World War I and Barack Obama

Cooler temperatures are rolling in and as always, Quince is where I turn for false staples that actually last.

From cashmere to denim to boots.

The quality holds up and the price still blows me away.

Quince has the kind of false staples you'll wear non-stop, like super soft 100% Mongolian cashmere sweaters starting at just $60.

Their denim is durable and fits right, and their real leather jackets bring that clean classic edge without the elevated price tag.

What makes Quints different?

They partner directly with ethical factories and skip the middlemen.

So you get top-tier fabrics and craftsmanship at half the price of similar brands.

When the weather cools down, my Quint sweaters are a go-to.

My cashmere short sleeve that works under any jacket, formal or casual, or my thick, long-sleeve, go-everywhere, do-everything sweater that pairs with any pant or jogger.

Quince products are my favorites, which is why I went to Quince to buy my recent very beautiful purse that leaves the house every time I do.

Keep it classic and cool this fall with long-lasting staples from Quince.

Go to quince.com/slash Victor for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns.

That's quince.com slash victor for free shipping and 365 day returns.

Quince.com slash victor and we'd like to thank Quince for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

Hello to the listeners of the Victor Davis Hampson Show.

This is our weekend edition when we look at and we've been looking at wars through history.

We are on World War I so we're going to do a segment on World War I.

We do take in a few news stories first, so we'll look at a new biography of Obama by David Garrow and a story out of Boston of the Boston mayor's new executive order on building.

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

Welcome back.

Again, this is the Victor Davis Hanson Show, and Victor is the Martin and Neely Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Buskie Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

You can catch him on his website at victorhanson.com.

That's V-I-C-T-O-R-H-A-N-S-O-N.com.

The name of the site is The Blade of Perseus, and you can find Victor's writings and his podcasts on that site.

There are writings under the term ultra articles, and those are exclusive to the website.

You have to subscribe for them five dollars a month or fifty dollars a year.

Come join us.

You can also just get a free subscription and at least get on our newsletter for all the new and free things that are on the website.

About three or four times a week, we send that out.

So, Victor, before we get into World War I, I wanted to do a few things.

I noticed, I know that you and Jack have done an extensive thing on the Trump indictment, and it just came through yesterday.

So, we'll leave that topic for your Tuesday podcast.

I encourage everybody to pick up Victor's Tuesday podcast.

It will be, it's a special podcast and it's on the Trump indictment.

So something to look forward to for your listeners.

So let's turn to some other news stories.

We just saw or we have an interview of an

a biographer.

And it's an i guess we call it an unauthorized biography because it's not something that Barack Obama agreed to.

But David Garrow did a new biography mostly about his pre-presidential period

called The Rising Star, the making of Obama.

And

it's in Tablet magazine, and the interview is by David Samuels of the biographer, David Garrow.

And I was wondering your reflections on that interview and this new biography.

It was very strange because

the book came out in 2017, you know, Rising Star, the Making of Barack Obama.

And I looked at it.

It was over 1,000 pages.

It had, I don't know, 300 pages of footnotes.

And he went back.

One of his methodologies was he went back and found all of these people that Obama had referenced in as either as memoirs with fake names or that people knew that Obama knew.

I'm talking about roommates at Occidental.

I'm talking about girlfriends.

I'm talking about people who knew him as a young person in Hawaii.

And

the left tried two tacks when it came out.

But I should preface it by saying that

He had been a consultant for that PBS Eyes in the Prize, and

he was was considered a man of the left.

And he had written a biography of Martin Luther King.

And that's very important to understand this biography because in it, he had discovered FBI notes that were not intended to become public,

outlining because of their wiretaps, not only Martin Luther King's infidelity, but his brutality toward women, hitting them and things.

And at that point, he was persona non grata in the world of the left, because they went crazy and they said, how dare you besmirch it?

And they said that he was a shill for the FBI.

And so this man of the left, who'd written on abortion and king, suddenly found that nobody on his side, New York Review book, New York Times, were either not They were either not reviewing the book fairly or they were not reviewing it at all.

So that was the pretext or the subtext when he started

this massive, massive biography.

I think he started it right when Obama came onto the national scene.

So basically, from 2009 as president to 2017, it took him eight or nine years to write it.

And it was,

he did a number of interviews.

And in the book, it's not a flattering portrait in my view of all, because

that book broke the story that

Dreams of My Father was not an autobiography as it had been

alleged.

It was a complete mythology.

In other words, when he went back and interviewed people that appeared in the book, they had radically different accounts of what Obama said they had said and what Obama said they were.

And more importantly, with outside sources, he doubled and triple checked and concluded

that Obama

deliberately

massaged these accounts and they could not be true.

At that point, if you remember, the White House said, well, it was an impressionistic memoir.

But that was really a blow to Obama's credibility.

And in this period of attacks on Garrow, he himself,

reeling from the attacks that they had leveled against him about Martin Luther King.

And by the way, just as a footnote, it wasn't just the FBI notes that he used, but Ralph Abernathy,

the second command, so to speak, of the civil rights movement, had written also an autobiography in which he claimed on the night that before King was assassinated, he was involved with a tryst with two women and that he had been brutal toward women, especially when he was drinking.

So there was corroboration.

I think that other people said Abernathy is a turncoat, a traitor.

He had brain surgery, he's enfeebled.

But nobody ever addressed those charges, and they will never address those charges, just like the allegation.

It doesn't mean that he's not a great man.

He was.

But we talk about Jefferson in terms of being a real person with real flaws, but you could not do that about Martin Luther King, especially, you know, he had been found culpable of plagiarism, etc.

Okay.

So he writes this biography.

It comes out.

It shows that Obama made up things about his

life,

that he

there was a very incriminating letter, and that was a bombshell where one of the girlfriends had a letter from a younger Obama where I don't know what he's trying to do, contextualize their relationship, problems in it, but he says he dreams of having sex with men,

repeatedly dreams of that.

That was kind of a bombshell.

And there were just things that the left decided could not stand.

So they made a concerted effort to suppress that book.

And that was his life's work.

So now he comes out six years later with a tablet, long, long interview with David Samuel, the writer and journalist.

In it, it's very critical of Barack Obama.

And he suggests that the two things that were really

fundamentally dangerous about, three things that were fundamentally dangerous about the Obama administration in retrospect.

Now that, because in his book, remember, it's not really about the Obama administration.

He finished it, yes, it came out in 2017 when Obama had left office, but it was still too soon to assess those eight years.

So it was mostly about his life up to being president.

And it was the making, the subtitle is the making of Barack Obama.

And then he has 50 or 60

pages of epilogue.

He was president, this happened.

But now, six years later, he can assess and put it in some kind of perspective that, and it's not pretty.

He says that basically

he didn't do anything in 2014 when the Russians went into

the borderlands of Ukraine and annexed Crimea.

I would have added, it was worse than that, Mr.

Garrell, because on the hot mic conversation in Seoul

in

March of 2012, it was an election year, and Barack Obama said, no, he didn't mean to say it, he got caught talking to Mr.

Medeved, the Russian president at the time.

He said, tell Vladimir this is my last election.

I'm quoting from memory, but I think pretty exactly.

Tell him it's my last election.

And when it's over,

if he gives me space, meaning don't do something stupid, like go into Ukraine, I will be flexible on missile defense.

Like I will dismantle our ambitious project to protect Eastern Europe and de facto Europe by having a missile defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic, ostensibly to stop missiles coming in from Iran should it become nuclear.

And guess what?

That's exactly what Obama did.

He dismantled those two defense projects and the greater idea of protecting the eastern flank of Europe from a rogue nuclear power or by association, Russia, perhaps.

It would be coming, it would be very valuable right now to have an ironclad dome that would tell Mr.

Putin, don't threat Europe, don't threaten Europe

because it can protect itself.

And the other,

so that was pretty bad.

And he mentions that.

in the interview of doing nothing in 2014 and

moving around the weapons of mass destruction that Obama said would be a red line.

He did nothing about that in Syria.

That really weakened our deterrence.

And then he also cites the Iran deal, this fixation that Obama had

with trying to empower Shia Iran and by extension, its subordinates.

and satellites such as the corrupt, brutal Assad regime, the death, deadly terrorist terrorist Hezbollah, the chaos in Lebanon, and of course Hamas.

And by somehow, with a wink and a nod, signaling them that we were not never going to take out the Iran nuclear project and that it would eventually get a bomb, but not on Obama's watch, but maybe 10 years from now.

But in the meantime, Obama could say that he solved the nuclear problem by fobbing it off on the next administration.

And the real subtext of that Iran deal was to isolate Israel by suggesting that Israel and even the moderate Gulf sheikhdoms would be in a

permanent state of tension in the Middle East with this new empowered Shia bloc, Shia Crescent, and the United States would be a neutral broker.

And that was just insane given the nature of the Iranian regime and its followers, vis-a-vis Israel and Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.

It's almost as if we empowered our existential enemies.

It was just insane.

We still suffer from it.

And what I'm getting at, Sami, those things in the Obama administration have bothered him.

So in this interview, he looks back in a way that he did not do really in

the book itself.

And you can tell from the interview, he's very sensitive, and he should be, the way that he was treated, because it was a work of magnificent scholarship and yet if you look at what leftists said they're still angry at it as they are about the martin luther king and this is a guy who was a socialist by the way and he was on pbs and everything so he was about as doctrinaire

part of the liberal establishment as you could think of

i mean it's not like He plagiarized like Doris Kearns or Maureen Dowd or Fareed Zakaria or he wrote a speech and then commented it on TV like John Meacham, all these fixtures of the liberal establishment that are in perfect good graces.

He never did any of that.

His crime was telling the truth, which the left cannot stomach.

So he gives this interview and it's very clear that he has a very mixed opinion of the Obama years.

And that is not surprising.

He says, given what he discovered in his nine years of inquiry, that Barack Obama, partly partly because of his lack of a father, partly because of the weird nature of his grandparents, partly the strange career of his mother, whatever, he was a narcissist and he was self-absorbed.

And that sort of

explains the callous way he treated people, the mythologies he created about himself.

the constant

reinventions of his name and his who he is.

And he finally concludes with racial relations that are really at rock bottom now.

You can imagine started with Barack Obama because he ran, remember,

he gave that speech in 2004.

There is no red America, there is no blue America.

And that was at the contentious time of the Iraq War.

And everybody thought, wow, here is a new type of black leader.

This isn't Jesse Jackson.

And because he's half white and half black, he can bridge that gap and he's going to unify.

No sooner did they vote for him, naively, as I wrote at the time, and I think I wrote three articles saying, do not vote for this man.

He's dangerous, than he started to go on the apology tour.

America's not exceptional.

America has to tone.

Trayvon Martin looked like the son I never had.

The police.

are always picking on black people.

Remember the beer summit,

attacks on religion, you name it.

And

we've just amplified that Obama paradigm.

And then as he points out in the interview,

and Samuel sort of

gives him a t-ball

setting to hit it out of the park, and that is there was something very disingenuous about Barack Obama.

No sooner did he come out of office than he became a grifter that would make the Bidens look silly.

He hung out with billionaires.

He went on yacht trips.

He got $100 million contracts, Netflix, you name it.

He built three mansions.

He felt not comfortable with the people he said were being neglected by America and treated unfairly and needed people like him to champion them.

But he went over to the ultra, ultra, ultra wealthy white establishment and to a lesser degree, the black establishment neglected the lower middle classes of all roots.

And then from time to time, comes out of his perch and lectures people on their shortcomings.

And he's very involved, of course, now with the Obamas.

So that was what the interview was about.

Mr.

Samuels, the interlocutor, has a very low opinion of Obama as well.

So

it was pretty devastating.

Yeah.

It's written, you know,

Neil Cosadoy, who was, I think he's the editor-in-chief, or he was at one time, is a wonderful editor.

And so Tablet's a wonderful magazine.

So it's very professionally done,

but it's very revealing.

Yes.

And it will have zero influence because nobody will pick that up.

You won't, readers, listeners, it will not be on any of your

news aggregators that are center or left, of course.

You'll have to dig it out in tablet.

And it's a very, very long interview.

It must be five or six thousand words.

Yeah.

You can just Google David Samuel's tablet and the rising star or Obama or David Garo with that, and you probably get that interview pretty fairly easily.

But you'll have, like you said, it's not going to be on any news aggregator or anything that

anybody goes to for

it's very strange about how they

the left works.

I mean, it just

has this ability to

completely smother anything that it does not,

you know, that it doesn't, it doesn't find useful or it doesn't approve of.

And

yeah, it does, but they're really having a hard time with this Trump indictment and the Biden things.

I know that you and Jack talked about it, but I was just reading an article because I thought maybe I'll look at all what the left wing's saying.

And of course, I went to The Guardian, and the article was: free speech can't be your defense for Trump.

And then I thought, okay, well, let's read down and see what she has to say.

And she says, everybody can say anything they want.

Nobody's angry at Trump for that.

But it's when you act on those words is what she says.

So I thought, well, maybe she'll give some evidence for these conspiracies.

But she had absolutely nothing.

All she had to say was, Tony, you can't

expect that Tony soprano can't invoke the first amendment for telling his crew he wanted someone who act right to illustrate the difference between somebody talking and somebody's actions well they put they

what was she saying is that if this indictment stands and leads to an actual trial and conviction

then there's no free speech at all because it says that

If you are president or if you are a major political figure and you disagree with the manner in which an election was conducted or you believe sincerely, and Trump did believe sincerely, that there was irregularities, and you bring that to people's attention and you try to seek redress of grievances through the courts, then

you're guilty of fraud against the United States government.

And as she points out, I mean, Al Gore sued for a month, and he was wrong.

The New York Times made an investigation of the Chad vote in Florida, and it's a left-wing investigation.

It should read the results.

They found out that George W.

Bush did win Florida.

That was self-evident.

But they did every possible thing, hoping that the left-wing Florida Supreme Court would stand.

They did everything to overturn that election.

They did it again in 2005, in January, when Barbara Boxer and 32 Democrats would not accept the Ohio electors.

They tried to get them unseated, and the left says, well, they didn't do it.

They didn't succeed.

What does it matter?

It was just a token.

Well, Donald Trump didn't succeed either.

And then we go into 2016.

And what, as she points out, what was the Russian collusion?

Well, there was a lot of things, but one thing it was, was election interference, because it's illegal to hire a foreign national to work in your campaign.

She hired two, Deshinko and Steele, and she knew that thing was a fabrication.

And yet, she promulgated that for a year, even into the Trump administration.

And the sole purpose of the Steele dossier was to destroy her opponent in the election and alter the election by doing something that was illegal.

She was fined over $100,000 for hiding her payments to Christopher Steele

as legal expenses.

And then we go into 2020,

and

what is Anthony Blinken calling up the former head of the CIA, Mike Moral, and saying, can you round up 50 intelligence authorities to swear falsely, basically, that this laptop, which Hunter never said, he never said, that is not mine.

He said, well, it could be, could be not, which we know what that means.

And yet they lied and they did it right on the eve of the debate to affect the election.

And that was a conspiracy.

Nobody said a word.

So now we're here with these indictments.

And they, as people in the Trump campaign have shown, I think correctly, that every time there's a disclosure about Hunter Biden or a breaking story, somebody gets indicted.

They either raid Mar-Lago or there's a new indictment or brag or the special counsel does something to

shield away public attention.

Look, right now, we were just getting these devastating revelations by Devin Archer.

And what happens?

The story dies because they add more indictments.

I guess they're up to 100.

And they're bragging they're going to get 600 and maybe they can put him away forever.

But what they don't understand is they're creating a precedent.

And like the left, the left is always assured of their moral superiority and that everybody recognizes that they're better than we are.

That's how David Brooks wrote an article, Maybe We're Wrong, or Maybe We're at Fault.

It's not very, it's not, it's disingenuous.

He doesn't really mean that, but he wants to float it out there that maybe all of this contempt for middle America shows their own biases and elitism.

Of course it does.

He's an elitist.

But my point is this,

that they're always naive about it because if they keep pushing it, you're going to get a Republican Republican Senate, a Republican House, and a Republican Democrat.

And they're going to go back and say, okay,

they told us that if you question an election and if you try to seek a redress of perceived grievances, that is a felony.

Okay, Hillary.

Okay,

all of your people.

Okay, Joe Biden.

And they're going to go to town.

They've got a blank check to do it.

And

look what the left has done.

The left says you can pack the court.

The left says you can go to the Supreme Court homes of the justices and mob yell and scream and try to affect their opinions.

They've said if you're a Harvard professor of law, that you can ignore a Supreme Court ruling.

If you need more senators, you can add more states.

You can get rid of the filibuster completely.

You can get rid of the Electoral College.

That must be necessary.

That the military, if a woman wants an abortion in a red state, the taxpayers will pay to fly her out.

You can have drag shows with simulated sex in front of minors.

So they've done all of this stuff, and they never think it's going to sanctuary cities, 550 of them, open border.

They never think it's going to boomerang.

And it doesn't boomerang.

It hasn't because the Republicans have played by the Marcus of Queensbury Will.

We're the adults.

These are adolescent leftists.

Don't take them serious.

So spoke Bob Dole.

So spoke

some of the Bushes.

So spoke John McCain.

So spoke Mitt Romney.

But those days are over.

The Republicans understand that these people

are not the old Hubert Humphrey,

JFK, even Bill Clinton Democrat.

These are Jacobin.

And the only way to stop them is to tell, warn them in advance, if you try to disrupt the process, to change the way people function for your benefit,

you're going to regret it.

And I think they're going to regret it because people are really getting angry.

Well, Victor, let's go ahead and go to a message and we'll come right back to talk a little bit about World War I.

Stay with us and we'll be back.

Welcome back.

Victor, so World War I,

my experience with World War I, and we're going to look at the causes because obviously it was a long and complicated war.

So we'll look at the causes today, but that the causes, nothing has been more studied in at least the military history that I've read, than the causes of World War I.

And I know that we all

are, we have maybe some sense that nationalism, alliances, and arms race, and then expansion, and to that was both a fostered nationalism and rode on top of this nationalistic sense that each country had are usually the deep roots of World War I.

And then, of course, all of the political events from the Balkan crisis to the Moroccan crisis to finally the execution or the

assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand

are well laid out.

But I was wondering, you know, usually you have something more to add or at least depth, in-depth explanation of those things.

And I was wondering what your thoughts were on the causes.

Well, everybody knows

the cause, the immediate causes.

The immediate causes was Austria, Hungary

was

a motley group of Eastern European countries run by Vienna that was not entering fully the Industrial Revolution and was getting poor.

It was an agrarian society, and yet it had a huge empire in the east.

And the Ottomans, the weak man of Europe that had had a presence there for 500 years was falling apart.

And Austria was absorbing Bosnia, Serbia, all of these places that we've heard about in the 90s was so violent.

Okay.

And on July 28th, they assassinated some Bosnian Serbs.

Bosnia was a multi-ethnic, multi-religious state at the time, part of the Austria-Hungary.

They assassinated Archduke Ferdinand.

Okay.

Who was he?

He was the nephew of Franz Joseph, the 80-something.

He lived to be 86,

Emperor of Austria.

And it was very strange because Franz Joseph should have never even been in line for succession.

But

Franz Joseph's son, Rudolf, killed himself.

when he was 30.

He was the heir to the throne.

He killed himself because I think he was in love with a 17-year-old maid or something.

He killed himself at a hunting lodge.

Okay.

So then

the brother of Franz Joseph's son, his nephew, is the heir to the throne.

So he's, and he married a commoner and Sophie.

So Franz Joseph didn't like him.

In fact, when he was assassinated,

nobody seemed to get upset.

The Archduke was killed, but

Franz Joseph was not upset.

And that was really strange that there was no mass outpouring.

But in any case, this was the spark that set off these prior tensions.

And so then Austria-Hungary mobilized.

Serbia as an Orthodox

Serbian state turned to its natural ally, Russia.

Russia told Austria-Hungary: if you start to mobilize and go after Serbia,

we're going to mobilize.

And then

Tsar Nicholas,

when he did that, that upset German strategy that they had always tried to avoid, a two-front war.

So then

Kaiser Wilhelm then assured...

Austria-Hungary that it would support it against Russia.

And then

Bismarck's idea of a one-front war by making Russia an ally had collapsed.

And suddenly France then

said

that it would support Russia, its new ally, as well as Serbia.

Britain kept out of it, except Britain had an ancient treaty in the 1830s with Belgium and said you cannot go into Belgium.

But that was crucial to go into Belgium if you were the Germans, according to the Schlieffenbund.

So that was the immediate thing that triggered it all.

But what was the real cause?

Well, there's about four real causes that made this thing pretty inevitable.

One was, as I said, the Ottoman Empire was collapsing.

It had extensive holdings in Greece, what is now what was now or was the former Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Thrace, and those were all up for grabs.

And that meant two things were happening.

Bulgaria on the one hand and Austria-Hungary on the other were trying to annex these countries.

And these countries, like Greece, Serbia, Bosnia, were trying to become independent.

So there was tension there.

And there were two spheres of influence: the arch enemy of Turkey, Russia,

and Austria-Hungary, and the Germanic-speaking peoples that had an affinity with Turkey.

And so there was tension growing.

At the same time,

since 1871, in the victory in the Franco-Prussian War, Germany,

at about 1865, 1875, in that period when they were very successful, they became the greatest industrial power in Europe.

They were surpassed by the United States at that time, but no longer was Britain the powerhouse industrially of Europe.

And one of the things that the Kaiser did was he started to invest in a fleet, and that scared Britain.

And there was this dreadnought race between

Britain and Germany, which British, because of better technology and design and more experience, eventually won.

But the point I'm making was Germany was now united after 1871 for 20 years under Bismarck, foreign minister of Kaiser Wilhelm.

It was crafting a strategy to enhance its control of Europe.

It was very bitter that it got what it called two-bit colonies out in the Pacific and just a couple in Africa, but it didn't have the crown jewels that France had in North Africa or Britain had in Europe or Singapore.

It was very bitter about that.

And it felt that it had more economic clout than France or Britain.

And so,

what was the solution?

The solution was to use that economic clout

and to forge a entire,

kind of like an EU under German auspices.

And they felt they could do it.

A key point came in 1890 when they dismissed Bismarck.

Bismarck was a realist.

He never overreached, but his central plan, and it was very influential in World War II with Hitler, it was you do not make an enemy of Russia.

You do not make at the same time, you make an enemy of France.

You can beat either one, given the superiority army, its arms industry, and its economy, but you cannot beat two.

And yet, when Bismarck was dismissed, what happened?

Almost immediately, France found out that Germany was very poorly governed as far as foreign policy, and they were able to make inroads with Russia, and they thought they had solved the problem of their own security by having a Russian ally.

And so the French thought, you know what?

We understand that Germany is flexing its muscles, that its subordinate Austria-Hungary is trying to absorb the holdings of the Ottoman Empire.

It doesn't matter because we have the British fleet on our side and we have Russia on one side and us in the middle and Germany is not that strong.

So

Germany came up with a plan.

the Schlieffen plan, and it was very simple, that you do not go to war

with Russia when a war breaks out because Russia is a backward country.

It'll crush you maybe with population and if it's armed sufficiently, as happened in World War II.

But it will take weeks, if not months, to mobilize.

So what you do is you put 80% of your army on the Western Front.

And they could do that with this elaborate rail system that Bismarck had helped.

you know, organize that you could take troops back and forth across Germany and get over the Rhine.

And they had the El Shach-Lorraine, remember that, they had it from 1871.

And so they were right pointing right into France.

And the idea was to go through Belgium in a big cartwheel, which that was tricky because if you did that, then you might invoke Britain into the war by

violating Belgian neutrality, not to mention Dutch neutrality.

But the idea was that you had about three weeks, you put 80% of your troops on the Western Front, and of that 80%,

80% of them were going to make a huge hook around Paris, go all the way around and cut off the British if they intervened on the coast and from the French and capture the

capital and win very quickly, and then immediately take that 2 million man army and send it east, kind of in Napoleonic terms, the outnote number, the Napoleonic manner of warfare where you defeat one and then you feature your other, you don't let your enemies unite.

And it almost worked.

The problem was that Schlieffen's plan was altered by later German commanders and they panicked.

So rather than putting 80% of their Western troops on the hook, they were afraid that where the hook was going to end up, that is the shoulder, that the French would look at this instead of

moving toward the hook and therefore becoming surrounded, they would just go straight through the Alsace-Lorraine and maybe into Germany, which was undefended.

So they altered the formula by taking too many troops, couple hundred thousand troops from the advance and putting it on the defense

so that the French couldn't march into an unprotected area of German.

holding and that really hurt them because while the hook was working it started to to find that it didn't have enough replacements, troops, provisions, and it ran out of gas right when it was going to

encircle Paris.

And then we had the Miracle of the Marne,

Jaffe's only great victory.

They stopped it.

They lost about 75,000 dead.

It was horrible.

The French did 245.

But at that point, Germany could not knock France out.

And that started the whole cannibal.

So then what did they do?

They had a race to the North Sea.

Both Both sides from Switzerland all the way for almost a thousand miles, they entrenched.

So you had these two big armies.

And meanwhile, Germany then thought they reversed the logic of the Schlieffen Plan and they thought that they could knock out Russia.

And they almost did at the Battle of Tannenberg.

They crushed the Russian army.

And

the Tsar, that became static.

But the problem was, as a lot of German diplomats understood, they had lost the war by by 19 in the beginning of 1915, because Germany did not have the wherewithal, either in manpower or industry,

even with Austria-Hungary, and maybe the sick man of Europe, Turkey, it did not have the wherewithal to fight a front

on the border of the Alps with Italy,

to the east with Russia.

to the west with France and soon to be Britain, with the British fleet

embargoing imports into Germany, and with the specter of the United States to enter any time.

And I'll just like to pause here because we'll get into the second and third phases in subsequent chapters.

But there is a,

my colleague Neil Ferguson wrote a book, The Pity of War, and there's been a whole corpus of books that said that this was irrelevant, this war.

It was just 17 million people died,

and it could have been avoided.

And it was the bankrupt aristocracy.

Remember that

Kaiser Wilhelm was the first cousin of King George.

And they were, I guess, what, grandsons of Queen Victoria.

And Nikki, the Tsar, was, I think, the second cousin of them.

So you had the three principles, the British king, the German emperor.

Chancellor, emperor, I should say, and the Tsar of Russia, all in the same family.

And they were squabbling over familial territorial disputes, so to speak.

And there was no real culpability.

That's a very strong, and it's argued very well.

But the problem is that

Germany was the aggressor.

And I'll give you one example.

Kurt Riesling was an academic, and he drafted a plan on the eve of the war called the September program, that if you were to go in there in September, September, you could do the following.

You would seize all the key French ports because Germany never had all-weather ports.

So whether it was Brest or Dunkirk or

Le Havre, whatever it is, Germany was going to carve out permanently, permanently.

the coastal strip facing Britain, just like they did in World War II, when for the period between June 1940 and June 1944, 1944, the coast of France, indeed all of France was German, and it was really advantageous for their U-boats.

Well, it was the same thing.

That was the plan they were going to do.

Hitler just took that old plan off the shelf.

They never reified it because they were stopped at the Marne, but the point is it was aggressive.

They were going to make Belgium a German protectorate and get rid of, basically get rid of Holland and Luxembourg.

And in other words, they were going to carve Western Europe up into a German protectorate.

And

that was

unpalatable to the French.

So the point I'm making is they had already taken the Alsace-Lorraine that had been primarily a French-speaking province through their victory of 1871.

They had punished

the French by huge war indemnities that the French were still paying, and they planned to take more.

And they thought they could do that because they had a moral right, because they felt that the other powers had shorted them out at the table of colonial diving up, that

the industrial revolution along the Ruhr had given them more wherewithal than any other country in Europe.

that the Prussian military code was superior to the French, and they were the true inheritors of Napoleon, and they were man for man a better army than any in Europe, probably true.

And they had split Europe up in the sense that

under Bismarck, Russia was either neutral or at least a non-aggression pact, kind of like Hitler would later do.

Hitler was very influenced by World War I.

Remember that, it's very important.

And that

the Ottomans were on their side and they had the Austrian Empire.

If you look at population, industrial capacity, it's a joke as far as Britain, France, Italy, Russia, and eventually the United States.

It was worse than the imbalance was worse even than World War II.

But

that was the plan, and it didn't work because they dismissed Bismarck in 1890, and they got a succession of mediocrities.

They altered the Schlieffen plan, but ultimately,

their imperial ambitions were far greater than

their industrial capacity.

A couple of other things real quickly is

this world,

we in the United States always say World War I and World War II and Britain and the English-speaking world in the sense of anglophone other than the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Britain, it's always the First World War and the Second World War.

But nobody

used that term First World War or World War I until I investigated this when I wrote the Second World War.

It had appeared haphazardly in 1939 after Hitler, but it didn't become part of common currency until two things happened.

Russia was invaded by Hitler on June 22nd, and we were bombed by Pearl Harbor.

Once Russia was invaded, and they looked at the nine other countries that Hitler had invaded successfully:

Denmark, Norway, Poland, France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Yugoslavia, Greece.

And then he went into Russia.

They said, oh my God, those weren't not just

the Norwegian War or the France.

They were part of a larger world war.

And therefore, this thing is now

a Second World War.

So

the Great War was no longer the Great War.

It was the Second Great War, and it became...

World War I.

And it was especially then by the time of Pearl Harbor, everybody was using the term Second World War, World War II, and no one was calling World War I the Great War because it was very clear that this disaster of 17 million people dead was going to be small potatoes compared to what this war was going to be waged with air power and bombing and everything.

And it took 60 to 70 million people that were killed.

What we'll talk about next time is

how did the United States come in?

And we were out, I mean, from August 3rd, when the major powers started to actually be in a war of 1914, we didn't come in until April 1917.

And so it was even a longer time than the,

what,

World War II, it was

September 39, September 40, September 41.

You can see that that was 24 months, and then it was all September, October, November.

So it was 27 months.

It was almost as long as that.

In both cases, the United States didn't get in the war.

And we were only going to get in the war on the principle of

unrestricted German submarine attacks and Woodrow Wilson's radical change of heart that he was going to save the world for democracy.

It's very important, the role of the United States, because it's somewhat

similar to World War II, Come in late, use its industrial power on the Allied side, and then be decisive, then take credit for winning the war, but perhaps not giving due credit to all the sacrifices made prior to your entrance by France and England and Russia.

Well, before we go to break, I just have a couple of questions.

The first one is, to what extent, because often you read in these books that Wilhelm II, who was the Kaiser in Germany at this time, who took over after Bismarck resigned.

And to what extent did his youth and recklessness and aggressiveness play into the causation of the war, do you think?

Because I think that's a very contentious

topic.

And I say that, and part of this is my second question, because there is a book out by Margaret Macmillan, The War That Ended Peace.

And it's a very, I mean, I want to give a recommendation for it.

It argues against that thesis of Wilhelm II

by looking at all of the diplomats and all of the leaders.

And it's a wonderful book in the sense that she gives you all these great little bibliographies.

And she's trying to make the argument that there were a lot more people that were aggressive than just Wilhelm II.

And so to undo that thesis that a lot of it was Germany was to blame and Wilhelm II in particular.

So if you could address that.

Well, I think she's right about that.

I mean, it's very hard to blame World War II just on Hitler.

There were other people that contributed to it.

But the problem was that Wilhelm I,

and that was the grandfather of Wilhelm II.

His father, the crown prince Wilhelm, died.

He was a chainsaw.

He died, I think he was 30 days into his reign.

So this grandson should have never been the chancellor.

His father should have.

And his father was closer to Bismarck and closer to the grandfather.

And their strategy was that time was on Germany's side.

And by that, I mean they had been

taking a few colonies in Africa.

They had taken things, the Marianas and others, the Bismarck Islands.

in the Pacific.

They had forged alliances

with Russia, they thought very carefully.

They were working on that.

But most importantly, they felt the Ruhr Valley and the rapid industrialization and the use of German universities gave them an edge over all continental power.

So it was going to be inevitable.

The 1871 victory and the unification of Germany was just a prelude.

They thought that's how they would gain power.

From time to time, they might engage in a border war or have a proxy war, but their economic power and they were building this huge fleet.

That didn't quite work because they couldn't match the British, but they didn't know that at the time, but it was gradualism.

And then a younger grandson comes in, and

he had a withered arm, and he had pretensions of

Napoleonic.

ambitions and he dismissed this old Prussian Bismarck with the idea that he was an old fuddy-duddy and that now was the time for Germany to be more aggressive.

That's usually the exegesis of what caused German

aggression.

But

others have pointed out there was a lot of problems.

And a lot of problems were that the Ottoman Empire was disappearing.

and it was giving very valuable territory and that territory was fostering nationalism and you were going to have eight or nine or ten independent countries that had been controlled by the Ottomans and who was going to control them the nearest power Austria-Hungary or its surrogates or would they be have or would they have national liberation so they were assassinating people I mean they they assassinated the the archduke and they they assassinated during this anarchist movement they they assassinated a whole group of people they assassinated Franz Joseph, as I remember, his daughter, as well as his nephew.

So it was a very tumultuous time.

And then you put

the French government right at the edge of the cauldron.

And they had just lost this humiliating war.

And in France, from 1871 to 1914, there was one issue.

and that is they stole all of this land from us and the Alsace-Lorraine.

It's some of the best farmland in Europe.

It's mostly French-speaking.

It gives us no territorial natural defenses.

And

the Rhine is no longer really the border.

And more importantly,

we're paying for it.

We're paying all this money.

It's very important for people to realize this.

And I want to just take a detour because there's a common mythology that Versailles was critically,

critical to starting World War II.

And by that, they say it is the culpability clause in the Versailles Treaty, where it says Germany was responsible for World War I.

And that was supposedly mean.

And then there was indemnities.

And let me just say that's not the problem.

The problem was the Versailles Treaty was not enforced when it could have been.

They could have enforced it and they could have occupied Germany.

And here's what I mean.

Compare the Versailles Treaty that ended World War I

with the Potsdam Accord, Yalta and Potsdam that ended World War II.

It's not even closed, Sammy.

Nobody went in, nobody thought that they could go into Germany in 1919, occupy the country, overthrow the government, and sit there and tell them what type of government they were going to have.

And that's exactly what they did.

in World War II.

It was much harsher.

More importantly, if you look at three treaties that the Germans forced down the throats of their enemies, first of all, the Treaty of 1871, where they occupied and stole land, they made the French pay this huge indemnity, the September program, the proposed idea that they were going to gobble up all of France as a condition to ending the invasion of France in 1914.

And the Treaty of Bres-Litovitz in February of 1918 that they put onto, they took

50 million people

and a million square miles that they occupied.

That was theirs from February of 1918 until November, the end of the war, when they knocked Russia out.

And that thing was so much more severe than Versailles.

So when you look at the way that the German government

imposed terms on, whether it was they defeated France in 1871 or the plan to deal with France after they took Paris in 1914, or the terms they put on Russia in 1918.

It was just

Versailles, it was nothing compared to that.

And all they had to do with Versailles is enforce it.

All they had to do to Hitler and says, you cannot go in the Rhineland, you cannot have a Luftwaffe.

You got it?

And they had the wherewithal and the power to stop it, and they didn't do it.

And

Hitler was in power.

So there's a big misapprehension

about

how World War I ended.

And

I think it was folk, General Folk, said when he looked at Versailles, and people, I think people like John Maynard Keynes were saying, oh, this is so cruel.

This is treaty.

He said, this is not a treaty.

This is a respite until we'll have a war with Germany in 20 years.

He didn't mean that they were being too mean to Germany.

He meant that they talked big at Versailles, but they did not allow him and Pershing to go into Germany and occupy it.

And had they done that, it would have been very different.

You cannot have a treaty

that tries to change the nature of German aggression unless you go into Germany.

And so

you made Germany officially culpable for starting World War I, which they did, but then you were afraid to go in there.

World War II, we did the exact opposite.

We said Germany was culpable, but we're going to divide up Germany between the French and the British and the Americans and the Soviets.

And that was the end of it.

And they even got rid of Prussian names.

They ceded East Prussia.

That was kind of bad to do that.

But when Russia grabbed Eastern Poland and renamed it Ukraine to make up that land to Poland, they took East Prussia that had been German-speaking since the Middle Ages.

So Germany never was again, and they would and Germany was not a nuclear power.

It was pretty tough.

And we haven't haven't had a war with Germany since and so that was the problem and Pershing and and the victorious allied generals they all wanted to go occupy Germany and it was Woodrow Wilson wasn't Clemenceau

maybe it was David Lord George wasn't Orlando it was Woodrow Wilson and his 14 points and you know I came in this war to bring my superior knowledge and university training and morality to make a world government under auspices of people like myself.

And these people said, listen, USOB,

we're right next to the tiger.

And you talk about defanging the tiger, but we're next to him.

And we have to have security guarantees.

Are you going to come to our assistance when they rearm?

No, the United States would not do that.

Are you, you have a League of Nations?

Can you guarantee before you mouth off about it that you can get conservatives to go with you?

No, you can't do that.

Are you going to remain armed and sell us arms?

No, you're going to disarm so that's what and we'll get into that on our second next week yeah our conclusion all right well thank you victor let's go ahead and take a break and then come back and talk a little bit about buildings without fossil fuel facilities stay with us and we'll be back

welcome back um Victor, so we have a

very liberal, not surprisingly, Boston mayor, Michelle Wu, and she has issued an executive order.

So she's doing it by executive order that buildings in the future cannot be built with fossil fuel facilities.

That's how I understand her executive order.

And I was wondering, wow, that is a...

The news stories are all saying this is going to be really expensive to build anything new in Boston.

And so maybe it'll just stop building and raise rent prices.

But what were your thoughts on that kind of of thing?

It's not just in Boston.

My daughter had a plan to add a little room onto her home in Santa Cruz.

And when I looked at the

planning process and the conditions under which you get that building permit, it was incredible.

The materials that would be used

for a 500-foot addition had to be non-fossil fuel.

And

the problem with all of this, if we can get an encompassing idea, is what the left and the elite do

is they mandate something without any, out of complete context, without any worry how it affects people in the middle class.

So if California decides that an ingredient in asphalt, which is a preservative, has cancer-causing repercussions, then they're just going to outlaw it.

And they don't really care how that affects people.

So a California paved road will wear out at twice the rate of some other road in the middle midwest or something and here's the point okay you pass that law then you say and we have money allotted so we're going to have we fix we're going to repave these roads twice as regularly as other states no they don't do that So what do you do?

You get a road right near where I am, where it looks like it's in Libya.

It's got potholes all over.

Or you say, we're going to have high-speed rail

to save gas and oil.

And it's all going to be, and then

you don't finish it.

And you don't care about the freeways that are killing people every day.

It's so dangerous.

So when she says that, we're going to transition to buildings.

Well,

what is the direct result?

Does it mean that a condominium that might serve people without adequate housing will now be too expensive because you have to find these other alternative and less adequate material.

Yes.

Yes.

When Gavin Newsom says he's going to outlaw gas, hot water heaters and gas cooktops, what does that mean for all these poor people who are cooking on gas?

Does he have a, and he says, well, it's going to be cheaper for an electric hot water heater.

Well, why aren't, why does everybody not have an electric water heater?

Why until he came along, when you looked at new homes, often the water heaters were gas because it's cheaper.

And yet he just by fiat says it'll be, it'll be cheaper to have.

No, it won't.

So what the left does, and this mayor is the latest example, is it mandates

a green edict that destroys the livelihood of people who are aspiring to be as successful, comfortable as the people issuing the edicts, who have the money and the influence to insulate them from their own ideological

directives.

Look at here in California, and we talked about it with Jack.

They're going to destroy four dams on the Klamath River.

It's going to cost a half a billion dollars.

Where are they going to get the half a billion dollars?

The state share is going to come out of a water bond that was passed years ago.

And what did that water bond say?

create more water storage.

So think of that Orwellian idea.

Hmm.

Well, the water bond is about water quality in a way.

So we can take the money to build dams to blow up dam.

And then you lose 80,000 homes, clean, hydroelectric.

So you just say, it's only 80,000 homes, but they never say this.

We're going to blow up four dams.

There's hundreds of people in these communities are going to be affected.

There's

millions of dollars of homes that will be destroyed or be rendered worthless.

There's going to be 80,000 people that aren't going to have affordable power.

And therefore,

we're going to have a new power plant somewhere else to make up the difference.

Therefore, we have a fund to reimburse the people whose lives we've destroyed.

Therefore, when we have flooding,

this is going to happen.

And when we have a drought, we have alternate.

They never do that.

And you know why they never do it?

Because they feel that if they make the law first

and make life miserable for people and costly, then they'll have to react.

Oh,

I have no choice?

You mean I have to get an electric water heater?

I have to find out power that I have to find an alternate source.

Well, I will do it.

In other words, if you force people to do it, they will do things they don't want because the alternative is extinction.

And that's how the left works.

Except whether it's Gavin Newsom at the French laundry during a mask mandate or Al Gore on the Gulf Stream when he's talking about our carbon footprints, or this mayor from Boston, when I can guarantee you that her house is not built that she lives in with non-fossil fuel materials.

And I can guarantee you that she's not going to go out in the open market and buy one right now.

She's living probably in a state house that's provided free for her.

And that's the problem with this bankrupt leftist elite.

There's one common denominator.

They are so smug and they're so hubristic and they think they're so entitled that they can issue these things, these things, these edicts that destroy the livelihood of the lower middle class.

And how do they justify it?

They justify it that they need the time, they need the exemptions, they need the capital to travel, to have a certain sort of existence that facilitates their moral superior orders.

They're like the old Soviet apparatus.

We have to be for the people, but we have to have that dock on the Black Sea.

Otherwise, we'd be too tired.

And we couldn't help those peasants in Ukraine.

But if you'd let us have a big, nice place on the Black Sea to relax, then we'll be more effective for you.

And that's the type of ideology they have.

And people are getting, and they have a contempt.

And so the other way they justify it, they come up with a vocabulary: ultra-maga, semi-fascists, chomps, dregs, irredeemables, deplorables, clingers.

I just quoted three successive major Democratic politicians, Obama, Hillary, and Biden.

And they try to demonize these people so that you say, well, they deserve what they get.

They deserve what they get.

We're going to take away their campers.

We're going to take away their jet skis.

They're going to take away everything, their big 4x4 V8 trucks.

We're going to do all of this to them because we have demonized them to the point where they deserve it.

And you keep pushing and you keep pushing and you keep pushing and you keep pushing.

And these indictments are the latest.

They're saying to America right today,

we don't care if our CIA directors or directors of national intelligence or FBI directors lie under oath.

We don't care.

But we take that stupid little Walt Nalta, that nobody who said, I don't know,

who does he think he is?

When we ask him, did he move around things for Donald Trump?

He said he didn't know.

Does he think he's John Brennan?

Does he think he's Andrew McCabe?

He's not.

And we're not going to give him an exemption.

We're going to put him in prison for 10 years.

So don't act like that.

We're going to do this to encourage the others.

That's their attitude.

And same with Donald Trump.

We're going to get not 10, not 20, not 30, not 100, not 200.

We're going to get 600 indictments.

How do you like that?

Get out of that.

And then you say, well, wait a minute.

When Charles Manson was indicted for mass murder, how many indictments did he have?

Did you go back to 1870 to find a law to get him on?

Did you tie him up?

Because

were you afraid he was going to get out of parole?

How many indictments

do you think of?

When you had the Weatherman bombers of the 1960s that are all out now?

Did you,

you know, did you get 600 indictments?

Who's ever been indicted 600 times?

No mass murder in history has.

And yet that's what they're going to do with Donald Trump to make a point.

It is.

And

it's all predicated on the idea that these stupid, fat middle westerners between the coasts deserve what they get.

They're so stupid that they don't even.

We don't care if they're the majority of the country.

We do not care because we have artificial intelligence.

We have Google searches.

We are smarter they are, we have Mark Zuckerberg, go back and look at 2020, we took them to the cleaners, we put our guys in key precincts, we fooled them on the laptop, we

fooled them on the news suppression, we got the FBI to work with Twitter and Blanket Out and Facebook.

That's how sophisticated we are.

That's their attitude.

And it's never, you destroyed the First Amendment.

You interfered with an election.

You were guilty of racketeering.

And just because you control the DOJ and the popular culture in the administration doesn't mean it's right.

And so

they're going to create a lot of contempt.

It's not going to be some old white guy that's angry at them.

You start doing this to the middle class of all colors and all backgrounds.

And they're going to finally rise up and say, you know what?

I don't care what you say about abortion or an open border or welfare.

You can't buy me off anymore because you're trying to destroy us.

You're destroying this country.

And I think it's not sustainable.

I would just tell the left, just stop it.

Don't do it.

You're pushing, pushing, pushing.

And

don't go on CNN or MSNC with a big smile and say, it's going to be 600 indictments.

Hey, you know, I thought about something.

I think you could get the death penalty for Trump.

We could execute him or maybe life in prison if he's talking nonchalantly like that.

What if you went on to Fox and you said, you know, we're going to go back and indict Barack Obama 600 times?

He broke the law.

You remember when he wanted to have recess appointments?

And I think Kimberly Strassel mentioned that in the article you referenced.

He just said, I declare the Congress not in session.

It was in session.

I declare it's not in session, and therefore I'm going to make a lot of recess appointments that it can't stop.

What is that?

That's an insurrectionary, conspiratorial, fraudulent act worthy of the type of indictment that Trump got.

It's not out of the realm of possibility.

So you get people so angry and then you're going to get a lot of people angry.

And if they take power lawfully, they're going to use the standards that you created.

And they're going to go back and look at all the things that you people did that you accused others of.

And that's what scares me that we're going to get into an escalating

spiral that you saw from 1850 to 1860 or from 1910 to 1918 or from 1935 to

41.

The passions are just going to get angrier and angrier and angrier.

And

the only thing that's going to stop it is the left is so much in control.

It's so

anarchist.

It's so chaotic that

it's fouling its own nest.

So they want Portland.

They got Portland.

They destroyed it.

They wanted San Francisco, defund the police, get rid of meritocracy on Lowell High School, let the homeless defecate, inject, urinate, fornicate.

They got it.

They destroyed it.

They destroyed L.A.

And,

you know, there's only so many Austins they can move to.

And so I think that

with that on Midas touch, finally they're going to destroy themselves.

Do you want to have Harvard?

You want to have Stanford?

You want to have Yale?

You want to hire 200 diversity, equity, inclusion people to monitor liberal faculty.

You want a guy who's an old-fashioned liberal having somebody breathing over his neck and saying, I want, you're on that hiring committee.

I want you to make sure every single person has a McCarthy-like diversity statement.

or else he's not going to get the job.

And I want to see in your syllabus what your commitment for diversity is.

And we're going to have a repertory admission.

So all of these horrible old white males, we want them no more than 10 to 12% of an incoming class.

Keep doing that and you're going to have a problem.

You really are.

Yeah, I think you're right about that, Victor.

And we're at the end of the podcast.

And a very interesting end to it it is.

You kind of, oddly, I know you're talking very serious and it almost seems grim, but it was very inspiring at the same time.

So thank you for that.

And I think your listeners, thank you for this podcast this week, too.

Thank you, everybody.

I appreciate you listening in.

And I'll be upbeat later.

It was kind of upbeat in a strange way.

So, no worries about that.

Thank you very much, everybody.

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