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Hello, you've joined 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.

This is our weekend edition, so we're going to look at a war, and that will be the 30 Years' War today.

A little bit of agriculture and then some current news.

We just recently heard that Donald Trump was indicted, so we're going to talk to Victor about that indictment.

Stay with us and we'll be right back.

Welcome back.

Victor, I know before we talk about Donald Trump and his indictment, we usually look for something positive in the news today.

And I was wondering what your thoughts were about positive things.

Well, in a weird way, Sammy, there is a positive development.

And this is they've crossed the Rubicon, they being the left, or maybe we should say they've jumped the shark, pushed the envelope too far.

But you can't have a constitutional government when

the

existing administration uses the Department of Justice to neuter their

political opponent that is ahead in the polls for an impending election.

You just can't do it.

And you can surely not do it when the existing president has more criminal exposure than does the person who's indicted.

Now, that's a serious charge,

but let's break it down very quickly.

Joe Biden, when he brought

documents out of the White House, was vice president.

He was not president.

Presidents can at any time declare any document within reasonable limits,

not classified.

Donald Trump had that ability.

So really, you're talking about almost a

technical error that Donald Trump brought things out that he thought were his personal papers or he thought they were, but he didn't do a technicality or he didn't go through it.

It's probably an infraction, but it's not the same magnitude as Joe Biden.

Donald Trump had them out for less than two years.

Joe Biden, and I don't think people have pointed this out.

He was vice president.

He brought those documents out.

He sat on them during the entire

Trump presidency.

He knew that he had them.

He knew that he had them in his office.

He knew he had them in an on-circuit.

He didn't say a word.

He would have never said a word.

Everybody knew Donald Trump had them.

The archives did, but they didn't, they acted as if they didn't know Joe Biden because why did they all of a sudden leak?

or the Biden family leaked that he had documents out.

It was only because Donald Trump's raid.

So

he was in defiance of the law, brazenly so, for six years.

Then you add the other element that nobody talks about.

Hunter Biden, as has been alleged, was

texting, emailing, communicating with members of foreign governments and foreign companies under the guise that this crackhead had expertise, inside knowledge.

And some of those emails are worded in such a way that he almost has classified information about the strategic landscape of Ukraine.

What does he know about that?

Come on.

This is a guy who poses in bikini underwear or nude or looks at his own phallus and then puts it on a computer.

And he is giving the government of Ukraine expertise?

No.

So there's a suggestion, it's unproven, but it should be investigated, that he had access to some of these things.

And why did Joe Biden take them out?

Why did he take them out nobody's ever asked that question

you can say well donald trump took them out because he thought that he wanted to they said he wanted to sell them and then they said no but maybe he wanted to keep mementos and he felt they were personal what did joe biden do he brought things out i think the purpose was to use them or to suggest that he had access or his family had access to information that had expertise about the workings of the u.s foreign policy so it's so egregious,

the asymmetry.

And then you put it in the larger landscape that we're talking about the laptop, Russian disinformation, the 51 intelligence officers that Joe Biden's campaign hitman, the present Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken, calls up a wannabe interim FBI person at one time, Mike Morrell, and basically dangles out a new FBI or CIA directorship.

He was, excuse me, the head, the interim head of the CIA.

He dangles that out.

And lo and behold, 51 hacks come out and they deliberately, they deliberately lie that this is

Russian

disinformation.

And they do it for one purpose, so that in the upcoming debate, Joe Biden can refute Donald Trump when he makes an accurate and honest accusation that Joe Biden is compromised.

And that's just,

it's just, you know, I don't have words for it.

And then you add in that the FBI was hiring, contracting out to Twitter at the tune of $3 million a year to suppress information on social media, which they did.

They squashed the New York Post.

That had election

consequences.

It might have changed the election.

And then, and then

James Baker, the legal counsel for the FBI, who was probably making $200,000, lo and behold, he gravitates under pressure because he has been trying to disseminate this fraudulent dossier.

And I say fraudulent, Sammy, because they knew it was fraudulent.

They knew it was fraudulent because they offered a million dollars if he could prove one thing.

And when he couldn't get the million dollars, if we know anything about Steele, we know he's greedy.

He couldn't get the million dollars and didn't affect them.

They went into a FISA court and they diluted a FISA judge.

And, you know, we haven't even talked about that.

What kind of FISA judge looks at that?

I looked at it and it was just junk.

And he looked at that junk and he

thinks he was taken in, but I'm not sure he wasn't part of it.

And then he gives this

writ so they can they can spy on an American citizen, Carter Page.

And then when you put all of that together and you think, wow, James Baker made $8 million as the private counsel for Twitter.

$8 million.

And he was seeding this phony dossier all around the government.

Nellie Orr had been working on Bruce Orr and DOJ.

He called up people in Victoria Newland.

John McCain had his hands in it.

And so that's the background.

And then you say, well, no, Victor, that isn't the background.

You forgot the first impeachment.

Remember the phone call when Donald Trump basically said the Biden family is corrupt?

Those weapons that Ukraine needs, that by the way, the Obama and Bidens

did not approve, the Biden administration, I should say the Obama-Biden, did not approve, and which he approved.

He said, I'm going to suspend him a while until you can tell me that

you're not involved in a quid pro quo.

And this is the irony of what I'm getting at.

They impeached him on the principle that Donald Trump, an existing president, was trying to harm the presidential aspirations of a likely opponent.

Can you believe that?

And given what they did.

And they successfully impeached him.

And then they did it again over January 6th, and they tried him as a private citizen.

So you put all of that together

around this.

And it's, it's really a, and the only thing I was on Fox this evening, I'm talking on a Thursday night, the only thing that I

might have differed with some of the other guests was

I am outraged, our listeners are outraged, but I'm not sure they even cover it at CBS or NBC or MSNBC or CNN.

I think the coverage is

not about the information that came out today about the Biden family.

I don't think they cover it at all.

I think it's all about Donald Trump is guilty.

Donald Trump is guilty.

Donald Trump is guilty.

Donald Trump is guilty.

So

that's disturbing, but

I said tonight, and I think it's true, I think the real question is what is the U.S.

government not capable of?

What will it not do?

What will the CIA, the FBI, will the directors lie under oath?

Yes, we know McCabe did.

We know Comey.

pled amnesia.

We know he leaked a classified document to the press from a presidential conversation.

We know Robert Mueller denied ridiculously that he ever heard of GPS

or the Steele Dossi.

We know that Christopher Ray Stonewall, we know that John Brennan lies under oath.

We know that James Clapper lies under oath.

We know that Mark Milley

called his Chinese counterpart to warn him about Trump.

I mean, this is pretty serious.

And we know that Mac Taibbi goes and testifies about

the government involvement and the suppression of information with Twitter and he comes back on, what, Christmas Eve, and he's got an IRS writ, and he's actually overpaid his taxes, and they're going after him.

That's scary what these people are doing.

And they're all doing it for a political purpose to take out a politician that is the people like, who is very popular, who they claim is a criminal.

I understand that.

But I mean, that's what they're trying to suggest and prove.

But I don't, anybody who's looking at it doesn't see you know you can't find where the criminal action is and the fact that he's been so investigated tells you that there can't possibly be any criminal problem i mean they'd find they would find something on anybody the amount they've been investigating him this it's just incredible it is and so and i mentioned i you know

this is I'm speaking on

June 8th, and just two days ago was June 6th, the 79th anniversary of D-Day.

And they landed on five beaches, and one of them was a screw-up.

It wasn't their fault.

It was just that they needed a wide 50-mile expanse for the type of troop, the 170,000 troops that would be there within five days.

But they needed a, so they couldn't be cut off by the Panthers.

But my point is, they landed on Omaha as well.

And there were cliffs that gave them fields of fire on the GIs.

There was sea walls that they couldn't get over.

There were hedgerows hedgerows waiting them.

They

didn't quite know that they didn't know how to handle some of their equipment that was novel, floating tanks and whatnot.

And about 4,000 casualties, dead, wounded, missing, happened in that.

Those people on this date of June 6th, they didn't die for this stuff.

They died for the equality of the law, for jurisprudence that was blind.

For a nation, you're not afraid of the government.

They were fighting people like the Japanese and the Germans and the Italians, where that was not true.

They didn't have to be good.

They didn't have to be perfect to be good, but they really did believe this system was worth dying for.

But when you look at what this generation has done with the IRS, with the CIA, with the DOJ, with the Pentagon, with the Director of National Intelligence, it's unrecognizable.

And so I think people are angry, but they're also kind of terrified or afraid because they know now that this administration and the left has so weaponized

the permanent administrative state that their ideology is

anything is necessary, by any means necessary.

We are so morally superior to you people that if we have to sick the FBI on you or take out a candidate or we have to use the DOJ, we're going to to do it.

If we have to swarm the Supreme Court and intimidate justices so that their impending opinions can be influenced by fears for their life, and that's a felony, we're not going to enforce it because that's necessary.

Or if we have journalists that get on their hind legs and think they're going to expose something and that would hurt us, we're going to go after them and we're not going to be unapologetic.

So when you get a state like that, it's quite scary.

Yeah, it is.

I'm just wondering as you're talking how new it is um and this is what i'm thinking

uh when when martin luther king uh just before he was assassinated and and we know a lot of the things he was doing because we have fbi tapes that of surveillance of him so we know that they did surveill surveill american citizens even though they weren't supposed well i guess the fbi could i i guess i mean was that that sounded that's always sounded to me like, wow, what was the FBI doing?

It sounds really illegal.

Unless Martin Luther King Jr.

was a criminal, then yes, of course they would have the right to do it.

Well, it was legal and illegal because they had a warrant from Robert Kennedy.

The Kennedys were listening to the tapes.

They knew about it.

And the idea was that he had communists.

He didn't, I mean, he may have been a Marxist, but they used the old national security dog whistle, and then they got writs.

But yes, but that's the point.

We have evolved.

So what happened?

J.

Edgar Hoover, they gave him a building, everything, and then he kind of retired in disgrace.

And then we had the church committees, and they went through the whole CIA, the FBI, and it was self-correcting.

And now we have the benefit of what, 50 years?

that 60 years where we're supposed to be more sophisticated than our

more impoverished ancestors were, but we're getting worse.

This is worse.

I think it's a lot worse.

I don't think what I'm trying to say is that FDR of all of our presidents was the guy who played hardball.

When the New York Times criticized him, he went to them and said, I can get a law passed that's going to change the inheritance laws.

And you're not going to be able to pass this

newspaper to your kids.

And they fold it.

And he did things like that.

And so it's not new.

And we, you know, he was much more egregious in exercising presidential power than Richard Nixon was.

But we haven't, I don't think we've ever seen anything like the Biden family.

I mean, we had Billy Carter, we had the Clinton brother,

we've had some, you know, Trump, some people in his family.

We've had all the Obama half-brothers, all those crazy people.

But we haven't haven't seen

like this Jim Biden and Hunter and all of these people who got together in a family consortium very early on, like in 19,

excuse me, in like 2009, 10, 11, 12, when he was vice president and deliberately tried to monetize this mediocrity, Joe Biden.

And when he said today, He just laughed at it when somebody asked, are your family corrupt?

Did you take money and sell foreign influence?

And he's ha ha, show me the money.

Well, what do you think Hunter's doing?

He's renting, he was recently renting a Malibu luxury, a condo house, whatever you call it, for $20,000 a month.

That's the money, Joe.

He wrecks foreign cars, Joe.

He blows $15,000, $20,000 a night on Coke and crack cocaine and

prostitutes.

He calls you up and needs $100,000.

Where do you get that kind of money being a lifetime politician?

Where do you get three homes?

Three homes.

So, yeah, there's the money.

And

let's see if he, if this was.

Where's the crime, as Balzac said?

Where's the crime?

I know it.

Well, Balzac also said, remember, behind every great fortune, there's a crime.

And behind every great political dynasty, there's a crime.

And so this is really, I guess what I'm saying is the left is saying

they got to a point now where they're saying,

I don't think we can trust the electoral system.

I don't think that we can have people showing up on ballot day as we did 70% of the electorate.

I think we have to have 70% as many states as we can, because the states control it, not show up on election day.

I think that we can't have three open debates.

I don't think that we can campaign in a normal campaign.

I don't think that we can have a disinterested CIA,

director of national intelligence,

FBI, DOJ, IRS, or Pentagon.

We just can't do it because we don't have popular support for our agenda.

And our agenda consists of an open border.

We got to have that.

We got to bring in 6 million people.

We've got to bring in the poorest people.

We do not want background checks.

We're going to make every damn person in that military get a vaccination, but we're not going to apply the same rules to foreign nationals from Mexico.

We're going to open that border so much that Mr.

Obador is going to say, hey, do not vote for DeSantis in Florida.

And then they're going to say, you know what?

We're going to force this green agenda down your throat.

We're going to take away your natural gas stove.

We don't care.

We're very elite bicoastal people, and we have the money to insulate ourselves and our enclaves from the consequences of our own protocols and politics.

But you don't, and you're stupid, and you don't know how to live and you don't know how to use energy and you don't know how to cook, you don't know how to eat, and we're going to tell you how to do it.

You understand that?

And that's what they're doing.

It's getting to the point now where they're using all the elements of government to push this radical environmental, open borders, destroying jurisprudence.

We're talking at the elite level that there's not an equality of the application of the law, blind justice.

But when we're getting down to the nitty-gritty, we've got all of these big cities and counties where there's essentially saying, if you're a street thug or a criminal, you're not going to go to jail.

And we're going to let that guy know you're not going to jail.

I'd like all our listeners to remember something.

We get mad at the Soros Soros prosecutors, and we should, because they've destroyed criminal deterrence and these guys, but this was designed.

You've got to remember what the ideology behind Soros is.

He's a nihilist.

He's an anarchist.

His ideology is the following.

I'm going to get these people elected with $200 million in these obscure DA rescues.

They're going to dismantle jurisprudence.

They're going to decriminalize assault, rape, theft, and they're going to do that.

And the result of that will be they're going to put the fear of God into the so-called middle-class American, white male, heterosexual Christian, and they're going to be scared for a change.

And this is going to be payback to them.

And we're going to let people who commit the crimes be in the driver's seat.

And we're going to turn the tables and we're going to create our own deterrence.

And it's going to tell everybody, you know what?

You deserve this.

You deserve to be afraid for a change.

You deserve to have your wallet stolen.

You deserve to have your store broken into.

That is redistributive justice.

And

that's how they think.

These people are really on hinge.

Yeah, they're crazy.

They're nihilists.

And I was driving home from Stanford today, and I pulled into Casa de Fruta, which is a favorite rest stop for some of our listeners that are not in California.

And

a guy pulled in.

I don't know if he said he listens.

Maybe he's listening, but he had a trailer and he was a working.

You could tell he was a working class, middle-class guy with another guy.

They were white males, and they came over and they just said, Hey, could I, they knew who I was, and they just came over and said,

They didn't say, Oh,

oh, you're victim.

No, they didn't.

They just got right to it.

They said, What the hell happened to our country?

And I said, That's a good question.

I wish I knew.

He said, They're crazy, aren't they?

And I said, you and you and me have target on our backs, and they don't like a particular person in this country, and they're out to destroy them because they're afraid of them.

They're afraid that they're the majority of the country and they're in the way of this revolutionary anarchist Jacobin project of theirs.

So there you have it.

And we're now, and remember, Sammy, as I said this on Fox, this is not the

end of the beginning.

This is the beginning of the end.

I hope so.

No,

I mean the

beginning of the end of jurisprudence as we know it.

Oh, no.

I thought you meant it was the beginning of the end of our revolutionaries.

No, no, no.

This is this is going to Alvin Bragg.

Remember, Alvin Bragg was elected, and Alvin Bragg said that there was nothing there on Trump.

He wanted to indict him.

And then when Trump announced his candidacy, he came up with 34 writs of an indictment.

And now we've got Letita Jane.

She's going to indict him.

Yes.

And the only thing I was wrong about, I said that it would be Bragg, James, Willis in Georgia, then Smith, whose wife, of course, is an Obama accolade, this quote-unquote special prosecutor.

We never hear about the special prosecutor, do we, about the Biden family?

Only the,

but this, I thought that he would be last.

He would be the closing act right before the election.

But they have a bad, they want to get rid of, they want to do it now.

And I don't quite understand their strategy.

I understand the general contours of it.

And make no mistake about it, they have a strategy.

This is not haphazard because this was done, remember, the same day

that the House of Representatives released,

they got their hands on, or they examined this document that Christopher Wray had Stonewall.

And by the way, they were going to give him a...

citation for contempt of Congress.

And he was scared about that.

You know why he was scared?

Because usually you laugh at that because there is no rule of law.

Remember Eric Colder on Fast and Furious?

He wouldn't turn over subpoena documents.

And he basically said, F you, I don't care.

And they didn't do a damn thing to him.

But then they got in power.

They always do this, the left.

They changed the rules and they went after Steve Bannon and they tried to, you know what I mean?

They really went after them.

So they set the precedent.

Ray knows that if you now refuse a

congressional writ.

Subpoena, yeah.

Yeah, subpoena, then you're going to be in trouble.

So that was

the fact that he did that, they tying this indictment just for the same day.

It's no accident.

And so

that would take attention away from.

Yeah.

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

And then I have a few questions.

You did have a column on D-Day, and then we have the 30 Years' War to discuss.

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

Welcome back.

This is the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

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So come join us.

Victor, did you have anything more that you wanted to say?

I was hoping we could discuss the Christopher Wray indictment maybe in our news segment.

And if we can move on to

absolutely, this is a breaking story when we're talking right now, listeners.

We've only learned about the impending Trump indictment.

And what's very strange about this is all leaking from the left-wing press.

We don't have the official

seven-count indictment because remember how the left operates.

They leak, leak, leak, leak, leak, bombshells, walls are closing in.

And that was for, you know, to hype it up.

And why were they doing that?

So that if you you go on CBS or NBC or MSNBC or NPR and PBS, the story is what

is Donald Trump.

It's not Christopher Wray refusing and then finally caving to a subpoena and then a bombshell, to use their expression, revelations that the whole Biden family is likely corrupt and was corrupt in the sense that they were willing to endanger the national security of the United States for these grifters to get millions of dollars, millions of which went for things as we saw with Hunter Biden.

So let's move on before I get too depressed.

Okay.

Okay.

So you did write an article for D-Day.

And

while I was reading it, I had several questions.

I know you've discussed D-Day with Jack, but you've not discussed it with me.

And I have some questions about that

amphibious invasion.

I know that Stalin insisted that they come in from the West rather than going going up the Balkan Peninsula.

But wouldn't it have been easier to invade into Italy and then go up through the Balkan Peninsula for England and America?

It would not have been easier.

So it was,

really, that would have been a harder than going into the city.

They did.

They did.

Remember,

they went into Sicily.

So let's put the whole framework there.

When the war started, we were bombed on Pearl Harbor on the 7th.

Hitler declared war on us, and we can get into that sometime.

It was one of the stupidest things he ever did, because had he not declared war on us, I'm pretty sure that it would have been, we would have concentrated solely on the Japanese.

And then, when we destroyed them, and we would have destroyed them quicker, then we would have gone into it, but we may not have, who knows?

But he declared war on us.

When he declared war on us on the 11th, remember, Joseph Stalin had made a non-aggression pact on August 23rd of 1939.

The Soviet Union was supplying

the Third Reich about 30% of their grain, their coal, and their oil.

And that was being used to do what?

That was being used to absorb Poland with the help of the Soviet Union.

That was used to attack Norway.

That was used to attack Luxembourg, Belgium, France.

That was used to go into Yugoslavia.

That was used to attack Greece.

And so they were an ally.

And then suddenly Hitler got flummoxed because he didn't have air or naval superiority to get the last Tesser in that mosaic.

He could not go into Britain.

He failed the battle of Britain.

So now he's stuck, basically,

in March of 1941, and he doesn't know what to do.

He's won the war.

It's over with.

Most people thought it was over with.

Because who was left?

There was nobody left, just us and isolated Britain and Canada.

And so he thought, well, you know what?

There were a lot of people in the Oberkommand of the Wehrmacht that wanted to, you know,

to start

releasing divisions back into the civilian population because the Soviet Union was on their side and all of Europe was under their control and Britain was surrounded, but they couldn't break the Royal Navy and the RAF.

So he came up with this idea, and this is really stupid, that he was going to attack his ally.

And then when he destroyed Russia, the lucre that would come in from the Soviet Union, and that that fact itself would have been of such a magnitude that he would then force Britain

to surrender.

And he had no idea, by the way, that the Japanese six months later were going to attack.

He didn't know where Pearl Harbor was, literally.

So he thought that the United States would remain isolationists and Britain would be alone.

Okay.

And so when then he attacked, we had this big existential question.

What do we do with these people?

They killed 20 million of their own people in the collectivization, the great famine of the 20s.

They wiped out their officer class.

They wiped out the original revolutionaries and the show trials and the military trials.

We didn't like this son of a bitch, right?

Stalin.

And then we had a big debate.

Well, the enemy of the enemy is our friend.

And so we gave him Lend-Lease, and we supplied 20 to 30%, along with the British, of Stalin's aluminum, his food,

aviation, almost all of his aviation fuel.

And we allowed him to concentrate on industrial production.

By that, I mean huge tanks, artillery, weapons.

And then we've supplied.

the necessary things that the Soviets weren't very good at, radios, radios, communications, K rations, tires, things like that.

And that allowed, that freed up the Russian economy.

Okay.

So almost immediately, he says to us, to us,

well, wait a minute, you and the British, we're being attacked by the Germans, and why don't you have a second front?

And think of that.

And we're saying, wait a minute, you were on his side and

you were helping them to destroy Britain.

And now you're mad that we don't attack Germany to help you?

We're already helping you.

We give you 30%.

He said, well, we're losing millions of people.

They've taken the Ukraine.

They've killed 4 million people in the summer of 19.

And we said, well, that wasn't as much as you killed of your own.

It was a ridiculous situation.

But

we decided that he was valuable.

So then almost immediately he said this.

You're going to open a second front and get the pressure off of us.

And we said, we have a second front.

It's called Japan.

where are you in japan you're on their side you have a non-aggression pact with japan they're killing americans in the pacific and these these russian ships are going by and then the japanese are waving them we're giving you supplies and we're sending it across the pacific and the japanese navy is blowing up americans and when they see an american liberty ship with a Russian flag on it, they wave it on by from your April 1939 non-aggression pact.

It was ridiculous.

So we finally, Roosevelt, and they said, okay, we'll open a second front.

And

you don't count Asia as second front.

And Stalin said, no, I don't.

And then they said, we invaded North Africa because we wanted to get rid of the Vichy government and we wanted to relieve the pressure on the British at Tobruk, et cetera.

after that.

And they said, that's not enough.

So we did that.

And then Churchill came into the the equation.

And he was right about this.

George Marshall said, we've got to land on the Normandy beaches.

Got to land on the Normandy beaches.

Well, they did that in early, in late 1942 at Dieppe on the Normandy coast.

10,000 Canadians landed and they were butchered and kept captured.

It was a total effing disaster.

And so then there was a big argument.

Well, what's next?

And then Churchill stepped up and said, look, we're not capable of a massive amphibious landing on the Normandy coast.

They have too many panzers.

They have air superiority.

But we can do two things.

And the Americans said, yes, we will run a second front.

We'll call it an air campaign.

So as early as April 1942, actually earlier, we sent B-17s and they sent.

two-engine and four-engine, they didn't have the Lancaster yet.

Manchester is an other plane.

And it was an ongodly bloodbath.

Americans came in under Iri Eker and Hap Arnold, who was a good guy, and they said, Well, we have the flying fortress, 11 machine guns.

It's a fortress.

It's absolutely

invulnerable.

Invincible.

And we're going to have five, six, we're going to just,

and they had, we're going to have daily, we have the Norden bottom site.

You can drop a bomb from 28,000 feet down a chimney.

It was all a lie.

And we put those Americans on those B-17s, lumbering about 220 miles an hour, loaded with bombs.

They took off from Britain.

From the moment they got over the channel, Luftwaffe bases right on the coast of Normandy started attacking them.

And then they would hand them off.

German pilots would go up on Normandy and they would shoot down and kill the Americans and the British.

And then they would play soccer for about five hours and have a cigarette.

And they would pass it on to the next

field around Paris, the next one on the other side of Paris, the next one near the German border, and on.

And then they would get a radio call and say, Hey, you know, those hundred planes that you guys shot down, five of them?

Yeah, well, we got three, and then they got eight, and they're on their way back.

And they said, How's the soccer game going?

Is that pretty good?

Well, it's time to get in the plane in about 20 minutes because they're back.

And then they would get them on the way back.

And they killed 40,000 Americans and they killed 40,000 British.

And the British had been doing it earlier.

But at least they said, you know what, you Americans, we like you, but do not send

un-escorted bomber crews in daylight over German-occupied terror.

We tried it and they butcher you.

We can't fight a ME-109, BF-109,

diving down like that.

You can't stop them without fighters.

And we don't have fighters that can escort that distance.

So they were going at night in small threes and fours, right?

They weren't just like, here we come, B-17s in formation.

And so

that was our second front.

But after a while, we got the P-51, P-47,

and they finally listened to us, the British, and started putting tanks on, auxiliary tanks on Spitfire.

And by 1944, 40,000 dead later, we were experts at it.

We had escorted escorted fighter escorts.

We had great pilots.

We had guys like Jimmy Doolittle organizing the pursuit of German planes, and we destroyed the Luftwaffe.

And that was a second front.

We destroyed 45%

of most of the critical industries of Germany.

And more importantly, we stopped their, they were accelerating.

They were really...

enlarging their economy.

Everybody says, well, well, after we bombed them, they were still big.

Well, yeah, because they were exponentially increasing with slave labor and everything.

They were in a war footing.

But that was not enough for Stalin.

Can you imagine that?

I want a second thought.

So then Churchill says, well, where do we go after North Africa?

And the Americans goes, we're going to go to 90.

He said, no, no, no.

It'd be just like the B-17s.

You guys are not up to it.

We're not up to it.

There's submarines still in the channel.

They've got a new FW 109, the Fockwolf 190 coming out.

They've got upgraded 109s.

We can't do it.

So we'll go up through Sicily.

And the Americans go, no, that's a just, oh, no, no, we want to get the thing over with.

And they said, no, no, no.

Let's go to Sicily.

We'll try it out.

And then Churchill made kind of a dumb thing.

He said, we're going to go, as you said, no offense, Sammy.

We're going to go up through the underbelly of Europe.

We're going to go up into the Adriatic Tyrrhenian Sea on the coast of Italy.

We'll go, we'll take Italy and we'll go into Austria, Austria and then Trieste.

And guess what?

We'll go into Eastern Europe and we'll skip 1,500 miles that we didn't have to go across from the channel all the way to Berlin.

We'll go right at him.

And you know what?

We don't trust that SOB Stalin.

So if we go up through the underbelly of Europe, then he can't absorb Eastern Europe because he says he won't.

But we know that that steamroller, given all the equipment and given the pressure that we're putting on the Germans from the West, it'll start winning and he won't stop.

He will go into Eastern Europe and Berlin and he'll take it all and he'll enslave the Czechs and the Romanians and the Hungarians and the Poles and say, oh, they worked with Hitler.

Yes, and so wouldn't that invasion have changed the

map of political map of Europe after World War II?

It would have.

Oh, Sammy, you preempted me.

What happened in Italy?

We landed at Sicily.

And we went in, we crossed the Strait of Messenia, and then we went into the tow And we went up through the Gothic, the Sied Freak line, to this line, this line, and this line, and this line.

And what happened?

Did we ever get to the Austrian border?

No.

Look at the map of Sicily, and look at the map of Italy.

They got a backbone, the Apennines Mountains, right down the middle of it.

And there's little coastal corridors.

It's designed, and it's a long, long, long peninsula.

So anybody who looks at that and looks at history, the Byzantines, Corsair, whoever it is that tried to invade, all the defenders do is they make a wall and then they go back up and back up and back up.

And you got to go fight through mountains.

And you can't do it.

You cannot start at the bottom of Sicily.

If you want to do it, We only know who did it really well was Hannibal.

He came in over the Alps and he came down in the Po Valley and the flat plains and he went the other way and scared the hell out of him.

Even then, he got trouble when he got down into the middle of Italy.

It's stupid.

You cannot attack Europe through Italy, period.

The only good thing about that campaign is it gave us B-24 bases that could hit German targets in East Prussia, which we couldn't do from England.

That was valuable.

But we never took Italy.

When the war was over on May 11th, 10th and 11th, the United States was in Germany and Russia was in Berlin, and we were not in Austria.

We were still in Italy.

And that killed 80,000 Americans.

It was a disaster.

But I thought we had the most incompetent people.

We had some of the most incompetent.

Mark Clark, the Eagle, the great Mark Clark, he was overriding commander.

Lucas was incompetent.

Clark was incompetent.

And they were up against Kesserlin.

He'd been a Luftwaffe officer, Smiling General Kesserling.

Whatever you say about the guy, he was a fanatic genius.

And he stopped us.

Every time we would go forward, he would back up a little bit and fortify.

And then we'd go forward, he'd back up a little bit and fortify.

And he was bleeding us the entire time in Acemer.

It sounds like he was bleeding too as well, though.

And the British and the Americans didn't have their full forces there because they were doing the Normandy invasion.

No, they weren't doing the Normandy invasion.

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

They went into Sicily

in 1943 June, and they didn't get into Italy until July.

Yeah, but they were still planning it and

arming for it and everything.

They were.

But the thing then, they had a big fight.

So then they said to Churchill, don't go there anymore.

It's not working.

And Churchill said, it's not working because Mark Clark can't do it.

You should listen to Alexander, who's a much better general, British general.

And Lucas, and you took Rome.

I mean,

they were so brilliant, the Germans, they evacuated Rome and made it a free city.

They didn't try to beseech, you know, make it a fortress because they were backing up.

And this entire American army

was going forward.

And they wanted to take the attention away from the Normandy.

project.

And so what did they do?

They just left a big freeway open to Rome to make a right turn and the Americans fell for it.

And they didn't go north.

They just, and Mark Clark had a big parade, and he was in all the newspapers.

I took Rome.

And Kesserlin said, you know, we know from memoirs, he was delighted because that gave him about 40 days to regroup and make a big, another

wall of defense.

But so there was an argument then, and they said to Churchill, it didn't work.

And Churchill said, Well, it did work in one sense.

I stopped you crazy Americans from trying to invade Normandy in 42, 43, or early 44.

And it would have been a disaster.

But now that it didn't work, let's go to Normandy.

And the subtext was, as Churchill said, and don't hurry it.

Don't hurry it because we're losing 80,000 airmen to take pressure off Stalin.

We are losing a lot of convoys up in the North Sea to supply

the Soviet Union from the Arctic Circle.

We're losing people to the Japanese coming in all the way through the Pacific into Iran.

We're doing a lot to supply him 30% of his war material.

We're doing a lot to bomb.

We're doing a lot in North Africa.

We're doing a lot in Italy.

We're doing a lot with the Japanese that can't help at all.

So we're doing a lot.

We don't need to go kill ourselves on Normandy.

But the Americans, you know, we're American.

We're saying, hey, man, we want to get the...

we're going to go in and kill the son of a bitch in Berlin and go home.

We're sick of this.

Stop.

You're just scared because you lost everybody in the Somme in World War I.

So we came in and we finished the business at World War I.

We're going to do the same damn thing.

And British said, well, we've been fighting them two more years than you did.

We know these people.

So that was what was behind the Normandy.

It was Stalin's pressure.

And then we invaded.

And how do you invade when you don't have a port?

You can't have Cherbourg.

You can't

Dieppe.

You can't have

Pal de Calais.

There's nowhere to go.

We didn't have any of them.

We didn't have any of the ports.

They were all fortified.

So we had to tow two cement mulberries all the way from Britain.

We had to put gasoline pipelines underneath the channel.

We had to bring everything in and we had to land on the beach.

And you couldn't make it just a night.

There was almost, I shouldn't say that, but there was very light losses at Juneau Beach.

and Gold Beach and Sword Beach and Utah Beach, the other American beach, the Canadian and British beaches.

They were much different than Omaha.

Omaha was a big, broad beach and we needed it.

So we wouldn't get cut off when we went online.

But people looked at that and they said, you know what?

Even Bradley said that.

He looked at that beach and said,

and Patton looked at that.

You know, Patton was on ice because he slapped soldiers.

So for a year, they didn't even use him except to be a decoy in Britain.

You know, Army Group Patton is going to

invade at Calais.

That was the idea.

It worked.

It was a ruse.

But think of that, putting your mediocre generals for the real invasion, putting your military geniuses at decoy.

That's another thing.

Didn't that throw the Germans off?

It did.

It did.

But I mean, it also threw us off because

once we landed on Detay,

I mean, we lost 10,000 dead, wounded, and missing, and maybe 4,500 dead, which is kind of amazing because in 24 hours, there was 160,000 people landed.

But

we were there all of June and July.

We didn't move.

The Germans cut us off.

God, the battle for

Khan with the British, it was a bloodbath.

We were trapped in the hedgerows.

And then on July 31st, we didn't know how to get out.

And so Operation,

you know, B-17s bomb, heavy bombers come in right at right in front of our troops.

We killed a three-star general.

We bombed him.

And

so

it was very touch and go.

And then we unleashed Pat.

We broke out on the 30th, the 1st of August.

We broke out.

We gave Patton the Third Army and he was off to the races.

And how many people got wounded and killed in that campaign for Normandy, Operation Overlord?

Well, 400,000.

400,000 British and Americans.

And there were probably 200,000 killed.

And that was, it didn't have to be that way.

Operation Cobra, which was, as I said, the B-17 bombing of the German lines, we killed 500 of our own.

Leslie McNair was blown up, three-star general.

And we could have done that in June, I suppose.

But my point is, it was all screwed up.

And then we went to the races with Pat, and they finally gave him the army and the rest is history.

And that was all because Joseph Stalin said, we need a second front.

And then when we got to, we would have got to Berlin before Joseph Stalin, but we had agreed at a series of conferences

about the Yalta Conference.

We had agreed how to split up Germany.

And unfortunately, Berlin was in the Eastern sector.

So we got into Czechoslovakia.

And we got on because, you know, we were into Germany and all of a sudden you can't take Berlin.

And Ike was a great guy, but he was strategically naive.

And he said something to the effect, well, let them take Berlin.

That was what we planned on.

And it'll be a bloodbath if we go in there.

No, Ike, it wouldn't have been a bloodbath.

The Germans would have surrendered to us in Berlin.

They weren't going to surrender to rapists and murders and killers in Stalin's army.

They lost 100,000 dead taking the city, but we wouldn't have.

And then we would have had East Germany just a little splinter way over to the east rather than, you know, one-third of Germany for 50 years.

So it was, it was, it's easy for me to talk like this in criticism, but you look at the whole D-Day campaign and given the resources we had, it was pretty brilliant.

It really was, how you can land biggest amphibious landing since Xerxes.

Even the first, you know, there were some great amphibious landings, Regulus in the First Punic War, a Roman army, and even in the third Punic War army, the consuls landed 80,000 people at Utica, but that's nothing compared to what we pulled off.

We and the British.

British were very,

I got kind of criticized for the Second World Wars because I put out the, made the point they were the only one of the six combatants, belligerents on both sides that fought the first day of the war,

September 1st-2nd, 1939 to September 2nd, 1945.

No other country did that.

Number two, they were the only country that went to war for reasons other than attacking another country or being attacked by another country.

The only one.

They went to war for the principle of Polish sovereignty, period.

And we did not go to the war.

We did not go to war, of course, until we we were attacked at pearl harbor and russia did not really get into the war until they were attacked by hitler and of course italy invaded uh

somaliland and germany invaded poland and jap japan had invaded china and the pacific and attacked us so that they were very different people that we need to and they were very they gave us a lot of help they really did they fought very magnificently they gave us a Firefly, a Sherman upgraded tank.

If it wasn't for them, the P-51 would have not had a Rolls-Royce Merlin engine in it, and it would have had a crappy Allison engine.

They did a lot of stuff for us.

I think sometimes we forget that about the British.

You get in trouble for saying that about them?

Well, I meant I praised them in the book, and I had some people who said,

oh, you shorted America.

I didn't short America, but I did say that

they really were,

I mean, they were arrogant and they would say things to us like, hey, you guys, do not fly daylight.

You Yankee people with all your money in the streets of London and your swagger and your cigarettes and your chocolate.

You think you can do anything?

We thought that too, and we got slaughtered trying it.

Don't do it.

Yeah.

And then they wouldn't listen to us.

And then when we, Americans are really smart.

I mean, they, they kept, they'd always do the, they finally do the right thing.

And the right thing they finally do after screwing up is always the best thing.

And it's always a thing that nobody else can do.

So we invented disposable drop tanks that would allow a fighter to go over France, drop their tanks, and then go all the way to Germany and back.

Wow.

And we told the British that you were losing aircraft and you should do that.

And they did not do that until very late in 1944, 45.

So

things like that.

And

the British, their idea of generalship is nothing too bad, nothing brilliant.

You just want to send people out of Sandhurst who know the protocol.

And

once in a while, you get, you know, a Wellington or Lord Nelson on sea, but mostly they're mediocrities.

But, you know, they're good.

They're Montgomery and they're Alexander and they're good.

Yeah,

they're valuable allies.

They are

deadly enemies.

But we're very different.

We're very volatile.

So we get the worst of the worst, right?

We can get a guy like Lucas who was just incompetent.

Or

we had five or six generals that were just,

I mean,

I

Simon Bolivar Buckner, I felt bad because I criticized him in a book and one of his ancestor or descendants, excuse me, criticized me.

And he had a point because I was unfair.

I mean, it wasn't unfair, but he really

was inept.

He was killed on Okinawa, but his policies were just disastrous.

But then at the same token, we create these brilliant guys.

I mean,

George Patton was a brilliant officer, and the people under him were brilliant.

You know,

Lightning Joe Collins or

Matthew Ridgway, all these Corps and Division and Army commanders under him were very, very good.

Lucian Truscott, all those guys, I don't know where they came from, but they were the best commanders.

They were as good as anybody in the war and mostly better.

But we, and that's the American brand.

We're very volatile.

We have genius and we have mediocrity.

With the British, try to avoid those extremes and just turn out the protocol guy that follows a protocol.

And he just sort of, you know, he won't screw up and he won't do anything.

It's like Montgomery.

Extraordinary.

Yeah.

Although Montgomery did do something extraordinary, which was defend all along.

Well, I mean,

that was what I'm talking about.

He had what he called the set piece.

So when they put him in there after General Gautt was killed.

He, you know, he just said, we're going to have the set piece.

So we laid a minefield and we rushed.

He asked the Americans, we rushed Sherman tanks, which believe believe it or not, were superior to German tanks.

The Mark IV, a Mark III was mostly a German tank then.

And we rushed, I think, I don't know, we gave him over 100, 200 Sherman tanks.

And then

he placed his artillery and then he just sat back and he let Rommel, who was under

fueled, under-equipped, and he just ground him up.

And then he reverted to Montgomery.

They said, you know, Montgomery, there's no Germans anymore.

They're a ragtag bunch.

They don't have air superiority anymore.

They're going to have to flee from El Alamein all the way back 600 miles to Tripoli.

And all we have to do is unleash this British Eighth Army and it will wipe them out.

Just let them go to the race.

Oh, no, no, no.

Let's be sober and judicious.

We don't want to worry.

We don't want to endanger our victory.

Let's go 10 miles, stop, take a breath, 10 miles.

And they got away.

And that's how the British did it.

Same thing with the Flaised Gap.

They could have closed it.

He could have closed it really quickly.

Well, it's not, let's not,

you know, I tell Brad not to close that gap.

Let's,

we don't want to break the balloon.

And here's Patton.

Close the gap, close the gap.

We can destroy the whole Army Group West.

We'll kill 250,000 Germans at Falaise.

No, no, no, no.

I'd rather have, I don't want to break our neck.

I'd rather have a little bruised shoulder.

Let them get out a little bit.

No, no, no.

And they let them get out.

And where'd they go?

They went right up to Arnheim and refitted.

And then the British 1st Paratroop Division landed right on top of a Panzer division that should have never existed.

And the bridge too far, Market Garden, was an ungodly disaster, partly because the Germans had escaped that noose,

you know, earlier in the summer.

And they went right up to

Holland and refitted, got right near the Ruhr.

They just bought from the Ruhr brand new Panthers and Tigers, and they had 30 40 000 new

uh recruits and they had the veterans that survived and they and they were all sitting there and we dropped airborne divisions the americans and the british right on top of them

just that's the brit that that was the british or when they had the road you know that all the way to arnheim

uh you know they they they didn't go fast enough they had brilliant defenses and they just would not take risk

Well, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and then come back.

And this

episode has gotten away from me.

We were intending to get to the 30 years war.

So we'll do that when we come back after this break.

Stay with us.

Welcome back.

This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show, and we are talking about,

well, we were talking about World War II and D-Day.

And I do have more questions about that, but we'll hold those off for maybe some other time.

To the 30 Years' War.

It's a war that everybody knows the ending of.

And very few people know the course of the war.

the fighting of the war itself, but we're all very well acquainted with the Peace of Westphalia, which ended the wars of religion in Europe and

ended with a political settlement that settled German states to over 300 of them, and they each could choose their own religion after that.

So, we do know a little bit about the peace of Westphalia, but the war itself is a little bit of an enigma to us ordinary people.

I have read about it and studied it and written about it, and I still don't understand it.

Because,

I mean, this was after, I mean, the Protestant Reformation was at the end of the 15th century.

We're we're into 1618 right

so

there had been a

understanding remember that latin phrase quies i think it was quies regio eus religio religo and that was whoever's kingship you have

whatever whose eyarchy is in control in the holy roman empire and we're talking about the Austrian parts of Eastern Europe, Germany, Prussia, that Holy Roman Empire, whichever whichever monarchy or principality there was, and whatever the particular religious affiliation of the king was, whether he was Protestant, we're talking about Calvinism, aren't we?

Mostly Lutheran Calvinism versus Catholicism, then you let that kingdom go.

And

the Holy Roman Empire, and we always quote Voltaire, it was not holy, it was not Roman, it was not an empire.

But the point was, it wasn't really, it didn't have control of all of these members.

I don't want to call them nations, but little monarchies.

And there was a peace and there was a way of living.

And then you had,

is it Ferdinand II came in?

Yes.

And he decided that they were all going to be Catholic.

And he started pushing his weight around.

And the result was for 30 years, they fought Catholic versus Protestant originally in these border wars for 1618 to 1648.

and

they bled Europe dry.

I mean,

I think of the seven to eight million people that died, a lot of them died from famine just because they unleashed these Protestant and Catholic armies out in the countryside and they destroyed farms.

They plundered, they raped, they killed.

And the result was that people were they didn't have the wherewithal to continue.

So it was it was kind of a 30-year cannibalism.

And it very quickly

transmogrified

into ethnic or nation rivalry.

And by that, I mean, on the one side, ostensibly, Fernand was the agent

of the Holy Roman Empire and the Catholic people like the Poles within.

it and as allies, but he should have had, and he was also operating with the Habsburgs, the Spanish, who were Catholic, who, you know, that they had the Spanish, Spain controlled the Habsburg Empire

extended all the way to Holland.

And there was the Spanish Road, I think that was the term they use, from Holland all the way down into the Holy Roman Empire.

It was controlled by the Habsburgs.

You had that rare kind of meeting of two major forces, the Holy Roman Empire nominally and the Habsburgs.

And you had a Catholic war, but it it didn't end that way.

All of a sudden, then France got worried about the powers of the Habsburgs and saw that if they jumped in as Catholics mostly on the Protestant side, then they could offset the power of Spain and break it and dissect its European empire and

free northwestern Holland from Spain and isolate Spain.

And so they were actually fighting as Catholics on behalf of Protestants.

And then you had

the Scandinavians come in as Lutherans, and that tipped the balance for a while.

And you had the Ottomans that were actually, I think they were fighting, they were hired by the Bohemians for a while.

And the point I'm making is

there were these stages from 1618 to 1648 that each new infusion just restarted the war on different premises that weren't just any longer religion.

And

so,

you know, you think that the war would have been Spain, Portugal, the Habsburg Empire up to Holland with France, and then the principalities of present-day Germany, Belgium.

And then that was going to be versus some renegade Protestant Holy Roman Empire monarchies with the

Scandinavians.

And then I guess there was even some people from Scotland Scotland that came in, although Britain never did.

And then they had a genius, and I have to say this because he was Swedish,

Gustavus Adolphus.

And man, when he came in, and if he hadn't been killed, I think he died at Lützen.

But if he hadn't been killed, it might have ended the war maybe a decade and a half earlier.

But anyway, it went on and on and on.

And

as Klauswitz said, the longer a war lasts, the more it escalates, the more that people get killed.

So it was the most destructive war

up until World War I.

World War I killed 17 million people, but prior to that, there had been nothing like it.

And

it weakened the European.

They had, remember, they had saved Vienna in 1529,

just 70 years after the fall of Constantinople.

And 1571,

they had had stopped them at Lepanto.

And that was just 50 years before the start of the 100 years.

After this 100 years war, they gave new life to the Ottomans because

say it was over at 1648.

They were in Vienna at the gates of Vienna again in 1683, and they almost took it.

So it was really destructive that it really weakened Europe vis-a-vis uh the Ottomans.

That was one thing that happened.

You mentioned this, the

Peace of Westphalia.

I guess the

final result of that war was

kind of

the map making or the general contours of what would be Europe today.

In other words, the Habsburgs lost in Spain, they lost Portugal.

I think there was an independent Portuguese nation that used the distraction of the 30-year war to break away from Spain.

And then you had the breakaway of the Dutch, and that would really free the Dutch.

And of course, they were Atlantic coastal

mariners, and they would have a great success in the New World.

In fact, all over, all the way into the Dutch East Indies, once they're freed

from Spain, and it's more or less wrecked the

Holy Roman Empire.

I guess the person that the people that came out on top were Cardinal Richaud, right?

The crafty foreign minister of the French, and who had, you know, and then we have the Sun King.

He was the, yeah, he was, well, yeah, the Sun King.

He was fighting.

He doesn't come in.

Yeah, he was very young.

Yeah, but I was.

Richelieu was the diplomat of all

diplomats and very forward-looking, very modern in the sense.

Absolutely.

And he used to be fighting a political war.

He was fighting financial war.

He was paying off everybody.

And then when the whole thing was over at Westphalia, France became, I think you could say, the most powerful country in Europe.

And that was kind of funny because he had used French money and influence to help the Protestants weaken his Catholic rivals.

So when the war was over, Protestant, I think you could say Protestantism won in the sense that there were now going to be a lot of Protestant, independent, powerful states in Northern Europe.

And

the Pope would no longer have control of a unified Christendom north of

halfway through Germany.

It wasn't going to happen anymore.

But at the same time,

France, a Catholic country, became, and he would, under Louis XIV, and then all into the 18th century, it was going to be the most powerful country in Europe.

And then we're going to go into Napoleon and everything.

So that was one of the results of Oswald.

I think it's militarily, and that's why I have to plead that on the diplomatic side, I'm not as

sophisticated as you, Sammy, with your PhD in French history.

But,

and you know,

French is one of your languages, but what I'm getting at militarily, Jeffrey Parker is one of your assets.

Well,

Jeffrey Parker, who's a very good historian, I know him pretty well.

I used to know him pretty well, but he wrote a book called The Military Revolution that was kind of controversial.

But he said, in this conundrum of the Thirty Years' War, they revolutionized the way that Europeans fought.

So the old,

and he was criticized because people said, well, the Spanish tertio still continued.

But basically from about 1530

until

1650,

there had been the idea that the Spanish had and the Swiss had adopted these pikemen in emulation of the Macedonian phalanx, and they were invulnerable.

But during the 30 years' war, under the constraints of

necessity, they started to really improve

arquebuses.

You can either say it with an H or an A, I suppose.

Every time I've written a book and I wrote Arquebuses, then they put an H in, and then every time I put an H, they kick it out.

So I don't know what the proper spelling is.

But anyway, they were lighter and they were more practical as an infantry weapon.

And that was new.

And they started to use lines.

By lines, I mean if you had

20,000 men, rather than stacking them eight to 10 to 12 deep, they were putting them three or four in a line.

And that was a much, that gave a much,

if you think about it, when you have a column, goes back to the phalanx, it's eight men deep, you take five men out of the killing zone because they can't reach the enemy with their spears.

And they either push off these mosses, they say in Greek, with their shields, or they step up to replace.

But still, it's like a Napoleonic column, which was a throwback.

It's a psychological idea that this big mass is going forward.

But during the 30 years' war, they said it's much more effective to have the British, what would become the British line of three people,

and that would be continuous fire.

And so that was that was new.

And that was one of the things that Jeffrey Parker has a whole section in the military revolution about people like Wallenstein and Gustavus Adolphus and how they changed European warfare into a war of artillery and small arms fire.

And that was the end then of classical, the idea that you could still be the Swiss pikeman by the Spanish tercio.

So it was a very bloody

It was a very bloody 30 years war and

it really set Europe back, and

it gave an extra century, I think, to the life or vibrancy of Ottomanism.

And it's a very important thing as a general principle.

When people, I've had this discussion.

I had it once with Bernard Lewis.

I went to Princeton and had lunch with him.

He was telling me how dynamic Ottomanism was.

I know he wrote a book, you know, What Went Wrong.

about the Islamic World, where he was very critical of the stasis of Ottomanism.

But otherwise, he was

very fair or

what the word was, but I was trying to tell him that

one of the reasons Constantinople fell was the divisions in Christendom.

And one of the reasons that the Ottomans, again, were at the gates of Vienna in 1683 is that

Europe was cannibalizing itself between Protestant and Catholic in the Thirty Years' War.

And they had earlier cannibalized themselves with the division between Orthodoxy and Catholicism.

And so

when they were united, then Ottomanism failed.

Ottoman was its great achievement, it united most of the Islamic world, not the Iranians, but most of the Islamic world into one potent force.

Well, Victor,

we're way beyond our time.

So we've come to the end of our show.

I'm not sure if you had anything more to add.

I learned something new about the transformation of the military in the 30 years' war.

So, thank you for that.

Well, thank everybody.

I hope it wasn't too long on military.

I've had some people that said, wrote me, Sammy, and they said, well, you said you were going to start with a history of war with the Greeks,

and then you're going to go to Rome, and then you're going to go to the Dark Ages and tribal war, and then you were going to go to the Crusades, and then you were going to go to

the rise of Ottomanism, you're going to go to the New World, and then you stopped.

You stopped with the

100 years' war.

We wanted the

30 years' war.

So, that's it.

And then we'll go, we're going to get into the more modern period of the

18th century.

Well, you should have made those people happy today.

And I hope also those who are big celebrants of Memorial Day and June 6th, the D-Day invasion.

So,

we satisfied lots of our listeners today.

I hope so.

I hope so.

That's our business to try to make our listeners happy and enjoyable and hope that

they

very loyal listeners invest time.

And I really try to appreciate that.

Yeah.

All right.

Well, thank you very much, Victor.

And we're on our way out.

Thank you, everybody.

Thanks for listening.

This is Sammy Wink and Victor Davis Hanson.

We're signing off.