would transmit from human to human in the laboratory very efficiently.

And then I get this virus that looks like it comes from nature, but I drop it into these programs.

10 minutes later, I see, oh, gosh, this has exactly the two things we predicted were going to happen.

It's coming out of the city of one of our other collaborators on our grant.

The next thing you need to do is you need to call the CDC or the NIH or Fauci or anybody who will take your phone calls and say, look,

this thing is going to transmit from human to human from the get-go.

We need to do certain steps to stop that.

Now, what they did in January, we do know they had lots of conversations and these very scientists talked to these very government officials.

They talked about, well, it came from a wet market, and so we need to talk, you know, we need to build that narrative.

Unfortunately, that narrative supports the concept that this is not going to transmit to human to human.

It's going to be slow.

You don't have to do mitigation.

Do you think that these new documents that have been released make it pretty clear that they knew that animal pangolin bat narrative was not possible given what they were doing?

That

they knew the...

the

real origins and the nature and the peril that this virus posed, and they didn't want to be candid because of

their own conduct, I guess.

Well, that's right.

So what would lead to them to be this way?

And so for a decade, the scientists doing this dangerous virus research and the bureaucrats who have funded it have been together in almost a blind faith and belief that this work was going to be useful someday.

And that was really the mitigating factor.

And so

if you start talking about, well, maybe it came from a laboratory if you start talking about the fact that it's not natural that it may have human to human spread early on um you're you're going to break that break that process now

i'm going on record uh to say that we could have stopped 99.8 percent of the 1 million deaths in the u.s

with this information so okay so the let's just say that the two scientists in question

given what we know post facto, would have said, oh my God, this thing has has gone off the rails and we've got to do something and we still have time to do it.

And they had been candid with Fauci or they'd gone to Trump,

you know, HH something

or the CDC.

How could we have stopped it right then?

Yeah.

Victor, the reason I am so sure we could have stopped it right then is because one country did the right thing.

That was Taiwan, where I live part of the time.

So, and Taiwan has a unique problem with respect to COVID.

Let's back up for your listeners here.

Population, 23 million.

It's an island off the coast of China, 23 million people.

They're also Chinese ethnic.

At any given day before the COVID pandemic, 6% of their population was in mainland China.

either visiting family, on vacation, doing business, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.

So if any country was going to get hit hard by a virus from China, it would be Taiwan with that huge flux going back on a constant basis.

But that's not what happened.

Taiwan was monitoring

WeChat, you know, the social media in China.

I actually interviewed the couple that did this.

They were on their honeymoon in London, two nice young doctors, one working for the CDC.

And his job was listening to Wuhan WeChat.

And

he said to his new wife, before we go out, I have to check in.

And he saw that there was a lot of chatter going on in Wuhan about a new virus.

He called back to the CDC.

They never got to the celebrations for the New Year's.

But Taiwan began boarding airplanes on the 31st of December from Wuhan.

It's very simple.

The plane lands, and before you get off, they send somebody down the aisles.

They take a temperature, they just point it at your head, they go down there.

Anybody that has a fever, they then put them in a special vehicle.

They take them off and quarantine them.

But the inconvenience factor, it's probably 10 15 minutes inconvenience for all those flights um we could have done that very easily and that would have given us if we had done that that would have given us time to explore the virus the vaccine and all of that we would have had a margin of

well we wouldn't we we wouldn't we wouldn't have nearly the number of people coming in so what happened tie taiwan finally found a patient in early january that had you know covet from this process they isolated it you know they they um and they they isolated the 46 other passengers on the plane uh they were to stop it so by april this simple process for for uh that taiwan put in place they had six deaths you know how did they and how did they finally end up did they finally get overwhelmed with different variants or did or did they they they let their guide their guard down at uh

when omicron hit they had let their guard down um and unfortunately there was a pilot who was who was pretty active in the nightlife in Taiwan.

And he brought Omicron in.

And then

we ended up with...

That did mean that they avoided the most virulent early forms of the population.

They did.

They absolutely did.

Their total deaths per capita were lower than other countries.

Yes, well,

for all of 2020,

they had under 10 deaths for the entire population of 23 million.

U.S.

had 142,000.

We went up over half a million in 2020.

So we could have been boarding flights from Wuhan.

They were either LA, Houston, or New York, or connecting flights.

I mean, the first case in America came from a student in Wuhan who came in through Seattle Airport,

took the train into Seattle, exposed about 200 people, including people that worked

in

a senior citizen's home.

So we wiped out senior citizens' homes in the United States.

No, I remember I wrote a column.

There were four flights going into Texas, San Francisco, LAX,

and JFK at a time when the Chinese government had stopped internal flights in China coming out and going into Wuhan.

They were greenlighting flights coming to the United States and Europe.

I don't want to interrupt, but continue then.

So

what's the significance in terms of policy or what did we learn or

what are the ramifications?

Did either of the any of these people face any ramifications?

Will they ever face any?

Well, this is interesting.

So remember, there are four scientists that wrote this grant,

two in the U.S., two in China.

Lin Fa Wong at Duke, the National University of Singapore, has been director of their infectious disease for a decade.

He was called the Batman because he would go into caves, and he really liked the bat.

The public sequence

of SARS-CoV-2 was January 10th of 2020.

That was the first time the entire sequence is seen.

What did Linfe Wong do that day?

He resigned as director of the infectious disease operation at Duke

National University.

So after a decade, he stepped down.

Where is he now?

Did he just display?

Well,

he is still there.

He's quietly in the background.

He doesn't seem to be doing too much research.

But they clearly took steps on that day with him to change his relationship with the university.

And the one Institute of Virology, the other Chinese location, went under the directorship of a People's Liberation Army general who was a virologist, a woman who was very active during SARS-1.

And so within a few weeks, that research institution became under military control.

In the United States, of course, nothing happened to these individuals.

So

my point to your readers twofold.

Obviously we should have Congress looking at making laws

to simply stop doing this dangerous research.

I think it's a case can easily be made that it doesn't do its purported purpose, which is to predict what would happen in nature and to allow us to get ahead of it.

These folks are centuries or millenniums ahead of nature in the things they're making in the laboratory.

And so it's completely unrealistic that they're mitigating anything that would ever happen from nature.

There's some technical reasons why this coronavirus in bats never

would get one of these cleavage sites called the furin cleavage site that made it so transmissible

because it's an enteric virus in bats, not a respiratory.

So in the GI tract, the furin cleavage site, the spike protein falls off the virus because it's been cut.

And so it makes it, it can't be transmitted.

And so in a thousand years of these cybercoviruses that are SARS-CoV-2's ancestors, it's never had one of those sites.

And it's because it probably got one, but it didn't survive because it couldn't survive.

So, but let's imagine we could ban the research

in the U.S.

with Congress.

Step two is then to step back and say, well, what's going on in the world?

And so there's 42 labs in the world doing this dangerous research.

Another 17 under construction because

there's nothing like a viologist scaring the folks with the money to say, hey,

we need to have our own new lab to do this kind of research.

So there's 42, there's 17 more.

There's going to be 59, but there are only nine of the 59 in the U.S.

and the other 50 are outside the U.S.

So any reasonable policy that you know, on the national level is going to have to include what I'm calling

a viral border protection plan.

So there's been a lot of talk and the, you know, the physical immigration of people across the southern border is a big issue for this national election and gets a lot of press around that.

But I think the concept of

people flying into America from the

50 countries, well, not 50 countries, but the places where these laboratories are.

is a real challenge.

And there's some very simple things that could be done.

You know, one is the immediate testing of all flights from locations where there's been a new outbreak.

So,

you know,

WHO gets notified there's an outbreak in

Wuhan, China.

Immediately, the FAA and the Homeland Security, they start boarding planes from that location.

The other thing that's been proposed and has actually been tested quite nicely is

you simply you do a sample of the bulk collection

from airplanes, the toilet collections.

You do a very simple test in there, and you can see if anybody on the plane

has lots of different infections and it's inexpensive.

So again, you could either save a sample or test everything.

What do we do say of the 8 million people who have come from, I think, 60 different countries across our southern border?

And some of those countries are now must be the sites where these labs will appear, right?

I don't know.

Victor, that's almost a rhetorical question.

I mean, the concept that

we spend all this time on people, you know, that people can walk over and there's no vaccination status or no infection status.

Wall of Byzantium or something like that.

Yes, I guess so there.

But so

I really would love, I would love to hear some of the folks that are interested in important issues for American people to step back and look at this.

Because the other work I did, and you and I have talked about this before, is that we know that these laboratories in China and elsewhere are working on 40, 50, 60% lethal viruses.

So SARS-CoV-2 is 1% lethal.

The black plague is about 15%.

My

Monte Carlo analysis, as they call it, of looking at health care, energy, food supply, police and fire,

if you take those four and you say

what kind of infection would break our system, looking at those four services, it's about 15%.

So we're working in a space where we could set back,

we could set back civilization

a couple hundred years because the Black Plague was a 250-year gap in European population from start to

the dip back to the start again.

What is the Chinese, I mean,

we don't have any accurate information of how many died in China, but we do know that they did enormous damage to their economy by their various social health policies.

Do they, you think that they are as scared of it, what they did, or do they learn anything, or do they just take that off as cost of doing business and they feel that it's a bioweapon at some future point or are they awed at what happened are they worried about what happened had they stepped up the security is there any way of knowing well it it it looks a lot of the post uh infection activities in china are strong indication it was an accidental release i mean there's you know people have tried to test the hypothesis was this a purposeful release to see what would happen or what the response would be or that sort of thing.

And look at there's precedence that for the U.S., for example, the U.S.

Navy sprayed serratia into the air around San Francisco to see how it would spread in the population.

And actually, people died.

This was in the 1950s.

Remarkable.

Serratia is that little red mold that you get sometimes on, you know.

well-made bread that doesn't have a lot of preservatives in it.

So that's that's serratio.

And they thought it was inert.

They were using it just to find the spores.

But people who were, you know, with cancer or that sort of thing, or would breathe it in actually died from that process.

But it's pretty clear that they were not testing it.

For example, in February, the president asked their legislature to pass a new law to say that you couldn't sell laboratory animals where gain of function research is being done in the market for people to buy to eat.

I can't make this up, but

that was a new law.

Why was the DOD interested, or at least even if they did eventually back out, why why were they interested

in a joint biology research problem that had these implications that would involve the Wuhan lab?

Was it the idea that we better keep an eye on what China's doing because they might detour into bioweapons research or something like that?

You know,

I think this segue would almost deserve a whole segment by itself.

Just a couple points out.

So Equal Health Alliance is the kind of the poster child of this kind of research in America and collaborating into Asia.

And while they had about $10 million of U.S.

NIH and Fauci money,

NIAID money, they had about $80 million

from Department of Defense over a 10-year period of time.

The U.S.

Navy was in the middle of Laos.

a long ways from any water, body of water, in the middle of Laos in 2016, 17, and 18, sampling viruses in the same caves where some of the bat viruses that are closest to SARS-CoV-2 were arising.

The Navy's never been asked why they were in bat caves in the middle of Laos.

So

there seems to have been developed a very strong, especially after 9-11 and when

Fauci's grant money went up extensively,

a real sort of dual-use approach to gain of function research, meaning let's do the civilian work and let's think about vaccines, but we need to be prepared if someone makes a weapon of these.

I mean,

I think

what often happens is

every military organization justifies an offensive program

in the spirit that, well, we have to have a defensive one.

And so everyone's doing offense and defense at the same time.

Let me ask you, what...

What is the status of Dasik and the other scientists that was involved with the framework?

Act.

Real Barrett, yes.

What do you think it's happening?

What is happening to them, if anything, now, and what might happen to them with these new Freedom of Information Act revelations?

So during the 2020 period,

when President Trump heard

about this funding and about these relationships and about wound instant virology, he cut off funding to EcoHealth Alliance.

There was that 77 Nobel Prize winner letter that's objected to this as a blockage of...

And then quietly uh you know during the the next presidential administration uh their funding has been you know has has gotten back to them so they actually have more more money than they did now there's a new bill uh that's been introduced to ban both them and the wuhanist of virology from funding uh for the next decade um because it's very clear if when you get you know i used to get i used to get money from nih so down in the fine print there is if if if they want to see your raw data since they paid for it you send them the raw data.

Otherwise, you know, there's all kinds of penalties.

And Wuhan has been asked for that data for the last three years and they've, you know, they've not sent it.

So they're they're in violation of U.S.

laws around receiving grant money.

But of course, there's no teeth and no way to

stop it.

Has the field of virology

ostracized them?

Or have they come to their aid?

Are they afraid of them?

Or do there are there voices out there that say this is outrageous because ultimately there's culpability for all of these people who died.

No, Victor, there has not.

And, you know, if you look at a historical precedence when the, you know, the 50s, late 40s, 50s, when atomic energy was being discovered and then it was thought to be weaponized and had peaceful uses, there was a lot of discussion around,

and it was physicists themselves.

It was Einstein himself, you know, that wrote a letter saying, you know, we need to focus on the peaceful use of this and not militarize this technology that I helped develop.

In the virology community, there has been none of that.

They really have circled the wagons.

They really have continued to foster this concept that it came from nature.

And it's now, it's almost ludicrous.

I would be embarrassed to make the claims.

without the evidence that they're doing, but they're doing it nonetheless.

And so it really is going to have to be the American people or the people of the world to say, hey, we don't want this dangerous research done anymore.

And we want our government to put in place some pretty simple procedures like Taiwan did and some other things to protect us from pathogens moving through the world because there is a foundational change.

You know, you can now go anywhere in the world in 24 hours.

And if you're asymptomatic for 24 hours,

it's going to be difficult.

So you need, we're in a challenging environment for worldwide spread of viruses.

I'm a little optimistic, and I don't want to get political, but I have talked to people in the DeSantis campaign, the defunct DeSantis campaign, and in the Trump campaign active, not Haley, but I'm sure that would be no different,

that if a Republican should be elected, that these key points at FDA, CDC, NIH, National Institute of Allergy, Infectious Diseases, HHS, all of these groups that control billions of dollars, the people that they have talked to me about are all dissidents and they're all they're going to have a I don't want to say a red line but one of the barometers of from what I can understand through people who've been talking to them or who they've asked about

one of the barometers will be to what degree back in 2020 21 were you on the right side of history or were you on the wrong side of history and I think it doesn't sound i don't mean to say they're being punitive but they're just thinking we want independent minds that have a proven record of empiricism and we can trust because they're terrified that this can happen again.

Yeah.

Well, you know.

That's encouraging if that group of people were to come into.

It absolutely is.

You know,

when Florida passed the first gain of function research ban on the state level, and I had the opportunity to actually look at the legislation and make some,

I think what they thought were helpful suggestions in that.

So they were very much at the forefront of that.

And that was, for me, you know, an appreciated gesture.

But it should be federalized, and then we should also think about the border

issues.

Stephen, when you sum up all of this,

could you make any prognosis about

are we wiser because of COVID?

Are we closer to Armageddon?

What do you look at when you look at all of this?

Do we even know?

I mean, we have these Freedom of Information Act suits, but it sounds to me like like we haven't even scratched the surface of all the communications and all the things they were doing that we don't still know about.

Well, yeah.

And so and these things are layered and they take lots of work.

I mean,

the latest Freedom Information

response from NIH of Fauci, some of Fauci's documents, 200 pages and 198 are redacted.

Wow.

So it really is insulting

to be treated that way.

So

I think there are

these parallel paths of stopping this dangerous research through legislation and some momentum around those things, which is encouraging.

Don't you think we have too many billions of dollars in research grants concentrated in too few hands in the government so that they can create consensus or they could if you're one of thousands of scientists worldwide and you need this critical funding and there's just a few people, four, five, six, that control, I guess, hundreds of billions of dollars in research monies.

It seems like it's far too much power without enough oversight.

Well, it is.

And, you know, again, that's a whole separate topic.

They basically,

they're sitting on committees reviewing grants for each other.

So, you know,

one month they're mailing grants to Washington to have their peers look at the grants.

And the next month they're flying to Washington to be on a committee to

look at the grants coming in from their fellow people.

So

it's not a true check and balance system.

Can I ask

maybe one final question?

Can you think of any positive

in a cost-of-benefit analysis, any positive development, invention, help for mankind that's come from this sophisticated gain of function research that justified the risk?

Well, if you restrict it to taking pathogens and

changing their property,

because

what they will say in their defense and it's it's a straw man it's i hate it but they'll say well guys you know when we make insulin in bacteria

that's a gain of function for the for the e coli the bacteria didn't know how to make insulin and we it is a gain of function and look at you know so why are you complaining about it so but that's a you need to really just pin them down on it so uh the answer is no if you any research that's taken a pathogen and tried to change its properties has not taught us anything uh useful.

There would be a chance to have either a national or international ban on gainal function research.

Could it ever be enforced if you did it?

It would be hard to be enforced, but I mean, you know, just like the concept that we have informed consent and institutional review board for human testing, I mean,

it's sort of similar is, is it possible to do human testing without a consent form and without oversight?

And the answer is, yeah, you could imagine that could happen in certain countries.

But the truth is that

every country in the world has this process put in place because of the abuses of human testing that finally was too much for the world to put up with.

Is there a sense of shame?

So if you're Stephen Quay and you're at a conference of

biomedical CEOs or companies or virologists and you see someone whispers to you, that guy over there is engaged in gain of function research.

Is there any ostracism ostracism or social taboo?

Is that field discredited now or not?

Do they have any shame about what?

No, they don't, Victor.

No, they don't, Victor.

And they continue to have the same feeling they have, which is it's a bit of I'm playing God and it's a bit of look how edgy I am.

Look at I'm putting myself in danger for the good of mankind.

It's a pathology.

I mean, you know, if I was a clinical psychologist, you know, I could probably find a whole bunch of disorders.

Is the funding all coming from government or is there private entities

that see any chance of profiteering in it?

As far as I know, it's all coming from

federal governments.

In China, there are private companies that will do, again, this military-civilian fusion.

So they'll be set up to do diagnostic testing or setting up to do some kind of virology work, and they will have military contracts,

just like maybe some of ours as well.

I'd like to warn all of our listeners, Jack Fowler and I talked about it, but when I was in high school, Stephen, I worked at a packing house in a little town called Readley.

I think we mentioned it.

And

about six months ago, as you know, somebody in Readley, it's an agrarian community, saw all of this water and junk on the side, and they went in, and here was this Chinese company that had all of these viruses.

I mean, there was almost every imaginable herpes and HIV and COVID.

And they had dead rats that were genetically engineered.

And then the poor, they didn't have the resources.

And the California Department of Health couldn't handle it.

Then they got the federal government.

And they still don't know how a Chinese company that went bankrupt in Fresno under the radar went to this little tiny, you know, 12,000, 15,000 person community.

And right in, it's not out in the outline, it's right in the middle of town.

And they were just with all these viruses and these dead engineered rats that they were.

And so it can happen anywhere.

You know, Victor, I knew that story.

I knew about that lab and I thought how crazy it was, but I didn't know you had a personal connection to it.

So

that's where my dentist is.

That's where

I go a lot.

And I worked in that building when I was in high school.

Well, so, you know, this is literally the poster child of the issue of

the open border at the south is changing the communities in the macro sense.

And, you know, the microorganisms are changing the community inside the walls.

Well,

that's kind of, it's been fascinating, chilling, but I think we ended on an optimistic note.

And I think everybody who's listening should take heart to what Stephen Quay has told us and talk to your local representatives.

And I know I am, to bring to the attention that we're not out of the woods yet just because

we seem to be, seem to be in variants that are less lethal and toxic than the original ones.

But somebody's working as we're speaking in things they shouldn't be doing.

Thank you very much, Stephen.

Well, thank you, Victor.

We're going to take a quick break and we're going to come right back.

Welcome back.

Victor, there's a new film out.

From the New York Times best-selling author Eric Metaxas comes a riveting new film, Letter to the American Church.

The film explores the parallels between the 1930s Nazi Germany and Mao and Stalin regimes and the infiltration of the cultural Marxism in America today.

The church's decision to stay out of politics undermines the very message of the gospel and its power to transform human existence.

Metaxas issues an urgent call to the church: stay silent and abandon its mission of proclaiming liberty or stand up to the forces of evil.

Join Eric and several leading voices of today as they explain how America and her church are at the precipice of destruction and need to wake up and take action.

Don't miss this film, streaming February 8th, on EPOC TV, part of the EPOC Times.

Visit lettertotheamericanchurch.com for more information.

Letter to the American Church, this film is not yet rated.

Victor, so you're going to talk to us about Xenophon and Thucydides and Herodotus, so I'm very excited.

I would be curious after you get done talking about their particular achievements,

if you could give it, tell us which one you think is the best story.

We know what I'm going to do is I decided that because I'm such a big fan of Xenophon and he has so much more work.

His corpus is huge.

It's the

Hellenica, the Hellenic history.

It's the memorabilia.

It's the Scriptoria Manora.

It's the

Anabasis, the most famous.

So I'm going to keep him for a separate whole episode next time.

because I think people should be introduced to a lesser-known historian, Xenophon.

Wow.

you just surprised me.

I thought you would say Thucydides was your favorite because you've written so much about and from him.

I shouldn't say

Xenophon's my favorite historian, but he's one of my favorite writers because he was a quote-unquote philosophical compiler.

He did what Plato did.

He wrote down what Socrates said.

And in addition to that, he wrote little tiny treatises,

biographies of Agisolaus, or

something called the Poroi, or how Attica could resume after the Peloponnesian War by using the mines.

So it was a scientific little scriptoria, and in addition he wrote the famous The March

up

Country when Spartan mercenaries and other Arcadians and Peloponnesians for the most part

joined Cyrus the Younger and tried to usurp or get back the Persian throne.

And that didn't work and they were stuck in the middle of the Persian Empire as it existed in Anatolia.

And they had to march all the way back to the Black Sea.

Thalata, Thalata, the famous, there's the sea, the sea, meaning they were safe.

So we're going to talk about that next time.

But right now, we have two historians of the fifth century.

And the first thing to remember is that the city-state now,

say, when Herodotus was born in the 480s BC,

maybe 485,

or Thucydides 20 years later, or 25, 465, 460,

it was a very sophisticated city-state.

It's not the Dark Ages, it's not the Mycenaean period, it's this 700 to 400.

We saw it with the pre-Socratics, we saw it with lyric poetry, and there's an energy there.

And one of the manifestations of that intellectual energy is history, as well as tragedy, comedy, philosophy.

And we saw last time epic and lyric poetry.

But we don't have any of the earlier historians.

There was someone called Hellanicus,

and

we have just names.

The first historian that's extant that survives is Herodotus.

So he's named the father of history.

This is the first and earliest prose account.

Prose just means it is not set to a metrical pattern.

It's not in iambic pentameter, dactylic hexameter.

It has a different vocabulary, more of a realistic or everyday vocabulary.

And

so these are not poets.

They are historians.

This is the first prose.

He wrote in a dialect called Ionic, which is similar to the

Middle Ionic or late Ionic.

It's similar to the dialect at the...

Iliad and Odyssey that are composed in.

Even though he was from Haliconarsis, that's a little city in modern-day Turkey.

We call it Bodrom.

It's a beautiful place.

It's a tourist area right near across from Rhodes on the Turkish mainland.

It's famous for its wooden boats, handcrafted.

And he lived there.

There's also the mausoleum of Mausolus at Halicanarsis.

There's some remains there.

You might want to go there sometime.

And then he traveled.

He went.

He may have

grown up on Samos where he learned the dialect, or maybe the dialect was in use, even though it was a Doric city.

And he went to Italy as an Athenian colonist at one point in Thuri.

He lived off and on in Athens.

And

he was born maybe

five,

485, so he was about five years old when Xerxes invaded.

So what I'm getting at is he was alive and could talk to people who fought in that war.

So the title is Histories, but you really don't get to the first invasion, the Ionian revolt,

the aborted invasion of 492, the famous invasion of Darius

at Marathon, the 10-year hiatus, and the famous Artemisium, Thermopylae, Salamis, Plataea, until books 6, 7, 8, and 9.

So the first

of 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 is a discussion of the history of the combatants.

And that is very valuable because we do not have a history in the 7th and 6th and early 5th century of either Sparta or Athens in the detail that Herodotus offers as a near contemporary.

So he's going to tell us, this is how Athens became a democracy.

This is how Sparta was different.

And then he's going to shift to the antagonist.

And remember, he was born in occupied Ionia.

So he grew up under Persian

rule of Darius I

and Xerxes' son.

I should say Xerxes' son.

And so he's very sympathetic to Persians.

So he has a long excursion.

He may have gone with the Athenian expedition to...

Egypt in the 460s.

He knows a lot about the history of Egypt as it came into contact with the Persians.

He talks about how the Lydians met the Persians, how the Persians met the Scythians, and the formation of the Persian Empire.

And this is all

sort of a preface to the climatic event of East meets West.

And this starts the whole narrative or topos that the West is intrinsically different or opposed to the East, and the dividing line,

the dividing line is somewhere along the coast of Turkey.

That's important because the word Orient,

Orient, Oriens, and

Occident have something to do with your position in that place.

So when you look

to the west,

it is

where the sun sets.

Akido means to set.

And when you look to the east,

the sun rises.

And the dividing point, as I said, is the Aegean Sea.

And this dichotomy will be very famous because it will

last into the Roman period, where the Romans try to go into the East,

earlier Alexander the Great,

and of course the great Byzantine Empire, and East versus West until 1453.

And we're still seeing that divide today, and we saw it on, Shirley saw it on 9-11, that there's an intrinsic difference from culture that grew up in the East versus culture that started in Greece and Rome and spread westward to Europe.

And that's one of the themes he has, that

the East is monarchical.

It's more absolutist.

He has a famous description on the best constitution.

And then to the West of the Persian Empire, it is more consensual or constitutional and more emphasis on the individual rather than the collective.

And this comes through in a series of speeches.

What is his method?

It's very different than a modern historian.

He says, this is what X says happened.

This is what Y says, but he doesn't adjudicate very often.

He gives you competing narratives, and he tells stories.

When you go to Lydia, when you go to Scythia, when you go to Egypt, when you go to Greece, this is what you see.

And he had

kind of miraculous large ants, huge ants, and things like that.

People had all discredited as just Herodotus the liar.

That comes partly from the Greek tradition in the Hellenistic and Roman periods.

But the more that scholarship has examined his stories,

the more accurate they seem.

And the famous classicist at UC Berkeley, W.K.

Pritchett, whom I knew and I really liked, he was a wonderful person.

He wrote a book called The Liar School of Herodotus.

And what he meant was, since Plutarchian times, people had said he was a malignant historian.

That was the famous title of

a translation in Latin of one of Plutarch's essays on the unreliability or the lyingness

and the philobaros barbaros that he liked barbarians, that is, Persians who didn't speak Greek too much.

But Pritchett went through and looked at all the stories, and then he looked at contemporary descriptions of the same

phenomenon, and he concluded that Herodotus was pretty accurate.

Herodotus died sometime in the 420s, that is, in the first decades of the Peloponnesian War.

So that history ends with a hiatus.

It ends around 479 BC.

And Herodotus then

spent...

When did he start writing it?

He probably wrote it sometimes in the 440s or 430s when he was in his 50s and 60s.

And it's very hard, you know, to write on papyrus with ink in a language that really hadn't seen prose.

So he was inventing methodologies, vocabularies, grammar, and syntax as he went along.

But then

the idea was that if you're going to write historia inquiry, you have to have a monumental topic.

So these are not going to be histories about social customs, clothes, gender, appearance, identity, government.

They're going to be histories about what the Greeks thought were the most important elements in their life, and that tended to be war, an occasion where everything is magnified and focused and intensified.

So the first great historian is going to write about the Persian Wars, even though he calls his history the histories.

And then he's going to tell you why it started.

He thinks it's kind of a, I don't know to what degree people take him seriously, but it's kidnapping

various women by suitors that causes friction between East and West, i.e., Paris and Helen.

And he's ridiculed by Aristophanes for that simplistic narrative.

But nevertheless, the next great historian is Thucydides.

And he wrote

sometime, we don't know,

he was born around 460, 465.

There's a big controversy

when he died because these

histories are organized into books or chapters later by Alexandrians.

And his history of the Peloponnesian War starts

with an introduction of his methodology, but then it has a big flashback of the 50 years that saw the growth of the Athenian

state, the empire, and why Athens goes to war with Sparta.

But then, as it chronicles this 27 and a half-year war, it gets to 411 in his book 8.

It literally stops in mid-sentence.

A lot of people earlier had said, well, he died.

Well, he didn't die because he mentions in the first book that the war was ended.

So, what happened?

And the answer was sometime in his 30s or 40s,

he was exiled probably around 422.

He was an Athenian admiral and he came too late.

It wasn't his fault, but he was blamed by the assembly for coming too late to help the key Athenian port of Amphipolis up in northern Greece.

It was taken by a brilliant Brasidas, the Spartan commander.

He came home.

He was an aristocrat, perhaps with Thracian lineage.

And guess what?

They do what they always do to powerful people.

They ostracized him.

or they banished him for at least 10 years.

In that period, he said, okay,

I will write a history drawing on my knowledge of being an admiral in this war and having now the ability to travel all over Greece and talk to Spartans and everybody.

So sometime in this period of his exile, in his 50s and 60s,

he died probably around early 60s or maybe even 60, who knows?

But late 50s, he began writing this history.

And I think

it took a long time, so it was under constant revision, and yet the war was still going on

in part.

So he was revising, writing, revising, writing, revising.

He may well have lived after the war ended.

460 to 400, 465 to 405.

But there are a lot of people who believe now he was alive in the 390s.

So when he was writing this history, he knew the the end of it.

Well, I should say when he was revising his earlier notes.

And maybe he just thought that the theme of the history of Athenian Eubris and arrogance of its empire led to its downfall and destruction.

Maybe as he was writing, he looked around and said, hey, it's 398, 399, 397, 396.

BC, Athens is back.

It wasn't just completely destroyed as I thought.

And he went back, and I don't know whether the events in which he was writing colored his interpretation of his earlier narrative, but he stopped.

He quit in 411, and he left 411, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4.

He left seven critical years out of the Peloponnese War.

And luckily, Xenophon, then, a lesser mind but a very versatile historian, picked up where Thucydides left off to finish the account of the war and something he called the Atlenica.

But why do we read Thucydides?

Because unlike Herodotus, he is called a

scientific historian.

He doesn't just give you story A, B, C, D, E, you choose, or what he called logographia.

you know, just the compilation of logoi or stories.

He has a method, and he says, this is how you write a history.

This is what I did.

I deduced analysis from evidence.

I traveled.

I talked to people.

I saw documents, I mean on stone, and I compiled this.

And he has about 121 speeches, some direct, some indirect.

And unlike modern writing, unless you're Claudian Gay and you don't footnote, we usually, when you hear somebody, you put it in quotation marks and you footnote.

The ancient historiographical method, and it was started by Herodotus, he has speeches as well, was something along the line of,

I was there and I heard this speech

and I'm writing it verbatim on notes.

Or

my best friend was there.

or my friend or my mother, my father, somebody heard it and I just took dictation.

Or,

and this is where we get into trouble, I know there was a speech delivered, and I know what should have been said, and I know that from events afterwards, it was probably said, but I don't know what happened.

So I just made up the speech the way that I thought.

Section 21 of his first book, he says that he recorded the speech as

best he could, or he put words into the mouths of people that seemed most fitting or most accurate.

And you can decide whether that

is his own composition.

So what do we do with 121 speeches?

If it's Pericles' funeral oration and everybody knows what he said, it would be very hard to invent it.

If it's the Melian dialogue and there's not a lot of people listening to the envoys talk to perhaps Alcibiades and his people, he may have elaborated.

What is

so?

Some of you are going to say, well, why do I want to know about what Athens did in 431

for 27 years against Sparta in 404?

The title is the Peloponnesian War, so it's the war with the Peloponnese, but it assumes he's as an Athenian.

When you say we had a war with Germany, the German War, the Japanese War, it's not from their point of view, it's from an Athenian.

With a twist, they exiled him.

He is an oligarch or an aristocrat.

He does not like the government at Athens.

It's a radical democracy.

Kind of a Nantifa-like flavor to it, French revolutionary

flavor.

And powerful, wealthy, well-born people get on the wrong side like he did.

So he is not sympathetic to either

radical Athenian democracy or the empire that fuels it, that is the 180 city-states that pay tribute to it.

But we read that not because the Peloponnesian War is the most important war in history, although he thought it would be in his time.

That's why he chose the topic.

But it's how he writes it and

what he does with it.

In his way of thinking, I can write a history that will be very important so people will know what happened.

But there's going to be key moments where I can expand in the 27 years.

There's some things that happened we know that he didn't talk about.

On the other hand,

There's some things that may not have been that important, the revolution at Corsaira or the debate over the fate of the people at Lesbos on Mytiledae, but he expands them.

Pericles gave probably two

funeral orations, and then his successors gave 20 of them.

But we only have the second one.

Why?

Because either it was the best, or it gave Thucydides an avenue or an opportunity to expand his views of what Pericles said, or what he should have said, or both.

So, what is his view?

His view is he's a realist, and he believes that human nature is tragic.

Tragic in the sense that people are no damn good intrinsically, innately.

However, with civilization,

they can reform their innate

DNA, so to speak.

So if you take away, if the lights go out in New York and there's a blackout and the DA doesn't prosecute people, then you see what's going on now.

That's exactly what Thucydides would say.

However,

you have a civilization, a culture, you have deterrence, you have laws, culture, then people rise to the occasion and they're not innately savage.

But war, like plague, tears off the veneer of civilization.

And what's beneath it is man in the raw.

Now, what does that mean?

That means if you have a plague at Athens,

He's going to show you what people are like when all sense of decency has to be removed because people are dying like flies.

So if you go out and try to scrounge around wood and make a funeral pyre, because that was the method of burning the dead, especially during times of plague,

and you got your wood pyre for your father and you turn around, next thing you know, some guy's come over there at night and put his family and use your pyre to burn.

with you using your wood.

Or everybody says, I'm virtuous.

I'm going to go visit my friend who's got the plague.

And Thucydides said, well, the people who were virtuous or said they were virtuous.

They died the most frequently.

I.e., there is no reward for virtue in human nature being what it was.

They were nice, and they got exposed.

And he was familiar with the idea of contagion.

So he's trying to show you how human nature operates.

One of the things he does is

he uses the scientific method.

I think he was influenced, I think a lot of people do, by

the Hippocratic method.

So when he's talking about the plague, he says when you look at a problem, you've got to look at the origins.

But first, and how do you do that?

You look at the symptoma, the symptoms, and you describe them.

And then when you know the symptoms, you have earlier models.

So if you have a sore throat or you have postules or you're dizzy, whatever the symptoms are, then you have a type of paradigm where you can make a diagnosis.

You can say what is causing them.

And then when you have a diagnosis, you can consult earlier therapies and treat it.

And then when you treat the disease or the malady,

you can make a prognosis.

You can predict what will happen.

Now, some of you say, well, Everybody knows that.

No, they don't.

I mean,

this happens up till Thucydides.

People said that during the plague it was

somebody polluted.

If you read Sophocles Oedipus, you pollute the shrine of a god and he's mad at you.

Or you go to Epidaurus and the god comes up with fumes and enters into your inner sanctum and you are healed.

If you you know, you got a broken leg, you got a clay leg and you put it up on the wall and say, here,

heal my leg, but not to Thucydides, he uses the scientific method to try to describe and analyze and predict natural phenomenon.

And that goes into his history.

So, in his method, okay, there's a war with Athens and Sparta.

What caused it?

What are the symptoms of this war?

Okay,

Sparta is oligarchic.

Sparta is Doric.

Sparta is inland.

Sparta is a land power.

Sparta is parochial.

Athens, sea power, cosmopolitan, ionic tribe.

And it's a radical democracy.

Therefore, they're in natural opposition.

But there had to be a trigger.

What was the trigger?

They were allies in the Persian War, and Athens became powerful as sea cosmopolitan radical democracies can be.

And Sparta was fossilized, ossified.

And so he says that a fear of Athenian power prompted Sparta to

preempt and invade Attica in 431.

But he's not saying that was the only cause.

He was saying that is the trigger of innate differences.

It's really hard to know whether he means the innate differences could have been, you know,

cemented over as they had been for 50 years when they had won earlier war, but otherwise they were able to get along.

But he's saying no longer, given the fear that Sparta had that everybody was becoming Athenized, Athenized.

It was so dynamic, kind of like America.

So, you know, we're like Athens, we're radically democratized, we're a cosmopolitan, multiracial society, very rich, affluent, creative, and maybe Russia during the Cold War was inward, a land power, repressive, and they were afraid that we were taking over, our culture was taking over the war.

That would be an analogy.

So that that is his method.

Remember, though, as I said, he's writing from an aristocratic point of view as a well-born, wealthy person from northern Greece, or at least his family was.

And that means that he has no sympathy for radical democracy.

So there's a lot of bad guys in his history, and who are they?

People like Cleon.

These are the people who are the demagogoi, who try to stir up the people against the well-born or the sober and judicious.

And he likes Pericles because although Pericles is well-born, he's also a Democrat.

So he brings, he knows how to deal with the people, and he knows that democracy is very popular, but he can constrain it, as Thucydides says, by his character and his education.

At one point he says the best constitution was a revolution of a 411.

He has this kind of crazy guy named Antiphon that staged a revolution for a few months.

And it was what we call a mixed constitution.

Instead of all 30 to 40,000 citizens just participating by virtue of their birth, being born in Athens, you had to have a property qualification, perhaps down to 5,000 people who had just enough property to say to the rest, I saved my money or I was a good farmer, I didn't lose my property.

Those are qualities that you, I'm not a renter, and those qualities make me better qualified than you.

It'd be as if today in the United States, instead of 330 million people, all equal, the history of constitutional government until I don't know the first three decades of our own government had it as well was a property qualification so we said everybody can vote who owns their home and then we know that homeowners are 62 percent of the population that means that they were either lucky or they were smart or they were careful but that type of possession where they have to take care of it and the upkeep is a different mentality than a renter.

So you, you know, you get a bunch of people over your house, they kick a hole in the sheetrock.

If it's your home, you fix it.

If you're renting it, you say, eh, you just put a poster on it.

The landlord will never know.

That mentality is not conducive for democracy.

That sums up Thucydides.

And he was very influential.

The problem

with him is that he, although his narrative is beautifully written in Greek, the speeches are so philosophical and political and sophisticated.

I mean, they read like the Federalist Papers that do in English.

The concepts are so subtle and nuanced, but also

insightful that the language, the early Greek language, Attic,

he's probably either the second or third people to write an Attic.

I think the so-called old oligarch was the first, or maybe Antiphon II.

But my point is: this is that the language isn't up to it.

So he has grammatical and syntactical and vocabulary constructions and

phraseology that is very hard to read.

So if you can be a great Greek scholar and somebody plops down a speech from Thucydides, like the funeral oration or the speech on Mytilene,

and there are passages in there that are like deciphering.

They're very difficult to quite understand what he's getting at, just because it's such a sophisticated thought that the language does not have an abstract vocabulary.

So, what do I mean by that?

So, if you're talking about a constitution, you can say democracy or oligarchy.

But what about the principle of constitutionality?

Constitutionality, that is, the idea of being adhering to a written doc, foundational.

You've got to make up a word for that.

Sometimes you can do it with the infinitive and the article, sometimes you can do it with a circumlocution of words, sometimes you can invent suffixes, ismos, and things, echos, and like that, and tack it on.

But there are a lot of words in Thucydides that are not commonly found in the fifth century.

So he was considered very difficult, at least his 121 speeches.

I think that he's the most important or the most sophisticated thinker of all Greeks.

And that includes Plato and Aristotle.

He's the most brilliant mind.

He's one of the best prose stylists.

And some of the things he writes just

resonate today.

I mean, there's internal truths that he hits upon that you know.

If you're interested, there's a very good edition by Robert Strassler called The Landmark Thucydides.

Years ago, he called me up and said, You know, I have this brilliant idea of having an annotated Thucydides with maps, with

headers, footers on every page, footnotes, explanations in the margins,

so that every

phrase can be defined, every concept can be clarified, there's maps everywhere, and then appendices.

And he asked me to introduce him to classicists.

I did.

And it became, I wrote the introduction to it.

It became almost a bestseller as far as translations go.

And then he went on, as I said, to others.

He did other Herodotus, the landmark Herodotus, the landmark Xenophon.

And they're wonderful additions, so you might want to look at Thucydides.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: For our listeners, Victor,

if they were to pick up one or the other book, would they have trouble without some sort of

guidebook to help them with the speeches, for example, in Thucydides?

And would Herodotus be easier since he's a story?

Herodotus is easier to understand because it's not an abstract

argument.

But

because he traveled so widely,

the sheer number of place names and personal names and Herodotus, I mean, you pick up, every page has a Persian and Egyptian name or a Spartan, and you don't know.

And they mention places all over the world, the known world at the time.

And you think, wow,

where is Arcadia?

Who is

Lycurgus?

Who's this Lycurgus or that Lycurgus?

Or Canbiases?

You know, just all these names and places.

But when you read Thucydides, they have that as well.

But the thought

in some of the dialogues are very, they're absolutely brilliant.

They're about national character a lot.

And he believes that, you know, when the Spartans are trying to warn

King Archidamus that you can't deal with these Athenians, you just can't deal with them.

And he says, you know what, we would say, oh, that's so unfair.

It's a stereotype.

But they believe that you can make legitimate generalizations about a people.

Not that they apply to every individual, but they say, you know what?

When they try to take something,

when they get it, they're not satisfied.

When they take somebody's territory, they think, well, that was a good start.

They never stop.

And when they fail to take something, they don't quit.

They don't say, oh my gosh, that was a bad idea.

They say, what did we do wrong and how can we rectify it?

They are a naturally aggressive people.

They do not let anybody stay calm, not themselves, not their friends, not their enemies.

And the only way to deal with these people is to defeat them.

And you're kidding yourself.

That's this kind of stereotype of Athenians.

And, you know, the greatest thing, and then I'll finish, is the greatest is

book five, The Melian Dialogue, where they go into the island of Milos.

You can go there today.

It's a volcanic island, beautiful black beaches.

And they go in

during a truce, 416,

late in the year, and they tell the Melians,

sorry, Melians, you've got to join the empire.

And the Melians go, but we're neutral.

Now, you say you're neutral, but you've always favored the Spartans, you're Dorians.

And they say, yeah, but why would you want to hurt us?

And the Athenians said, because if we let you go when we know you're quote-unquote neutral but lean toward our enemies, then people are going to think we're weak.

And everybody can do that.

And it'll be contained.

And the Aemilians go, no, no, no.

You don't understand.

If you're magnanimous and you say, you come in and you see a people that are different from you and you let them live and be independent, people will say, gwash, I want to join the Athenian Empire.

No, I wish that were true.

We didn't ask for the Empire.

We didn't particularly, you know, we just inherited it.

And if we were to adopt your attitude, everybody would jump on the bandwagon and interpret our magnanimity as weakness to be exploited and not as magnanimity to be rewarded and like kind.

I'm sorry.

And then the Melians say, but anything can happen.

You know, you think you have this big fleet and we're Melians and we'll fight and we could win.

i.e., you know, look at you guys.

You fought at Salamis.

You won.

And they said, yeah, that's possible.

but if you think the Spartans ever risk anything on anybody's behalf except themselves you don't understand the people who are your patrons be realistic we're going to squash you like a bug they said but there's always you don't know what's going to happen we could win oh hope dangerous comforter so you we can't talk to you because you put your reliance in things that are not there.

They're just abstract and obtuse.

And we're talking about the things that are here.

Like,

we're strong.

We're taking your island.

We're going to put our guys in there instead of you.

We're going to wipe you out unless you surrender.

And the millions will say,

well, we think that you're wrong, number one, and we have the good cause and we're going to trust and hope.

And

Athenians said, fine, and that's famous last words.

And it gives us no pleasure, but we're going to destroy you.

We have no choice.

We didn't ask for the empire, but if you're imperial people and you, you know, slack off, then you're all through.

And this is a theme that was earlier voiced in the history and the Middle English dialogue.

And of course, so they have a siege, just like you think.

The Melians have a little moment of resistance.

It's successful.

They kind of break out of this.

And then the Athenians, Thucydides says, they complete the siege.

They take the city.

They enslave the women and children.

They kill the adults that were part, or the resistant, most of them, and then they parcel up the land and give it to their own colonists.

And that's the end.

Except,

final note about Thucydides, he believes in a hara, he's not completely 100% scientific.

He does believe that there's a, I don't know what the word is,

karma, hubris, nemesis, but there is, he's not anti-religious.

He's saying, I guess the way to term him is 90% of the world is rational, but 10% isn't.

That means that if Victor gets in a car right after I finish and I get in a fatal accident, I can explain what I did wrong, pulling out in the stop sign, my car failed, but I can't explain why it was me in that particular moment, not somebody else.

And that is the realm of faith and religion, and he respects that.

So he puts

episodes,

he's an artist with a tapestry.

So after the Melian dialogue, it shows you how arrogant the Athenians and cruel they were.

What's the next thing?

Book six starts.

They go to Sicily.

And what happens in Sicily?

The tables are turned.

They now

are the victims of their own Eubris, and they're completely wiped out, 40,000 of them.

Go over there, and he says, very few get home.

And he does that again and again.

He'll give you a great speech about Pericles' funeral oration.

And so we are the school of

Hellas, school of Greece.

Look up on your eyes and be proud that you're an Athenian.

We are the envy of the world.

It's a beautiful speech.

What follows it?

The plague.

Where the same Athenians that are supposed to be the examples of civilization are fighting among each other to survive.

And

so it does show you that he believes there's an irrational element in human affairs that you have to respect, albeit 90% of what we do is rational and can be explained by logic, but not all of it.

I think you all enjoy it, especially if you get the landmark, Thucydides.

So next time we'll talk about a third, less impressive intellect, Xenophon, but a more versatile person that he did everything possible.

He was a cavalry

soldier.

He was a mercenary,

went into the depths of the Persian Empire.

He was a farmer.

He knew about economics.

He lived with the Spartans for a while.

I wrote a novel once called The End of Sparta, and I have him in there as a Spartan, obsequious person, not a nice guy.

He lived in Corinth at the end of his life.

He got sick of Athens.

But we'll talk about him next time.

All right.

That sounds good.

And thank you for that.

There's so much more to say about both of those historians, but I hope our listeners enjoy when they read either one of those.

Stay with us, and we'll be right back.

And we're on a

hard break, I guess.

We're getting into a very long show.

So we'll just take a few minutes and talk about the movie Napoleon.

Stay with us, and we'll be back.

Welcome back.

I would like to remind everybody that Victor has a website, The Blade of Perseus.

It's victorhanson.com, and you can come join it for $5 a month or $50 a year, and we will welcome you.

You get access to VDH Ultra articles that come out three times a week.

So, Victor,

one of your listeners said, hey, you promised a review of the

movie Napoleon, and so I would like to hear that review.

Well, I know I was going to broadcast, so I have never bought a, I have DirecTV for 15 years, but I never really use it.

I don't think I rented one, but I bought Napoleon and I watched it.

And

what would I say?

Mr.

Phoenix Joaquin Phoenix.

What's this?

Yeah, Joaquin Phoenix.

He's Napoleon, but the problem is that

he seems on the screen about 55, even when Napoleon's very young.

So it's an epic in the sense that each stage of Napoleon's life is shown.

When he is an agent of the French Revolution, the whiff of grape shot,

the guillotine, the Robespierre,

his famous

saving of Toulon,

the masterful the masterpiece of his military career, Austerlitz,

the creation of the continental system, and then the terrible invasion of Russia and the incineration of Moscow, and then the first abdication, the famous scene of the Hundred Days when he meets

his former colleagues who were there to arrest him, perhaps Tieti him, and he wins them over by sheer force of personality, Waterloo, and then the

the end of the second reign, brief as it was, and this time he's not going to go to Pleasant Elba, but out in the middle of nowhere in the Atlantic and St.

Helena,

to a rat-infested, horrible place.

That's not really in the movie, and then he's going to die.

And so

I admire what he was doing

in cobbling all that stuff together.

And it's hard to make the transition, so he doesn't try to.

In other words, there's a scene, and then the next thing is five years next, and then eight without much explanation.

He just goes.

The one theme that ties it all together is Josephine, this widowed woman whose husband was killed in the Revolution, of course.

And he and she had some strong, passionate sexual bond.

That's really emphasized.

in one scene a little bit graphically.

And

more importantly, she has affairs, he does.

He has to marry someone else, as you know from the story, for his son, a son to be born an air, even though he's going to be gone by the time the son comes of age and the son will be, I think he dies early of tuberculosis or maybe it was typhus, I can't remember.

But that romantic relationship,

I'm leaving out things.

We have the part where he goes to Egypt.

I'm not sure he was called back because he didn't leave his army in the field

with disastrous consequences given disease and they were kind of marooned without sufficient naval support given Admiral Nelson, etc.

But

what's my final take on it?

I really think he gets

a B-plus for the ambition.

He's got some really eerie scenes, that scene at Austerlitz of the people, of the horsemen, the Russian cavalry falling through the ice.

That's disputed.

A lot of people think that that didn't happen quite to the same degree that it's in the movie.

We have conflicting stories about it.

Later, they looked at it and they tried to get the bodies out, and there weren't very many bodies, but who knows?

There are things like that that a lot of nitpickers

looked at.

So I think he's impressive for

the scope of the movie.

I wish, I know that Joaquin Phoenix has got a lot of accolades, but he plays it,

what's the word?

He downplays all emotions.

It's sort of, he's kind of sarcastic, ironic, skeptical.

And so people talk more than he does,

or you don't really get a sense of the character.

And

although you're covering a period of about 30 years, he doesn't age at all.

He looks the same.

I know that cost, so that's a little bothersome.

And then it's an effort.

I don't know, I'm not a cinematographer, but it looks like the entire

it's filmed through a kind of a murky lens or a gray lens.

It's dark and foreboding.

It's overcast.

It's damp.

It's gray.

And so you don't really get these Lawrence of Arabia brilliant light scenes, even though he's in the desert part of the time.

And that's bothersome.

I compared it with with that earlier film.

I think the Russians actually

contributed to that.

That was the Rod Steiger

movie Waterloo that had that beautiful Ariel's view of Marshall Ney's charge into these British squares.

And that was...

There was something about.

You're never going to get an actor like Rod Steiger.

His Napoleon, I thought, was brilliant.

And it was.

And he did it a very different way.

he did it very emotionally and outburst and erratic and not sort of

sphinx-like so that was but I thought it was a good movie it's worth watching but

there's still

if you want to watch a movie about a famous Napoleonic battle and get some sense

of who Napoleon was,

I would watch that classic Waterloo with Rod Steiger.

I didn't remember the actor's name who played Wellington, but he was pretty good.

He's not in there a lot, especially the final scene where he gives him the details that St.

Helena is not going to be the English countryside.

That's kind of historically in dispute whether Napoleon really believed he was going to get a pastoral retreat in

the nice hilly country of England versus a windswept island that deliberately

they gave him a shack, not a shack, but a house that was full of mold and full of rats and unhealthy.

But in any case, he was lucky to be alive.

At the end, the final credits, you learn that three million people died due to him, Frenchmen, probably a lot more, Europeans, in the Napoleonic Wars.

If you want to read, you still, I think,

were blessed with Andrew Roberts, Napoleon, sometimes in Europe.

I guess it came out as Napoleon the Great.

It's a sympathetic biography of a person who destroyed the old order, the old regime, and that was probably worth destroying, although I don't think Andrew made the argument at the cost that it took.

But what followed was a merocratic system, the Napoleonic law code, and a blueprint for a classically liberal Europe that might not have happened at the same rapidity had Napoleon not destroyed for at least three decades, two decades, two and a half decades, the Bourbon monarchy.

The monarchs look really decadent in those, the Bourbons.

Louis does.

The corpulent.

And also, to be fair, so do

the Robespierre type, the Jacobins.

They look creepy.

And the movie starts with the beheading of Marie Antoinette, which is kind of gruesome.

But I would have liked to see, if I was, I don't have the skills, of course, of a filmmaker, none of it all.

And I think Ridley Scott's one of my favorite directors.

He's a wonderful director, but I would have liked to see a more panoramic, David Lean type treatment where

or a Rodstiger like Napoleon, somebody who's dynamic, yells, has

bouts of raw emotion,

arguing back and forth with Ney, Suit, Davut, all of his generals, that type, and then

heat, light,

all sorts of different terrain.

This was more slow, gloomy,

gray.

You look at a lot of the acting by Walking Phoenix, you have to look at his facial expression and his eyes.

And it was sort of,

he's an idiot.

That guy doesn't know what he's talking to.

I'll say an aphorism right now that that kind of

I don't think that was as effective.

That was my take.

No, I agree with you.

You saw it too.

Napoleon, yes, I did.

Napoleon could have been a lot more dynamic, and he was too sedate and glib, really, for somebody who did so much, I thought, as well.

Although I love Ridley Scott's films, and I felt like it didn't have enough focus on something.

I think it should have been focused instead of plodding through each of the moments of Napoleon's

history that that changed his and France's lives.

I would have done a focus and skipped some of the I would have shortened the revolutionary part and looked more at his administration once he became emperor.

The key to

understanding Napoleon is that he even though he he um

he he favored aristocratic people, they were merucratically selected.

So why did he, you don't get a sense why he's so successful.

The reason he's so successful is he revolutionized the art of war so that these,

when we say the Napoleonic army of, say, 75,000 to 100, it was compartmentalized.

It had independent corps.

almost like a modern army of 25,000, 30,000.

It was independently, logistically capable, so that they had wagons with food and drink and ammunition that were very scientifically calibrated to support this group.

They knew how to combine these corps from different places.

He had a strategic vision of deception and how

it was a series of wars against a larger enemy.

He would try to break them up by pre-battle maneuver, and when they were not conglomerated, then the idea was

you destroy Buchler before he can unite with Wellington.

That didn't work at water.

But that type, what he did at Austerlitz, trying to break up coalition armies.

So he was always fighting the Spanish, the British, the Prussians, and the Russians.

And in terms of manpower and wherewithal, he was severely outnumbered.

But in these 60 battles, he was able to isolate each one, even if it was just a day or two before

even if the battle went over three days, he segmented it so that when he actually fought, it was maybe he was only outnumbered 10 or 20,000 rather than fighting the conglomerate army of the enemy by 50,000.

But you didn't get that, is what I'm saying.

And there's some really colorful, brilliant people.

As I said, Suit and Davo and Ney.

And

they were brilliant commanders at Austerlitz, especially, but also

at

Jena, the Battle of Jena.

And he owed a lot to those generals, and he selected them, and he promoted them, even if he didn't like them, or even if they were commoners, or whatever their circumstances, he promoted on the basis of merit.

Even though

he governed with nepotism with his brothers, the here and there.

But

you didn't get the impression that part of why he was in Russia or why he was so successful in Prussia or why he scared the crap out of the British, was

he was a very volatile character that was completely unpredictable, at least in the beginning.

I know that Wellington said, Well, he came on the old way, and we

dealt with him in the old way, meaning by the time he was in his corpulent 40s, he was ultimately pretty predictable.

But in the 1790s, and say

1800 to 1810, he was not predictable.

And he had refined the French army into a

well-oiled nation in arms.

And he was able through manpower, levies, and morale to

field armies that were not commiserate with the population of France, vis-a-vis its enemies.

meaning he could get a lot of people in that army and infuse them with revolutionary fervor, attack in a column.

And my God,

no one knew what to do with him.

He was a loose cannon in Europe for 10 to 15 years.

They were terrified of him.

And you go to France today and you go to Versailles in the Hall of Mirrors

with all the great French victories going back to antiquity.

And I think you get to Napoleon and that's it.

I mean

There's some Verdun was they shall not pass was a victory of sorts and the French army had some brilliant moments but then

World War II

until its reincarnation under Third Army, they were not impressive.

And then Dien Ben Phu and Vietnam, etc.

So you think that people are very critical of Napoleon given the carnage, but you go to France today and you see the monuments in believe,

my gosh, he's still their hero.

And Mr.

Villepon, remember when he was haranguing us about the Iraq war?

France will not participate in this ill misadventure, I think is his word.

I was reading this.

He wrote a long biography in French of Napoleon.

I think it was called the Garga, Cry of the Garga Goyle.

Somebody listening has probably read it.

It was pretty easy French to read, but my point is that it was an encomium to Napoleon.

Well, I thought that was ironic.

I wrote a column sometime at that time.

I said, this is very strange.

The French UN ambassador is accusing, I guess he was was the foreign ambassador, is accusing the United States of being an imperialist while he's writing an

encomium to the greatest imperialist in history, Napoleon.

Yeah.

Well, he does start it out very spectacularly for everybody who wants to see it with Marie Antoinette and the crowds that were watching the beheading of Marie Antoinette.

That is scary.

It reminds me of the.

That was brilliant.

That was brilliant.

What did that remind me of?

That reminded me of the 2020 May, June, July Antifa Biel Imro.

When the cameras look at those people screaming and yelling and

laughing and just exhilarated.

Or maybe that crowd also reminded me of the reaction to October 7th on our campuses.

undisguised glee.

Remember that professor from Cornell?

I was exhilarated.

You know, the IDF hadn't even responded.

All he knew was that a bunch of innocent Jewish people had been slaughtered, mutilated, decapitated, raped.

And when he hears the news, I'm exhilarated, this professor at Cornell.

Yeah, and I bet Ridley Scott was inspired to show just how much they were like French revolutionaries.

Every Thucydides were capable of the same thing.

So when you watch that, that's a good point.

Because when I watched that, I thought,

especially the revolutionary themes, I thought, wait a minute, these are revolutionary courts.

They're kind of like the way that you treat anti-abortion protesters vis-a-vis

people who burned down an historic church or pr police precinct.

That's called revolutionary justice.

Or the January 6th, or would be guillotined in a minute if they had their their drothers.

Yeah.

Even the people who never went to the Capitol.

So it it's kind of frightening to see those scenes.

Yeah.

Especially the demagogues that were speaking in the the chamber, the French chambers.

Yeah.

I don't know exactly who they were supposed to be.

Maybe one was Danton.

I don't know.

No, I think that the one I thought was Danton was actually Robespierre, yeah.

So that was worthwhile putting into the movie as well.

He did a good job on that.

But Victor, so we're at the end, and we've got a really long show this weekend that we're just finishing up.

So we're going to close it down here.

We like Ridley Scott's work here at

the Blade of Perseus here on the Victor Davis hansen show so we highly recommend the movie um it's got more merits than demerits so definitely go watch it thank you oh go ahead oh i was just going to say that um

i think the guy who played the duke of wellington rupert ebert i don't know him as an actor but i thought he did a great job yeah he did he did it was really good he just captured wellington perfectly yeah so thanks to all of our listeners and thank you victor for a nice historical weekend.

Okay, thanks everybody for listening.

This is Sammy Wink and Victor Davis-Hansen, and we are signing off.