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Welcome, America.

This is the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Victor is a trained classical philologist, as for those of you who are just joining this show, but he has also written much in military history and classics and on agriculture.

So lots of books, 727, if we count every single thing that has been published by Victor Davis-Hampson.

And he is also the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution, and the Wayne and Marsha Buskie Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

This is our weekend edition, and we will be looking at some news, and then we'll go on to another topic.

For those of you who have been following the weekend editions, we are changing pace a little bit because we did get to the end of wars that we were recounting throughout history and we got to the present.

So we're going to turn to some topics in literature and then

people or individuals that Victor has known personally and some of their history.

So that will be the new direction of our weekend edition.

We want to listen to a few messages and we'll get right back with you.

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We're back.

So, Victor, we got news first, and then we'll go into

our discussion, literary discussion today.

We've just finished Thanksgiving, and so we're the day after Thanksgiving that we are recording this, and there's been disruptions of the Macy's Day parade, the traditional parade.

The pro-Palestinian protesters have glued themselves to pavement in front of the parade, and they were duly arrested, which was a good thing.

But I was wondering if you had any thoughts on this continuing madness.

Well, I mean, we could go on long

for a long time because the pro-Hamas, Palestinian, whatever term we use, off-campus, on-campus, immigrant community, visa, I don't know what the status of individual protesters are,

but when you have Veterans Day and you have people protesting for Hamas and they tear down American flags, or they shut down the Manhattan Bridge, or they shut down the Golden Gate Bridge, or they shut down a traditional Macy's festival, or they disrupt

sporting events,

Harvard-Yale game.

So, my point is this: at what point do they think that that helps them?

And

in other words, if you come over to this country, and I'm not talking about those who are on green cards and student visas, and you do that thing, that thing, whatever we call that thing is, disrupting the lives of your host,

why would you think the host would like you here?

Why wouldn't the host say, you know what?

All we ask, if you want to visit our country and take advantage of our educational institutions and our freedom and security and prosperity, safety, Please observe our customs and traditions and don't break our laws.

But if you do,

what?

Nothing?

And

I guess what I'm getting at is I don't understand their behavior.

Second thing is,

as I pointed out before, the methodologies and the customs and the means of the respective

pro-Hamas or pro-Hisrael demonstrators mere image what's going on in the Middle East.

So one side here in the United States defaces public property, one side wears masks to hide their identities,

one side occupies public transportation or highways and disrupts things, one side calls for a genocide,

one side gets people arrested, one side attacks third-party people who

are watching.

One side kills people.

I mean we had a professor kill a bystander.

I know that the media said that the sidewalk did, but he hit him and then he fell down and hit his head.

And the other side doesn't.

And what are they representing?

They're the domestic manifestation of reification of what's going on right now in the Middle East.

One side takes captive, the other doesn't.

One side beheads, the other doesn't.

One side mutilates, mass rapes, the other side doesn't.

One side chronically lies about the hospital situation, about that Islamic jihad hit, or

the

number of, I mean, I shouldn't say one side, the side here domestically does too, when they deny that on October 7th, 2,000 gunmen came in and raped and murdered and killed 1,200 people.

They lie about that.

They said it didn't exist.

So that's really disturbing.

And this,

I guess this prompts the question, why are we doing this?

Why are we allowing people to come in here that hate us?

I don't understand it.

The people from the Middle East that come here no sooner get here than they don't like the policy of the United States.

That's fair.

That's fine.

But then don't break our laws.

Please don't break our laws.

Don't turn our universities into anti-Semitic

spaces.

Nobody said that you had the right to come in here and then do what you do in the Middle East.

It screws up the Middle East here.

And this is not Victor Hansen and his little farm ranning.

I mean, this is a worldwide phenomenon that they have reached, this October 7th, allowed them to reach peak disgust with illegal, unlimited immigration.

So,

what this weird thing that's going on in Dublin, Ireland, where a supposed Algerian, we don't know if that's true, immigrant may have stabbed a little girl and a mother or a woman, and it set people on fire.

They're tired of it because they have the same thing is happening in France.

The Le Pen faction is probably going to gain traction.

Same thing is happening in Germany.

We just saw Gert Wilders win the most seats in the recent Dutch election.

Same thing is happening in Argentina.

Same thing is happening in Ecuador.

Same thing is going to happen here.

And what is that same thing?

That same thing is a small globalist elite who control the institutions in Western societies for whatever particular reason, whether they really do believe their rhetoric about their an open society or they realize their agenda appeals to nobody,

at least not 51%, that would ensure their retention of power, so they want to change the demography.

And no, that's not the great replacement theory.

That's demography is destiny, the new democratic majority, self-confessional on the part of the left.

And whatever the reason is, people don't like to let in people into their country who don't obey their laws, who don't like their society, who feel that they're entitled almost immediately to taxpayer subsidies.

And they don't want to do it anymore.

So if the first thing you do when you go to a Western country is break the law by illegally entering, and the second thing you do is illegally residing, the third, fourth, fifth, sixth is a pretty downward slope.

So that's what's happening.

And I think people are getting really, really tired.

I wrote Mexifornia 22 years ago, and I predicted at the end of the book it was going to be like this.

And nobody,

you can say all you want left.

You can say you're a racist, xenophobic, protectionist, whatever, nativist.

It doesn't matter because you're on the wrong side to use your own words of history.

And you don't care about your own people and of all different races.

And some of the fiercest critics of illegal immigration in this country are African Americans and second and third generation Hispanics.

Because it impacts their communities as we see in Chicago and New York and Orkney.

And we saw what the mind of the leftist elitist was at Martha's Vineyard.

And we're seeing it with Sanctuary Cities that are getting their final wish, and that is more migrants.

And guess what?

They turn out to be the most illiberal, angry people in the world.

How dare you have me have an illegal immigrant in my Martha's Vineyard utopia?

I'm not going to stand for it.

I will get a box of food and a quilted jacket, and I'll have a bus out there in 10 minutes to get rid of them.

That was their attitude.

And we're supposed to take them seriously when they call people names?

I don't think so.

Yeah.

Well, I think you got the approach and the attitude wrong.

They were all smiles, and these are just the best people ever.

Here's your bus.

Get in it and get out of here.

What do people expect when you take the poorest people in the world from a war-torn southern Mexico, Central America, but now all over the world?

I mean, the people are coming from Africa, Asia, China, and you put them in a post-modern sophisticated society without any confidence on the host.

that they would assimilate them or integrate them or teach them the general protocols of their new country,

and then allow them to come in illegally.

So,

the last quarter century of my life is just a mirror image of what we're watching now.

What do I mean by that?

That means when I hear a screech or a screaming

wreck out in front of my house, and that's happened,

I've lost count four to six times,

and a car goes ballistic and tears out an almond tree, two almond trees, 20 vines, hits a pipeline, causes thousands of dollars of damage.

The car is sitting there.

I run out to see if anybody's injured, and guess what?

The person is gone.

Gone.

Took off.

Left this car there.

And then, of course, you can't repossess it because the police come out, say, we're going to put it there and the person can reclaim it.

There's no consequence.

You're stuck with the bill.

And if you object, you're a racist.

Or when you walk on your own property, as I have been doing every day of my life almost, and I see somebody, which happened, let me take a look,

five days ago.

I go around, here's a man on my property.

I say, what are you doing here?

He said, well, just in broken English, I'm just here and some Spanish.

And I said, no, you're not just here.

And I say to him, you know, you're breaking the law.

And he has a sense of entitlement that he can just drive drive onto your property.

And nobody ever used to do that for the first 50 years of my life.

And when I see somebody

with a car full of trash bags, and I say, What are you doing?

Oh,

no,

you can't take wet garbage and diapers and just dump it on somebody's property.

Or if

you know, I go to the supermarket and I see some person come out and

takes all the trash in her car and throws it on the ground,

I say, what are you doing?

It's none of your business.

That's what I'm told.

So, and what do all of those have in common?

The people are in the United States without knowledge of the language and probably without legality, but surely without any regard for private property or other people's feelings or comportment.

And yet, since I work on the coast, and if I try to tell people that,

they say you're protectionist or racist or nativist.

And then I go down El Camino

Real, and what do I see?

Bus after bus after bus, Winnebago after Winnebago after Winnebago of immigrants that are sleeping there on the side of the street working as domestics for the richest people in the universe.

And there you have it.

And those are the most productive people.

If I go into my

local food market, it's a ritual.

It is a ritual.

I stand in line and I,

God is my witness, at least one time, every single time I go in, a person in the line opens the purse, whatever, and then starts to produce not one, not two, not three,

but four.

Four, five

EBT cards, WIC cards.

How can one person have four or five different identities?

And say, I'm living, what are you supposed to say?

I'm living in a state where the tax rate is 13.3%

and the state is $45 billion in debt.

And does this have any connection that we have over 11 million people who are quote-unquote undocumented?

And so what I'm getting at is I usually don't get angry, but when I see the people in Europe, the most sophisticated leftist in the world angry,

then I can see that this is is going to spread.

And when I see people in Chicago, African-American communities who vote 99.9% for Barack Obama,

and I see people in New York, Eric Adams, a man of the left, I see people in Martha.

What's going on?

And what's going on is that

their policies, which they thought were going to help them, have reached such a critical mass that they don't have the power and the money and the influence any longer to shield them from their own ideology.

They don't, from the ramifications of it.

They do not.

And maybe, just maybe at our 11th hour, that'll start to have some changes.

Well, you mentioned the elections that are going somewhat right-wing in Europe and in Latin America.

And I wanted to look at a couple of them more closely.

In the Netherlands, we had Gert Wilder's Party of Freedom.

They got 24% of the seats in their parliament.

And on his agenda, actually, what the article I was reading said was that, well, he'll make a coalition with the other right parties, and they will have, you know, they'll have the parliament, theirs.

But they said he's going to need to drop his

ban on immigration and ban on the Koran and

he wants to close mosques too.

And they say, well, those three parts of his agenda are going to have to be dropped.

And just to note, before you say anything, he also calls for what he's calling next it, like the British Brexit.

It's the Netherlands exit from the EU.

So I was wondering your thoughts on that.

Well, he can't drop.

That's what got him elected, isn't it?

That's what won him the greatest number of seats in the latest election.

But I should remind our Americans that when a European goes right-wing, they don't go right-wing like Americans do.

Because they have no experience in a multiracial, assimilated, and integrated society as we used to.

We don't we're like we don't do it anymore, but we used to.

But they never did.

So when they go right, they go right, right, right, and ban things that we would think were anti-constitutional, like ban the Koran, right?

Yeah.

And they will go further, further to the right.

That's the history of the twentieth century.

When you do not allow dissent

or different views in the public sphere, then you go where Europe is going right now.

And that's what's happening.

And I don't know what the limit is.

And then one of the things that's very interesting is

I was listening to the news and reading, and the universities have, you've probably seen this new word they use, settlers, that the Israelis are settlers.

And they use it in the connotation of, well, they were like

white people who came to North America who were settlers.

Settlers used to be a noble view, right?

Noble idea, that you came on the frontier and you created a civilization out of wilderness.

Okay.

Well, now settlers is a pejorative to attack Israelis.

And then I was interested in how I wanted to study philologically how they use that in the context.

And I came to the idea that Israelis

who had a historical birthright to this, which they deny, of course,

they'll never tell you why the Al-Aqska Mosque is built on top of the second temple.

But

that's neither here nor there.

What I'm saying is they define that term as a people who are in a community that shares different views that's unlike its neighbors.

You know what I mean?

And then I thought

I was reading about

areas in Michigan.

because there are 250 million 100,000 Arab-speaking self-identified Muslims.

And there were a couple people on television I was reading about that said we voted overwhelmingly for Joe Biden, right?

And we're not going to do it because he's genocide Joe.

Okay, so according to their own definition, not mine, I welcome immigration if it's legal, measured, meritocratic, right?

And people

learn English and assimilate.

But if you come en masse from the Middle East and then you put mosque down, that's the minority religion, and you put it right in the middle of traditional Michigan, and then you vote in bloc, and then you come out and you don't allow any dissident opinion,

then what are you?

You're a settler community.

You came into a foreign country and you haven't fully assimilated.

Because you're saying things about your mother country to those in the demonstrations who are U.S.

citizens.

You're going beyond the pale of free speech because you're inciting violence when you say from the river to the sea or you're occupying bridges.

In other words, you're a settler community in a very foreign, different country that you came to to settle.

And you didn't come necessarily to be a fully assimilated American.

You may well be, but it won't be of your own volition.

And yet you're accusing the Israelis of being settlers?

That's really ironic.

It really is.

And we're seeing seeing something.

I have so many friends that are from the Middle East and you want to tell them,

you think that just because you get up in the morning and you talk to other Middle Easterners and then you go to the university and you see other Middle Easterners and then you get your Middle Eastern news or you read Al Jazeera or you hear it on the news that therefore you're a majority and everybody thinks like you.

Because you've intimidated people at the universities.

No, it's not true.

Nobody

agrees with you.

And all you're doing when you occupy the Manhattan Bridge or just try to, what, reroute the whole thing, I don't think that's ever happened,

the Thanksgiving parade in New York.

Or tear down a flag.

Do you think that's going to win people over to your side?

Or just say, whatever this phenomenon is, I don't want it anymore.

And that's what's happening.

So it's kind of tragic.

You want to say to people, don't do that.

And the idea that you're going to create a climate of violence in the United States, that Jewish American citizens don't feel that they can walk and identify as Jewish without somebody from the Middle East, whether a student, a green card holder, or an immigrant or a U.S.

citizen, will not hurt them?

You think that's going to be, that's a...

That's a

winning tactic?

I don't understand it.

No.

And they want to pass that off as, and they want to say that, oh no, really, Islamophobia is the main fear out there, and there's nothing to, no evidence of that whatsoever.

I don't understand.

A lot of this, again, I know people are going to get a little upset about this, but a lot of this goes back to Barack Obama because he took a traditional matrix.

African Americans, 10 to 12% of the population, history of slavery, discrimination, civil rights, so-called white, right?

And he took up that word diversity, kind of borrowed it from Jesse Jackson, Rainbow Coalition, and all that.

And he said, by virtue of your race, you're oppressed.

And what was the virtue of your anybody who was not white?

So suddenly, as I said before, you could be a Sikh immigrant that owns 5,000 acres of almonds and you're oppressed.

You could be a Middle Eastern person who came from Kuwait.

You're oppressed.

You can be an Italian American with an Hispanic name from Argentina

and you're propressed.

And so in that matrix, the Middle Eastern group, and I saw it one day at Berkeley, about 1990, the first time I saw it, and this is before Obama, but he institutionalized it, that it was a Hamas booth in the Berkeley free speech area.

And guess what?

It was free speech, Palestinian, radical Palestinian, and oppressed minorities.

It was right next to the black and Latino and all this.

And I thought to myself, oh my God, now we're getting anybody into this matrix who has no history of oppression, discrimination in the United States, and just by virtue that they don't look white.

But

it's very peculiar what's going on.

So

if I go into Fresno and I see an Armenian-American friend of of mine and I put him in a chair and I take a Portuguese American friend of mine and I put him in a chair and I take a Mexican American friend and I put him in a chair and I put a Middle Eastern person in a chair, they don't look Nordic, right?

Or I put a Jewish American, they all have black hair, they all have olive complexions, they look exactly like you couldn't tell what or Italian, you couldn't tell them.

And if you look for grievances, you say to the Jewish American, you come from a culture where six million of them were wiped out.

And you can say to the Portuguese American person, you came from the Azores where it was dirt poor.

And I don't know how you did it, how you came over here, right?

And you see the Armenian American, and you say, my God.

The Turkish government tried to wipe your whole people out.

They butchered a million and a half of them.

And you came over here with nothing.

And you created some of the most successful businesses in California.

You've been a model immigrant community.

And yet you say to all these people, and you don't get any set-aside, you're not a dispossessed minority.

You're not going to be marching on campus.

In fact, as with Greek Americans,

you're so-called white.

And then you say to people people who look from the same profile of olive complexion and dark hair, you're Mexican-American, Central American, Middle Eastern, and you are what?

You're protected.

You're part of the diverse community.

You tell me why.

What is the criterion other than one attitude?

The one group says, I came to America.

and I came measured and legal fashion and I stressed education and I have an income higher than the existing population and I have nothing but sincere thanks and the left says to those people, you're sellouts.

You get nothing.

And the other people say they have grievances against the body politic.

And so what I'm getting at is why do we let people from Kuwait

or the Emirates or Egypt come over here and then all of a sudden they're on campus and they have all these affiliations as if they're oppressed people.

I don't understand it.

What has America done to somebody from Saudi Arabia?

Nothing.

What has happened to people from Armenia?

I can tell you.

Or people who came from Eastern Europe right before World War II, I can tell you.

So I don't understand it, but it's a pernicious idea that we pick and choose victims and victimizers on no coherent logic.

And the fruits of that we're seeing right now.

When we've entitled a whole group of people on campus who think they can chase Jews into a library or they can tell the MIT president there's not going to be any Jews here in this area, you better watch out.

Can't do it.

Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and then come back and finish off this conversation.

We are talking about the right-wing movements in Europe and we'll be right back.

Stay with us.

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Welcome back.

This is the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

So, Victor, I have one more question on those right-wing and especially on Gert Wilder's movement.

It seems to me it's like the Pen in France France redux, where you're going to have this movement, and some larger percentage will be following Gert Wilder and his Freedom Party, but it will fizzle out and not really ever produce anything.

I don't think the, I think it was called the National Front with Le Pen, really ever manifested much in

French politics.

Well, it came in second to Macron.

Still, second place is.

And she renounced her uncle, right?

So it was the second largest popular movement, but it's all about numbers.

That's all.

All you have to do is numbers.

So this movement was warning people that if you're going to bring in people from the Middle East whose religion, whose customs, language, history,

and values are antithetical to the Western Enlightenment,

then and Christendom, if you're going to bring that group in, then you have an enormous task of assimilation,

marriage, integration.

But if that group says, we don't want to integrate because you're infidels and you don't feel confident in your own values, and you're going to create what?

A whole suburban ring around Rotterdam or Paris or Berlin of unassimilated immigrants who, because they're new to your country and they come without any capital or money or skills, they're going to resent you and they're going to interpret your magnanimity of allowing them in as weakness to be exploited and not to be reciprocated with kindness.

So, what do you think is going to happen?

And it's numbers.

And it's taller.

If you have 80 million people in Germany or 60 million in France and you have a couple hundred thousand, you don't have a problem.

Or you're Sweden.

Yeah.

But you get 25%.

And I'm talking about European-wide.

It runs per country.

20 to 25% were not born in that country.

Some of them have been integrated fine, but 20 to 25 percent, you're getting what California is.

California has 27 percent of the resident population was not born here.

That should be an enriching experience, but it requires two things.

The host has to have confidence in his culture and civilization and say, I did not ask anybody to come.

They asked to come here.

It is my, not just

my wish, but my duty to acclimatize newcomers to the California American experience.

So we're going to learn the Fledge of Allegiance, Star Spangled Banner, what happened at Gettysburg, and

we're not going to have a multicultural, well, we're no better than Syria, or who's to say that your Egyptian homeland's not better than California.

None of that.

I agree with you.

And then the newcomer has to come in and say, as they used to, I just voted with my feet.

Yes, I'm going to wave the flag of Lebanon.

Yes, I'm going to talk about Israel.

Okay.

But I voted to come here.

And that's on the periphery.

But my values say that I don't

desecrate the flag on Veterans Day.

My values say I don't go out and shut down traffic on the Manhattan Bridge.

My values say I don't go out and try to beat up Jews on campus.

And if you don't follow that, then it doesn't work.

And here in California, one of the subtexts is: people say, I get this all the time.

How can you have 13.3% income tax rate and you're $40 billion broke?

How can you have at one time in the top 10 infrastructure and now you're down to about 48th ranking?

How can your test scores in

your public schools be sort of like Mississippi and Arkansas, which are higher, I think?

And how can you

have half of almost half the homelessness?

And how can you have one-third of all the welfare recipients?

And how can the wealthiest country in the world have 21%

below the poverty line?

And part of the answer is we took in 11 million people who were here illegally over the last 30 years.

And we have failed to integrate them, assimilate them, to allow them to fully participate in the American experience.

Very clear.

When you come in illegally and you reside illegally and you come in huge numbers and not you're not diverse,

then

the host is overwhelmed and you add to that equation the host has no confidence in his own civilization and the visitor knows that.

Yeah.

Well, just with all due respect,

they still lost, and Macron was still the French president, and he's proven himself a little weak kneed with China and in the Ukraine.

And so I don't see that the Le Pen National Front movement has really done much.

Well, what I'm saying is it shouldn't have done anything because

Mr.

Le Pen was a Holocaust denier, anti-Semite, right?

He was crazy.

But his daughter and his niece, her great niece, I think whatever her relationship is,

they took that movement and tried to mainstream it.

And they're in one of the most liberal places in the world, and they should have 1% of the electorate.

And when you look at those votes they've been getting, they're getting 40%.

And that's before this latest stuff.

And

I think Europe, the Ukraine war shook Europe up about how vulnerable it was and how an enemy right on its borders could have just gone right in and done whatever they wanted if the United States hadn't helped Ukraine and NATO.

And when Sweden and Finland wanted to

enter NATO and Russia threatened them, and Turkey threatened them, and Turkey's threatening Europeans, threatening Greeks.

All of that was the background.

And then you saw October 7th.

When you get almost half a million people in London, and they're screaming and yelling and attacking Britain, this country that they were dying to get into.

Well, a soft manifestation of it is:

what is a soft manifestation of the pushback?

It's something like Downington Abbey,

or it's something like all creatures big and small, right?

Yeah, great and small.

Great and small, yeah.

What it is, is this weird,

it's weird.

This rosy-colored, idyllic English, rural, English people, 96%

Anglo-Saxon,

whatever their background is, all speaking English, all wedded to Churchill and the Duke of Wellington and George III, right?

Yeah.

And the Union Jack.

And that doesn't exist anymore.

And so that's why people find those genres the majority.

They're still the majority.

That's the soft version of it.

The hard version is Brexit, get the hell out of the EU.

And what is the very, very hard?

The very, very hard will be very quickly is you're going to see candidates that say we're not going to have any more immigration.

It's going to be merucratic, limited,

legal only.

And that's where it is kind of in, you see it in the Italian government.

The Italian government is conservative now.

Yeah, that's true.

How about the Greek government?

It's

conservative as well.

And it's going to happen all over Europe.

And it's going to happen here, too.

When you see Mr.

Mayorkis lie like that,

right in front of Congress, you think anybody's going to say, I really like what he's doing on the border?

Maybe Pete Buttigig, but he's a fossil.

Everybody has nothing but contempt for him, Mayorkas, and Pete Buttigig, this whole left-wing elite project.

that doesn't address the concerns of everyday African Americans, Latinos,

anybody of any middle-class background who just wants to have the laws obeyed and wants it to be orderly.

But when, as I said, look at California.

When you don't assimilate immigrants and you don't try to insist on legalization, then you have the largest underground economy of any state.

Or you have the highest taxes and the least recompense,

very poor education, poor infrastructure, poor safety, despite paying the highest income tax, I think fifth highest sales tax in most counties, highest gas tax, and you don't get anything in return because you can't.

Because you've had millions of people from the most impoverished nations in the world who are told that when they come here, they have a right to come here illegally and the host should feel guilty.

And that doesn't work.

Yeah, it would seem it doesn't.

But I guess I'm just talking from experience.

When I run into these people, they're pretty much, well, my life's really good, so therefore the left-wing policies must be doing well.

And they're usually wealthier, you know, so they're not the people that get hit hard by high prices.

100%.

100%.

What we're seeing, the left is run lock, stock, and barrel by the Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton grifter in politics style, the CEO of of Silicon Valley Tech Company, a university president, a tenured for life professor.

It's that group.

And they live on the

bi-coastal elite corridors.

But

they're rapidly becoming the minority.

So if you're a poor African American and you're trying to make it in

inner city in Chicago and you've got your whole budget

affected by illegal immigration, or you're in New York and you're going to spend more for illegal immigration than you are for the police, and you're going to defund parts of the police service, you get the idea that these elites don't like you.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, you're surprisingly optimistic today on these topics, and so I hate to turn to the other topic, but it's very important that we talk about what's going on in the war in Israel.

I know that we have a hostage exchange going on.

There are supposed to be

150 Hamas

prisoners that have committed all sorts of crimes released for 50 Israelis.

And right now the count is at 24

Israelis and Thais and Filipinos have been released as of today and this is Friday.

We've had some interesting things rise up in this.

We saw a woman on Sky News by the name of Kay Burley and she was interviewing interviewing an Israeli spokesperson, and she told him the most extraordinary thing, that people are saying that because the Israelis are giving up three

Palestinian or Hamas lives or prisoners to one Israeli,

that means they don't value the Palestinians as much.

And the look on the Israeli spokesperson's face was

out of his head.

I know.

That is so stupid, but I was wondering if you had any thoughts.

Well, I mean,

that's that term, jump the shark.

We got to the point of absurdity now.

So, some idiot looks at 150 terrorists have to be exchanged who have blood on their hands for 50,

in theory, Israelis.

And we've only had, by the way, it's only 13 as I speak.

And the other 11 are Israelis, the other 11 are foreign nationals.

And you know what's going to to happen.

I'm making a little excursus here, but this is a disaster for Israel.

I mean, nobody's happier that they're getting back three and four-year-old girls.

But they're going to stop this war.

And

people from Gaza are going to filter back to the north on instructions,

human shields, collateral damage.

Hamas is going to regroup.

And just when the IDF starts in again to destroy this labyrinth, guess what?

Oh!

The Qataris have a breakthrough.

We're going to have another 30 hostages.

And they're going to meter them out.

And this is a bankrupt, amoral world.

So when you have a stupid newscaster who quotes that allegation that the Israelis somehow value life less,

because they're willing to let out three terrorists, back to terrorist killers, just to get one person for every three.

And that shows you

what?

Well, I guess his eyes popped out of the head as he said, well, why don't they just give it one for one then?

If you think we're so amoral.

Of course, the amoral people are saying we value our lives so much less than the Israelis value theirs that we are willing to

take captives, do whatever it takes, and we know that

they're so paranoid that they will give us three people for every one.

And they would never consent to one-on-one, would they?

Well, no, and of course, Israel would be more than happy to take such a treaty.

Only an idiot would even say that.

That newscaster, Kay Burley, she should be summoned to be fired, absolutely.

She should.

That was a votesque thing to say.

She said, well, some people say this.

No, nobody says that except your friends and you.

You're an abject idiot, and you're morally bankrupt to even say that.

And Israel is now faced with an existential problem.

It's politically impossible for them not to agree to get back their captives, especially when they're young and old people.

Everybody's for that.

But they know that they have to let out for everyone they get back, because these people do not value human life.

They're going to have to give back three terrorist killers.

Number one.

Number two, they're going to have to have a pause.

And that means any momentum they built up is going to be abbreviated.

That would be, we know what happened to George Patton.

He's rolling through France 50 miles a day.

He gets to Metz, and guess what?

They cut off his gas and divert it to Operation Market Garden.

He doesn't get across the Rhine for what?

All September, October, November, December, January, February, for five months.

Can you imagine when we're ready to reland on D-Day?

We're up over the beaches and all of a sudden the SS says, I tell you what, we have about 10,000 Americans.

We're going to kill them unless you have a hostage swap.

So you guys just stop.

I know you got over the beaches.

You're now in the Bokaj, but just stop for four or five days.

And then they keep doing it.

What would our grandparents do?

They would do this, what they did.

They said, we're going to keep going.

And you know what?

For each one of you people who kills an American or a British or an Allied soldier, we're going to hold you responsible.

We're going to hang you and we're going to hang all the top people.

And they did.

They did.

And they said, you know what?

We're going to.

That's what Bomber Harris said.

You sowed the wind, you're going to reap the whirlwind.

And that's what they did.

And they had no compunction about it.

And so

Hamas's plan will be from now until next year, end of next year, oh, here's 10 more.

Oh, here's 15 more.

Oh, here's 20.

Oh, I'm sorry that that poor IDF woman, she must have been shot at the hospital.

Oh, poor baby.

Well, that's she was on unit.

That's what they're going to do.

They're going to kill the people in the IDF.

But they're going to say, you know what?

You can still get nine little girls and old people, but we killed your IDF people.

And

how do you stop it?

You've got to keep going.

And you can't keep going because the United States is putting enormous pressure on you.

And Joe Biden is very unpopular and he's using this already in a campaign.

He's touring the country and I shouldn't say tour, broadcasting to the country that he helped get the hostages released.

And he's broadcasting on Thanksgiving.

We need to have unification of this country.

We need to unify all of our diverse ideas.

We're the greatest country in the world, why his political operative sends out memos on social media how to talk to your ultra-maga people at Thanksgiving.

In other words, how to start a big fight over Christmas dinner.

That's what they're doing.

That's what, you know, the semi-fascist ultra-maga, that opera, Phantom of the Opera speech he gave.

So

that's what we're Israel's dealing in with.

Yeah.

And they cannot do anything but say,

don't you think?

thank Joe Biden, he gave us the weapons.

It's kind of disingenuous for our conservative commentators.

They always get an Israeli on and they want him to confess what an awful person Joe Biden is.

Well, can't you think of something that Joe Biden's not doing?

You can't, what do you expect them to say?

They're 100% dependent on supply of Patriot batteries, iron dome missiles.

Of course they're not going to criticize Joe Biden because they know what that administration's like.

Look what they they did with the FBI and DOJ.

Look what they did to the January 6th protesters.

Look what they did with the 51 intelligence operatives that just lied.

They're capable of anything, so don't get on the wrong side of them while you're fighting.

Don't you think that Israel's calculation, because I've been listening to these commentators and

they are talking about that these prisoners that they're releasing were all criminal and involved in various

terrorist

attacks on Israelis.

And don't you think that the Israeli calculus is, yeah, let them out and get them on the battlefield and then we can take them out there?

I mean, that would be to me the only logical

thing.

They don't want to do this.

They have no choice.

They're forced to.

The United States is forcing them to do this.

The United States is.

Because the United States, as embodied by Joe Biden administration, is worried about the election.

And they're seeing

mass exodus, mass desertions of their people, young people, who are mentally unhinged and will vote against Joe Biden or stay home.

And they want to do anything.

It's no different than right before the midterms offering to cancel student debt or emptying the petroleum reserve.

It's the same idea.

They always put their interest ahead of the national interest.

And a national interest in a sane world would be call up the government, yet, and you say, look,

I'm going to hold off as much as I can.

I got crazy people in this country, but don't worry.

I'm going to give you 30 days.

You take care of business.

30 days.

I don't care what you do.

I'm going to support you.

But for 30 days.

And that would be a normal.

response.

That's what we did in prior wars.

And this one can't do it.

And somebody said, well, Victor, they're doing.

No, they're doing on day three.

before the Israelis had even replied to October 7th, Blinken was with the Turkish foreign minister talking about a ceasefire.

And you're dealing with SS.

That's who you're doing.

This is a death cult.

And this is what's so baffling that these people at the universities are out protesting.

And when you're asked, when you confront them, they will deny that it happened on October 7th.

And they will insist that the Israelis blew up a hospital.

And they will insist there's no tunnels under this hospital.

So they're like the SS

and they're killers, Hamas is.

And you can't deal with killers.

They're just absolutely a death cult.

The only bright spot that I see is that there were several hundred.

I don't know the exact number.

But apparently there were a lot of people wounded or got captured on October 7th.

And unlike Hamas, they're not killing them.

They're taking the men, treating their wounds, and they're interrogating them.

And they're comparing their stories, and they're getting, they can wear all the masks they want, the Hamas people.

But when an Israeli interrogator says, this is what you did, this is the penalty for what you did, this is who you are, this is where you live, this is who your family is.

We want to know who, how many people you know, they will identify them and they will cross-check them.

And they will have the names of all 2,000 of those people.

And I think they already have a lot.

So a lot of these buildings are blowing up are probably some of the residents of the architects of this.

But they will go after every one of those people.

They'll have to

send a message.

Last topic on this war in Gaza.

The Israelis are uncovering all sorts of things in the tunnels that they are opening up.

And I was wondering some of your information on that.

I saw that, and I said, so so this is what Joe Biden is paying for.

This is what Barack Obama paid for.

This is what Donald Trump did not pay for when he cut money to the PA and

Hamas.

When you're talking about a billions of dollars project, when you look at those tunnels, they have those reinforced concrete prefabbed arches on them.

They have 220 cables going along the side.

They have internet cables.

They have bathrooms.

They have kitchens.

They have dormitories.

They were living in a subterranean city, and they were siphoning off all of the foreign aid and using it on their own protection so that they could go out and wage terrorist acts and send off rockets.

And for them, it was a win-win.

We're going to go into Israel and slay people and decapitate them and rape them.

And then we're going to go hide in our tunnels.

And then, when Israel replies, they're not going to kill us, they're going to kill the civilians, and the world will get angry, and that's the win-win.

We get to live, we get to kill, and then we get the propaganda value of getting our own people killed.

We need them.

We need the cannon fodder.

That's what their attitude is.

And it's all predicated on those tunnels.

And they need to blow up every one of them.

Everyone.

And that whole city, as I said before, it'll be...

Paint your wagon movie, you know, nobody's seen that, probably, but it's an ancient movie.

But Clint Eastwood and Lee Marvin, the whole city drops down 30 feet because it's the subterranean tunneling underneath this old gold mining town.

That's what will happen.

Yeah, absolutely.

Well, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and then we'll come back and talk a little bit about the Iliad today.

Stay with us.

We'll be back.

We're back.

I would like to remind everybody that Victor, you can find Victor at his website, The Blade of Perseus.

It's victorhanson.com.

That's the URL.

And you can join for free and get our newsletter that we mail out about three or four times a week with the new articles on the website.

Or you can join for the VDH Ultra material at $5 a month or $50 a year.

So please come join us.

There's lots of VDH ultra material, and you won't be disappointed with the website.

So Victor,

I know that we want to talk about the Iliad and especially

to what extent is the Iliad a historical document and what can we know about or how much of it is about the Mycenaean and particularly what kind of evidence do we look at to say well this has some Mycenaean civilization that it does represent or maybe it doesn't at all but go ahead.

Well, everybody, we started with, as you remember, the Persian Wars, and we worked all the way down to Afghanistan

and the Israeli wars, so that took us over a year.

So, what we thought we would do is talk about great literature from Homer to contemporary times.

And you start in the West with the Iliad.

That's one of two monumental poems of about 15,000-plus lines that were composed orally, orally by memory,

by someone named Homer around 700 BC

about a far distant event in the past when Greeks called Achaeans went over to Asia Minor, modern-day Turkey, not far from the Dardanelles, and at a place called Troy they fought.

Okay.

That's what the Iliad is about.

The poem itself, and the word Iliad comes from Ilium, which is the Greek word for Troia.

And

it's about 10 to 12 weeks in the 10th year of the war.

And it's not the very end of the war where

Paris is killed and

the Trojan horse, that's not in it.

Nor is it the first part of the war.

It's just this period about the wrath of Achilles, the great hero.

He gets angry.

We're going to talk about the literary examples, but what is it?

Is it history?

Is it myth?

Is it combination?

And it's gone back and forth since the Middle Ages, but basically, the poem was composed by a supposedly blind bard by memory, but not quite by memory.

About 30% of the Iliad's language is formulaic, repetitive.

Rosy fingered dawn.

So he fell and his armor clattered upon him.

In other words, they're fillers, all in hexameter meter, sung by a bard who is trying to

compose a monumental poem.

And each time he does, believe me, it'll be different, slightly different.

And when he wants to put in an epithet or adjectives or now, he just goes on to automatic pilot for a while.

And then he has original material.

And if you think that it was written down, then you think he's not very bright compared to Virgil, who doesn't do that except by an effect, because Virgil composed it by writing.

But if you recalibrate and say this is the technique of an oral poet, like Milman Perry, the great American classicist, proved,

when in the 1920s he went to Serbia and found people like Homer still composing by formulaic composition through memory.

Okay, and they were illiterate like Homer.

So why do we have this Iliad?

Because

from the date of the actual destruction of Troy, which we can document by archaeology, somewhere around 1250 to 1200, to when we have Homer's version 500 years later,

it's like an onion.

Each generation there was an adaptation of the story.

Why do we have Homer's version and not his grandfather's or his great-great-great?

Because he happened to be, A,

probably the best of the tradition, the most famous, but more importantly, he coincided with the rise of the city-state and literacy.

So he composed it orally, but he was the last generation because when you have a literate society, people who are oral bards fade out.

So it was like his version was, what, set in stone by writing.

Somebody wrote it down.

So then they said, well, when did it take place, modern scholars?

Did it take place in 1250 and Homer was mouthing it?

And so when you read about the Iliad, it's just a window into Mycenaean civilization before the fall?

Is it the Dark Ages?

That is the period from the fall of Greek Mycenaean civilization around 1200 to its rediscovery around 750 in a different Greek type of social organization, the city-state?

Or is it Homer's own, did Homer, just alive, put everything in?

The answer, of course, is all three.

It's an onion, Mycenaean, Dark Age,

and contemporary with Homer's own period.

So if you're a historian, you want to learn about the Mycenaean period, you go into the Iliad and you say, oh my God,

there are place names in the catalog of ships that we have archaeological evidence for in the 13th and 14th century

or the Dark Ages, but Homer didn't know what they were because they didn't exist in 700.

So you'll say, well, why did he mention it?

He didn't know why he mentioned it.

He just mentioned it because he inherited it from some earlier bard that thought it sounded neat, old, ossified.

So that is a Mycenaean what we call relic.

How about descriptions of armor that didn't exist?

So he talks about a long silver-studded sword.

He talks about helmets that have boar's boar's teeth.

Whoever heard of a helmet with boar's teeth?

So if we were having this discussion in 1700, we'd say he just made it up.

It's a myth.

No.

He was describing a boar's tooth helmet because his prior predecessors did, and they had never seen one.

He'd never seen one.

But

thanks to archaeology, we've uncovered at least two of them.

So that the Mycenaeans who actually fought probably at Troy against, I guess they were a Hittite Semitic people,

some of them wore these decorative helmets that had boar's tooth, and that is very important for Homer to keep that presence alive.

Linguistic,

we know that when the Mycenaeans collapsed, people went into the hills of Arcadia or they fled or there was a Mycenaean restoration in Cyprus.

And that we know because on Linear B, which is a pre-Greek alphabet, Greek, it's Greek, but it uses pictograph symbols rather than alpha, beta, gamma.

Okay.

When you look at that script and you compare it to what we know later on when people use alpha beta gamma, it turns out that

classical Greek in Arcadia and classical Greek in Cyprus keeps the Mycenaean dialect.

And that Mycenaean dialect,

Arcadio Cypriot survives in one to two percent of the Homeric poems.

Why?

Because somebody thought that these words that nobody knows what they mean, about three or four hundred hapox Lagomana we call them or that the dialectical endings or the syntax whatever term you use Homer thinks like a borrow-tooth helmet they resonate an ossified ancient and therefore mysterious

past civilization that are are important to keep in the poem.

Was the poem ever written down in Mycenaean times and where it was all Mycenaean?

Probably so.

Because this was a literate society.

I think just two years ago, people found in the Peloponnese

a shard that had linear B, a tablet.

And that linear B tablet has three or four lines that are almost identical to the Iliad, although written in Arcadio-Cypriot, or what we call Linear B.

So it's not beyond the realm of possibility that there was a script, very short, that when the Mycenaeans came back from Homer for the next hundred years, somebody in Linear B wrote a poem about their conquest of what was Ilium.

And then they were imploded, or they

should say they imploded, they were conquered by sea people, whatever the the particular exegesis is of how the Mycenaeans suddenly and abruptly disappeared.

The Dark Ages came in, and guess what?

People were walking around, the population, nine out of ten people died, agriculture was decentralized, it collapsed.

It was a nomadic society around horses, sheep, goats.

And suddenly, that Mycenaean poem and that Mycenaean event was elaborated in the Dark Ages by oral blind poets.

And there was a lot of them.

They had the Odyssey, the

Wrath of Achilles and the Iliad, the destruction of

Ilium, the judgment of Paris.

They've all been lost except one, the Iliad and the sequel, the Odyssey.

But the point is that we can find things in the Dark Ages that were in this onion added to gift-giving, tribal chieftains, and people in the Iliad burned their dead.

We know the Mycenaeans never burned their dead.

They buried them.

But in the Dark Ages, they burned them.

So the onion gets thicker and thicker with more layers of dark age contamination.

And then we get into Homer's time,

and he starts using the word phalangas, phalanxes, even though if you're going to describe warriors that are heroes from the dark ages of the Mycenaean period, you want one-on-one dueling.

But implicit in his description is the fighting of his own period.

And you have some of the military equipment that reflects not Mycenaean or Dark Age, but contemporary 700s.

And there are, I think, two illusions that there are mysterious symbols

that may represent writing, that Homer knew of writing in his own time, and reflects that in

the poems.

So, what does this all mean?

It means that

Mycenaeans, some of them had names like Achilles, Mycenaean lords at

Tiran's, at Thebes, at Ga,

at Mycenae.

They had various expeditions to across the Aegean, and one of them

we have the Mycenaean tale of

Theseus and the Minotaur going to Crete, but one of them was to go over to Asia Minor and conquer a city.

They did so.

They magnified that achievement.

They had their names in there.

I don't know, I haven't got the whole list of names in Mycenaean Linear B that turn up in Homer, but there's a lot of them.

So let's just say Achilles was a small-scale Mycenaean thug or something, but once that society blew up, those names were exaggerated and exaggerated and exaggerated, and that original Mycenaean poem was elaborated and elaborated and elaborated, so that instead of being 100%, it was probably down to 3 or 4% over 400 years of Mycenaean authenticity, but the story remained there.

And so is it Dark Age?

The great classicist Moses Finley thought it was.

I don't think it is.

I think most of it, not all of it, but 70% of it reflects Homer's time around 700, where he took an old myth and he reworked the Dark Age renditions of it, generations over 500 years, and then he was a monumental genius, and he incorporated contemporary warfare, the contemporary city-state, contemporary agriculture, and it's now a rich tapestry of three different historical periods.

Well, Victor, you speak of Homer as one person, and I hope that next week we can have a discussion, at least for part of your time, on whether.

We read the Iliad not because we want to learn the history of it.

Historians do, but because it's a great piece of literature, and we'll talk about that next time.

Yeah, hopefully.

It's the growth of the character of Achilles.

Yeah.

And the debate over whether he was one person or a guild or

composed by great classicist Wolf in the 18th century.

Great.

Well, thank you for all of your wisdom this week.

And I just want to tell you that we did get a reader who wrote a comment that

he liked your work very much, of course.

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All right.

Well, thanks for everything, and thanks to our listeners.

We appreciate you.

Thank you, everybody.

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