Aid to Ukraine and the Motors of World War II

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Hello, you've joined the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Victor is a classicist and philologist, and he has written a great deal on military history and agricultural history.

And this is our Saturday edition, and we will talk about a new war, a new war, an old war, but nonetheless new to our podcast.

And it will be

World War II and we'll do the origins of World War II in this episode.

But first we'll look at a couple of news stories and then get to World War II after that.

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

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We're back.

Thank you for joining the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

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

So, Victor, before we get into the origins of World War II, and I would like to remind your audience that you wrote a book called The Second World Wars, plural,

and it's out and it's about World War II.

It has lots of new information or new ideas about both causes and the nature of World War II.

So, I highly recommend The Second World Wars by Victor Davis Hansen.

I think it's been out two years, correct me if I'm wrong.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no no no no

how many years

how can you believe me how can you do that

how can you do that i had a

i can hear you going back to look it up well i wanted to make sure i wanted to make sure that i was right i finished i finished that book in 2016

And I had a lot of edits because it was kind of like a quarter of a million words.

Yeah.

So I had to edit it, edit it.

And it came out late in 2017 and the paperback came out in 2019.

Maybe that's what you were confused about.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, the paperback was a little bit later, so maybe.

All right.

Well, before we get to World War II, I have a few things.

Currently, Joe Biden has sent a

emergency aid package to Congress for all sorts of things, among which is aid for for the Ukraine, the war in Ukraine.

And the whole package is for 40 billion, and 21 billion is targeted for Ukraine.

And I was wondering what you thought on that, given that the border crisis we have, that even our New York mayor is fretting about now, or the fires in Hawaii on Maui.

Given those things, go ahead.

Well, I mean, the answer for the people who want to give unlimited support for Ukraine is we can do both.

We can do both.

We're a rich country.

Don't take the Ukraine as just a fraction of our budget.

Why do you always do that, you people?

Why do you say that you can't do?

Well, you don't do both.

That's the problem.

You have a wide open border.

And you say, well, if we built a $10 billion wall, it'd be too expensive.

If we gave El Paso a billion dollars for recompense for what they've gone through, it'd be too expensive.

Well, don't no comment on Maui.

We're not going to go over there with a C-17 or C-5 and

bring in supply.

It'd be too expensive.

And East Palestine, no, no, no, we're not going to touch that place.

So they always say, it's not either or we can do both, but they never do both because they have contempt for half the population.

And

so the problem with Ukraine is that we've been lied to constantly.

There was a heroic rescue of Kiev from a thunder road flash blitzkrieg, and that took place in February and March of 2023.

And then there was a new dynamic with drones

and

javelins, et cetera, that repeled the superior Russian force.

Fine, we're all for that.

Although I might add that Joe Biden, who's now hectoring us about more, more, more, more, was the person who offered Zelensky a safe ride out of Kiev.

And he was the one that said he wouldn't object if it was a minor invasion.

And he was the one that told Vladimir to knock off the hacking on some sites and, you know, okay about the others.

So it was that appeasement.

I'm not even getting into Afghanistan.

But the problem was, is we talked about in this podcast, Russia has 30 times the area.

It's got

three and a half times the population.

It's got 10 times the GDP.

It's got a new bloc in its corner of China and Iran.

Turkey is selling its stuff.

So is Iran.

North Korea is, who knows what it's doing, giving them missiles, no doubt.

And it has a particular Russian way of war.

And we know that from Charles XII.

We know that from Napoleon.

We know that from Hitler's invasion.

We know that.

with the Soviet border wars with Japan.

We know that with

the invasion of Poland in 1939, the earlier one in 1922.

We know it with a winter war in Finland in 1939 and 1940.

And while the Soviet Union-Tsarist Russia-Russian Federation does not do well when it's outside its borders, it still usually wins or grounds down the enemy to an armistice.

So, yes.

The Russians have no moral cause.

They're the aggressor.

They have no morale among their their soldiers.

And they have incompetent, corrupt leadership.

And they blew that offensive.

Good.

I'm glad.

But the idea that you're going to grind down the Russian army with a spring offensive and through 800 miles of Maginal, Siegfried line, Gothic line type of entrenchments, encasements, concrete, artillery, kill zones, drone, air cover is just absurd.

And yet, all these people that our uniparty expertise.

Wait for the spring offensive.

We had a at the Hoover Institution, I chaired the Military History Working Group's spring conference on Ukraine, and it was pretty sobering because the most zealous people of an unlimited blank check were not stupid.

They're very sophisticated scholars.

And when you had really brilliant people there like Edward Lutwack and David Goldman cross-examining a lot of people and trying to warn them not to be so exuberant that this was going to be George Patton slicing through the Falaise Gap all the way

to the German border in 60 days.

It wasn't going to happen.

And they're taking enormous casualties as they ram their head against this line.

And so then we get John Bolton and all these people say, well, you got to give more money.

We got to do it.

And that's the problem.

We just trickled it in.

We trickled it in.

We trickled it in.

if we had given it at the very first

well

when you give it to the very first what do you mean you're going to give them a hundred billion dollars right away now what have we learned in the last month zelensky's had to fire a lot of his recruiting administrators because it's corrupt they were giving exemptions to people to get out of the war there's a high level of corruption in ukraine

And we're now learning that they took, as I said, a lot of casualties.

They haven't been able to, and who would be able to get through that line?

In other words, what I'm saying is the types of tactics and strategy necessary to break the back of the Russian Federation are there, but they're beyond A, the capability of a nation of 40 million that's down to about 30 million.

And B, it would be so provocative in the Russian eyes, they would do something nutty.

If you want to chance that, that's fine, but be careful what you're doing.

And what do I mean about those strategic gambits?

Oh, continuing the drone attacks into

Moscow suburbs.

That's completely understandable because of what Russia does and hits civilian targets.

But you're still doing that to a nuclear power.

Sinking the Black Sea fleet, we've done that a little bit with some of our weaponry,

hitting oil depots and transportation hubs right near the border.

Fine.

But that hasn't stopped broken.

That hasn't stopped the Russian effort.

It hasn't broken apart.

So what are we looking at?

We're looking at $100 billion plus, and we're going to probably be there for another year or two with $200, $300 billion.

And what is the strategic objective?

It's to repel every Russian from where they were in February 1st of 2022?

Okay, that's a legitimate strategic aim.

Or is it to go back to 2014 and do something that Barack Obama

and Donald Trump and Joe Biden never said that they were going to do, and that is to expel all the Russians from the land they stole in 2014 in the Donbass, the borderlands, and the Crimea.

And that's what I think their present strategic aim is.

And

we bought into it.

But just remember, I know that aims change when wars start, but this aim was expanded in response to the giddiness.

of repelling these Russian aggressors from Kiev.

So

I think people don't understand, secondly, the United States is on the razor's edge.

We have this idea, we're Americans, we're rich.

No, we're $31 trillion in debt.

We have

supply chain challenges.

We've got incompetent people in our universities.

We've got an entire underclass that can't read or compute.

We have an enormous labor shortage.

We have a wide open border.

Our major cities and blue states are completely pre-civilizational.

So we're not this unlimited country that can say, here, take 100 billion.

You know what?

Take 2 million of our artillery shells and take our javelins.

We could do that if this administration said, you know what?

We're going to do what we did in World War II.

We're going to ramp up and we're going to build three, four million artillery shells a month.

We're going to have a thousand javelins a week.

We're going to produce F-35s, F-new,

recalibrated F-16s, F-18s.

You won't believe.

We're going to get a 600-ship navy.

Yeah, that's what a big power does.

But they're not going to do that because the very people calling for this expanded war are the ones that are most opposed to resupplying the United States.

And then we'd have to do another thing as well.

We'd have to tell the Pentagon, we don't have the...

You don't have a good record.

I'm sorry, Mr.

Pentagon.

Not after the Libya bombing, not after Iraq, not after Afghanistan, you cannot translate tactical brilliance and success into strategic resolution.

You're just not capable of it.

You don't have the thinkers, or you're politically hamstrung, or you don't object.

I don't know what it is, but you don't have a very talented group of people in the Pentagon, to be frank.

And now that you become woke and you talk to, give us lectures.

about what we should read and white rage and white supremacy and you call up your Chinese counterpart if you're the chairman of the joint chiefs and warn him about your commander-in-chief or if you're a retired four-star grandee you evolve into

you know general dynamics or Northrop or you are another grandee and you say you're commander-in-chief's Muslim no no no no no no no you've got to get back to we want you people to come because we want to protect America and we want to deter our enemies and our primary mission is military efficacy.

And then you would have to say, whether you like it or not,

Oliver Young's constituency of rich men north of Richmond, rich men north of Richmond, is the constituency that dies at twice their numbers in these god-awful places.

And yet these are the very people we've insulted.

And so that would be required.

Now, if you want to do that, if you want to say, you know what, we're going to reboot the American war production machine just like we did during Vietnam or during, finally, during Korea, or especially during World Wars I and II, fine.

And we're going to be stronger that nobody's even going to think of attacking us or fighting us.

Fine.

I'm all for it.

And we're going to reboot the U.S.

military so it is deadly and it's not a social woke project to green light stuff that can't get before through Congress easily.

Fine.

And we're going to get strategic thinkers in the Pentagon clean house and we're not going to have any more revolving door.

We're not going to have any more exemptions for generals to come back as secretary.

None.

It's just going to be a lean-made fighting machine.

We're going to be for it.

Yes.

But I don't see that happening.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, let's talk about another grim subject, which you just wrote about recently, I think for American greatness.

It's an article called Biden's Race Against the Truth.

And of course, it's the indictments coming down.

And you said something very interesting.

I would like to hear anything about the article that you want to talk about, but you did say something interesting about the middle where you start talking about the changes in the investigation of Biden that brought out so much more information and corruption.

And it was something beyond the House,

the House turning to a majority Republican.

Yes.

What I was saying is that all of a sudden, the Joe Biden's strategy of playing out the clock with health Merrick Garland and

Prosecutor Weiss is now inert.

Remember, about two months ago, it was, we're just going to give the kid gloves treatment to Hunter.

We're going to just, in the dark of night, metaphorically go into this justice's chambers and say, you know what?

We'll just do this and this, this, the big gun about an illegal gun registration.

I know I talk about gun control and all of this, but you know, my son's different.

And I know I always tell people about, this is Joe speaking, I always tell people, pay your fair share.

And I know we Bidens almost certainly do not pay our fair share of taxes.

So you lawyers go in there and I got Merrick Garland on the team and they will fix it, fix it.

And that was what was going to happen.

And it was going to die.

And that's been the last five years, five years.

And then three things happened.

I don't.

know people assume that, but the Republicans took the House in 2020 and they came into power in 2021.

And they are pretty good people that are running that.

And they are subpoenaing documents.

And the documents are not very flattering to the Bidens.

They've got whistleblowers.

They've got renegade FBI agents.

They're sick and tired of the weaponization of their bureau.

They've got Bobolinsky.

They've got Devin Archer.

They've got oligarchs and grandees in Ukraine that swear to...

that they have Joe Biden on.

They've got a lot of stuff in addition to the laptop.

That's one thing.

So there's new attention

when they came into power.

The second thing is the Ukraine war was in a really strange way,

it brought light onto the Bidens.

For this reason, there was a lot of

disagreement.

Not that I think 90% of Americans sympathized with Ukraine, but my point was there was a lot of disagreement.

that

how we should manifest that support.

And do we have the wherewithal that we talked about at the beginning?

And then there was the corruption.

In other words, we looked at that Ukraine war.

We see the corruption on the part of Ukraine.

We see the role of the Bidens with burisma.

We saw during the 2016 election the interference of the Ukrainian ambassador at Washington who was riding op-eds attacking one of the candidates.

We saw Mr.

Lieutenant Colonel, not Lieutenant Colonel, not Lieutenant Patton, Lieutenant Colonel Venman, who was so idealistic and he didn't know who the whistleblower was.

And he was offered three times the Minister of Defense in Ukraine.

He's so brilliant.

And he ended up, what, a Ukrainian middleman arms dealer.

That's what he's doing now.

He's selling arms to Ukraine or facilitating the sale of them in his new company to get rich off the war.

So all of that then begged the question, well, what was the Biden's role in all of this?

They got all this money from Ukraine, and now they're shaming us if we don't go along with it.

So that opened up a line of inquiry.

And then finally, everybody had talked about indicting Donald Trump for years, but nobody thought they'd really cross the Rubicon.

So then Jack Smith did it.

And it was pretty much law professors looked at that and they said, you know what, you have criminalized free speech and legitimate objections to an election.

And if we took your theory, Mr.

Smith, and we applied it to the 2000 election, you would have had to indict Al Gore.

And then in 2004, you would have had to indict Barbara Boxer, senator, and 32 House members who questioned the electors and wanted them to be false electors, renounced their constitutional responsibility.

And then in 2016, you would have probably had to go after Mark Zuckerberg and his 419 and Sam Bankman-Freed is 100 million.

So that's what people came away with.

And you put all of those factors together and they said, you know what?

It's time to deal with the Bidens.

And the judge took the lead, very courageous judge.

So this is a joke.

I'm not going to be a part of this.

So we'll see.

And what's the elephant in the room, Sammy?

Nobody wants to talk about it.

So why does Joe Biden keep bragging on what he says that Hunter is the most brilliant man he's ever met and talked to?

He knows that's not true.

He says he talks to Hunter every night.

He didn't give a damn about Hunter.

And why is Hunter painting with his nose and his mouth, you know, marks paint by numbers trash and selling them for $500,000?

I mean, everybody's looking at the Biden crime syndicate, so you wouldn't think that the wayward renegade son would be tempting fate and telling the American people, F you, I'm going to run another scam right in front of you.

I'm going to paint atrocious paintings with my teeth and my nose.

It might even remind you what I used to do with my nose.

And you know what?

I'm going to sell them to people who want influence with my father.

And I'm going to tell you that I don't know who they are and nobody's going to tell me.

And then they're going to tell everybody who it is.

So what's going on?

And the answer to that is in the laptop when he says to his sister, I am tired of the old man taking half my income.

I'm tired of paying his bills.

I'm tired of carrying this family.

So, in other words, in a weird way, he's kind of blackmailing the Bidens.

He's saying, you know what?

You make fun of Hunter.

He's the guy that knocks girls up.

He's the guy that snorts Coke.

He's the guy that leaves his crack pipe in the car.

He's the guy that loses two laptops.

He's the guy whose illegally registered handgun turns up near a school in a dumpster.

Yeah, we get it.

He's the guy that has on laptops with prostitutes using drugs, et cetera.

He poses nude funny.

I understand that.

But I am also the moneymaker for this family and I gave you all a lifestyle that you would otherwise not have because I was the mad genius that put together how to sell Joe to foreign people for quid pro quo favors.

And

I think they want to keep him close.

Yes.

Keep your enemies closer.

And they're afraid that if they go, this thing is going to blow up, he'll just turn state event.

Yes, absolutely.

Well, he's got a lot of bitterness against his uncle and cousins.

And apparently his father, too, and some strange

and his stepmother, too.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and then come back and look at World War II.

Stay with us and we'll be right back.

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So, well, Victor, we're going to talk about World War II.

And I know that you have a lot to say about this.

We're doing origins, and so I'm going to let you take it.

But I do have one question, and that is, are there things that help explain the war beyond Hitler's war aims and Hitler's personality?

Well, whenever you look at a war and you want to know what caused it,

you have to look at the proxima, the immediate trigger wire, and then the long-term causes.

But before I go into the World War II,

you know, Angela

Coteville was not stupid.

He was a brilliant guy.

I know he was eccentric, but he was a good friend of mine, and he was one of the more gifted people in our Hoover working group.

And he wrote a book about war

means, and he wrote a lot of articles.

And one of the points he made, and this was not original, it came from an Australian scholar who wrote The Causes of War.

And

it's basically ignorance about relative strength.

In other words, one side does not know exactly who is strong and weak.

And some people who don't know that relative strength do something stupid.

It's like you're in a bunch of people in a hallway in high school and everybody's joshing each other and ridiculing.

And somebody is going to lose his temper, but he's going to be selective about how he loses his temper.

But if he knows

who has a gun, who has a knife, who can lift 500 feet.

You see what I'm saying?

Yes.

And when you don't know that, and you're ignorant, especially when strong powers are not clearly

communicating to weaker powers that we're strong, not just in material wherewithal, but with the ability to use it and that happened in world war ii so

first of all

if you looked at the economy of the british empire it was bigger than germany

uh

alone and austria and almost as big as austria germany italy and japan if you looked at the economy

of the Soviet Union, it was larger than Germany, Germany's, and even after the Depression.

If you looked at the wherewithal of the United States of what it could do as it had finished World War I, it would turn out to be in 1945 larger than the British Empire, the Soviet Union,

Germany, Italy at its zenith, and the Japanese Empire.

And yet, That was not made manifest to Hitler.

So, when he went into the Saarland for that plebiscite,

35, I think, 36, and then when he went into the Rhineland,

36, Saarland, I think it was 35, and then he did the Angelus in 38.

All of those were violations of the Versailles Treaty.

United States, even without rearming fully, even in its decrepit state after World War I, and the Soviet Union and Britain and

France, France, the eventual allies, had the ability to stop it.

But when they didn't stop it, because they were traumatized from World War I,

and again, the irony was the people who won the war were traumatized, and the people who lost it were very quick, eager to start again.

Then Hitler, as he said, I saw those worms at Munich.

And he interpreted that either they were weaker than he thought they were, or he had greater contempt because while they were stronger than he was, they were afraid to use their power.

And he had said, if I had those bombers, if I had that navy, I would have done this.

And so he got a false message, a miscommunication about the relative strength.

And he went into a world war, not just the Polish war, the Norwegian war, the Danish war, the Low Countries War, the French War, the Yugoslavian War, the Greek War, the war in North Africa.

I'm talking about a world war involving the United States and the Soviet Union.

And when that happened, he was done for, he being a metaphor for the Axis power.

So part of it was ignorance, part of it was the loss of deterrence long term.

And part of it was a great mis

I don't want to say misinformation, but misunderstanding of the Versailles Treaty.

So

Germany invaded in 1914 in the guns of August, and they ended up with 70 miles in of the Belgian and French borders.

They took the coal fields.

They did billions of dollars worth of damage to the French economy.

They killed collectively over

probably near 3 million Italians and French and British and Americans altogether.

They were the aggressors.

There was no need for that war.

And they killed probably four to six million Russians.

So they had a Versailles treaty and there was a war war guild clause.

As Margaret McMillan and others have said, somebody starts a war.

It's not just, oh, miscommunication.

No, it doesn't work that way.

You know, when you have a fight, you don't say, well, both of us started it.

It was miscommunication.

No, one person has got 51% culpability.

So they had a war clause and then they had reparations.

And of course, Germany was

broke.

So they just inflated their economy and paid back the debt with worthless marks without gold.

They didn't have the wherewithal, but

the result was the United States could not collect its debts from France and Britain because they couldn't pay them because they had been given worthless currency.

And so what I'm getting at is the Versailles Treaty was not as harsh as everybody says.

It did not say to Germany, we're going to go in there as we will do in World War II, if they were Ostradama,

and occupy your country.

We're not going to partition it.

We're not going to take East Prussia from you.

We're not going to take most of what is now Poland from you.

We're not going to do any of that.

And we're not going to treat you the way that you treated the French in 1871.

And we're not going to treat you the way that you treated the Russians in 1918 under the press,

the 1918 peace treaty.

and we're not going to treat you the way that we had planned under the Reisling Plan, the September program of 1914, where they were going to take all the French coastal ports permanently, and they were going to abolish Belgium and absorb it as a protectorate.

In other words, the Versailles Treaty was not as harsh as the things that Germany wanted to do in World War I, what they did in 1870, and what would happen

to them after World War II?

Ask yourself, Sammy, did anybody in 1946 say, oh my God,

this treaty that you guys did at

Potsdam

is horrible.

You guys are going to occupy Germany.

You're going to divide it up.

You're going to split it in two between a communist section and three democracies.

You're going to force them to have your type of government.

You're going to get rid of Prussia.

You're going to say it doesn't exist anymore.

The word word will be excised out of the vocabulary.

You're going to give all of Prussia to Poland.

You're going to give to Czechoslovakia large parts of the Sudetenland.

This is horrible.

We can't stand it.

We're going to go to war.

No,

they didn't do that, did they?

No, because Germany was too good of an aggressor.

Too strong.

It was under no doubts that it had been beaten, which we're coming to the last point.

After 1918, they disbanded, demilitarized, they, the Allies, and Versailles did not start for eight months, not till summer of 1919.

Okay.

And by that time, the stab in the back had already promulgated that we,

whoever loses a war when your troops are in their territory.

And did they ever invade us?

No.

Did they ever occupy us?

No.

Did they ever get in our internal affairs?

No.

All they did was stab us in the back with Jews and communists, waging strikes and cutting off food for the brave stormtroopers at the front.

And that was the myth.

And so it wasn't the Versailles Treaty was too harsh.

It was, again, not nearly as harsh as other treaties the Germans had inflicted on people or after World War II or what they had planned for people had they won.

But it wasn't adhered to.

So,

you know, had they just said

you can't have Austria and

you can't militarize the Rhineland and you can't have a Luftwaffe unless we say so.

And then they all together in concert,

the Soviet Union, the United States, and France and Britain had enforced it, but they didn't because they were traumatized and they believed Hitler would, if you gave him one little piece of meat, the crocodile would close his mouth.

And if he opened it again, maybe he'd want two pieces, but not the whole Europe.

So those were

the long-term causes.

And then there's a couple of other wrinkles.

Because they had a Keynesian economy, even though they weren't Keynesian, the Italians and the Germans did better in World War II, excuse me, during the Depression before World War II than the Allies did.

You know,

they printed money, yes, but

Hitler went into a massive rearmament program, public works, Mussolini, you know, rebuilt the railroads, highways, and they kept full employment.

And they were very in bad trouble in World War II.

And that was one of the reasons that they were eager to go to war.

They were broke.

But nevertheless, it was propagandized that only a fascist type of government could survive economic times, which were the result of capitalist thievery and selfishness.

And that was very popular in the salons of Paris and London and New York.

A lot of people say, oh, Mussolini is a pretty good guy.

He got the trains to run on time.

There's not people like you here in the United States sleeping on the road.

So there was an idea that fascism was a modernist.

It was

technologically based.

It had a lot of appealing attributes to a lot of naive and misguided Westerners.

And you add all of it up, and they just were not up to rearming right after the Depression or right during the Depression and deterring Germany.

And then, of course, the final Tessera, the final piece in this puzzle was Germany had a policy that they could never fight World War I

again on two fronts.

The Schlieven plan had not worked.

It was supposed to knock out France and then

fight Russia.

And then they ended up not knocking out France and fighting Russia and France and England and America.

They said no more.

So they would not go to war against France and Britain.

They might swallow Poland

or Norway, but they were never going to do it as long as their eastern flank was open.

And when they had the Molotov

Ribbentrop Pact of 1939, August 23rd, that solved the problem.

And it's no accident that he invaded Poland seven days later because, and everybody was shocked.

They thought, oh my God, the Soviet Union, for all their barbarity, keeps Hitler in his cage.

But he transferred 100 divisions from the east, and it was bare.

It was nobody there between September 1939 and probably, oh, I don't know, January or February 1941.

They were all in the West.

And all Stalin would have had to do is just walk in.

He didn't want to walk in because he had a strategy that said, Hitler's a useful idiot, a useful pawn, and he will wear down the democracies and I'm not going to lift a finger to help them.

So I'm going to sit back and watch Hitler butt his head against France and England.

And my hope is they both destroy each other.

Then I'll walk in and take all of Eastern Europe and whatever I want in the West.

So all of that Machiavellian maneuvering explains why Hitler invaded Poland on September 1st.

He was convinced that the Allies wouldn't do anything.

He was going, he had promised that he would give half of Poland to the Soviet Union, and that's where it is today, isn't it?

Western Ukraine.

How ironic.

We're fighting over old borders and how unfair they are.

And basically,

most of Western Ukraine

was Polish.

And it was annexed by Stalin and reified and institutionalized after the war.

And so

that war then broke out.

And then there was a question, at what point would Hitler stop?

And that meant, what do I mean by what point?

At what point would he bring in the Soviet Union and the United States against him?

If he did either, or especially both, he was all through, as were the Japanese and the Italian.

That was just a fact.

And he went into Poland and he went into Denmark and Norway and then he went into Belgium and Luxembourg and he went into Holland, and he went into France,

and then he went into Greece,

Yugoslavia, Crete.

Okay, and then he was in North Africa.

Nobody thought, as I said earlier, that that was World War II.

That was the Danish War, the French War, the North African War.

And he won all of them.

And so by January 1941, he was on top of what is basically the EU

today.

Every capital in Europe, every capital in Europe by January 1941 was either pro-Hitler or in his possession, with the exception of London, Rome,

pro-Hitler, Lisbon pro-Hitler, Madrid pro-Hitler, Belgrade under German control, Paris under German control, Oslo under German,

Copenhagen, Brussels, you name them, they were all there, plus all the German cities.

And he won.

And then the question was, would he stop?

And he felt that based on how the Soviets had performed in the Winter War, based on the fact they'd liquidated their officer corps, based on the fact that they had bullied him under the Ribbentrop Accords where they wanted, you know, they wanted the designs for the Bismarck and the Tirpitz.

I don't know why they wanted them.

I don't know if battleships would have helped them, but the Soviets wanted them.

So he was going to go into the Soviet Union and do what he did in France in six weeks.

And we know how how that ended up.

And so once he did that and once he declared war on the United States, and had he not declared war on the United States, I'm not sure the United States would have ever

declared war on him.

Pretty clear they wouldn't have.

They would have fought the Pacific War completely and supplied Britain.

and Russia, but not necessarily been a combatant unless they were attacked.

And I don't think Hitler necessarily was going to attack them.

But when he declared war on them,

then we have a world war.

Why did he declare war on them?

He was told that the submarine fleet was much bigger than it actually was.

If they were able to go off the east coast and attack American cargo ships as they left their ports, they could starve London into the ground and take England.

He actually believed that the Russian campaign was a way of winning the Battle of Britain, which he couldn't win because he didn't have naval or air superiority.

But by getting the Soviet Union out of the war and occupying and utilizing its landscape, it would be invulnerable or indomitable vis-a-vis Britain.

So he attacked the United States.

He said, you know, I think it was Gwadaria and said, one division can repel these, one SS division can repel these cowboys.

And so we didn't have a particularly good name.

We were very strong, but it was a potential strength in power, which was not manifested.

But the key thing to remember is once he went into

Russia on June 22nd, that became World War II.

And that was intensified and institutionalized by December 7th for the Japanese.

And then

we'll talk about the relative alliances in the first two years of the war next time.

Yeah.

Do you think he had planned to invade the Soviet Union from the get-go, even while he was planning Poland with the Soviet Union?

Yes, he wanted to go in the year before, and his generals told him

that it was insane to knock off France.

France was knocked out by June 25th, and he thought he could send everybody and catch the Soviet Union.

But

it was a very strange thing because when he started the Battle of Britain, that is the Blitz, say from September of 1940 that went all the way into March of 41,

that whole campaign was dependent on Soviet oil, Soviet grain, Soviet precious metals, Soviet bauxite.

It was all going into the war Wehrmacht.

And so it was a win-win for both of them.

So why did he do that?

Because he'd finished Western Europe and he couldn't,

he thought he could never get Britain out of the war.

He just couldn't do it because he didn't have a navy and he didn't have air superiority.

But he thought that if he went in, and as I said, people he thought had good reason to believe his generals that the Soviet Union was weak, was corrupt, that it was communist.

They hadn't done well against Finland.

The Finns would be helpful.

He was going to get the Spanish to give a division.

The Italians would give him troops.

He formed the largest

invasion army ever since.

There's never been an invasion army of three and a half million people.

And everybody says, oh, you know, coalitions are better and you have to be diverse and you got to get your allies.

He had a lot more allies than the Soviet Union did.

When he went in there, there were Hungarians,

there were Romanians, there were Finns that would help him.

There was an Italian, 160,000 Italians would find again.

There was

the Blue Division.

There was Franco-Spaniards.

You name it.

It was a motley group of French,

old French chart tanks and

trucks that the British had left behind at Dunkirk.

It was just a huge, disorganized,

equipped force without really a strategic objective.

Nobody had said what it was other than we're going to win the war.

So,

yeah,

he had a long plan to go in there, but did he actually think he was going to implement that plan?

I don't think he did.

I think he thought that Operation Sea Lion, after he had taken the continent, was so easy, and he thought that the Luftwaffe had repelled

British aircraft from the continent, and he had no idea of British aircraft production.

It was over 400 a month of Spitfires and hurricane.

He had no idea the caliber of British pilots, but he thought that he was going to be able to bomb, as Goering said, he was going to bomb Britain into submission, cut off the Empire's imports to it, and they would surrender, or you'd have to invade it.

But

when that proved impossible

by the turn of 1941, then yes, he said, you know, we won't have two fronts because it's not a front.

It's inert.

We surrounded it.

It can't get back on the continent.

It won't be able to send troops to North Africa because they thought that the Italians would take Malta.

So

don't think it's two fronts.

We'll now go against the Soviet Union and we'll just clean up and get all of their resources.

And we won't have to put up with their communists double.

Then they created a great myth that the Soviets, and it's still a very powerful myth, was on,

just days before preempting and would have attacked Germany had they not done that.

I don't think.

Oh, I had never heard that myth.

It was a big myth in Germany, both during and after the war.

And you can see scholars who still buy into it, but there's no evidence other than some

communications that stalin may have said well eventually we're going to have to attack germany but there was no troop movements in fact the first two days stalin had people shot who radioed back to him that the germans were 30 50 100 miles into russian territory he was so paranoid he really liked hitler a lot better than he did churchill or roosevelt Yeah, you think so?

Because it sounds like they were both.

It sounds like they were both planning war against each other while they were cooperating with each other over pulling they both hated consumer capitalism

and

they were command i mean it was was national socialist party and communist party and they they hated capitalism and uh they had a lot in common and hitler said that

while if he won, while he would have had Churchill hanged, executed, and he would hope to have had the ability to execute Roosevelt, he would put Stalin in a secluded place and treat him very well because he admired his ruthlessness

of taking and obtaining and holding power.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and then come back and talk a little bit about farming in an unusual way.

So stay with us, and we've got something special for you.

We're back and Victor, so we want to talk a little bit more in depth about Oliver Anthony's Richmond.

Sorry, Richmen North of Richmond.

I know that you wanted to talk about it in a little bit more detail.

So why don't you go ahead and

address Oliver Anthony.

Well, maybe I could,

you know, he's from a rural area.

and I think there were suggestions that

he was engaged in farming or had worked on a farm.

But

I think a lot of people have really misinterpreted

what he's saying.

And that is they glom on to,

if you're 5'3 and you weigh 300 pounds, you're on welfare.

Therefore, he's a welfare basher.

Or I think National Review wrote an article saying,

well, why doesn't he go out and get a good job as a plumber or electrician?

We have a labor show instead of whining about it.

And

so he's been, Rolling Stone attacked him.

But

it's sort of like Trump once

people

had said Trump, they don't take Trump literally.

They take him figuratively, you know, metaphorically.

They believe what he says, but they don't tie him down to

the actual

nitty-gritty.

They don't take him literally.

And you don't have to take

Oliver Anthony literally.

What he's trying to show is a zeitgeist.

And what I mean by that is

he's talking, let's be honest about it, he's talking about the lower white middle class.

And as I said on an earlier podcast,

whether it's fentanyl and 100,000 deaths a year, or it's a suicide rate of rural versus urban, or men versus women, or white versus non-white, or occupational by

people who

are in construction or oil and gas or mining, these people commit suicide at a much higher rate.

It's epidemic now.

And there's other things that...

create that anger in him.

And what is that?

Well, what's very funny about this is

we all have this therapeutic culture that we say, well, this particular group or women are angry because

they were scrubbing floors when they had PhDs.

Okay, I understand that.

My mother graduated from Stanford in 1946 and got a job.

The only job that people would hire, she was way up in the top of her class at the top third and was, you know, as a legal secretary, which is fine.

So there was a lot of anger, but we don't do that for this particular group.

Instead, like if you're General Austin, you insult them and say that they're suffering from white rage and white privilege.

So when they look at the world,

they look at it economically, socially, culturally, politically.

And they say to themselves, I know them because I grew up with them.

And I married into a family that was from Oklahoma.

And my children have grandparents that reflect that white working class.

And that's what I did for most of my early life was deal with in-laws and cousins and nephews from that milieu, a white working class from the South or the Midwest or the Southern Midwest, northern Ohio, Oklahoma, Arkansas, southern Virginia, whatever.

So what I'm saying is they look at the world and they say,

since when did they get all this idea of white privilege?

There is white privilege, but we don't have it.

It's some some guy that lives in Palo Alto, or it's some guy that lives in Manhattan.

And what they do is they tell everybody about these awful irredeemables and chumps and dregs to deflect the fact that they want, they're the winners of globalization.

They're the ones that had globalized skills.

So if you were a lawyer, or you were an investor, or you were a corporate magnet, or you were an academic, or you were a person in entertainment, or you were an athlete, or you were a techie, then suddenly your market went from 330 million to 7 billion.

And I was a beneficiary of it.

I mean, I get letters all the time and requests from interviews from Switzerland, from Japan.

I think in the last 60 days, I've given interviews to Japanese.

I gave one this week to a French magazine.

That would have never happened before globalization.

And so those guys didn't have that ability.

They were muscular labor.

So if you were in, you know, Coldwater, Michigan, and or you were in Salma, California, and somebody that was the investor or the owner of the Upright Harvester or the Fruhoff Trader plant, he just closed it down and they sent it to Mexico or they sent it to Japan or excuse me, Vietnam or China.

And the person that had muscular labor could be replicated or duplicated, you know.

Same thing with small farming.

I realized that

I planted some red seedless grapes that were very expensive to farm because you had to hold them in cold storage for months until all the grapes cleared out, but they would stay in cold storage pretty well.

And for the first two years, they were selling for $12 a box.

And then suddenly, globalists and investors went down to Chile and poured billions of American dollars for early

grapes.

And the Chilean market, instead of coming in on, I don't know, March, it came in in November and destroyed the whole late-season table grape market.

And what did everybody tell you?

Get over it.

Don't whine, Victor.

You're not Oliver Young.

You can't whine.

You've got a great life.

Same thing with the raisin industry.

It was the EU subsidized raisins.

They put them on the market in 82 and 83, and it just destroyed the world raisin market.

So the price went for $1,400 to $400.

A guy from from the Reagan administration came out to the Raisin Administrative Committee meeting.

I was there.

He said, this is great.

It'll make you, A, more competitive.

Do you'll have to learn how to make it on $400?

The price of raisins then required $800 a ton to break even, believe me.

And it'll make you more competitive.

And you know what?

The Greeks,

that subsidy will just break the EU.

Maybe it did 50 years later.

And then he said, it'll weed you guys out.

There's a lot of fat in the raisin industry.

A lot of guys shouldn't be farming.

You're going to see who's going to eat your neighbor's shorts.

So that was what we were told.

And that was the attitude.

And so these guys that had that muscular labor, they thought they were doing really good stuff, making steel and building cranes and cement factories and mining.

But they could be replaced.

And they were.

And then people like Joe Biden told them to code, or Hillary said that she was going to put them out of business.

So they came up with this vocabulary that they were illiberal.

They had funny accents.

They didn't go to college.

They didn't get there.

It's kind of like J.D.

Vance wrote about hill billiology.

Not that they didn't have self-induced problem.

But what I'm getting at is if you're in that group and you're always told that you're a white male with privilege or you're a white rage person and you're not, you're making less per capita than black women.

Or you're committing suicide higher than white women, or

the epidemic of certain drugs is destroying you at a greater rate than the inner city.

And then at the same time, this bicoastal white wealthy elite has come up with this idea of woke and

quotas so that if you're a white male and you do play it by the book, you're not going to get a scholarship.

If you think you're going to leave rural Nebraska or northern Mississippi or

western Pennsylvania and you have a perfect SAT score and you're a white male,

you're not going to get into what they tell you you should do to be successful.

And why is that?

Because the wealthy white overclass in its guilt has said, we suffer from white privilege and we're going to fix it.

We're going to have affirmative action.

We're going to be racially obsessed.

We're going to make quotas.

We're going to do.

And you know what?

But we're not going to tell you that we're going to use our sat camps and our money and who we know and the children of this person who gave money.

And we're going to get around this stuff.

And they did.

And then they fobbed on all of the pathologies of the white class.

They fobbed on to these other people who had no opportunity.

And they destroyed the idea of class.

Democratic Party destroyed the idea of class so that it had no constituency constituency anymore.

So then you came up, as I've said, I don't know, people are going to say, Victor, don't say this again, but I will say it.

That Whoopi Goldberg suddenly was a victim,

and

Oliver Young was a white guy that was riding high on privilege.

And then when you look at the actual middle-class wages geared toward inflation, it had gone down for 12 years.

12 years.

They lost money, wage earners did.

And And then we had a three-year uptick under Trump.

And now with Biden, this 25% inflation over three years,

it's eroded it again.

So yes, yes, he shouldn't whine, he shouldn't drink, he should be, but you've got to, it's more than that.

And these people at Rolling Stone National Review don't understand what it does to a person's brain because they've never done it.

They've never done, I farmed for $6,000 a year for five years.

And I can tell you, you can say to yourself, I should not have borrowed money and planted that type of plum tree.

Yes, I understand that.

And this member of my family shouldn't have been drinking.

Yes, I get that.

But there's something wrong when you go out there and you work all day and you produce wonderful, organic, delicious fruit.

And some guy pays you $4.

And by the time it gets to the consumer, it's $20.

And the people who are clean and sport coat, and I guess they're the version of coders, they're making a lot of money on the processing, the

distribution, the selling.

And the person at the bottom of it gets nothing, gets nothing.

And that's why there is no small farming today.

It's been destroyed.

Less than 1%

is small farming.

And I think agriculture itself is only 2% of the population.

And so that gets people angry.

And then they talk about

these wars, you know, all these wars.

And I supported the Iraq war after 9-11.

But let's be honest, these same people that were being called dregs and irredeemables

and chomps by Joe Biden and clingers by Barack Obama, when they wanted somebody to go to Hellman Province, or they wanted someone

to go into Basra or,

you know, Fallujah, who do they ask?

They ask usually Mexican-American Latinos, and they ask poor whites.

And they went in over there.

In the case of poor white males, they died at double their numbers in the demographic.

About 75% of the people who died in those wars that were dreamed up by wealthy, privileged people

who

weren't really on the front lines.

And then they came back, and what happened?

They were veterans, and veterans committed suicide at almost the highest rate because they came back and said, Well, we fought, but why did we, why did my dad get killed?

Why did I lose a leg?

Why did my cousin get wounded when we just turned over the whole damn country in Afghanistan to the Taliban?

And then we come back and you make fun of us, you call us all these names that were illiberal because we vote for Donald Trump.

Because why?

He's going to get close the border, keep wages up, get tough on China, pump oil and gas, export coal if he can't sell it in the United States.

And all of a sudden, you know,

you can't listen to that song without thinking of the antithesis.

And the antithesis is somebody who makes fun of that song, but lives a much more absurd life.

And that what is the whole

absurd life?

It's a guy like John Kerry that

inherited money and then married into money and then married into big money and then flies in a Gulfstream and lectures everybody why they should give up their

natural gas cooktop or their natural gas hot water heater or your Barack Obama.

And you say, well, we're going to do global warming and we're going to have to change the economy and we're going to go to solar and wind because we're going to have flooding along our coast and we just can't have, you know, this lifestyle is not sustainable.

And then the guy buys $14 million stay right on the seaco.

And then he thinks, well, I'll really rub it in people's noses.

So I'll go out and buy a place in Hawaii right on the beach.

According to his own philosophy, they'd be flooded by now.

And then we find out he has 2,000 gallons of propane in his fossil fuel and his Martha Vineyards estate.

So they're sick of all that.

And yes, they don't articulate it in a way that, you know, somebody at National View can parse every word and say this is illogical.

Or the Rolling Stones say they're making fun of somebody on welfare.

But

I suggest the people who write that just

go out and lay bricks or plum or electric.

These are very important jobs.

And yes, they're in short supply, but then go to Fresno or go to Bakersfield and say, you know what, I'm a cement layer.

I'm an expert at it.

I talk to these guys.

Mostly now they're Mexican and Mexican-American.

They're brilliant people, but I can tell you what they get will not buy you a house in Fresno.

I'm telling you that.

And

it's just

the way it is.

And so these people are trying to say to it.

And they don't like the politicians because they feel that they're subject.

So what all

Young is saying,

if I don't turn in my tax return or I try to skimp, my wife or girlfriend doesn't report all her tips.

And you were a waitress, Sammy, I think.

You know what happens if you don't report your tips.

It's not a lot of money, but the IRS seems to like to focus on waitresses,

then you're in trouble.

But not Hunter Biden.

He's not in trouble.

Not Joe Biden, not Jim Biden, not all of these people.

And if you lie to a federal investigator, you're in trouble.

So what he's saying is that

this country that was founded on the idea that there was going to be a landowning yeomanry class that was going to be the bulwark of democracy and constitutional government and independent and autonomous that after the globalization of the millennium at the millennium it didn't work that way and a lot of people

maybe they're irrational maybe they don't think it out maybe they take drugs that they shouldn't of course but they're angry and uh

it it's manifest in this song and if people in national review

and the Rolling Stone and the New York Times can make fun of it and all that, they just have to ask themselves one thing.

So who was Oliver Young's PR person, Sammy?

Who was the brilliant person from New York who discovered him and then said, here's our ad campaign.

And this is what we're going to do with podcast.

You're going to go on Podcast of America or you're going to go into MSNBC.

We've got a great blitz.

No, there was nothing, was there?

He just was strumming on the guitar in June.

Nobody knew of him.

He just put put his face on his own phone.

And guess what?

It's the highest ranked number one song on all the charts, not just Country Western.

So why is that?

And the answer is it's the same reason why Budweiser lost 20% of its product.

And the same reason that nobody's going to go see the Snow White and Seven Dwarfs remake.

It's the same way if Skittles is stupid enough to get transgendered this and that in an ads campaign, it'll meet the fate of Target or or bush because there's a there's an anger at all of this and he tapped into it and it's not quite

you know what i mean it's kind of like saying when a person paints a a good painting or he writes a good book that you go back there and it's very popular and people respond to it because it has truth in it then the

snide little critic gets angry and that's and goes back and looks at this and says, oh, are there really people 5'3 that weigh 300 pounds that are eating fudge?

And is that the problem with America?

No, that's just an outburst and a wreath of somebody who's frustrated about all these other issues.

I just spent 10 minutes explaining.

Yes, yes.

Well, Victor, we're at the end of the show, and I have a comment from a listener for you.

He writes, or he titles this, The Essential Listen for Serious Military People.

U.S.

Army Special Forces vet here.

Victor's thorough understanding of military history, ancient and modern, coupled with his philosopher's mind and insight, are a force of nature.

Also appreciate the knowledge and well-timed interplay of co-hosts Jack Fowler and Sammy Wink.

Sammy brings a smart, witty female perspective to highly masculine discussion.

This is old green beret, thanks to the entire VDH team.

So there you go.

That was very nice.

That was very nice.

Not all comments about Sammy are very nice, but that was very nice of him.

So I thank him.

And I thought it was a great comment on you given what we just did today, actually.

So

I really appreciate that.

And just a final thing is that we started with the Persian wars.

And we're working our way over these several months to wars, but we're going to have to stop and pause because World War II is, you know, 70 million people.

It's the war to end on a wall.

We talked about the Seven Years' War, 30 years' war, civil war, but we're going to have to spend four episodes.

So next time we're going to talk about the first two years

and where was the magic point where the Axis stopped their momentum.

It was somewhere between Al-Alamein and Stalingrad and Midway.

But we'll talk about that and why they hit.

And then we'll have the last two on the defeat, the last two years of the war, the cost of the war, war, and what was the significance.

And then looking ahead in the fall, we're going to be going to Korea, Vietnam, First and Second Gulf Wars, Afghanistan, and the present.

And then, you know what I think we're going to do, Sammy?

What are we going to do?

I thought we'll replace the military history, history

survey with great literature, because I was, after all, a classics professor and I taught humanities for 20 years.

So we're going to start with the Iliad and the Odyssey, and we're going to work our way all the way up to modern American novel for the next year.

That sounds great.

Those will be for our weekend edition.

So I hope everybody will join us.

And thank you for listening here.

And thanks, everybody, once more.

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