What to do with the FBI and the Vietnam War

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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 Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

This is our Saturday edition and we look at things cultural, sometimes political.

We do a few of the current news stories before we get into

another subject that's in more depth.

And right now we're looking at wars and we're on the Vietnam War.

But we'll start with a few stories, current stories in the news first, and then we'll go to the Vietnam War.

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

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Welcome back, Victor.

So lots, so much going on.

I know that our Friday news roundup, we had quite a series of stories, but I didn't get one in that I was particularly interested in, and it is the CIA whistleblower who is saying that the CIA was investigating the lab origin of COVID and they came up that it was probably

came out of a lab, but then they were apparently, according to the whistleblower, paid off to say that the origin of COVID was uncertain.

And I was wondering, do you have thoughts on that?

It's a very

strange connection to COVID, I think.

Well, they had a team, a CIA team, and apparently six out of the seven

investigators who reviewed the evidence.

And I guess what they could do,

in addition to what doctors could do, they weren't looking at the genetic sequence or the medical aspects, but they were relying on stealthy sources,

probably in China, or people who had examined the Chinese media or had intercepted voice and email or text communications, and they came to the conclusion that the majority were

from

the majority of the evidence indicated that the virus had been

birthed, maybe not as a bioweapon, but the research had been long going,

and there had been some information or some indications that the virus had escaped much sooner than we were told in early 2020, and the Chinese may have reacted to it as if it was the SARS-1 type of virus, which they had been able to control.

And then it got out of control by 2020.

What's interesting about this is then there was an effort to suppress

that CIA finding, and it's sort of the bookend to Peter Dasek's Lancet

journal,

most prestigious medical journal in the world.

He got a team of people to go over to China.

They stonewalled him.

Didn't matter.

Nevertheless, they said it was more likely to be a

pangolin or a bat original transmission.

And of course, that was retracted and withdrawn because

it was also politicized, weaponized.

It was imperfect.

It was flawed.

So the question is, why when we have these prestigious institutions like Lancet or the CIA and their own people that are involved in these investigations repeatedly come back and say that

when you have a level four Wuhan virus controlled by the People's Liberation Army right at ground zero of the first documented, at least in the West, cases of this virus, that we still say that bats and pangolins were the method of transmission, even when there has never been any animal

known to have SARS, COVID, before a human had it.

None, period, zilch.

And most of the bats and pangolins are way distant from Wuhan's urban

meat market.

So this also begs a second question.

Why do they do this?

And I think the answer is self-evident.

Why do they do it?

Look at the original email correspondence between Francis Collins at the CDC and Anthony Fauci at the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases.

What are they talking about from the first moment they hear about it?

Basically, we've got to be very worried about this because there's going to be people who associate this virus at Wuhan with the money that we routed through Peter Dasick's Echo Health to fund gain-of-function research in coronaviruses, specifically SARS viruses, and this fits that pattern.

And therefore, people are going to suggest that we in the United States helped to birth this.

Which brings a third question and final one.

This is a billion-dollar project.

The French built the lab.

There's billions of dollars of salary and equipment.

It's rumored that we gave them $600,000 through EchoHealth, but that's a little drop in the bucket.

So what was the role that they were so worried about?

And I think the role that they they were so worried about, and this is what people have suggested about the CIA, that they thought by giving money to Wuhan

and maybe instrumentations,

expertise in texts, phone calls of experts to guide them in their research that would be off the books, they felt they had one a stake and then therefore they could monitor what the Chinese were doing.

In other words, they knew the Chinese were working on gain of function.

They knew it was outlawed in the United States.

So the CIA and our health, top health experts thought we better get in on this and find out exactly what level and what degree of sophistication they are, i.e.

for a bioweapon maybe,

they are

reaching.

And so we gave them a little stake and some help and that allowed us, I think, to

get in there,

have a stake and find out a little bit about what they were doing through exchanges with all these doctors.

And that's something they apparently did not want anybody to know.

They being Anthony Fauci, Francis Collins,

CIA, the FBI, et cetera, the medical community.

Nobody wanted to know that, which finally suggests to us the virus did come from a lab.

Yeah.

Well, that's such a grim scenario.

I hadn't really thought myself about the military's interest in that.

Well, think about the scenario, though.

So a million Americans died of it.

So you're sitting here.

I mean, I had been sick for a year and a half from long COVID.

So you're sitting here and you're thinking, this didn't have to happen.

Why did the United States participate, even at a later stage, in the creation of this monstrous virus?

Why did they do that?

And do they have any culpability?

And is Anthony Fauci a monster?

Because not only did he know about the creation of this virus and aid and abet its development, but then to hide his tracks, he gave us an incoherent public health policy.

Mask, no mask.

Social distancing, no social distancing.

Travel bans, no travel bans.

As he

waxed and waned and was desperate to find mechanisms that would hide his involvement.

And so I think that Anthony Fauci, I know it's going to offend some of you who idolize him, but he is going to go down in history as the most culpable public health official in American history.

He has been duplicitous, he has been not honest, he has been incompetent, and ultimately, much of what we have suffered from COVID hatched out of his mind.

Well, let's turn another

political situation.

Recently, Charles Grassley has warned the GOP to stop talking about defund the FBI.

He says, quote, we don't want to defund the police.

We don't want to defund the FBI.

You reform the FBI.

Ramaswamy has something very interesting in in his pocket, I guess you would say,

that he wanted to shut down the FBI and move the people that are good to the U.S.

Marshals.

And I was wondering your thoughts on either of those politicians.

Well, Charles Grassley is sort of a contradiction

about age and inability to hold high office because we have septogenarians that are failing and some octogenarians.

I'm thinking of

Joe Biden, I'm thinking of Diane Feinstein, I'm thinking of Federman, I'm thinking of Mitch McConnell,

and yet

I think he's 88, 89, and he's pretty sharp.

He's also a farmer, so I have a soft spot from him.

He was.

But his point was not that we shouldn't go after the FBI, but we should not fall into the trap that the left says, oh, patriotic right-wing people want to destroy the FBI.

We're helping it.

We're preserving it.

So what he wants to do is thread the needle.

Do not destroy the FBI's ability to hunt down people that need to be hunted down, whether foreign or domestic, but

reform it.

And so I'm not so sure Ramaswamy's position is all that different than Grassley's.

I think what others say is let them have the same amount of money, but do not concentrate the months in some multi-billion-dollar new headquarters with all sorts of types of perks and bonuses and incentives that these weaponized directors from Mueller to Comey to McCabe to Ray have exercised.

Don't do it.

Just, if you have to break it up a little bit, then give, you know, the terrorist element of the FBI, anti-terrorist to Homeland Security.

If you're looking at

fraud or something, that goes to the Department of Treasury, the FBI unit.

If you're looking at homicide, take it and give it to the DOJ.

And so you could take elements within the FBI and attach them to a different cabinetcy, and then that would help

break up the sources of power and not concentrate it in a few people's hands.

And

they could coordinate.

And that's why this new atrocious idea of a huge FBI building should never be built.

Never.

Shouldn't it reward those people for what they've done.

Yeah, absolutely.

Well, the last story that I didn't get to on Friday was that F-35 jet, which was abandoned in flight by its pilot and then found crashed.

Did you have any thoughts on that event?

Well, you know, everybody's been warning that

since World War II, when we had over 100,000 fighter craft created and bombers,

that we were putting

proverbially too few

too many eggs and too few baskets, too much money and too few weapon systems.

And when one goes down like an F-35, that is a hundred million dollars.

You can get a very sophisticated large drone

sophisticated large drone for a million bucks.

And you can get a hundred of them.

And as we see in Ukraine, they can be very effective.

So when you lose one of these, there's going to be a cry cry suggesting that they're too expensive.

Maybe you could have an F-35 up there directing a drone fleet.

There is a role for piloted fighter aircraft, but we put so much technology and computerized systems in these planes, and they're so expensive.

And they're so delicate that when one goes down, we lose this huge...

It's like a carrier.

When you lose a carrier, you lose $13 billion.

So I think what we're seeing is a return, a return to the World War II strategy of building thousands of aircraft at a very cheap cost to spread out our exposure.

And that won't be, you know, 18-year-olds in cheap planes.

It'll be drones.

drones the size of your thumb and drones the size of an airplane and drones that are ships and drones that are tanks and it makes a lot more sense.

And so, I think this is just a reminder that we're looking, I think, at the last generation of multi-multi-million dollar, hundred million-dollar-plus airplanes.

Because

the ability to fly those day in and day out and not have an accident, it's very hard to do.

And when you lose one,

you lose the entire city budget of a major city.

Well, just before we go to break, there is a smaller story, but maybe a little bit more,

I don't know how to say this, a little more entertaining, even though it's terrible, that Russell Brandt is being canceled.

He's had some of his

YouTube

videos suspended and some of his streaming has been suspended.

And he's being accused now of sexual assaults that occurred many, many years ago.

So I was wondering if you had any short thoughts on our new canceled celebrity.

Look, everybody

who knew Russell Brandt before his conversion knew that he

was

a despicable person.

He was rude, he was vile, he was profane, he was hard left, he was a Marxist, he would get on and insult people, he tried to destroy people's reputation.

So it was no surprise that he was a serial predator.

There were too many voices coming out against him.

That said, they're coming out against him for one reason because he has now created kind of a Robert F.

Kennedy Jr.

persona.

He's questioned the lockdowns, he's questioned the vaccinations.

And from that platform, he's kind of expanded out, attacking the woke, transgender, everything

in a manner that he's sort of the rogue,

disgusting version of Bill Maher or Elon Musk or Matt Taibbi.

And so people on the right have a natural inclination to listen to him.

And he's got a podcast that's very popular, et cetera.

But the fact is that once he crossed that ideological line, as everybody listening knows, then you give up your indemnity policy.

You give up your armor.

The left says to every person, you, me, everybody listening, look,

if you just mouth these left-wing shibbolets, you get insurance.

You have armor.

So that means when you slip and you say some bad word, if you're Joe Biden and you call an African-American boy or a junkie or you ain't black, it doesn't matter.

You purchased insurance.

If you're Donald Trump and you say a Mexican judge, in the sense, I guess, like an Irish judge or a Polish judge, in which we don't use the whole hyphenated nomenclature for ethnic groups in America.

I know that people have called me a Swede.

I didn't say, I'm a Swedish American.

Don't put me down.

But they did with Donald Trump, and they did because he had no insurance.

So that's what it was all about.

He gave up his insurance when he started crossing the boundaries and attacking the idols of the left, which are mandatory vaccination ad infinitum and lockdowns and masks and three sexes.

And when he started doing that, they went back and looked at his entire personal life.

And of course, no surprise that he had sexual relations in a very casual and crass way with a number of women, that he was profane, he was mean, he was cruel.

Okay, he was all of that.

Yet, I think the age of consent in Britain is 16 years old.

And so I don't think that anybody has charged him with statutory rape yet.

he had.

And there is an element, as there is to all celebrities, that I think all of us understand,

is that when someone is targeted for political or ideological reasons and then they go back through their past, and it's not their immediate past, but they go back years, think Brett Kavanaugh, and they find things or they make up things, or

a woman goes after Donald Trump 30 years ago and can't remember the day or the place where where she was supposedly attacked, then you get into the

fantasy world of accusations.

And so they're doing it for the wrong reasons.

I don't know whether the accusations are true or not.

He's perfectly capable given his career of doing stuff.

But the real story here is

he said things that were

anti-orthodox, heterodox, and people didn't like it, so they decided to ostracize him, ban him, dox him, cancel him out and we should feel bad about what they're doing to him but not back not to defend his conduct.

Yeah okay well Victor let's go ahead and take a break and we'll come back.

This is the Victor Davis Hansen show and we'll be back after these messages.

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Well, Victor, we're on to the Vietnam War and kind of a free flow

approach to it.

So

I just wanted to let your listeners know that you have a book out called Carnage and Culture, and you do do a chapter on the Vietnam War.

So an excellent

textbook to look at all of the

wars.

How did you set that up, Victor?

It was all of the wars that were

hard to win or significant?

I took ten elements, cultural elements of Western armies from antiquity to the present.

So their reliance on superior technology,

the reliance on infantry as their primary force, militia, a nation in arms, on constitutional government, you know, like freedom or decisive battle, that they like to hit the enemy with overwhelming firepower and

a head-on collision.

And discipline, that they had a different idea of discipline.

It wasn't a tribal idea.

It was regularized, it was systemized.

And then I went through ten battles, each of them that displayed all of those traits,

but emphasized one in each battle.

So for Vietnam, I

took Tet

and I suggested that the Sturman drang, the back and forth of criticism in a free society actually forced us during that war to

be much more sophisticated in the way that we dealt with the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese.

Tet was a great U.S.

victory.

We lost a thousand dead.

It was tragic.

It was a surprise attack.

We had people on the lawn of the embassy in Saigon.

But what no one told us is that

we did kill 40,000 of the Viet Cong and we wiped it out for a year or two in the entire South.

And yet that chapter suggests that a free press, back and forth, argumentation, dissent is valuable for our armed forces, but to a limited degree.

So you cannot just

unleash the press to destroy what was a successful campaign.

And in that book, I also looked at defeats of Western armies in the epilogue

and the conclusion.

So the main thesis of it was not that the West wins every

battle.

I mean, the Byzantine Empire was crushed.

The Roman Empire fell.

There's a lot of colonial armies that were wiped out in Africa, etc.

But my point is this: that

the Western paradigm gave armies a greater level of latitude so that Hernan Cortez could find fleets to sail over to the Caribbean and then get over to the coast of Mexico and then march in.

And the idea that Montezuma could do that and land in Barcelona is impossible.

No other country could do that except a European country.

And so

it gives the European army or the Western armies not absolute guarantees of victory, but advantages in logistics, supply, command, etc.

And that allows them to fight often with fewer numbers, far from home, in disadvantages, disadvantageous places and locales in a way that their enemies cannot.

Now every once in a while they bump into a Genghis Khan or Attila the Hun or Hannibal and they are in the wrong place at the wrong time, maybe in the First Afghan War, and then

those advantages are nullified.

But over time and space there is a reason

why the Chinese uniforms look like ours and the Russians look like ours and every country in Africa who has a military look like ours.

And guns tend to look like those that were created in the United States and Europe.

It doesn't mean we invent things in every case.

The Chinese invented gunpowder, but they used it largely for fireworks.

And every subsequent advance in gunpowder, whether it's corn gunpowder or flintlocks or percussion caps, came from the West.

So on to Vietnam.

One thing I would like to ask just before you start is we have all these movies in popular lore, and it seems that the suggestion is that

the Vietnam War was a disaster and that we lost.

And I know that you have a different opinion on that, and I was hoping that that at least could come out in your discussion.

Yes.

Well,

the first generation of

Vietnam movies,

Apocalypse Now,

the Deer Deerhunter was not anti-American, but it revealed that the whole effort was

a disaster.

And

Apocalypse Now suggested it was surreal.

That was a modern take on Conrad's Heart of Darkness.

But the second and third and fourth generation, Platoon is another Oliver Stone, that Oliver Stone

movie was emblematic of the general feel that everything was wrong about Vietnam.

But when you start looking at subsequent movies, that Mel Gibson movie about landing when we were young, or I forgot.

We were soldiers.

When we were soldiers, yeah.

That was very balanced.

And so

what is the story before we go into the war itself?

It was, we won most battles, as we always do.

But we have a great difficulty translating tactical victory into strategic advantage and to end a war when we're far from home in an optional war.

And Vietnam reminds us, as does Afghanistan, why that is so.

A,

we're not threatened with an existential enemy.

It's an optional, preventive, preemptive war.

So you have to go in, defeat the enemy, and get out before the American people say, why are we worried about the Ukrainian border and not our war?

Why are we having 58,000 die in Vietnam when we don't have enough money for necessary programs at home, that kind of stuff?

Or

people will say

we can't use all of the weapons and tactics at our disposal because we're a Western humane society.

So if the Viet Cong killed 80,000 people, North Vietnamese did, people that spoke foreign languages had

glasses at whey, we can't do that.

Or we can't allow, we don't get to use our firepower, you know, Operation Linebacker, Rolling Thunder bombing, because we can't, you have to be selective about the targeting.

Or

in a house-to-house insurgency or counterterrorism tactics, they're not conducive to tanks and artillery the way we see in Ukraine today.

So given all of those variables and

we have soldiers walking in neighborhoods when I was in bedded, you go into Baghdad or you go into Fallujah or you go into Taji and who is who?

It's not like a battlefield where you blast them in the first Gulf War to smithereens.

If anybody serves up on the platter a Western way of war the way Saddam did in the first war, then the war will be very short and there will be some strategic resolution, but that's very rare.

Nobody wants to do that within a Western army.

So that was a problem in Vietnam.

It was a 20-year war.

It started when the French gave up and said that they no longer felt in a cost-benefit analysis.

Dien Ben Phu, after that disaster, they just said, you know what?

At one time

Indochina was the jewel of the French Empire, but whether it's Cambodia or Laos or Thailand or Vietnam, we're out of here because we cannot have a colonial presence on the borders of Russia and China, not during the Cold War.

We're not going to do it.

So they turned to us before they made that decision.

And the Eisenhower administration had given them several hundred million, but was not willing to give them the necessary tools to win.

Had we wanted the French to win, we probably could have done it because they were very everybody said, well, you know, they were very, very effective as fighters, as they were in Algeria.

But they didn't have the financial or military wherewithal to do that.

So then

they divided it up and they said, you know what, the Japanese had been here and they kicked out the Japanese.

So the French took over.

And by 1955, these communist insurrections were had foamen in a civil war between mostly conservative Vietnamese in the south and

communists that were close to the Russians and China geographically in the north

under

Ho Chi Minh.

And the Americans didn't quite know what to do.

And we didn't get involved.

Eisenhower said, don't get involved.

So then John Kennedy came in and he put in eventually 25,000 soldiers.

And the idea was we were going to train the South Vietnamese to do two things.

to defend the DMZ so that conventional army couldn't come from the north and to wipe out these communist infiltrators that had dispersed themselves with the population.

And then he was assassinated.

And then LBJ said in his campaign of 1964, I am not going to send American boys over to Vietnam to fight a war that

Vietnamese boys should fight.

And of course, that was a lie.

So within two years, we had 500,000 soldiers there.

And they were attacked in the south by Viet Cong in insurgency operations.

And that required the CIA to do things.

It leaked out in the Pentagon Papers.

The Phoenix program was very successful.

They just went in, they found out who the communist grandees were in these villages, and they took them out.

And they armed the montagnards and the hills, and they helped.

And after Ted, as I said, by 1967, there was not an active Viet Cong force in the South.

And Mark Moyer is writing a three-volume history in the first Triumph Forsaken.

The theme of that book is that we were doing pretty well, even though we blast William Westmoreland for his search and destroy missions, which Moyer defended.

And he said that the key mistake was the Kennedy administration's idea that they thought that Diem was too crooked or corrupt or ineffective.

He was a Catholic and he had his entire family was part of the government.

And they took him out.

But what they failed to realize is that he had been making headway against the Viet Cong, and he had rallied support.

And thousands of people,

when they knew

that

the peninsula was going to be divided, people did not go north to join Ho Chi Minh's communist project.

They all went, over a million fled.

So that was very indicative.

And Diem was not unliked and hated like Kennedy said he would.

But

there were people in the Kennedy administration,

our ambassador, Ellsworth Bunker and others, that thought

we should get rid of Diem.

I don't know if they planned on killing him, but they killed his brother and they killed him.

And after that,

there was no leadership.

And the corruption, far from waning, it waxed and things got bad.

And then LBJ took over, and then there was Tet

and LBJ just panicked after Tet and said, you know, basically had decided not to run for president.

And by this time, we'd been in there for four years,

and there was a huge anti-war demonstration.

And the only, and he went in

67, 68, we had this kind of mass bombing, Rolling Thunder.

It didn't seem to work.

The only way the war was going to be ended was simple.

Everybody knew it, and nobody wanted to do it.

You had to mine the harbors at Haiphong so they could not get massive supplies from China and Russia by sea.

You had to destroy the Mekong trails

of supply

into

Vietnam, and you had to go north and destroy the people who were planning the subversion of the South and the conventional war in the North.

And you had to do all that without provoking a nuclear war with nuclear China and Russia.

And then they elected Richard Nixon in a landslide victory.

And what did he do?

He ended the draft.

I was

17 and I turned 18 my first year

at UC Santa Cruz and I got a lottery number 245.

And that year I think they only called up 35 people and by the end of 1971 into 72 almost almost all American troops had been withdrawn and he called it Vietnamization and then there was about you know 10,000 advisors that weren't actively involved in combat but it mostly was an air war and we gave them air cover but more importantly the next type of air campaign was not like Rolling Thunder, Operation Linebracker.

It was specific.

And this was first-generation laser-guided smart bombs.

So we targeted the communist hierarchy, including Russians that were running their anti-missile batteries.

And we pretty much obliterated it.

And we brought them to their knees.

And they went to Paris and said, let's have negotiations.

And there was, by 1972, there were no Americans really in there on the ground fighting.

And the South Vietnamese were a viable force.

And they had a larger army than the North, and they had kind of obliterated the Viet Cong.

And so if they were going to lose that war, it was not going to come from an

AK-47 shooting behind a building.

It was going to come from tanks, Russian tank T, you know, 34 tanks coming down a freeway.

And they had the air power and the artillery to stop it.

And then we had Watergate in 1973, and Nixon was emasculated.

Kissinger was

kind of lost his luster, and the U.S.

Senate

connected Nixon with Vietnam, even though he hadn't started.

He was the one that was getting us out.

And lo and behold, I think they had 17 different Senate resolutions cutting off aid to South Vietnam.

I don't know what they were doing because South Vietnam, it was corrupt, absolutely, but compared to the murderers in North Vietnam, it was saintly.

And yet,

everybody believed, believed

that

the North Vietnamese would win.

They would come in.

They would have agrarian reform.

They would give equality to women.

It would be a paradise.

So they were rooting.

I'm serious.

They were rooting for the North Vietnamese.

Jane Fonda did that.

Tom Hayden said that.

There were congress people that wanted them to win.

There were journalists that stayed there.

And guess what happened?

They took a conventional army right down Highway 1 into Saigon.

and we did not allow air power.

We cut their gas.

It was during the oil crisis anyway.

We cut their gas.

We cut their munitions, and they just collapsed, crumbled.

And when they started to crumble, the North said, Lido-To said, oh, wait.

Yeah, we had a peace treaty that the war was over in 74.

And yeah, it's over.

But now, since we're cheating and we're probing and the probing is working and the Americans are not giving you any weapons and they're not fighting on the ground with you and they're not even giving you air support, well, just forget the Paris Peace Accord agreements.

We're going to go and start the war again.

And they did.

And so within a few months, they were in Saigon and we had that picture of the 1975 embassy.

of people,

you know, trying to smash their way into the embassy, get to the roof, get the helicopters, fly them out, push planes off the carriers to give room.

And

it was 1.0 what we saw with Kabul 2.0.

It was a

utter humiliation of America.

And then all what the left said,

remember what they said, that once you got the colonialist French and the imperialist Americans out and their running-dog lackeys out, then you would turn power to the people

and you would have a utopia in Southeast Asia.

And suddenly we heard of this guy named Pol Pot

and

Long Ngo, our American ally, got out of Cambodia and he killed a million people, just slaughtered them.

And then we learned that

when the North Vietnamese arrived in Saigon, they didn't say, oh, now that the imperialists are out, we're going to have kind of a reconciliation committee and we're going to extend our hand in brotherhood.

No, they put about a million people in camps, 250,000 people drowned, the boat people trying to get out of Vietnam, another 250,000, mostly people, Montignards, Hmong,

they fled, they fled to the United States.

They airlift today 70,000.

It was my

last year in college.

They airlifted 75,000 into Fresno, and these people who had never seen natural gas stoves or cars right out of the mountains of Vietnam.

And it was one of the biggest airlifts in history.

And so that was the end of it.

And then after that,

nobody wanted to do anything.

So we didn't really get involved from 75 until 91 with the first Gulf War.

But the revisionists

who,

and I mentioned Mark Moyer, the fine historian, but there's others.

Wordley was a great historian, and he wrote a book called A Better War, and that was kind of a pay on to Creighton Abrams.

And Moyer's book is kind of a pay on to William Westmoreland.

And they look at the data much differently.

And they said the American soldier was not a fracker, drug addict, hippie, anti-war, fragging his officers.

For the the most part, they were very effective soldiers, and they fought very well, and they were very disciplined.

And in battle after battle, they defeated the enemy.

And when you look at the Kaesong bombing campaign,

you can fault the generals for saying that we have to protect this outpost near the DMZ with air power.

And then, after we not only protected it, we wiped out a whole division of North Vietnamese.

Then we just vacated it.

That was kind of crazy.

But the command level was not good.

But at the colonel, lieutenant colonel, major, captain level, and sergeant, corporal, private, it was excellent.

And we defeated the enemy again and again and again.

And so it was a great tragedy, both defeated at Vietnam.

And I know that critics are listening and say, well, Victor, Vietnam's our friend now because

they're a foil to China.

They're a friend because the Chinese are a little different than they

were then.

The Chinese are not quite communist kindreds.

They're a klepto-communist state and they're imperialistic and they're trying to take over everybody.

And

don't kid yourself, the North Vietnamese are now, what is now Vietnam, is a hardcore Stalinist state.

But they have the same interests as we do in one area and one area alone.

They hate the Chinese communist imperialist.

And so we're trying to help them and people of the Philippines and build a new alliance to thwart China.

But

it comes up also when people say we have to be careful about

Russia.

We don't want to offend Russia and help in this proxy war with Ukraine.

And I'm one of those who says that, but let's be frank.

Russia had no ambitions.

China had no ambitions.

If they hadn't have given the North Vietnamese Sam missiles or anti-tank weapons or billions of dollars of military equipment, or if they did not have Russians themselves inside Vietnam killing Americans in the way the Iranians were doing,

we would have easily won the war.

So the Chinese, just as they did in Korea when they sent a million people in to attack us and they

armed to the teeth the North Koreans in that proxy war and just as the Russians did in Vietnam and in Korea they flew MiG-15s and just as the Iranians did in the Iraq war

don't have any if you are opposed to the Ukraine-Ukrainian war and you do not want the Americans to arm or to put boots on the ground, that's a legitimate position, but it's not legitimate because it's unfair to Russia because that's what Russia has done against us every time they've been

we've been in a proxy war with them.

Yeah.

Well, if I can ask a question before we go to break,

you said they killed his brother and they killed Diem.

Do you, I mean, I know that that's controversial, and so perhaps you were using they without specifying who they was on purpose, but I was wondering if you had any thoughts on the assassination of Diem.

Well, it was passed on to the American people that it was necessary that he be killed because he was incompetent and he was corrupt.

And

his brother knew and Madame New and all of these people, this whole conglomerate of Catholics, A, were a minority of the population.

And they were westernized.

They spoke French.

They had been

the elite and therefore they were out of touch of the peasant class.

And therefore, the peasant class was naturally resentful of them and of their out-of-touch leaders and the way they were not of Ho Chi Minh.

But of course it was all a myth.

Ho Chi Minh was a cook in Paris.

He spoke beautiful French.

And a lot of the North Vietnamese and communist elite had been trained in China and Russia.

So that wasn't, so the point is that getting Cai and then later Thu

to in there was no improvement.

And in fact, if you look at Diem, he had more credibility than the later two presidents did.

And the United States, more importantly,

we don't do well when we call in generals and we said, we do not think Diem is doing very well, and do the murder, as I said before, the Murder and Cathedral Act, where we say, is there not a person that can solve this problem?

And then the generals went out and killed him.

And then we said, oh my God, when we meant

maybe we can get an improvement, we meant maybe an election or maybe we meant a quiet little conference and give him a chateau in Hawaii or something.

But you guys really overdid it.

But if you read the transcripts of the reactions to it, you will read very quickly that

there was not a lot of lamentations on our part that he was killed.

And

so

we were, the CIA was,

you know,

ultimately responsible for his death.

They would not have ever tried to kill DiM if the CIA had opposed it.

Or if Henry,

Ellsworth Bunker came in later, but it was really Henry Cabot Lodge who was the ambassador at the time.

He knew all about it.

He didn't like Diem.

It was really controversial because when JFK was assassinated, I don't know if you you remember the character named Madame New.

She was very beautiful and very elegant and very Western, and she

was very bitter because after the Diem family was dethroned, they fled and she was in the West, off in the United States, and she said something to the effect that the chickens came home to roost.

i.e., Kennedy had ordered the assassination of her brother, and therefore it had stirred up, and people got very, very angry at that but

if you read

the second volume of Moyer's book triumph it carries on this idea that the first volume triumph forsaken is is everything went downhill when we ordered his assassination and we were suspect in the eyes of the South Vietnamese but in triumph we gain then we tried to regain

control and we worked better with the South Vietnamese government than we had with Diem in the sense not because

they weren't Diem, but just because we'd learned our mistakes and we didn't order him around as much.

And he ended up being a pretty good leader finally and a legitimate leader, although we sold him down the river when we forced him to sign all these agreements when we cut off his military aid.

And he asked us, how am I going to protect my country when the Soviet Union and China have armed these communists to the teeth and they will not honor this agreement.

I guarantee you they won't.

And you will not give me air support and you will not even give me gas for my tanks and our bullets for my guns and shells for my artillery.

And we said, oh, well, you know, Nixon was corrupt, Watergate, we're tired, Jerry Ford doesn't know what he's doing, so

he will greenlight this policy.

We're sorry, we're done with you.

We've been here for 12 years, and 12 years is enough.

Do you think that's what's going to happen with Ukraine eventually?

It always happens.

The only way it doesn't happen is World War II.

World War I, we feel it's an existential war.

It may or may not have been.

World War II was,

and everybody supported it.

And Korea was a different generation.

And

got to remember, as we said about Korea, it was hard,

ugly, dirty fighting from July of 1950

to July of 1951.

But then we saved, I think Matthew Ridgway saved the theater.

We had been, we were back to the DMZ.

We had destroyed a million of the North Vietnamese and Communist Chinese.

And then it was a...

It wasn't a Verdun.

It was just a static war where each side was shelling and making incursions.

But if you look at the actual deaths per month, they dropped radically the last two years of the war.

But at the end of the war, there was very little support for the Korean War, and Vietnam had a lot of initial support.

And then it just dive, dive, dive.

And the Christmas bombing of 1973, when it was done with laser-guided bombs, There was a little increase in support, up to about 50%, because that really wiped out a lot of communists.

And it said to the Communist apparatus, if you're going to sit here with your Russian and Chinese advisors in Hanoi

and you think you're free of any danger while you send assassins down that are killing American soldiers inside South Vietnam.

And you know, another thing that I think Mark Moyer pointed out really well,

the word Viet Cong was just kind of a construct.

There was almost nobody in the South who said, I want to be a communist and I'm trapped in the South, so I'm going to form the Viet Cong.

The Viet Cong were northerners.

It was a northern Vietnam enterprise to send in counter insurgencies under the cloak that they had actual peasant support.

They didn't.

And you can tell they didn't because after Teth, they wiped them out.

and nobody lamented their loss.

And the war was not won by the Viet Cong.

There was no Viet Cong.

There were the North Vietnamese and there were the North Vietnamese that infiltrated in the South and said they were Viet Cong.

And

so, yeah, we don't have a tolerance for long wars, whether it's in Afghanistan.

Iraq was a little different because we were there from 2003 and by 2007,

that was four years.

By 2007, there was no support for the war.

But whatever you want to say that David Petraeus' surge worked pretty well.

And today, there is a government.

It's a constitutional government.

It's in Iraq.

Thanks to Donald Trump, it saved it from ISIS that was almost ready to fall.

It bombed, as he said, the SHIT out of ISIS.

It kept the Russians out.

It kept the Iranians out.

He killed Sulaimani.

He bombed the Wagner group.

And today, as we speak, Iraq is a functional society without Saddam Hussein killing a million people.

I don't know in a cost-to-benefit analysis that justifies the war, but it did not.

That was the bad war, remember.

That's what Barack Obama said when he ran for office.

Bush's war was bad.

Iraq, I will get us out.

And he did.

He drew everybody out, and ISIS took over.

He almost ruined it.

But Afghanistan was the good war, and that's why he sent troops.

Well, the good war was always the bad war, because Afghanistan, as I said earlier, it has no ports.

It's landlocked.

And it's surrounded with borders with China and the former Soviet Union Union and nuclear Pakistan and

it's got rough terrain and it's got rough weather and it's hard to get to and it's pre-civilizational and Iraq had some affinity with modernism and it was clear and it was flat and it was open and it was ideal for air power and they had ports and we had troops in the region and we knew the people.

We'd been there before.

So anybody, I wrote an essay very early.

I said Iraq will be the easy, comparatively easy war in comparison to Afghanistan.

That's the tough one.

Well, Victor, we need to take a break and then we're going to come back and talk a little bit about agriculture.

Stay with us.

This is the Victor Davis-Hansen Show and we'll be right back.

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You can find Victor on social media at X, now the former Twitter.

It's at VD Hansen.

And then he has Hansen's Morning Cup on Facebook.

And there's also the Victor Davis Hansen Fan Club, which is not associated with us, but lots of members.

And they bring out lots of the old stuff as well as the new stuff that Victor has done, either in speeches or in his writing.

So it's a great fan club to be a part of.

Victor, so we want to go into agriculture or turn to agriculture.

And I know that we often hear this phrase, we are a community, but agriculture as well is a community.

And I know you wanted to talk a little bit about that community.

You know, everybody who wants to know about the roles of neighbors

and farming and the local regional agriculture should read Hesiod's Works and Days.

It was written by a Greek who lived up in Ascra in Boeotia, about 20 miles from the capital at Thebes.

And he wrote it, I shouldn't say he wrote it, it's composed orally probably, around 700 BC.

And it's a kind of an almanac of what, that's what the days are,

what you do on a farm, and the works are what is the ideology of a farmer.

And

he's most famously distinguishes two types of jealousy or envy.

The good envy, that you see your farmer's wagon and you want to make one better, and that makes you work harder, and the bad

jealousy, which makes you want to sabotage it because you don't have one like it.

But he has a very ambiguous, and I think very accurate view of neighbors.

And so when we were farming, we had

50, 45 acres in one place and 135 in another.

But we had a very, what we, I guess, people at Stanford would call a diverse

neighborhood because we were kind of a larger small farm.

So we had a Japanese American on one side.

We had a Sikh American on another.

We had a Dutch American.

We had an Armenian American.

We had a Mexican American.

We had another Armenian American.

And

so we were surrounded by different groups of people of different backgrounds, different values.

And the main ethos when you're small farming and neighbors is

it's kind of funny that you develop a hyper-legalistic attitude.

And what do I mean by that is that I think my grandfather really embodied it, that everybody understands that we're targeted by city people.

So among us, we have an ethos that we follow to the letter neighborliness.

Now what does that mean?

That means if you

are short a vineyard wagon then you loan it to your neighbor but that neighbor then gives it back and if it has a flat he puts a new tire and he gives it back promptly.

Or

if

to take another example If you have a communal ditch and you have to irrigate, then you to the letter do not take more than the acre feet allotment that you have, otherwise you'll hurt someone.

Ows do it.

If you're on a party telephone line, you make sure your grandmother, your wife, your sister does not talk more than her allotted 10 minutes and hog the line.

She does not listen to other people on the line.

And that was sort of the ethos.

And you associate with these people.

You have them over for dinner.

You go over to their house.

You also, this is very important, you don't trespass.

I know people say, well, if everybody's friendly, you just kind of, there's no such thing as borders.

No, it's almost the opposite because you don't want anybody to trespass on your place, and so then you accord a courtesy.

So I would remember if I had to go talk to a neighbor and I wanted to walk to his home, I felt really eerie, creepy going through his vineyard or orchard.

When we were, I think, eight years old, my twin and I would

would drop us off at a friend about two miles away.

And then after we played for about two hours, my mother came home, and we got to walk home because we would not walk on the road.

But we cut through three farms, and my brother and I were really scared.

We'd run as fast as we could.

And then as soon as we got to the outer edge, It's kind of like Hobbits in the Shire.

As soon as we got to the outer edge, we just felt so relaxed.

We were home and safe.

And we would see Joe and Manuel, the hired men, and my grandfather or somebody out there.

It was really, but you didn't do that.

But there were some people who didn't follow the rules.

So maybe out of six or seven neighbors,

there would be a person who, as I've said earlier,

he would come by at night and pick fruit off your trees and then peddle them at

farmers market.

He would borrow your vineyard wagon and never

turn it back to you until you had to ask and ask and ask.

He would sneak in at night and turn on his valves and shut your gate off and direct the water on your turn to his.

He would have your hired man, this happened, I wrote about it this week on the Ultra, he would have your man make a quick deal.

So if he liked the way your man disc a vineyard or an orchard and he liked your quality of your tractor or your tandem disc,

Dahlmery's good made a good disc if you had something like that, then at night he would have him come over, sneak over, and

on a cash per hour basis, work his field.

And then my grandfather would say, Danny, why are you doing this?

This is my tractor.

You can do it on your own time, but you're sneaking and using my diesel fuel and my tractor.

And he would go over and say, Mr.

X, please don't do that.

But his attitude was, I just keep pressing until I get caught.

And so it was a very strange relationship.

But

if you look at the whole neighborhood calculus, and I look at those people I just named, and I look at their children,

they all grew up working on the farm.

When the drug epidemic hit my local high school in the late 60s, rural, and it did hit it hard.

We had about four ODs.

We had a lot of people who were arrested.

None of those farm families had a drug addict that I can think of.

And when I look at those kids and I look see where they are now, they're all successful.

They're all successful.

And when I talk to them and I run into the children of my age, and it's rare because everybody's scattered now,

they all have fond memories.

Nobody locked their home.

When a big rain came, people tried to come over and say, if you want to use my tractor, go ahead.

And the neighbor in question I was talking about, I kind of really liked him in this sense, that he was the antithesis to neighborliness, and he was human nature in the raw.

So often I would go talk to him just to understand his mentality because I was under the deep suspicion that outside the sanctuary of our farm, his Hobbesian view of a war of everybody against everybody was the norm.

So I'll give you one example.

In 1976,

an inordinate rain came and wiped out the entire raisin crop.

My cousin was trying to do his best working here, but I was in graduate school.

My mom called me and she said, is there any way you can come down and help your cousin?

So I drove down.

I flunked my French test because I was just ready to study and I was like reading French three or four hours a night and boning up.

And then I took a whole week off right before the test.

And I came down and it was just hopeless.

You know, we were trying to spray Botron or Botran.

captan fungicides on the trays.

I think they're both outlawed now.

And

stop the mold and we lost the whole crop.

But he had very sandy soil.

Sandy soil is hot soil, and that means that vines ripen quicker, grapes do.

So he picked early, and it means you don't have a very big crop, so usually you don't want a sandy vineyard.

But some years with a light crop and a hotter soil temperatures, three to five to six days quicker, you'll get 20 bricks of sugar.

And he did.

So he saved his whole crop.

So the price went from four hundred dollars up to twelve hundred per ton

and

most of the neighbors lost it not all but they were commiserating with each other oh wow we get nothing we uh we're gonna have to mortgage and i walked over to him and i said wow

this is really bad i got to get back to school but my parents had

any money they had was tied up in this this crop and it's all gone.

It's $100,000.

It's gone.

And they're going to have to mortgage the ranch for the first time since 1932.

And he said, well,

some people's loss is other people's gain.

Because

sure as the sunrise, young Mr.

Hansen, the price of raisins is going to go up.

And I got over here 50 acres and it's all saved.

And you know what that means?

You're farming 180 and I'm farming 50, but this year you're farming nothing and I'm farming 180 180 because I'm going to get a monetary value on my 50 that's equivalent to a normal year of 180.

And I said, now why would that be?

He said, because I know what I'm doing and you don't.

And, you know, your loss is my gain.

And that's the way it goes.

It's a zero-sum game.

It says, I just remember him saying that.

It's a zero-sum game.

I wish it wasn't, but that's a fact.

So it was really interesting to hear that.

And then later, of course, in 82, we did what he did.

We kind of picked early.

It wasn't a great reason, but we saved the entire crop.

And by that time, he had, you know, he was six or seven years older.

He didn't have help.

And he lost almost every of it.

And I walked over and I and he's he looked like he didn't want to talk to me.

He was much elderly then.

I said, you know, it's really tragic what happened to you.

And if you need anything, let me know, because we have some gas backpacks, gas motor bass packs that you can walk down the row and spray captan.

Or here's the number of the local crop duster who will do it at a discount.

If you need a couple of Massey Fergusons to

help get your raisins out before the next cycle of rain, here it is.

But it was, it's very interesting.

That world's gone.

It's been nuked,

neutron-bombed, it's over with.

So when I look around this same place, and I'm still here, and I look at all of those places,

every single one without exception is part,

it's a, as I say before, it's a tessera in a larger mosaic, and that larger mosaic can be thousands of acres.

In other words, these small farms of 40, 80, 100, 200 acres

are of two types now.

They're all rented out.

But they're either part of a huge corporate conglomerate of 10,000 and more acres, 8,000 and more acres, or a very successful family of maybe 3,000 or 4,000.

That's not traditionally a corporate entity.

And the houses are rented out.

And the result is that

these corporate large concerns, what do you do with a farmhouse?

It has some utility, so they rent it out, and the people they rent it out are usually people from south of the border, and usually they're not legal, and usually the first thing they do is bring in some Winnebagos, bring in some trailers, bring in some lean-tos.

And a house that used to have a farm family of five to six will now have 20 and 30 people living there with dogs that aren't vaccinated, licensed,

and some type of criminal activity going on.

And it's just, and the result is now

that where there was no crime before, there is crime.

And when nobody locked their door, everybody has bolt locks and security doors on them.

And in the past, when you saw somebody walking on your property, you were in command.

And now they are in command because you're likely to be unarmed and they're likely to be armed.

And so Calgacus, that Scottish nationalist, and

quoted in Tacitus'

Agricola when he was talking about Rome.

He said,

they made it a desert and they called it it peace.

So in California, we destroyed family farming agriculture.

We called it progress.

But we don't create citizens anymore from farming.

There's a word, just to finish, agriculture is

from the Latin word cultura, which means to cultivate.

and agrum, which is the land.

So agriculture is

cultivating the land.

Agrarian,

agrarian, agrarian, that's more of a Greek word.

The two words agros and agrim are related, of course, Greek and Latin, but it goes back to classical Greece and it's the idea of rough equality of landhoning in the countryside.

So if you say you're an agriculturalist, you're referring to your ability to farm specifically.

If you say you're an agrarian, that means you're an advocate of a checkerboard out in the countryside where everybody, not by government mandate but by happenstance, is more or less of the same culture.

And

there's not a lot of big corporate farms.

It goes back to classical Greece when

people divided up the land in a checkerboard and then people had allotments and it was very hard to aggregate other ones.

They called it alienability.

You were not able to be alienated from your your land due to coercion or money problems.

And we know in classical Greece, it's very hard to find any evidence of any farm that was larger than,

I should say, classical Athens and Attica, that was larger than 140 acres.

We do know in that same area, especially in places not far away in Marathon, that by Roman imperial times, somebody like Herodes Atticus owned the entire demeanor marathon.

He probably owned 10,000 acres.

We had Petronius Satyricon as a joga, and

Trimalchio thinks he owns most of Sicily.

Well, Victor, we're at the end of the show, so thank you so much for that discussion, especially all the neighbors.

It brings a new understanding to the don't they use the, they say the phrase, it takes a village, but it takes a community, and communities are

very necessary, but they're not perfect institutions.

So

that's what I found interesting in what you had to say.

Not perfect.

It's better than the alternative.

That's a good phrase that we should all learn in this area, that era that we have to be perfect to be good.

When all the left says, oh, you've done this and you've done that.

And we're better than the alternative.

If you don't believe it, look at the southern border and ask

what is the alternative on the other side of the border and why are people in the thousands fleeing.

And that's the story of the West.

And it's true in Italy, it's true in Greece, it's true anywhere in Europe.

Nobody in Europe is dying to get into Russia or China or Africa or anywhere in Asia.

Everybody in those places are dying to get into the West, whether Europe, the United States, or the former British Commonwealth, for the most part.

People should ask their questions that.

The left should answer that question.

They never do.

No, of course not.

All right.

Well, thank you, Victor Davis-Hansen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show, and thanks to all of our listeners.

We're so happy to have you.

Okay, thank you for listening again.

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

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