Activist judges, Remembering Kissinger and The Iliad Continued

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Hello, America, and welcome to the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

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

This is our weekend edition where we do something of culture, sometimes warfare.

We finished our discussion or historical progression of wars all the way up to the present.

So we're now looking back at literature and we will continue with the Iliad this week.

We have lots of news stories before that, so stay with us and we'll be right back after these messages.

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Welcome back.

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Victor, so we had some recent news on the Trump trial today, and one of those judges, Judge Beryl Howell.

I hope I pronounced her name right.

She has Beryl Howell isn't it?

I'm not sure.

Yeah, Beryl Howe.

She has denied Trump a subpoena for the January 6th Committee records and calls it a fishing expedition.

And she's also warning about authoritarianism coming to America.

And I was wondering if you had thoughts on her activism.

Well, Beryl Howe has a long history, you know, she's a left-wing judge, and

she was

she's been involved in a lot of different.

I think she's the chief judge of the U.S.

district court there in D.C.

And she's a liberal judge, and she's been a high-profile judge throughout the years.

But my point is that she doesn't want Donald Trump to

investigate or try the January 6th investigations because she knows what will come up if he does.

They'll have security.

They'll have testimonies from prior security people that said they had asked for security, which would have prevented that little riot from the people who were trying to disrupt things.

And they would have had FBI

hierarchy forced to testify.

And Michael

Mr.

Rosenberg, excuse me, from the New York Times, has showed us that he said there were FBI informants everywhere.

And the FBI has been very reluctant to talk about that, but there may have been a lot of them there.

And so, my point is that she doesn't want to get into any of these things.

But my question is: why are I thought that the special counsel is going to look at

the documents that were taken out?

You can see when she talks about a fishing expedition, that's what Jack Smith is doing.

He's trying to try Donald Trump on any imaginable

writ, well beyond any of them that are specified, you know,

and

specified in her

in the special counsel's

prerogative.

So she just, she's on a fishing exhibition, what I'm struggling to say.

She worked for, you know, she worked for a Patrick Leahy when he was a senator.

So she's

She's a hard leftist, and she was

all into the rich financial recording industry, came out of music, and she was an academic.

And anyway, but I guess she's been a DEI advocate, and it's just going to,

it's just, she's just going to be another person that Donald Trump's going to have to deal with in these four writs.

So as I said earlier, you're going to have Alvin Bragg.

and Letita James and Fannie Willis and Jack Smith.

Okay, they're all left-wing.

And three of them are African American, and I made that very clear.

Letita James ran on the idea that she was going to put Donald Trump in jail.

And then you're going to have a Washington, a Miami, a New York, and an Atlanta jury, Nuff said.

And then you're going to have judges and they're all going to be like

what we've seen in the Fannie Willis case and what we're going to see with Jack Smith.

They're all going to be like Beryl Howell, even on the state level.

She's a federal jurist

because it's the one federal suit.

And

it's the question that everybody has is: to what degree are they going to be able to prevent him from campaigning as they intend to do?

And to what degree will public opinion be so

adamant, so angry that it will boomerang on them?

Or will the traditional voter, the independent voter, especially, say, I can't take this anymore.

He's innocent.

They're just doing this to him, but I need to get away from it.

That kind of go into the futile position.

I'm tired.

And I don't have the answers answers for that.

I just do know that most of the people listening

feel that this judge, like all of the judges, is an activist left-wing judge and cut her teeth working for Democratic politicians.

And the way that Jack Smith has been compromised, his wife is a partisan, the way that Letita James

campaigned on getting Donald Trump before there was a formal charges, and the way that Alvin Bragg has bragged about he's going to take Trump down.

All of them have a history of left-wing activism.

Well, Victor, if we can then turn to something a little sad, Henry Kissinger just passed away yesterday or the day before, I think.

He was 100 years old, so a very good long life.

My recollection of him is that while he was controversial in the sense that he had very strong supporters on the right and a lot of critics on the left, he seemed to rise above all that and sort of continue his career and his influence both domestically and diplomatically.

I was wondering your reflections on Henry Kissinger.

Well, he was tarred and disliked by both the left and the right.

The left never forgave him

for Vietnam and said that, you know, he was involved in the secret bombing of Cambodia.

And then people on the right said he was a globalist and was not a nationalist.

And that came in during the Yom Kippur War when there was an initial reluctance to supply Israel in those first dark days

of 1973 at the same level the Soviets were supplying

the Arabs, the Syrians and the Egyptians and the Jordanians.

It was Richard Nixon who forced Kissinger to snap out of it.

Kissinger did not want to see his efforts to get the Soviets out and peace destroyed.

And he thought if he restrained or gave a signal to the

Israelis that they weren't going to do what they did in 1967, maybe they'd have a better peace.

And I think quickly he saw that was wrong and re-pivoted.

And so then he was all for it.

And I think Goldemir and other people had gone to him and thought maybe they could preempt as they did in 1967 because they knew the war was coming.

They were were surprised, but within 48 hours they knew the war would start and they weren't ready and where they were going to just go with what they had.

And he said that would be bad for their global reputation.

But

so he was attacked on the right and he was attacked as a war criminal.

Christopher Hitchens wrote the trial of Henry Kissinger and

there was a lot of anger at him.

But what happened was he just kept writing.

And so he never really served in government after the Gerald Ford administration, because when Reagan came in,

the idea was we're going to win the Cold War.

We're not going to have detente.

And we're not going to deal with the Soviets.

We're going to bankrupt them.

And so Kissinger was the object of derision.

So he was not allowed to be in

the

Reagan administration for eight years, nor the George H.W.

administration, nor the George W.

administration.

So that right there was 20 years of Republican administration when he was in his prime, his 50s and 60s, where he was ostracized, not allowed to be in official capacity.

And yet, and yet, they all called him

because he had a brilliant realist insight into the way human nature worked.

And

so he made, then he was criticized by the left.

This is before

the Biden normalization of cashing cashing in, that he had made Kissinger and associates, and he was using his prior stature as a Secretary of State, National Security Advisor, to advise illiberal

regimes in the Middle East.

And so

he was ⁇ the thing about him was

he was witty and he was ironic, and that meant that people, as he got into his 70s and 80s, appreciated his wit.

He was funny.

And his reputation changed.

So you take a guy like William Shockross, really brilliant guy whose father had been one of the chief jurists at the Nuremberg trial.

I got to know him.

He came to Hoover a couple of times and I spent the afternoon.

I don't think I've liked a British person as much as I did William Shawcross, but he wrote a book when he was younger called Sideshow Kissinger.

I think it was Nixon and the destruction of Cambodia,

The Secret Bombing.

But when he got older, he apologized for the book.

And he said, you know, I wasn't fair to him.

Christopher, whom I knew well, Hitchens, never apologized and didn't like Kissinger.

But

I met him a couple of times in New York.

I was giving a rest-in-lecture once he came.

And then when I wrote

A War Like No Other, he wrote me a very sophisticated, insightful

note about Thucydides, which was one of his heroes, he said.

So I think he was a great American, I really do.

And I think people gained from his knowledge.

And even though the Republicans felt that they could no longer put him into an administration because of his views, that they were realist rather than hardcore conservative.

Yeah.

Well, I was wondering then if we could turn to the war in Gaza.

I was recently reading a column by Carolyn Glick,

and

she said, quote, Biden is the primary obstacle to Israeli victory.

I was wondering your thoughts on that.

She said Israel is dependent on U.S.

resupply of arms and so subject to the Biden

administration's directives.

Yeah, we had Carolyn on this podcast, remember?

Yes.

And I've known her 25 years.

I have a high regard for her.

What she was trying to, and I think successfully point point out is the tragedy of Israel, because

there are three loci in her argument, as

I read the article as well.

One is that

the Israelis put a high premium on every Jewish life.

They have to after the Holocaust.

Number two, they are absolutely dependent on the only Western country that is unwavering in their support, the United States, for resupply.

What does that mean?

It It means 155 millimeter shells.

It means more missiles for Iron Dome.

It means ammunition for every type of weapon they use.

They need us.

They need surveillance.

And they need those two carrier groups out there to make sure that Iran and Hezbollah doesn't interfere.

Okay.

And then

so they have, and then they understand,

three, that the United States interferes in their internal affairs.

We saw that with James Carver and Bill Clinton, who were active and actively trying to stop the Likud Party.

We see this administration doing the same thing.

So the tragedy is that Israel knew, A,

that if it didn't get the hostages back by negotiation, it was going to have a terrible domestic problem.

And they could not afford that after the internal disputes over the Supreme Court.

So that's number one.

They also knew that the United States is far more supportive than any other Western country and they need those weapons and that the United States would then have a degree of influence upon them.

Three, they also knew that

those A and B that I just listed were contrary to the efficacy of destroying Hamas.

The more you negotiate for hostages, the more you mainstream or legitimize a terrorist thuggish group as a nation, as if it's an equal to you, and the more you slow down your operation and you lose momentum and

you empower Hamas and the further you get away from October 7.

And by the same token, they know that when you take this larges, and it's up to $14 billion

from the U.S.

and you have a left-wing administration,

then they are going to resonate with the UN, the international

globalist elite, and try to restrain you from

striking back at Hamas.

So you're between a rock and a hard place.

Bottom line, Benjamin Netanyahu and his coalition government knew they have to destroy Hamas or they're going to do it again and again and again.

They said that.

Benjamin Netanyahu and his coalition government know that if they don't negotiate for the hostages, they will face enormous internal criticism.

They know that if they retaliate in a way that makes military sense, the United States is going to be eventually, because it's a democratic administration power, forced to restrain them.

And that's where they are right now.

And Carolyn is saying

that

the latter third force that they're dealing with is the most powerful, and it's hurting them because Biden.

And what does she mean?

I mean, she didn't list them all.

She's done that before.

But I mean, what, five days out, the Turkish minister who's anti-Israeli got a hold of Anthony Blinken.

They were calling for a ceasefire.

Five days out.

And then Biden said that he was rock solid.

He wasn't rock solid.

He's been telling him to slow down, pause, do all of this, because

he's got about a 35 to 38 percent approval rating, depending on the poll you read.

And he feels that the 250,000 voters in the one state that will make a difference, Michigan, who are Arab Muslims, are threatening not to vote for him.

If he was a true statesman, he would just address them and say, well, who are you going to vote for?

Donald Trump?

Because he's going to be a lot harder on Hamas than I am, and he's going to be a lot harder on you students who break the law and should be deported than I am, and he's going to be a lot harder on your brother who wants to come into the United States from Gaza than I am.

But he's not that kind of leader.

And so he gets pushed around.

So he apologizes for doubting the Hamas casualties.

And of course, Hamas says there's 15,000 dead.

Okay.

15,000 dead.

And if you look at the figures and the names, they're about 75% women.

Do you really believe that there haven't been killing very many terrorists and they're killing more women and children?

I don't.

I believe that they've killed thousands of Hamas people and they have buried them somewhere in trenches or somewhere.

And do you believe that there's 15,000 graves all over?

I mean, think about it.

A cemetery with two or three thousand graves is big.

I'm sorry.

Hold on, Victor.

What do you mean they,

who are they that have been killing?

Hamas has been killing their own.

You're saying or?

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

What I'm saying is this.

Hamas has been giving figures.

They have women and dead.

And the majority of their figures are women and dead.

But the majority of people who have actually been killed are terrorists those are the ones that they're hammering the israelis okay so they're not counting them they're not saying to us the world we have 15 000 dead there was three thirty five children there was uh twenty eight hundred women there were seven

six thousand men and there were this many militant hamas they don't break it down like that No.

Because they know that the majority of the people who have been killed are not civilians.

And they've been exaggerating that because they won't give you a figure.

So then the next question is, that is an enormous logistical problem to bury 15,000 people.

Aerial photography has not found

brand new huge cemeteries, right?

Yes.

It would be a logistical nightmare.

And so if there were 15,000 people, you would have just ditches open throwing bodies in.

I don't know if that's happened or not.

Or maybe they're doing it with the Hamas people, but my point is this.

The majority of the people who have been killed are Hamas killers.

And they do not want to admit that.

It makes them look

and they get no global traction out of people lamenting a terrorist.

And so they lump all the people who've been killed into one number,

right?

And

they manipulate that number to say there's more women and children.

But if they would just give the exact number of terrorists and Hamas that were killed,

the aggregate number of people who were killed would be much lower, and the number of civilians, the proportion of civilians and children would be much lower.

And they're not going to do that.

And they're not going to do that just like they said there were no tunnels below.

the hospital and there were.

They're not going to do that just because they said the Israelis bombed a hospital and killed 500 people.

They're not going to do that because they insisted that they did not go

into Israel and they did not kill civilians.

They didn't rape them.

They didn't commit necrophilia.

They didn't behead people.

And they lie.

That's their currency.

They're liars.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, let's go ahead and go to some messages and then come back and talk a little bit about the literary background of the Iliad.

Stay with us and we'll be right back.

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Welcome back.

This is the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

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So Victor, so we were we've been on the Iliad.

We looked at the connection to the older Mycenaean civilization last time and so we wanted to turn to the literary background this week and hear a little bit about why anybody would want to read the Iliad.

So go ahead and let us know.

Well, remember, we're talking,

after we finish great wars or battles, or I shouldn't say great in the sense of wonderful, but awful in the sense of magnitude, we're trying to do the same thing and walk our way through Western literature since we don't really study it anymore in the university.

We talked about what the Iliad was as a historical record.

It was sort of a layered record with a little bit of Mycenaean culture from 1600 to 1200 BC, a little bit more of the Dark Ages when it was transmitted orally by blind, probably blind bards, and then a lot of contemporary Greek history in Homer's own lifestyle, the last of the oral bards, lasts because he was the one who coincided with the discovery of writing.

So once he gave a rendition, somebody wrote it down, and then the art of the oral poet was no longer necessary.

And then the other thing, remember, was

We don't have all of that epic cycle.

There was the Cypria, and that's the judgment of Paris that

caused it all,

That Helen judged the most beautiful woman, and then she's kidnapped by Paris and goes to Troy.

We don't have all of the elements of the Iliad, the 10-year war.

We don't have, I think it's called the Ethiopias, the arrival of Memnon and the Ethiopian.

We don't have the little Iliad.

That's what happens after Achilles gets killed by Paris.

Remember that heel.

We don't have the Iliopers.

We have just fragments of it.

That's

the actual sack of Troy.

And then the most famous is the Nostoi.

Those are all the people that get back.

What happened to Agamemnon?

How did Menelaus get back?

They all end up badly, reflecting the Mycenaean cycle that after the destruction of this Hittite kingdom around Troy, the Mycenaeans declined.

And that is manifested in math, in myth.

with all of these tragic fates of almost everybody ends up bad.

And among the Nostoi, there is is one, the Odyssey, and that is there.

So we only have two of maybe 20 poems.

And the Iliad is not about the sack of Troy.

It's about one

six to eight week period in the 10th year of war about Achilles, the greatest of the Achaean warriors that are besieging Troy.

And

they are suffering from a plague, and the prophet Crysus says his daughter Crisis

should be taken from from Agamemnon.

She was sort of in his harem.

She was a captive.

And if he doesn't do that, they're going to be in big trouble.

Apollo is angry at them.

So he gives her back.

But he says, if I have to give her back, I'm going to take Achilles' girlfriend, Bryce's.

And so he does.

And that is the Iliad.

It starts the wrath of Achilles.

And Achilles' basic argument is, I'm the best guy here.

You can't win without me.

You've insulted me.

I do all the killing along with Ajax and other people.

And you, Agamemnon, and your worthless brother, Menelaus, don't do anything, even though you guys caused all this by

convincing everybody we had to get Menelaus' wife back.

So he retreats and doesn't fight.

And then he prays to his semi-divine mother, Thetis.

Make them suffer so they know what it is to lose Achilles.

And they do.

So So then most of the poem is that Hector runs wild.

He's the Trojan champion.

And at one point, he's so wild that Patroclus, the friend, best friend of Achilles, asked to put on his armor and stop him.

And he has a wonderful counter-attack, and then he's killed.

And at that point, Achilles goes crazy and tells Agamemnon, I want to get back in there.

Not because

his Greeks have been losing, but because his best friend is killed.

And then he goes wild and wipes out hundreds of Trojans and he kills Hector.

And then he desecrates Hector's body and drags him around the city.

And then Priam, the father of Hector,

begs for his release.

And then Achilles allows that.

And there's funeral games, and the poem ends.

So, what is it about?

First of all,

it's kind of sets up the irony and paradox and reality of Western culture.

That is, the race goes not to the swift.

Homer's telling us that Achilles is the strongest person by any meritocratic system.

He should be in ahead of the Achaeans.

He's not.

The two people that are, by virtue of their birth, because they're from the largest city state, Mycenae is Agamemnon and Menelaus, and they're both mediocrities.

They're bureaucrats.

And that comes off right at the beginning of Western literature.

And then we have this tragic hero,

with

two characters.

One, Achilles is told that if you go out on the field and you revenge Patroclus, you will be famous because you will kill Hector, but you will die here.

You're going to die here very young.

But you're going to save the Greeks.

If you just go along with your wrath and stay put,

you're going to live to be a long life back in Thessaly with your father.

And so what does he do?

He chooses glory and to save the Greeks and to revenge Patroclus.

And he makes a tragic decision when he has a bad and worse choice.

Same thing with Hector.

He's different than Achilles.

He's not just a young thug.

He's got his family.

and Andromache, and he's got his young son, and he's on the walls of Troy, and he's got his entire extended family and his friends, and they're being attacked, and they're going to be wiped out unless he and he alone goes out there.

But he knows

that once Achilles comes back, all of his boasting is going to be hollow because he's boasted he's killed all of these Greeks, like Patroclus and other heroes, but he's not as good as Achilles.

And yet he has to go out.

He doesn't want to go out.

But if he doesn't go out, they're going to destroy his city.

But if he goes out, he's going to be killed.

And he chooses to go out.

and he's killed by Achilles and humiliated.

And so it's telling us these tragic heroes are people who are better than the rest of us.

And they're tragic because they get themselves into situations in which they're needed by each of their, their cause needs them, and yet they're not going to be appreciated, and they're going to end up badly by saving other people.

And so that's sort of the model for Sophocles, for John Ford's Westerns.

They come out of the Iliad.

There are some other issues, and one of them, of course, is the divinity of the gods, and the gods are not moral gods like ours.

They're big humans with big egos, and

they reflect contemporary Greek morality.

And one of the worst sins is eubris, to be arrogant, arrogant, arrogant, arrogant.

If you are overweeningly arrogant, then you're going to suffer nemesis.

The god nemesis will pay you back, and then you're going to have Ate,

which is destruction.

And that happens

every time that a hero boasts, like Patroclus does, that he's just about ready to take Troy when he knows he can't,

bad things happen.

When Hector boasts that he can beat anybody, bad things will happen.

The other is that there's, in life,

rank and privilege don't reflect ability.

So at one one point, Thersides, this ugly commoner, you think he has a bald head and he's kind of repulsive.

He gives a great speech and says, you know, we're fighting for the wrong cause.

All of our bureaucratic

monarchy, they get all the glory.

We do all the fighting.

They get all the booty.

And then he's hit on the head by shut up.

You may be right, but...

You're not in our league.

You're ugly and you're a commoner.

Shut up.

And then everybody laughs at him.

And that's put there in a way by Homer to suggest that that may not be right, but that's an old aristocratic prejudice that's starting to maybe die in Homer's own age of the city-state and constitutional government.

So there's a whole morality that's presented in this, the first of Western literature.

And the fact that it was produced orally is very hard to fathom.

It's such a sophisticated characterization of Ajax,

Achilles, Menelaus, Agamemnon, Odysseus.

Odysseus is the wise guy.

He's very smart.

And why everybody's talking about we can beat them or we're better than them, he's thinking, ah, we have to outsmart them.

And we have to figure a way to get home.

And we've got to know what their weaknesses are.

He's the multifaceted man, the new man of the city-state.

He's not just a one-dimensional heroic gunslinger.

And then you have Ajax.

He's the dependable.

He's the person we all know.

He's big, he's strong.

There's nothing flashy about him, but when you're in a pinch, you call in Ajax.

And he will always be there, and you can't stop him.

And he plods along.

Homer talks,

uses the metaphor, he's a lion or he's a donkey, but he's just there.

Menelaus is

the person who's sort of smart ass

and of some value, but he shouldn't be in the position that he's in.

Agamemnon is sort of like Joe Biden right now.

He is a president that, by any qualification of the president, he doesn't deserve to be there.

He's all title and no

nothing else.

He's a good fighter, but not good enough to be the head of the Achaeans.

And that's this commentary on the aristocratic fallacy.

Paris is everybody, he's good-looking, he's smart ass,

he's the cause of it all, he doesn't really care about anybody but himself, he's the ultimate narcissist, and on and on.

So, each one of these characters is described in such brilliant fashion, they become archetypes for later Greek tragedy and later Western civilization.

So, next time we'll talk about the Odyssey, the second,

and the only surviving poet, the only other surviving

you know, 15,000-line poem of the epic cycle.

Okay.

Well, Victor, we'll go ahead and take a break now and come back and talk a little bit about a few more news items for this weekend.

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

Welcome back to the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

Victor, as we've been talking, there has just been an

attack.

Two gunmen opened fire at a bus stop in Jerusalem, killing three, wounding 11, and Hamas has claimed responsibility for that.

This is getting,

seems to be getting more and more serious as we go along inside of Israel itself.

Well, as you know, Sammy, I'm in Florida speaking for the Hoover, so I haven't seen that news account, but it's indicative of what's gone on.

Israel has lost control of the situation temporarily.

And by that I mean they had to agree to this hostages, but

if they hadn't have taken the 240 hostages,

we wouldn't be speaking of Hamas now.

It'd be gone and be destroyed.

So they knew that in advance.

So their idea is to meter them out and give fewer and fewer hostages at greater intervals all the way until

they can get international pressure to stop Israel.

And meanwhile, they're going to be asymmetrical, doing what you just talked about, suicide bombing, bombing, breaking the truce.

They had another truce infraction two days ago.

And it's all going to be double-edged so that the world says,

well, come on, Israel.

You wouldn't want.

It's just.

Just forget about it.

They do stuff like that.

That's who they are.

You're better than that.

But more importantly, then they can say to the Middle East and to the Arab street, look,

we went and killed more Jews than any single day since the Holocaust, and we're still here.

We're still here, and we're still doing it.

Islamic jihad's not doing that.

Fatah is not doing that.

We're the only people.

Hezbollah is not doing that.

We're doing it.

So that's where they are.

And they have to just come down hard,

hard, or they're going to lose deterrence.

And if they lose deterrence, Hezbollah is going to jump in because they look at Biden and they think, you know what?

We've had over 90 attacks on American assets in the region.

He's only feebly responded.

They sent a missile at an American ship, and he kind of contextualized it and said, well, maybe it wasn't there.

So they're not going to.

They have to restore deterrence, and they've got to destroy Hamas quickly.

And this hostage thing is designed.

you cannot let Hamas outsmart us.

And they knew what they were doing, and this is going according to their script.

And Biden Wiltz, I shouldn't say Biden, he's a construct.

The Obamas are getting what they want.

Yeah.

Well, you know, we haven't also talked about the UN lately, and I know that the strange things like Iran being the head of the Human Rights Forum, but also just their position on this war in Gaza.

I was wondering if you could comment on that.

Well, it all started when we had the UN Secretary General Guterres, Guterres, I guess it's a lisbian name.

He's a socialist lisbon, Lisbon

politician, Portugal,

Prime Minister of Portugal.

He's a socialist leftist.

And so he came right out of the starting blocks and said, before the IDF had done anything, right after October 7th, well, you can't look at this in a vacuum, he said.

There has to be context.

Think of that.

Everybody, think of that.

That is the most meaningless amoral qualifier you can think of.

December 7th, yes, yes, they killed 2,400 Americans, but you've got to look at it in a context.

It's not in a vacuum.

Long hostility.

Yes, Hitler invaded Poland in 1939 on September 1st, but

I just got to look at the context.

There have been disagreements with Poland before, tit for tat.

Yes, yes, yes, China went in 1930.

Japan went into China in 1937.

Yes, they killed 250,000 people in 1980.

But there were prior tensions.

You've got to have context.

That's what we're reduced to at the UN.

And when you turn in the International Criminal Court or the WHO,

Now there's another, I don't know, what we want to call it, a mycoplasma bio

epidemic in China.

They're going to keep, I mean, they run the WHO,

and so we're going to keep getting these weird diseases coming from China, either because their quarantine shut everybody down and they lost their immunity, or they're spin-offs from some of their biology labs or bacterial labs.

Who knows?

But we're not, the UN is not going to address it.

The WHO is not going to address it.

So we would be much better off.

There is a simple solution.

We have two choices.

We can say, A,

we'll stay in the UN, but it's got to get out of New York.

And I know New York's in trouble and everything, but we're going to get it out of New York.

And let's put it in, I don't know,

Nairobi, Caracas,

Havana.

Who knows?

Maybe,

I don't know.

Maybe Pyongyang.

A nice place that all the socialists can go to, and they'll have nice restaurants and TV coverage.

It just won't be here.

And they'll be in a third world country because that's who most of them are of the 193 nations or whatever they are.

Or you can just say we're getting out of it completely and we're going to start our own and you have to have a constitutional federated republic or democracy,

not a socialist democratic republic.

I mean a real democracy.

And then you can't join.

And just have our friends in it and just screw the rest of them.

But this idea that they're in New York and they live it up at restaurants and they get on TV and they put their kids in prep school and they strut around like they're diplomats.

When they go back home,

their regimes kill people.

The only time they've ever voted on their life is when they're in New York.

So they're really disgusting.

And half of their resolutions since

1967 have been against Israel, half.

You know,

nobody has a resolution.

There's 200,000 Greek Cypriots that were ethnically cleansed.

They're refugees.

No, they're not refugees, Victor.

No, no, no.

It's been a long time.

It's been a half century.

How could they be refugee?

Well, that's what the Palestinians are for 80 years.

Nobody's saying, look at Defer.

These Arab Muslims have killed, killed.

500,000 black African Christians, killed them, and animists.

They've killed them no no no victor that's not that's not our concern there's a million muslim wagers

no none of the people on the street care about that nobody at the un cares about that and we're supposed to take them seriously it's nobody should take them any you should take the u.n as seriously as you do the president of harvard

says it all yeah it sure does you know and um i was i was looking at all the news in our country we have this this, I'm sure you've seen it, and I'm sure our listeners have: Oakland City Council and all those people that came up before.

One woman even saying that the Israelis were responsible for

October 7th.

But they had a resolution to

ask or call for a ceasefire, but they wouldn't pass a resolution condemning October 7th and Hamas.

And that's one story, but let me give you another one.

The CIA official posted a pro-palestinian comment on her i think it was a her facebook um while biden was in israel promising our support and these the cia of course should be an objective institution and it's clearly not and my

question is or my point is is that our culture seems to be permeated by this anti-semitic groups and individuals.

And I feel like I'm living in a Swiss cheese culture on this entire issue.

And it's very uncomfortable.

It's the 1930s.

It's just exactly what the 30, 31 was starting in Weimar.

And then

when Handenberg died and Nazis, even though Hitler was vice chancellor and had only won, I think, 38% of the vote or 32,

that empowered people from 32 all the way to 39.

And so that's what's happened.

They're empowered because there's no corrective.

So if an MIT president says some Jewish students at our university should not go to place A or B,

or if a professor says you Jews get on one side of the classroom and the Stanford president says, well, we'll look into it and suspend him for a while.

If you have that attitude, then it's going to continue because they're empowered.

If nobody's arrested for shutting down the Manhattan Bridge, nobody's arrested for swarming the Capitol, the rotunda.

And so that's what's happened.

It's a different, and why is it happening?

Because our universities,

to tell you the truth, they're of no value except for science, medicine, engineering, the STEM.

But the humanities are not taught.

Humanities are of enormous value, but they're not being taught at the universities.

They're picking literature and they're calling.

They're not reading Shakespeare.

They're not reading Chaucer.

They're not reading Homer.

They're not reading Sophocles.

They're not reading Tocqueville.

They're reading just

liberation

kindy stuff.

And so

what's the value of them?

I don't see any value anymore unless you go to a Hillsdale College or St.

Thomas Aquinas or something like that.

But

that's the problem.

And these institutions are promulgating this anti-Semitic, anti-American, anti-Western narrative.

And they're doing it from the comfort and security and prosperity of the West.

And they never just once say to themselves,

how come I don't have to work today and I'm out on the bridge?

How come I'm screaming about this government who let me into their country and there's no consequences?

How come I'm not arrested?

How come I'm on TV?

Go back to Gaza and see what happens when somebody questions the government and is accused of something.

They shoot you and they hang you upside down from a crane in the West Bank.

And

should read the Hamas Charter if you're a woman out there.

Just see what it says, what you're supposed to be doing.

So it's all hypocrisy, but it's our fault.

That's my point.

And get it, it's our fault.

We allow it to happen.

We have no moral courage.

If we said to everybody, Mr.

Obador in Mexico, you're not going to send 8 million people through your country to our place, we're going to build a wall, and because you didn't keep your side of the bargain, we're going to tax the $60 million in remittances, 10%.

No money leaves this country without 10%, $6 billion.

We're going to put in a fund to address the money that you've caused us to spend for illegal immigration.

And if you don't like it,

then we're going to restrict entry into the United States from Mexico.

If you don't like that, then we're going to repeal the North America Free Trade Agreement in its entirety.

And if you you don't like that, we can go further.

And I think they would change their attitude.

And, you know, it's the same thing.

If we're out there and the Houthis send a missile, we don't want to go into that God-forsaken Yemen.

But the next time they send us a missile and we know where it came from, just drop about a 5,000-pound bomb on it and see what they say.

It would stop.

You don't want to get anywhere near those people.

You don't want to go on the ground in the Middle East.

But

you can create deterrence.

And you've got to help Israel because they are doing the work of civilization and getting rid of these killers.

And the funny thing about human nature is that the left has it so wrong.

They really think that if they stop now and they give food and water and fuel to Hamas, and they negotiate, it's peace.

It's going to just end up with more and more killing.

But if they destroy Hamas, Hezbollah won't do a thing.

Islamic Jihad won't do a thing.

Iran won't do a thing.

Not destroy Hamas, and Hamas goes all around the Middle East saying that we beat the Jews, and they're going to have enemies coming out of the woodwork.

Yeah.

Well, Victor,

I wish it wasn't true.

I know.

You made my

Swiss cheese culture that much worse.

It's just, this is a really, this war in Gaza has really opened up a waterfall of serious issues in our country and obviously in the Middle East.

But let's finish this podcast with a question from one of our,

I think it's one of our readers on the website.

I know I read a lot of different comments everywhere, but this one has a question for you.

Have you ever written about General Peitan

and his World War II leadership of Vichy?

Was he really a traitor?

And we want the short version of the answer because we're at the end of the podcast.

Was he a traitor?

Well,

he died at 85,

you know, in 1951.

So do the math, he was 75

in 1941.

France was overrun in May and June of

1940.

So he was a man that was the hero of the Battle of Verdun.

It attributed to him, they shall not pass.

They shall not pass.

And they stopped the unstoppable German army at Verdun.

And for nine months, the French army held firm because of him.

And he was brilliant.

The Germans just were pounding and pounding away.

And he created this new system on the defense of he brought people in by bus and train, soldiers.

He put them in there for two weeks.

They were fresh.

And no matter whether they were worn out or still fresh, he got them out.

And then he brought in another two, and he kept just enough to train the two.

So while the Germans were getting sick and worried and tired, demoralized, almost everybody in the three million man French army, in some sense, fought at Verdun.

And he was a brilliant man on the defensive.

But he died, you know, at excuse me, I didn't mean to to say he was 85.

He died at 95.

And

he was 85 when they brought him back out.

So

he didn't volunteer, you know, when they he wasn't running France is what I'm saying, Sammy, when on May 10th it collapsed.

Yeah.

I mean, it basically was invaded, and then it fought from May 10th to June 25th or 6th, and it collapsed.

And

Laval was culpable, but he came in to save it.

And he said, I was your sword, now I'm your shield.

And the Germans, he worked out a deal.

And then at 85,

he thought, well, this is an opportunity to get rid of all the socialists and the communist and the atheist.

And I will recreate the French of Louis XIV, religious and powerful.

And they gave him a little tiny enclave around Vichy, and they held the entire country with 100,000 German troops.

So, the other thing about it is there was no French resistance at this time.

Everybody says the French resistance was a nation of arms.

It wasn't.

It was mostly a few communists in the beginning.

And so, most people collaborated.

Maybe not with Pata and Vichy, but they dealt with the Germans.

And then, when the Germans were weak and

we were going to invade, then everybody was a patriot in the resistance.

So, he was a collaborator and a traitor, yes, but he was 85 years old, and they put him on trial in 1945.

And, you know, he was

91.

And he didn't say much at the trial.

And then he kind of gave a little speech about the glory of France, the glory of the Catholic Church, the glory of anti-communism, da, da, da, da.

And he helped round up Jews.

They rounded up over 150,000 Jews.

They had about, I don't know, 2 million Frenchmen working as slaves in German factories.

And he didn't stop any of that.

But then the question is, what could he have done?

And

I don't.

So he's a very problematic.

And you know what makes it even more problematic about him?

You know who

his

protege was?

Was Charles de Gaulle.

I think he wrote.

Oh, really?

Yeah, I think they wrote a book together.

I'm just doing this off the top of my head, but Charles de Gaulle

famously said, you know, he was glorious in battle, or he was mediocre, and then he was glorious, and then he was awful as a thing, and then he died

well known.

And

he had, he, de Gaulle was one of these kind of Gwadarian, Rommel, Patton pre-war figures that believed in

fluid war, mobilized warfare, Blitzkrieg type of tactics.

And Pattin,

who was still a very influential military strategist, favored de Gaulle's career.

And then during the war,

the actual war, the eight-week war, de Gaulle did pretty well.

Yeah.

But he was still a minor figure.

I mean,

the idea that just it would be like today some second two-star general says to everybody, America, I'm going to lead the United States.

And the Pentagon says, what?

You're nobody.

That's what they all said, the German, I mean, the French staff said about de Gaulle.

So it was, but

he protected Petan after he was, he was convicted of treason and was ordered to be shot.

Oh, I was wondering about that because

they tried like 10,000 people or something in France after the war, didn't they?

They had to because

before

they could do it, the mobs killed 20,000.

Oh, wow.

Put it this way.

And I know we have a lot of good military historians, and I'm doing this off the top of my head, but I did do a lot of research when I wrote the Second World Wars.

I'm pretty sure

that in the period of May 1945, there were more killings by French, of Frenchmen, than French killed Germans during the resistance.

It got out of hand.

And every little small town and every province and every city in France, they went after the collaborators before

they could maintain a new government.

There was no government when Germany got out.

So

they had to come in and start trying people in a constitutional fashion.

And he was last question.

He was, you know, as I said, he came in when he was 84.

So he was,

this was in 1940, so he was...

89, 90 when they tried him.

And then they let him go and he was senile.

He died at 95.

Yeah.

dude um that must have been hard to do if they tried other people who were below him convicted them and executed them that's what what must be a little bit controversial that he didn't he he he escaped execution while others did not

i think de Gaulle said two things he saved us at Verdun.

If it hadn't been for him, we would have lost the war because Verdun was a turning point as far as the French were concerned.

Yeah.

And

he said he's senile.

Yeah.

He didn't know what he was doing.

He was 85.

He did not want to come back in.

We asked him to come in and deal with the Germans.

He didn't lose the war.

We did.

We brought him in and he

fell for the right-wing German propaganda and thought, oh, I'm not a Nazi, but if I get along with them, they'll let me recreate the France of our ancestors.

So he thought, and he brought every thug and criminal into

that, and they went out and killed Jews and communists, atheists.

And they lost.

I mean, they had, supposedly, they had control of North Africa, but by November 1942,

North Africa fell.

So they didn't have much influence.

And got to remember a couple of other things very quickly before we end.

I mean,

the British blew up the French fleet in North Africa that had left Toulon.

And they killed, I think, 1,300 Frenchmen.

And Churchill said it was the most difficult decision he had of the war because they didn't want to have these beautiful ships.

They had the best destroyers in the world

and battleships fall into the hands of the Nazis because they would control the Mediterranean.

And so and then when we landed in North Africa, we fought it out for a few hours with the Vichy before they joined us.

So, I mean,

it was kind of weird that they had been the first to fight on the ground, the Germans of a major country.

I mean, they'd gone into Poland, Norway, and all that,

and then they lost, and nobody could believe it because the indomitable French army that had never broken in

four years collapsed in six weeks.

Again, Mark Bloke wrote, you know, Strange War.

It's a brilliant account of what happened.

And it went back to the 1920s and 30s school system, which we should take note of.

And he argued that the socialists had already conditioned people to be ashamed of their victory in World War I.

Yeah.

All right.

Okay.

Well, Victor, thank you very much for all of that and the surprise question at the end.

I appreciate the answer to that.

I'm sure your listeners do.

do too and we thank the listeners for listening.

Thank you everybody for listening.

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