The Hundred Years War and Our Domestic Conflict

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Hello to the listeners of the Victor Davis Hampson Show.

This is our weekend edition and we look at usually things a little more cultural or historical and we've been on a series of wars and so this Saturday, Sunday, we will be looking at the Hundred Years War.

We don't skip out on the latest news so we will look at some of the news stories today.

And so stay with us as we go to a break and then we'll come right back.

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I would like to remind everybody that Victor is the Martin Anely Anderson Senior Fellow in Classics and Military History at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marcia Buskie Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

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Well, Victor, I know we always start out with the positive.

So, anything on the positive agenda today?

Well,

I'm looking out at a very verdant, green,

and

plentifully supplied

hydrological California.

So that's, I drove over to work and I saw a San Luis Reservoir for the first time five years, completely to the top, 98%.

There's still 10 to 15 feet of snow on both sides of my house, and we're in May.

It's cool in May.

So

what the weird thing is, this is global warming, global warming, global warming.

And we're hearing that forest fires forever, forest fires forever.

And we never stop to think that these are cyclical.

And this is one of the, this is, I've been on this farm since I was born in 69.

This is the coolest May I can remember.

I remember in 1980, there was a very cool June and the harvest was very delayed, but I haven't,

you know, I haven't seen temperatures in the 30s.

I remember once,

I think it was

1980, we lost some young vines to a frost on May 5th.

But this is just amazing and that snow's not melting.

So I think we're going to have snow in the Sierra for one of those weird years.

It doesn't melt in the high Sierra.

And that's good,

even though

Gavin Newsom, you know, has done all he can by shutting down the timber industry so he doesn't take care of the forest, so they don't clean it out.

So the drought's dead trees are still there and inflammable.

But nature is helping California out, and that is good.

I also sense

a pushback, a very subtle pushback, as if people are saying to themselves, you know, Joe Rogan,

a Bill Maher, a Barry Weiss, we've talked about a Joe Manchin, Senator Sinema,

that all of the ideologies, bromides,

politics that they adhere to are no longer sustainable.

They just don't work.

And whether it's living in San Francisco

or it's walking on the street in Washington, D.C., it doesn't work.

And the idea that you're going in California to get 130% of your daytime power

by wind and solar, but have no power at night when you have to charge your batteries for your, it doesn't work.

And the big city DA does not work.

And

Mr.

Eric Adams calling everybody a racist because

Ron DeSantis sends

illegal aliens who pick where they want to go.

And so Governor Abbott and Texas, they go to the two biggest cities.

And they just happen to be run by African Americans, but they were both sanctuary cities.

And there's a good tape of Mr.

Adams going to the bus station, remember, shaking hands, hands, come on in

for Photoshop.

Now he's angry.

And what does he do?

He reverts back in reductionist fashion to racism.

But what I'm getting at, I don't think anybody believes it anymore.

I really don't.

I think that people in the center and left, not the hard left,

they just look at this and they said, you know what?

They gave us everything we wanted.

We had the House, we had the Senate, we had the President, we had the corporations, Disney, American Airlines, Anheuser-Busch, we had the Lakers, we had LeBron, we had the NFL,

we had Colin, Kaepernick, we had K through 12, critical race theory,

we had the transgender movement, we had Mark Zuckerberg's 419 million, we had Silicon Valley, we had the Washington Post, New York Times,

we had Jamie Dyne, we had everybody, and we got what we wanted, And now it's blowing up in the fastest rate of decline we've ever seen.

That should be an object for pessimism.

But I think we can self-correct because the people who bought into that don't buy into it anymore, at least publicly.

And the movement's eating its own.

Yeah, it is.

They created, as I said before, with that other metaphor, they created...

a Frankenstein and the Frankenstein's attacking Dr.

Frankenstein, the creator.

And so they thought they can handle this, but once you take away the bridles and you unleash human nature without civilization, tear off that scab, the wound underneath is pretty ugly.

And that's what

San Francisco is.

It's pretty ugly.

They had, you know, it's ungovernable.

So

the thing what's so strange about this crumbling West,

this crumbling progressive agenda is

People know they have the power to stop it.

So when you see these tapes, like we're on Fox News the other night of these criminals going into to rob this guy's house, right?

He was being interviewed by Laura Ingram.

It reminded me so much of H.D.

Wells' time machine.

He was an Eloy, right?

And he kept saying things like, well,

I don't think this is sustainable.

How many times have you been?

Well, I think 12.

They even took my washer and dryer.

They just come in.

And then they show clips of these people driving up and nobody stops them.

They have the ability to stop them.

You don't believe that after spending a billion dollars down the drain on homeless, they could have taken that billion dollars and gone down to somewhere in the industrial zone or suburbs and taken five acres and made a beautiful tent city with 200-foot little cubicles that had a central heating cooling pipe in them and then have a group bathroom and showers and a doctor on call and say, if you want to be on the street, here it is.

You can live here, but you're not living down there, injecting, fornicating, urinating, defecating.

They could do it.

So they know what,

that's what's so strange:

we know that if we just exploited Anwar, we could do it safely, much more safely than the Saudis can pump oil or the Russians or the Venezuelans, Venezuelans.

We got Keystone back online.

We had new federal leases.

We encouraged fracking.

We could get up to self-sufficiency again.

We know we could.

We know if the military today said the following, if you are a four-star general,

you have to wait five years before you work for a defense contract or firm, either as a lobbyist or serving on the board.

We know we could do that, and that would either discourage people from being four-star generals who shouldn't be, or if they did want to go rotate to lucrative billets, they at least have five years where their currency wouldn't be as valuable because they would lose contacts.

We could do that.

We could know that if we had a new chairman of the Joint Chiefs, we're going to get one, but he's woke, and we got a new Defense Secretary, and they said, you know what?

We're going to go back and enforce the 1965 Civil Rights Act.

We're not going to be advocacies of anything.

We are going to make sure there is no discrimination and bias.

But our main point is battlefield efficacy.

We are going to redo this military.

We are going to have the most stringent rules.

We're going to go out and try to recruit people all over on the idea that you can be part of a very, very, very competent,

resolute, and deadly military.

And we're going to create the biggest weapons arsenals we've had in our history.

We're going to have more shells.

We're going to be ready for anything so that we have nothing to fear.

And our enemies won't dare attack us.

We're going to have missile defense.

We're going to work on space defense.

We could do that.

We could.

We could.

But that sounds almost like a dream when you're talking about it right now.

Well, given the people we have, it's an impossibility.

But the point is, there are people among us that know that

they know what we should do.

They have the means to accomplish what we should do.

They have the will to what, but they're just sitting now in a holding pattern.

They're wondering, hmm, who's the first person who's going to get decapitated by the woke council culture and be destroyed?

And who's the second, the third, and the fourth?

Because the fifth won't.

You know, it's kind of like talking, we were talking, I'm going to talk about the Hundred Years' War, but Joan of Arc was 19, right?

So you only was active, what, two years, three years, 17 to 19.

But once she

tried to embody a new idea, like there is such a thing as a comprehensive nationalist France, then everybody, oh, wow,

she galvanized everybody.

Maybe we're all French people.

Maybe we can get rid of the English.

And suddenly they started winning.

Not suddenly, but suddenly she developed a national fervor.

But, you know, you got to be burned.

The first people have to be burned at the stake.

So So

that's where we are right now.

And if you had some person that just said, no, no, hi, porkus, I'm not a pig, not this pig.

I don't give a damn what you say about me, but you're not going to cancel me.

I'm not going to shut up.

We'll see what the example with Tucker is.

I mean, if he goes full Joe Rogan and he has the ability to,

he can be bigger than the people who replay, who got rid of him.

He's got that ability.

I don't know.

My only worry is I don't know what his shelf life is, how long a person

can

be deplatformed and how long he has to regroup and reboot and have the same level of resonance.

I think his window of opportunity is about a year.

Yeah.

You know, I was surprised in that interview that Laura had with that young man whose house had been robbed 10 times in the last three years when he described everything to her and all the robbings, et cetera, and how disheartened he was.

And he said, I just don't know what to do.

And I felt like, yes, you should know what to do.

You vote somebody else in.

You know, H.G.

Wells was a brilliant guy.

He wasn't just a scientific writer.

I know he was a Fabian Marx socialist, but he did write an outline of history.

It was a brilliant history, one volume, history of the world.

And he saw something about the combination of market capitalism and constitutional government, which was he approved of, kind of.

At least he wasn't an out-and-out Marxist.

He was a socialist.

But my point is this, he saw the innervating effect of affluence and leisure in classical terms.

That's what Catullus said when he said, you know, Catullus, luxury is going to ruin you.

Luxis, Luxis, Luxes.

And

so he created this idea that in the future, there's going to be these refined, elegant,

inert drones, and they're going to wander around and they're going to be at the mercy each evening of these Morlocks that are pre-civilizational because they don't have the, they have the intelligence, but they're either programmed or they're.

genetically, I don't know what's happening, but they're not able to take care of themselves.

And this guy was kind of an eloy.

He just recounted all the horrible things that have happened to him, all the money he spent, all the unsustainable futures he's going to have trying to remodel.

I looked at his little place on TV.

I thought to myself, hmm, number one, what good are the cameras if the police don't come?

So don't rely on the cameras.

See that entryway?

Make a seven-foot steel gate with spikes on it.

Then put a Weimaroner, a German Shepherd, Shepherd, and a Doberman, and to be fair, a Queensland, put all four in.

And every once in a while, throw a piece of meat, but keep them a little hungry, and they won't come in.

All your problem is you'll have to pick up the defecations, no problem, and do that.

And then, second,

when you're there, get a handgun or better yet, a shotgun.

And when they break through the door, shoot them.

And

it'll be very hard to convict you, but you will create deterrence.

And if everybody did what you did, then it would stop.

But when they matter of factly on his security cameras, remember they parked outside and kind of just, oh, wow, we're here.

Let's just take the washer, the dryer,

you know.

Yeah, they just waltzed in, jumped over the wall or gate or whatever you had out there.

I felt like I was watching those

various versions of the time machine.

It's the same thing.

And that's kind of where we are.

Yeah.

Everybody's pushing it.

The The left is pushing, pushing, pushing.

So you saw that guy, the Marines.

Subway, yeah.

And he choked Mr.

Neely.

And what was amazing was two things that he did.

He jumped up because this guy was threatening everybody and he had no idea what the guy was going to do.

But then the reaction, it was...

Again, the Eloids, CNN, did you see CNN's coverage?

Oh, yes.

It was astounding.

I mean, it was like

he was a Michael Jackson impersonator.

He was beloved.

He was nice.

And then at the down, however, he had 42 arrests and three for violent assault.

In other words, this person had been arrested 42 times for doing things that he was doing that day that he got killed.

In other words, he was threatening people.

He was jumping over turnstiles.

He was physically assaulting people.

And they wouldn't do anything until this Marine came over and accidentally choked him to death, but he stopped him.

And the point was that our society was empathizing with a person

who

had been arrested 42 times, and his last act on this earth was threatening people physically and scaring people.

And then we were talking about the people who weren't.

Aren't there protesters?

Yeah, aren't there protesters outside because they don't think that the Marine's going to get charged with enough?

The protesters are.

Like I said, you can kill 8,000 young people in Chicago and nobody's going to protest.

But you get some, and again, if that had been a black ex-Marine and that was a white homeless person and the CNN started saying, well, he was a wonderful person until this thug choked him.

No, I don't think that would have happened.

This whole thing wouldn't have happened, this protest.

had he been black and the victim been white.

Everybody knows that.

I surely would have had no different reaction.

I'd say, what do you mean?

We're going to punish a African-American Marine who was worried about fellow people in the subway because this white guy was a homeless person and he had been arrested 42 times, including numerous assault

convictions?

No.

I mean, I would say to him, next time you intervene, be careful you don't kill somebody.

But the idea that you created first or second, you were guilty of first or second is absurd.

And so,

yeah, I mean, and like I said earlier, on an earlier broadcast, are we going to go protest because three African-American gangbangers went out and executed three white girls who wanted to go in the wildside with them?

Are we going to go picket the school district because two small white children were beaten to a pulp by an African-American group of boys?

Are we going to go down to Orange County and protest because a white doctor was riding his bike hurting no one and then deliberately run over by a person of color who then got out of his car, went over there and said, I hate white people, and then executed him?

No.

We're going to see that these are isolated incidents of people who do not represent the collective, either black or white.

But on this particular case, we throw all of that out.

And what I'm saying is that is not sustainable.

That mode of argumentation or that mode of reasoning is not sustainable and everybody knows it.

And that's what I'm kind of worried about.

Unless people realize that, you're going to create

a great anger in this country.

You can't just say that every time an African-American is injured or killed by a white person, regardless of the circumstances, justified or not, it's racism.

But all the times an African-American does this to an Asian or a white person, it's part of a social pathology that was caused by the victims.

It's not sustainable.

Nor is the idea that you have a greater death toll each year

in Chicago than all of the killed, all the dead,

everybody in the Afghan and Iraq wars.

And you just say, well, we're not going to talk about it.

We're not going to talk about it.

So that's not sustainable.

And

again, this is the left that's doing this.

And that's why I think there's going to be a pushback against it.

That's why I think one of the reasons they got rid of Tucker Carlson, he crossed the line on at least three areas.

Think about it.

The red lines.

The red line number one was

Zelensky is a folk, a modern Truchilian folk hero,

and the

Ukrainians are 100% correct.

The Russians are 100% evil, both Putin, of course, but also the Russian people.

And Zelensky, if he's properly supported and you're less than honorable if you don't give him everything he wants, we'll be able, with a country that's now about 30 million after people have left it, we'll be able to defeat a 144 million person country and push them back out of all the areas that were under Russian control prior to this war, along the Donbass and the Crimea.

And Tucker came along.

I think

you can disagree when he demonized Zelensky, but he basically said, that's not the whole story.

I happen to believe that

I'm a little bit more pro-Ukraine than he is.

I hope Ukraine does not lose.

But the idea, we're going to give them a blank check, deplete our arsenals, and we have.

And the Europeans are about ready to bail, and then we're going to arm this guy so he can conduct offensive weapon,

have offensive weapons to conduct, I don't know, preemptive attacks inside Russia that has

65 to 7,000 nuclear weapons with an alien.

That's not sustainable.

It's not sustainable.

While Putin and the Chinese and the Iranians and the North Koreans appeal to the Saudis and the Indians and the Turks,

a lot of South America, and build this anti-American alliance, that's what's happening.

Why we're broke.

We're broke.

We're 2 trillion in debt this year and 33 aggregate and 130 of gdp and we're giving them 150 billion and every time we give them a new weapons platform all zelensky can say it's not enough we need more

so tucker objected to that and that was

one thing the second was

he said the border is what

the left said it is.

And we remember, I mentioned James Carville last time.

He wrote the new Republican, I mean, Democratic Majority, Lanny Davis.

Remember Lanny Davis, that lawyer who's always on box?

He was Michael Cohen's lawyer.

And he had a lot of scandals about things he said during the Russian collusion hoax.

But he wrote a book about the new Democratic majority years ago in the 70s.

And then we had that book by

John Judas and Roy

Teixiera.

You remember that one?

It was the Emerging Consensus or something.

The point I'm making, these were raw, raw, triumphalist books that the open borders policy was changing the demography in favor of the Democrats, which would end in very quickly a new Democratic majority.

Tucker read those books.

Tucker got on and said, yeah, they're right.

That's what they're doing.

They're trying to replace the existing demographic and change the percentages.

And they're doing that under the guise of calling everybody white racist, white supremacist.

Okay, that's what he said.

And the next thing you knew, Tucker Carlson was a racist.

He said that a lot of these places are dirty now.

Well, I mean, if somebody comes from the poorest areas of the world, and I've been kind of poor myself, and my yard didn't look like it does now when I was farming.

I had about six cars.

It looked kind of trashy, to tell you the truth.

And I couldn't afford a big bin like I do now to pay, you know, $110 a month.

I had plastic garbage cans for 15

and coyotes would knock them over and there'd be trash.

So if you don't have a lot of money, it's not, it's, it's difficult to keep up the appearances.

And that's what he was saying.

And so he agreed with him.

And then that was the second thing.

that I think they got him on.

And the third was, and this was more controversial, he was looking at the demographics of modern crime.

And if you, I went back through some of his tapes, and he was giving two arguments that most of the crime rise can be attributable to an increase in African-American males crime that represent about three,

excuse me, in that age group of 15 to 40, about 3 to 5% of the population, right?

And he was saying that group commits

about 45% of the violent assaults and over 50% of the murders.

And it's hard to find out about that because a lot of politically correct police departments in major cities do not report their data to the FBI Crime Statistics Bureau because they don't want the results that inevitably will be published, number one, and the FBI as a woke organization is a couple of years behind.

But all of that said, that's what he said.

And he talked about hate crimes against Asian Americans and Orthodox Jews and Hasidic Jews and how nobody did anything about it.

And so he had clips of, you know, Compton, where they swarmed

the service station, or they had in Chicago swarming.

And those were inordinately, inordinately, I mean by inordinately,

in greater numbers than the demographics of African-American youth.

That's all he said.

And he said, if you're not going to address this problem until you identify it.

So those were the three red lines that I saw, Ukraine, the border, and crime.

And he talked in explicit terms that are outlawed or barred or tapu in our society.

And at that point, I think people in the by...

the bi-party or whatever you want, uniparty establishment said, no, that's it.

Can't do that.

And then the other thing is

he said something that undercut his support on the rhino or Republican establishment.

He went after two or three people.

You remember that?

He criticized Mitt Romney.

He criticized Mitch McConnell.

And he criticized Paul Ryan.

And you can't do that.

You'd think that the left would be happy with him because he brought on

Barry Weiss ones.

He brought on Glenn Greenwald all the time.

He brought on

Matt Taibbi.

He brought in a lot of people,

Robert Kennedy, that the left used to idolize.

So he was more critical, if you think about it, on doctrinaire Republicans than he was

former leftist or still leftist, but on certain particular issues they agreed with him.

And yet

that was taboo.

You can't do that.

No.

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

And since we were on the

domestic issues for a while anyways, there was one more thing I wanted to ask you about, and then we'll turn to the Hundred Years War.

But let's first talk a little bit.

Troops that have been sent to the border.

Stay with us, and we'll be right back after this break.

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We're back.

This is the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

We are,

our mothership is John Solomon's Just the News.

So we recommend that you go

find out what's on Just the News.

John does, he's an investigative reporter.

He's based in D.C., so he's been doing some great investigation of the

Victor.

What is it?

He's looked into

leaks and the leaks.

Yes, the latest is he's got some sources of whistleblowers or documentation on two areas.

One was the solicitation

by

Anthony Blinken, the letter to Mike Morrell, and then Mike Morrell's efforts to get 50 former intelligence authorities, quote unquote, to say something that wasn't true so that Joe Biden on the eve of the debate could go in there and attack Donald Trump.

who said, you can't criticize me for being

involved in the laptop shenanigans because the laptop is not there.

It's fake.

It's flesh and disinformation.

And I can prove it because he didn't say this, but this is what he was saying.

I can prove it, Donald Trump, because I got Anthony Blinken, who's going to be my Secretary of State, to call up a politicized former interim head of the FBI who then got a hold of Clapper and Brennan, and they got the bunch out.

And they all didn't even, and what was striking about some of this, the time of the emails you know would you consider investigating this laptop to see if it's it was like a nanosecond yep it's a it's it's disinformation they didn't do any research no and so that was one thing and the other is there's apparently he believes some documents uh that reveal pretty clearly that the FBI and the IRS had reasons to feel that Joe Biden had received payments for services rendered by foreign governments.

I can't validate that.

I am not repeating it to rush to judgment, but I'm just suggesting that John Sullivan says that his sources apparently believe there are people in Congress on the Republican side that have documentation to that effect.

And we'll have to wait and see if that's borne out by actual evidence.

Yeah.

Well, what the 1,500 troops being sent to the border by the Biden administration and the end of Title 42, I think it is, in the coming week.

Yeah, well,

remember when Donald Trump

wanted to put troops down at the border, and they said he was militarizing the border, and it would be a PR stunt, and the Pentagon Secretary of Defense, they were saying, undercut him.

And now we're told that when

Article 42 expires and

mess there becomes even messier, if

that's possible to envision, guess what?

They're going to send 1,500 people down to the border as we head into the election cycle.

Something that they said was an election stunt.

And the thing about it is, ask yourself this.

After letting 6.5 million illegal entries occur, and you send down 1,500, it's not very much, and you tell the Border Patrol, we're here to help you with 50.

What happens then?

Are they really going to stop this big influx?

And then, what do I mean by stop?

I mean when a person comes across and they swim across or they walk across, they go, stop.

You have now entered U.S.

territory.

You are under arrest.

Put them in handcuffs, take them to a detention center, say, you are in violation of U.S.

immigration law.

This is your second or third offense.

First, who knows?

Get their

biometric

data, put them in the system, put them on a Greyhound bus, and immediately deport them.

I don't think so.

I don't think so.

So it's a show.

They're worried.

What's weird about this thing is

they feel that based on the 2020 election of Joe Biden and the 2022

salvation in the Senate,

and add to that mixture those two Georgia Senate races they won in January of 2021, they feel they've hit upon a matrix of victory.

And it's not based on public opinion vis-a-vis any particular issues.

In other words, they feel they have a radical Jacobin agenda.

Let's open the border.

Let's turn jurisprudence over to big city Soros-funded DAs

to basically nullify existing laws.

Let's destroy federal immigration law, which they have.

Let's stop exploring, leasing, et cetera, for new sources of gas and energy.

Let's increase the price of energy, which they have.

Let's have a massive amnesty for Illulegans, for people who took out student loans, for this group and that group.

Let's print so much money that we spread it around and cause inflation and high interest rate.

They feel that they don't need to defend those because they're indefensible.

And so, what they do is they don't.

They don't talk about any of those things.

What they do is two things.

They go after the right as the big triad.

They are fascist, they are racist, and they are sexist, number one.

And then

number two,

as things get bad, they do a performance art virtue signaling exemplum.

Okay, so we're right before the midterms.

We're paying $5.50 a gallon in gas.

California, you go beg the Saudis, you beg the Venezuelans, you beg the Iranians.

That doesn't work.

You drain the strategic petroleum reserve, even though you hate this stuff.

It's called black goo, but suddenly it's green honey and you bring it out.

And then you get every, see, your gas prices went down.

Or you, oh, wow,

we're going to get the army out there on the border.

And then you get Corinne Jean-Pierre, and she's going to go down.

She's going to reference the border and say it's down by 90%.

90%.

We got some really weird little data point about this particular tiny little minuscule subgroup.

And we feel that in the last six months, that's what you do.

You have this big gesture as if you're conservative and traditional and you're going to care about them, but they don't.

It's just all fluff.

And then it worked in 2020 when good old Joe Biden was, Joe, we know Joe, he's conservative.

I remember when he was for tough penalties on criminals and And he was uh he thought he was against abortion on demand.

Yeah, he's back.

He's back.

He's going to tell these radicals that, you know what, you got to behave.

That was the idea and it worked.

And then in 2022, he got his Phantom of the Opera speech and he got the red sets and kind of a satanic background and said, these people, MAGA, semi-fascist, they're going to kill women with restricting abortion.

And it worked.

And that's how they feel they can, and that's what they're going to do.

Sure, they're going to lie.

They're going to go after,

they're going to say that

the right wants to kill every woman

and the right wants to pollute the entire universe

and the right was responsible for all joe biden's got more jobs than he the right is responsible even though inflation skyrocketed interest rates skyrocketed by didn't matter and they hate trans people and they hate freedom and they're trying to ban books about critical race theory

and then

We're good old Joe Biden.

We sent troops down to the border.

We tap the reserve to get oil to the American people.

When it's necessary, we do what's good for America.

That's what they're going to run on.

That's

the official strategy.

But as we've said so many times before, the subtext is

we're going to get Mr.

Bragg.

and Miss James, and I think her name is Willis in Georgia, and then Smith, the special prosecutor on the Fed side of Mu-Lago, and then we have the sexual assault suit.

We're going to get these people coordinated.

And I swear to God, Mr.

Trump, we're going to do two things in the next year and a half.

We're going to have an indictment, a gag order, a preliminary hearing.

And you're going to have to be in on one of these, you may have to be photographed and fingerprinted.

And we're going to publicize this.

And you think everybody's giving you empathy now.

That'll be just enough to get you nominated.

But your supporters will go into a fetal position and exhaust, oh no, why did Trump have to do that?

My God, you know,

he, I know that he probably didn't do it, but why does he leave himself?

Can't we just make it all go away?

And then they're going to give him, like they did in 2016, a billion dollars in free publicity.

And they're already starting to do it.

And you can hear it.

Well, Donald Trump is actually not as bad as DeSantis.

Donald Trump is for Social Security expansion.

He doesn't want to cut entitlements.

Donald Trump is reasonable on abortion.

Donald Trump met with people like Diane Feinstein.

He was very reasonable about guns.

Donald Trump, not some guy who wants to shut down the government.

He's spent a lot of money like we did.

Donald Trump,

Donald Trump doesn't believe that you should harass.

He's at Florida and he knows you don't harass Disney, a good family company.

That's what they're doing right now.

And between the empathy of, they have a a passive aggressive, they're trying to destroy Trump and drag him out through these coordinated lawsuits or indictments.

And then they're trying to gain empathy for him.

And they're going to try to build him up as a preferable candidate to Santos because he's reasonable.

And then they want him to get the nomination.

And then they're going to really hit the accelerator on these legal matters and then start indicting him.

And I mean, indicting him for nothing.

and so that's the plan and we'll see if it works oh that's half the plan the other half is you call up mark zuk hey mark i know you gave 14 419 million last time that was pretty smart of you saying you're not going to do it again but we know you're going to get so this time we need 500 million we need more drop boxes we need more mail-ins we need we're sued we need more legal help we're suing every state we're getting rid of uh

checking the registrar's lists We're getting rid of you have to have all the signatures.

We don't have to have the correct address.

We're going to do all that third-party stuff and we're going to have ballot curing, but you've got to give us the money.

I mean, a lot of money.

And he said, yeah,

we'll get more.

There'll be more money from Silicon Valley this time around than last time.

Yeah, I bet there will be.

Well, Victor, let's go ahead then and turn to our central feature today, which is the Hundred Years War.

And I'm just curious how you place it in

the list of wars that we've been looking at.

Is it perhaps the most significant one to this point?

Or

like all when you say the Peloponnesian War, you're talking about,

you know, the First Peloponnesian War and then the Second Peloponnesian War.

When you're talking about the Persian Wars, you're talking about the invasion of Darius and the invasion of Xerxes in the aftermath.

So there's when you say Hundred Years' War, it's so complicated because there's periods of that Hundred Years' War and there's people that come in and out of it.

But the bottom line is that from,

you know, 337, 1337 to 1453, that's a very iconic date in itself, of the fall of Constantinople.

There was 116 years of French and English English fighting, and usually it was in France.

And why was it in France?

Because

the British Navy, you know, very early on, I think it was, what,

340,

I don't know, was it Sluis?

That there was a big battle and they destroyed the French fleet.

And the French were not able, they hadn't really done been able since William the Conqueror.

They were not able to go into England.

So when you say 100 and Years' War, it's 116 years of British armies armies landing in Normandy mostly and trying to

reclaim based on going way back to William the Conqueror that the British crown had royal estates in Normandy.

And they felt that

they were

going to return to the proper ownership of the British crown.

And France wasn't as united then.

It wasn't the modern French nation.

And so in this 116-year war, British monarchs, you know, landed and they were usually outnumbered and they had to go across sea.

But in a,

you know, the famous one is the Battle of Cressy.

I think that was 346.

And then the Poitiers, the next year, 347.

And then way in the future, Agincourt, 415.

They had a model where they would land and then they would go inland.

And the French relied on kind of an ossified medieval heavy cavalry that nobody could stop.

They were lancers.

But if you get into muddy ground or you have something that Cressy, and it's exaggerated a little bit, the longbow, which could

outshoot the crossbow by a considerable margin, even though it didn't probably have the velocity at shorter speeds.

And you had to be trained to use it.

And, you know, you shoot it 20 or 30 times, you get tired, but you can shoot six times two or three hundred yards.

And that was pretty much the end of this idea that a heavy cavalry could wipe the battlefield clean.

They couldn't at Cressy, they couldn't at Agincourt.

So, what was happening in this long war

was the British were being, because they didn't have the resources and agriculture, etc., that the French did, even though the French were more fragmented, the British crown was getting,

I guess the word would be

tired.

And the tax tax collecting was becoming burdensome, even though they were winning.

They were winning.

And

then something started to happen as they were winning.

The British people got tired of them and were starting to develop

this

flicker of consensuality.

In other words, that if you keep cheering us for this foreign war about a dynastic problem that doesn't involve us,

then we're not going to like it.

So one of the results was there was a new political mentality in Britain that would finally manifest itself in a series of revolutions.

And then when Joan of Arc,

you know, if they had taken

Orléans, they would have won.

And the British couldn't do it.

And of course, this 19-year-old

burned at the stake when she was captured, but she saved the city.

And that was very strange because that created something that nobody had anticipated, that all of these little fiefdoms first

began to galvanize that they had a common language and a common ethnic pedigree.

And they were more than just small, fragmented, medieval castles.

They were a new nation, and they were going to have a one

monarchy.

And this would eventually lead to the Bourbons.

And so, and then France, which is much larger than Britain, both population and

area-wise, that started to manifest itself in the four, you know, 30s and 40s and 50s.

And I guess that last battle at Castillon,

that was the end of the war when the French won.

So the result was there was never, ever going to be, after that 116 years of waste, any Britain that thought that any British royalty, whether they were plantagenets or tudors, anybody who thought they had claims to any land in continental Europe, that was over with.

And they would have to be more careful.

Henry VIII, of course, wasn't, but there was a backlash.

They have to be more careful about

conducting these very expensive foreign dynastic wars.

And it had an enormous influence on the British crown because

what started to evolve was the idea of a

navy that was preeminent, whose

primary mission was to protect the British Isles from invasion, and they never invaded again.

Caesar once, William the Conqueror twice, never in history since.

They've always had, even in the darkest day of World War II, they had naval supremacy.

And that was one of the offshoots that that showed.

And then the idea that they would never, ever have a huge continental army.

And

they kind of violated that in World War I, and they really paid for it.

They sent a million men, but the idea was most of the time, British had small numbers of professional troops, 20,000, 30,000 that they would dispatch all over to save the crown's interest.

But they were not going to be a major continental power that would, you know, even at Waterloo, the majority of the soldiers were not British.

They were Prussians and Germans, although there was a lot of British there.

But so

that was another legacy that you don't want to go over into continental Europe and fight the French or the Germans on their ground.

And contrarily, you want to make sure they can never get to England.

And you can dispatch people.

You can have small expeditionary armies.

You can have alliances, especially in the case of Napoleon with the Germans and the Russians or with the Russians against the Germans in World War I and II, but you're not going to be a big, the British people won't stand for it.

And they did in World War I, but they wouldn't do it in World War II.

That's one of the strategies they had in World War II.

They were not going to have another, that was an oddity in British history.

The Psalm wasn't going to have this.

Could I ask you and go back just for a second?

Because you were talking about the longbow.

And I was wondering what its, I guess,

efficacy was, meaning,

could it is I've heard that it could take a cavalry, a a knight off of his horse.

I mean, absolutely kill a knight just in one hit with a long bow arrow.

Is that true?

Yeah, it was.

And when you say take a knight, does it mean that at a certain range that it

that it could always penetrate chainmail?

No.

But it had the ability because the horse was exposed in many places, the arms, the neck, and the fact that you could shoot, I shouldn't say loosen, because let's say,

so quickly six to seven times, and you had such a long,

you know, such a long range that it meant that if you had enough of these skills, you had to be skilled to use it.

That was different than the crossbow.

The beauty of the earlier crossbow was anybody could use it, but it was very slow to operate.

And the same thing with the shortbow was pretty easy to operate, but this thing was, it took a lot of,

I guess what the word was,

it took more skill than the composite short

bow, and

it was exhausting to use because of the

difficulty in stringing, I mean, getting enough tension on the bow for the type of long shot that was necessary.

But because it was so large and

this

it just changed everything and it was ideally suited for the English because they didn't have the expense and they didn't fight the type of wars on the continent of heavy medieval cavalry.

So, the longbow, and I know that this is kind of stereotype, but the longbow

kind of put out of

use the idea of a medieval knight that

was the so-called medieval tank that controlled the,

you know what I mean, that controlled the the battlefield.

Yeah.

And also.

Well, for example, at

Agincourt, I mean, when I hear about the Hundred Years' War, I think the battle that we hear most about is Agincourt.

And I'm not sure why that is, but it seems that I believe Henry V had only 6,000 troops and that the French had 16,000 or somewhere thereabouts.

A little bit more on each side, but you're right.

You're right.

That was very tragic.

Because as you remember

at the end because the the the field was difficult and muddy and like cressy

and the charges were not well coordinated and they suffered a lot uh

as well that there were at one point these nobles and usually they were very lucrative to be ransomed right

and

and you would have thought that

that they would have ransomed them but they panicked and they they executed them all

and that was very rare for the british to do that but they they did it they executed all of their prisoners and they were they really had they were really infamous for doing that people got really angry and um

so that was something that was new but that was you know i was wondering oh go ahead go ahead i was I was wondering too, I know that one of your favorite historians is John Keegan.

I think he wrote a book called The Face of Battle, and didn't wasn't Agincourt one.

And what was the uniqueness about his account of Adgincourt?

Well, remember, The Face of Battle, I think it came out in 75.

I knew John Keegan very well.

He was very friendly to me.

He wrote the introduction to the Western Way of War when I was, you know, 30 years old, and he really helped me.

But

he had been a professor at Sandhurst, and he was actually

an expert in German armored divisions in World War II.

He wrote a history of World War II, and especially SS.

He knew all about that.

But his point was that when you looked at battles, and he tried to take three iconic battles, right,

very close to each other.

So there was

Agincourt,

and then not very far away, there was Waterloo in Belgium, and then there was the Somme, right?

And they were all next to each other.

And what he was trying to show was two things, how war evolved and different, but how it stays the same.

So, what he did, what he called the angle of vision, he changed it.

So, instead of saying, and I try to do that in the Western way of war and in terms of farming the other Greeks, but what he was trying to do was this.

It doesn't really tell you what went on on if you just get a map and here's the French and here's the British and here's Henry and here's his counterparts.

And then you go through chronicles and you try to describe the left wing versus the right wing versus the reserves versus the retreat versus the pursuit or the British go over the top.

Or this was what the Duke of Wellington, then he sent the squares and Napoleon.

You see what I'm saying?

It's tactical strategy.

Yes.

From one point, he was trying to say, what was it like to fight there?

How dirty was it?

Was it noisy?

Were people screaming?

Because if you do it from that angle, then

things start to make sense that you don't understand from the top-down version.

In other words, if somebody says, well, Wellington gave an order that wasn't carried out, or Napoleon left

too early, or he sent the wrong thing.

Well, yes, but why did they do that?

Maybe

if you could imagine what somebody wrote in a diary, you couldn't hear anything.

Or it started raining and there was a drizzle and people were sopping wet and cold and they didn't see it.

Or maybe Wellington was distracted because one of his attendants, he turned around and a cannonball took his head off or his leg off.

And

if you start looking at that way, or what were the wounds like and what was the traumatic reaction to seeing somebody

gob

messy?

In other words, you wrote of the actual day of battle and the bad part of it, and it's not sanitized.

Then you can understand

why people do what they do.

And it's not orderly, it's not rational, it's confused, it's ad hoc, it's full of mistakes.

The side that wins is the side that makes, A, the fewest mistakes and makes the greatest number of corrections to their earlier mistakes.

And that becomes logical when you start reading these accounts of

what people wrote diaries, or he looks at the weather for that year, or he looks at a type of shell, the damage it'll do to somebody.

And then you start to describe people being hungry.

And where do you defecate in the psalm if you're in the trenches?

You just, well, you eat and then you can't go anywhere.

It's muddy and dirty.

You just have to have a bowel movement right next to you.

I kind of did that.

I tried to do with hoplite warfare and I tried to say there has to be passages where saying if you're out in the armor and you're sitting there, it's not just two squares that attack each other.

So I went through all of Greek literature.

I used the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae, 54 million words, and I found some incredible things that people talked about people who crapped in their...

in their armor they were or they were shaking so much that you they were visibly shaking

or or they were potbellied and

they were made fun of, or they got confused and killed their own troops, or they got lost.

It was confusing.

So the answer is it was confusing.

And so when these

three places, roughly in the same area of the western coast of Europe, you just don't look at them as

the British did this, the French did this.

It doesn't work like that.

And you try to say

it was a complete, god-awful disaster.

They put thousands of people in small, contained areas.

They didn't get enough food.

They didn't get enough water.

The weather didn't cooperate.

There was no sanitation.

They all had different types of weapons.

Nobody knew what was going on.

They were shouting.

They were yelling.

There was gunpowder smoke

across the battlefield.

You turn around and an arrow would come out of nowhere.

And that's what he did.

It was absolutely a brilliant.

And then the added thing was he was probably

the best English prose stylist his generation.

He had this mastery of, I guess, what the Romans called, the Latins called variatio.

And that means that the key to good writing is varying your sentence structure, the length of your sentence structure, the grammatical and syntactical nature of your sentence structure.

You can have a one one-sentence paragraph followed by a whole page paragraph, and the level of vocabulary and diction should be

changeable.

So

you'd be reading this very elegant phrase by John Keegan to the effect

something like, I'm just making this up because I don't have the text with me, but he would say something like,

Napoleon turned around and said, My God,

there the British go.

And then he'll say, and that was no small beer.

Small beer, if you used a colloquialism like that, everybody would flunk you out of English one comp.

But he understood that if his diction and his level of

vocabulary was polysyllabic and Latinate, a lot of the times, then you could use a colloquialism like that, and it would shock the reader.

Or he would have sentences that were only one or two words long after a whole paragraph sentence.

So that was one of the appeals.

He was such a good writer.

And he wrote very fast.

I mean, after that book, he was in his, I guess, mid-40s or late 40s.

He became world famous.

And then all of a sudden,

the time left to him would not be sustained what was asked of him.

He wrote a book on World War I.

He booked World War II.

He wrote a book on

American battles.

Yes.

And he wrote the American battlefields and battles against the frontier wars.

He wrote a history.

He had great generals.

He wrote

about sea power.

That was a great book.

And then he got criticized for the Civil War, which takes a lifetime to master the intricacies, but he wrote an account that was criticized.

That was the only book I remember that he was severely criticized for.

And he did all this after suffering a childhood bout with polio.

And as people know, that virus either gets reactivated

in your elderly years or the damage done to the muscle becomes more acute as you age.

But when I knew him, and I met him four or five times in Washington and other places, he was very disabled.

First time I met him, he had a limb.

He did a documentary series and he sent a crew out here in the 90s.

I did the one on hoplite warfare, and then he did a

history of warfare from antiquity to the modern times.

And he had, I think, 15 scholars write books.

I wrote the first volume.

And of course,

it was very controversial because he was John Keegan.

He got all these people from Oxford and Harvard and Yale.

And he asked this guy from Fresno State

to write the ancient part.

And I did, Wars of the Ancient Greeks.

and the Greek part.

And by I remember, and it was translated into about 10 different languages immediately, but I remember a French scholar, Fermiere, he said, this farmer has no business belonging in this series.

And then he just attacked it.

And they gave me, the publisher gave me supposedly 40 mistakes I made.

And I looked at them very carefully and I realized that A, he didn't read English.

So when he was reading the English text,

He

was relying, he didn't read the English text.

He was relying on the french translation of the english text and i had to spend i spent a whole summer collating the english text with the french translation and showed that he's that the translator had made a lot had made a lot of stick mistakes and then mostly it was class about why he wasn't asked right

that he should have been the one asked to to do the ancient part even though he was french so

he i that's a long detour about what a good guy he was he was a very good historian and he died a little.

He, I don't know exactly how I remember in the 70s, but he I thought he died way too young.

But can I take you back to Agincourt?

So he also wrote a history of war.

Yeah, history of warfare, if you remember, that was really good, a history of war.

Did he establish that part of the

French obstacle in that war was all the rain and the rain?

He did.

That was the thematic.

He was trying to say that French heavy cavalry had been the scourge of the European battlefield, that once you unleash these 1,500 or 2,000

French heavy knights, the Franks, they had been the terror, remember, of the Crusaders, I mean, of the Islamic army.

If they were properly used, on dry, hard ground and their flanks were protected and the distance from them to the target was not too long so that the enemy couldn't keep retreating and shooting arrows at them, there was no way they could lose because they were like in a modern armor corps let loose.

But

that rarely occurred.

Finally, people caught on to them.

So they tried to lure the French into difficult ground or ground where rains had made it muddy.

or where the enemy tried to bait them but was too far so the horses tired, or that they trained bowmen to gradually retreat, or they used light

cavalry and archers on the flanks to hit them on the side where they were

more unprotected.

And so that was, and he said, and so he described really that chapter on Agincourt was kind of the tragedy of

the French.

And, you know, I don't know whether they had 15, 16,000 or 25.

I don't know if the British had, the English had six or eight, but it was somewhere in there.

But when you looked at the casualties, it was 10 to 1.

And more importantly, they wiped out the French nobility at that time.

There was, I don't know, of that 6,000, 600 British versus, I think it was 6,000 killed

of the fatalities.

That really helped, in a weird way, it unified the French crown.

You know what I'm saying?

It wasn't just Joan of Arc that created a national national fervor, but these principalities were losing a whole generation at Agincourt.

And

so

that was Henry V's legacy, kind of.

I mean, banned a brother speech in Shakespeare and all that, but it was...

It was the idea that you're going to lure,

and he had to fight Henry because they were wet.

And John Keegan goes into that.

They were wet and they were hungry, and they had been amphibious troops that had been landed there.

And I think John Keegan also, I should give him credit, he didn't just say that the longbows had greater range and penetration at greater range and greater rates of fire, if I could use that obsolete word, fire, but

he said that they aimed at the horse's bodies.

because

they only had thick hair metal on their forehead and frontal face.

So what we were were doing is at an angle they were trying to target the horse.

And when they were going so fast in that muddy ground and that horse went over with,

the heavy clad knight on top of them with a lance couldn't get up or he was killed by the weight of his armor or the contusion or the crash of the horse.

And then, of course,

the horses just made the ground worse and worse and worse.

It was like taking a tandem disc and disking it so that

each

successive wave of French heavy cavalry made the battlefield more untenable.

And that was something that,

and, you know,

people,

when I first started in graduate school, and you'd look at the longbow, that was the

consensus was that it was a revolutionary weapon, right?

That it, because of its range, and but uh it couldn't really penetrate armor like a crossbow.

The crossbow had a very limited range, but the reason I think Keegan stressed this is even though it might not have been able to

penetrate

steel, I guess it's iron, it's not steel yet outside of Toledo, but

it could only penetrate a breastplate at pretty close range.

The lethality of the longbow is that there are so many places as it comes down its trajectory that are not protected by armor?

You see what I mean?

The apertures of the arm that come out, the neck, parts of the eyes, face,

the feet, the ankle, and the horse.

So they put their long bowmen at an angle to the battlefield.

Some of them they did, not all, but some of them were shooting and then retreating, shooting and retreating, shooting and retreating.

And

that

got the French further and further away from their base.

And the cavalry were more and more isolated.

Their flanks were more

exposed.

They were going slower and slower.

The ground kept getting rougher and rougher, and they were losing people.

And

then, when you know,

when they were finally tired and they were out of arrows, they had hatchets, I think, and small swords, and then they would swarm a horse and pull him down, horseman.

And so,

I guess what I'm saying is that

if you read the conclusion, I haven't read it and reread it in 10 or 12 years, but he was trying to say that

if you're on those horses and you're running through a sea, a cloud of arrows coming down,

and the velocity and the range, but especially the rate of fire means there's a lot of them.

And they're going to hit some part of your horse or some...

part of your body, maybe not lethally in your heart or brain, but it's going to make it very hard for you to continue.

And you add that to the fact that

it was muddy and it's loud and you have to continue, continue, continue, then

it's, and it got hot too.

He points that out.

And he talks about how hot it would be in armor.

So they were sweating.

and they were tired.

And he added all that up.

And, you know, there were 6,000 of them.

There were more people taken prisoner than surviving British.

So what do you do if you're Henry and you got to move on, right?

So that was the tragedy of it.

He wasn't necessarily

a barbaric king, but

he had them all executed.

And

that was kind of a stain.

And

that really enraged the French.

And that was another reason, besides the loss of the nobility, but another reason that galvanized the new french cohesiveness was the anger about that because you know that was the age of chivalry

and i don't know keegan talks about how they were executed and the mechanics of having to kill you know five or six thousand of them split their throats and um he wanted to terrorize he everybody said you know they wanted to they couldn't they couldn't

go anywhere with all these men because there were too many prisoners.

They didn't have food.

They didn't want to turn them loose because they had won the battle and they didn't want to have to come back and back and face these

deadly lancers.

So they killed them.

It was logical.

And Keegan said, no, they were terrorists.

They were trying to tell you that they're capable of anything at any time, anywhere.

The British were.

And it had a psychological effect.

And

so, anyway, that was one of the things he made a point about that.

Right.

And I think he also said, he also made a good i just remembered something he also made a good point that the people who actually did the killing were not the english counterparts there was a few you know english knights and heavy they didn't want any part of it in other words their loyalties were to the idea of ossified medieval chivalry and they had some empathy for their French counterparts and they and so they turned the peasant longbow people and the irregulars who did the killing is there more on the Hundred Years' War, or should we take a break?

Well,

I'll just finish.

We've talked too long about, remember one thing that I mentioned just in passing: that

final battle was in 1453.

And, you know, the British had, under Richard the Lionhearted, had been pretty good in participating in the Crusades, but

there had been a call

with the death of Murad and the onset of Mehmet II.

And people were worried that this time

the

Ottomans were serious about taking Constantinople.

So Constantine XI had gone after he left the Morea to become crowned king.

He had about four or five years to try to marshal public opinion in Western Europe.

Of course, it was very difficult for a Byzantine emperor because they had been nursed on the tradition that the West had fallen in the 470s and they had lacked something, either the cohesiveness or the resoluteness or their type of Christianity, but they could not stop the barbarians coming across in the 5th century AD of the Danube and the Rhine.

We talked about that in that one talk.

But Byzantines had survived intact cohesive and expanded.

So they felt that they had a superior paradigm.

And here they were at the end of the rope.

the end of their 1100 years.

And what were they doing?

They were asking the decadent, failed West that had somehow reconstituted itself in what we would now call pre-Europe and was more dynamic and wealthy than the Byzantines were there was a complete role reversal so they were going over there Constantine and he was asking the British crown and the French crown because that's where the power was

and some of it in the Prussian German kingdoms, but they didn't help.

And the Pope, Nicholas,

he tried to get the Papal States.

He tried to get Venice and the Genovese, the two big powers in Italy at that time.

He tried to get the Spanish.

And

he couldn't.

Part of the reason that he couldn't get a Western contingent, 10,000, 20,000 people to help Byzantium was the Hundred Years' War.

Because they were just wearing themselves out.

And the British and French crowns, we're not going to do it.

We can't.

It was going on during this period where he was desperately trying.

And, you know,

last time we talked about that,

and everybody, if you look at Sir Stephen Runciman

or,

you know, going back to Gibbon, everybody says it was fated.

There was only 50,000 Byzantines left out of the city that had once been a million.

It wasn't going to be taken in 1453.

It would have been taken in 1460.

But that overlooks one point.

The Genovese contingent that did come were superb.

There were 700 of them.

And they lasted six and a half weeks and didn't lose very many and repelled every Ottoman attack at the most vulnerable part of the walls until their leader was killed.

And then they collapsed on the last day of the battle, and that collapsed the entire defense.

So, my point is this:

if 700 men out of 7,000 defenders, i.e., 10%

from

Genoa, were in Genovese-controlled roads of chios, if they were able to last that long, what would have a thousand more done from Venice and Genoa?

What would 2,000 from Britain?

What would 3,000?

It wouldn't have taken much is what I'm saying to stop that Ottoman army.

And once they had been stopped and humiliated, there were claimants for the Sultanate.

that they would have had all sorts of fissions, but the opposite happened.

They lost, and and then there was a sense of momentum and then then

the sultanate was off to the races it was seven years and they took the morea all of the peloponnese and they went up to the black sea and wiped out those small little byzantine kingdoms all the way to the crimea

and that was it and then they started cleaning up the entire aegean mediterranean but

A small number of people, I think, could have helped and saved the city.

If the city had been saved, it would have caused so much demoralization.

Because that was the largest army in the history of Constantinople's sieges going back 1,100 years.

That city had been besieged 10 or 12 times by Russians and Hungarians and Arabs and Ottomans, and it's always been able to fight them off.

But yet this time, there were 80,000 soldiers and probably another 40,000 camp followers outside the walls, and they only had 7,000 defenders active of a city of only 50,000, and they almost won.

So I'm not sure they were droned.

But the hundreds of people.

So are you suggesting...

I was, yeah, I was going to say, and that it occupied the French and the English with each other at the expense of Byzantium.

Is that what the.

They did.

And even more

omni,

even more disturbing is that with the rise of Ottomanism, they began to appeal to the French against the English and against the Spanish.

So

fast forward to the 16th century, that Ottoman fleet would go into the harbors of Toulon and be welcome, even though the Spanish were fighting all down the Maghreb and they were fighting in Tripoli and they were fighting in Algiers against

the Ottoman Muslims.

And

the Italians were fighting everywhere from

all the way to Cyprus.

They had fought them in Crete.

And then you had the knights of Malta that were trying to and did survive.

And yet here were the French that were looking for aid or help

vis-a-vis their continental enemies, i.e.

the British.

So they were not.

They were not only tied down by the British, but they were starting to look to the Ottomans as a counterweight to their European rivals.

You've got to remember one other thing that history is kind of weird about.

We're in the period now of revisionism where everything in the East is reconsidered as more dynamic, more tolerant.

And our current day Western pathologies supposedly start back at the foundation of Western civilization and get worse as it progresses.

But

one of the reasons that

there wasn't a unified

response is that

Christendom, if I can use that archaic word, was trisected.

It was,

you know,

right after the fall, the reason they didn't get it back was they had a division between the Protestant Revolution in the 490s, and it went all the way up, as you know, into the early 16th century.

You had the Counter-Reformation.

So, Catholicism in Europe was at war with Protestantism, and both of them had been at war with Orthodoxy.

And the megadukes had said at Constantinople, I'd rather have

the

turban of the sultan than the tiara of the pope.

So you had Christendom and the West divided between Orthodoxy, Catholicism, and Protestant at the very time Ottomanism brilliantly had combined all of Islam under one imperial system.

So

that was what

was unique about it.

And the other thing that was very unique is the Ottomans, they had this bizarre idea that

it would be better to have a European slave that was picked up from a forced recruitment as a child or a woman sent to the harem or a boy sent to the harem or a guy sent to the janissaries,

because once they were converted to Islam,

they would be more fanatic than somebody born into Islam.

They would have no family, no collective memory.

They'd be cut off.

They were not part of the Turkish aristocracy.

They had no claim to aristocracy or the throne.

They were more trustworthy.

They could be killed any minute.

And so the grand viziers, the generals, the admirals, the janissaries, the women of the harem, the eunuchs, most of them were European born.

And that had a traumatic effect on Europeans.

They thought, wow, we're trying to fight Islam and we've got all these people that are killing us that are European, Christian-born.

It was Orwellian.

Yeah, it sure was.

This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show, and we'll be right back after this break.

Welcome back.

And so, for the final segment, Victor,

I would like to ask you about this,

if we could go to the war in Ukraine, this Wagner group, I think it's called, and its leader.

Yeah.

Is it Wagner or Wagner?

Anyways,

Yevgeny Prigozhin, I probably

really pronounce it.

Is it Prigozin?

Prigozin?

Yeah, Prigozin.

He's the leader of it, and

he's Putin's chef.

What do you mean by that?

Literally, he's a fighter, isn't he?

Yes, but he was...

He's the leader of the Wagner group.

Yes, but he was a total thug.

if I recall right.

This guy was arrested for assault, for robbery.

He was in prison and then the soviet union fell and he was a complete thug he was a talented brilliant thug but in the chaos of the soviet union falling he came out and he was a hot dog salesman on the streets no he was

and then he started to buy uh hot dogs and frozen meats and he created one of the biggest

frozen food conglomerates in the days of the oligarchs.

He became an oligarch and he got concessions.

He got to know Putin, and that's how you made money.

He got a concession where he got a monopoly and he became fabulously wealthy.

And he started to supply food for the government that was trustworthy.

And, you know, they weren't going to poison Putin.

And Putin began to trust him.

They called him Putin's chef because he supplied food for government agencies.

And okay.

And then, you know, he had this neo-Nazi, I think his name was

Alton.

I can't remember.

He was a Russian military

special officer, special commando.

And the guy loved the Nazis.

He was a killer.

And what he did was, as the Soviet Union fell and the Russian Federation emerged to put down things in Chechnya or to cause trouble for the United States overseas in Syria or in Africa, or to get concessions for trade, they created kind of a thuggish version of the French Foreign Legion.

In other words, it would be plausible deniability.

You could get these Russian speakers and they had everybody in it.

I mean, they could have

Cossacks, they could have Slavs, they could get anybody to join.

And a lot of them were prisoners.

And then they would be well-trained and well,

if you died, you got about 80,000 bucks until Ukraine at least, Your family did.

They gave you good funerals.

They gave you good food.

They were mercenary thugs in this legion.

And then they changed their name to the Wagner because this,

I don't think that

Prigozin founded it.

He expropriated it from the founder who was a Nazi and had named it

after Wagner the composer.

and his

love of, you know, the German,

I shouldn't say German, the Nazi infatuation with Wagner, to this guy,

it became a pan-Slavic movement.

And that was really took off when we intervened in Bosnia, Kosovo, and began bombing Slavic peoples, the Yugoslavians, the Serbs.

And then that created this idea that they were Orthodox.

Russians were Orthodox.

They had fought the Turk.

They had saved Western Europe.

Not just the Roman Catholic Poles, but the Orthodox, not the check the orthodox people of the balkans except the albanians they had been failed i'm not saying this is accurate i'm saying what the wagner group said and

that's what's kind of took off the idea that they needed help

to refight these ancient wars because the turks and the muslims now it wasn't turkey but it was the radical islamicist al-Qaeda people were going back back into their ancient domains and galvanizing the Albanians and the Bosnian Muslims to kill Christians.

That was the propaganda.

So that required a pan-Orthodox coalition.

So they had fighters that volunteered from Greece.

And there were people, all the Orthodox people of the Balkans, of the Greeks, the Russians.

They created this new mentality.

I kind of got in the buzzsaw.

I did a, John Heath, my co-author, we were going to do a book tour of the Greek edition of Who Killed Homer in the 19 late 90s, and he couldn't make it.

So I went alone.

I rented a car and drove to these little towns and gave talks about who killed Homer.

But, boy, I got drawn in on TV to this discussion.

And very naively, I

said something

negative about

Milosevic.

I got hit with it.

And at this dinner, this guy hit me in the back of the neck to wake me up.

He said, who is that over there, Mr.

Hansen?

It was a beautiful woman about five, eight, nine, with a mini skirt, blonde.

I said, I have no idea.

He said, that's Milosevic's daughter.

I said, okay.

She came over and introduced herself.

And I had given a little talk about

who killed Homer and Hellenism.

And somebody had asked me, of course, what I thought about the war.

And I said, I'd just like to see the killing stopped.

And I thought, the Serbia, and then she said, you were all wrong about that.

I don't even think she was supposed to be in Greece.

I don't know if she,

she was, the whole family then was wanted.

But what I'm getting at is that was a very controversial

topic.

And this pan-Slavic movement was one of the catalysts for the Wagner group.

And so its mission is to do things the Russian army can't do because it's messy and dirty dangerous and murderous and i think a lot of them are declared international by the court of the hag international criminals and they can't leave russia but they they commit atrocities they're the dirty they do the stuff that you that the russian government thinks has to be done and they don't want to be blamed for it and there's about 50 000 of them So everybody, and they were there in Bosnia, you know,

during the Obama administration, 2014 in Crimea.

And they never really lost very many.

They lost maybe, I don't know, two or three hundred, and they had these lavish funerals.

The family got, as I said, 80,000.

They got an Orthodox cross.

And then all of a sudden, this thing happened.

And so Prigozin thought, oh, this is going to be interesting.

The Russians are

bogged down.

They don't have enough ammunition.

I'm going to take my elite group and send them in there.

And he did, but this time he was fighting Ukrainians with Western weapons.

And there were people in the Russian military who were not adverse to seeing him embarrassed and lose and lose.

So they started to cut back on his ammunition.

And he got very angry.

And then he started to welch out on the bounty, I think.

I think he went down to about 50,000 per family of the killed.

And then he emptied the prisons.

Stalin had done that in World War II as well.

And so, you know, when they sent the 40,000 in their counteroffensive prisoners, I don't think any of them made it.

I think they wiped the Ukrainians, wiped, I shouldn't say any, 35,000 of them.

So that whole prisoner contingent was wiped out.

They weren't adequately armed.

So now Frigozin is all over the news.

I don't know what his game is.

He's criticizing Putin.

He's criticizing.

the Russian military.

He's saying they're incompetent.

I don't know whether he's saying the war shouldn't have been fought or more likely that if you fought like the Wagner group and you gave us enough stuff, we would have won, but you've sabotaged us.

And so it's pretty high stakes.

Put it this way, if he continues what he's doing, he's either going to be killed or he's going to commit, he's going to commit a coup.

But you can't in Russia do what he's doing, openly defy

the Russian military and the Russian government and blame them for the losses without either crossing the Roubaton and trying to take power or be assassinated.

That's my prediction.

Yes, when I was reading, they said that he had threatened to take his men out of Bakhmut because the Russian military officials had allowed for so many of them to be massacred, and that that's what he was angry at, was the numbers of dead that he had on the battlefield of his own men.

Yeah, I mean, and he was mad at Russia for that, just as you've sort of explained.

Yeah, and he's,

I think you can make the argument up until his ammunition and supplies were cut off,

he had a record that was more impressive militarily, if not worse humanitarily, than the Russian military.

I'm not singling them out.

I mean, we had Eric Prince, who's a good guy, he had Blackwater.

Remember, it was a private contractor group.

And we were contracting not just

health or food in Iraq and Afghanistan.

We were hiring, you know, contractors, paying them much more.

The Blackwater Group, I think he sold the Blackwater Group, but they were private contractors.

And the idea behind any of these mercenary, if I could use that term, was if they get killed, they don't cause the same trauma back home as a draftee or an enlistee does.

They say, well, you know what?

The guy was making $100,000 a year.

He knew exactly what he was going to get in.

He was a professional 30-year-old something killer.

He's not an 18-year-old who naively joined and was fodder in Afghanistan.

See what I mean?

So

governments see see advantages throughout the ages in using these soldiers, but there's always tension.

I was embedded twice in Iraq, and I can tell you that there was tensions because some of the more dangerous operations Blackwater people got into,

and they were not subject to the same scrutiny as officers of the military.

But then when they got into it, they wanted to be flown out or they wanted relief and the regular military was sort of, I don't say they were hesitant, they weren't, but there was grumbling that that guy who called in for air support or said they needed help used to be my commanding officer and he was making 40,000.

Now he's making 150.

I'm making 30.

That kind of tension.

And that's the same thing that's going on in the Wagner group today.

But

we'll see because

I think we're reaching a point of equilibrium now.

So that the Russian offensive has failed, as we see from these

leaked transcripts, but the leaked transcripts also show that the Ukrainians are exhausted.

And we in the West don't have a lot of confidence that they can wage the type of counteroffensive that Mr.

Zelensky says will result in the complete recapture of the Donbass and the Crimea.

And so they're going to try it if they haven't started already.

And

we'll see how what happens to the Russians.

Because ultimately, if the Russians did break and they fled back into Russia, they would do something because that's the end of Putin if they do.

And everybody in the left thinks that's great.

Maybe it is.

But they're not going to sit there.

It's not just going to end what I think the lefts and maybe the neoconservative right thinks.

Their version is

the offensive starts.

We fund it to the full.

We give them offensive weapons, they sink some more Black Sea fleet, they take out depots inside Russia, they push, they kill another 30 or 40,000 in the Wagner group, they humiliate the Russians, they get them back into Russia on all fronts, the borders return to 2013, Zelensky's an international hero,

and

the sense of anger at the Putin government is such that he's overthrown by an oligarch or one of his subordinates.

And then that's a prelude to some type of constitutional federal system where Belarus or Chechnya or

who knows, members of the Russian Federation break off and fragment.

I think that's a mistake.

I think instead of having 7,000 nuclear weapons and one depot, you're going to have five or six countries with nuclear weapons if that were to happen.

But anyway, the point is that's what the left dreams about, and that's what they think is going to happen.

We'll see.

Once again, a wonderful dream.

Yes, we'll see what happens.

Well, Victor, thank you very much.

Yeah, well, I'll just finish, but I think that what's going to happen, we're going to get a call in about a year from the Taiwanese and say, we need 5,000 javelins, we need 5,000 surface-to-air missile handheld, we need about 10 Patriot batteries, we need

100 Abrams tanks, 200, and we're going to say, sorry, we don't have them.

We don't have the

155 millimeter shells.

We don't have enough smart bombs.

We gave them all the Ukrainians.

That's been the biggest wastage of humans

basically since World War II or the Korean War.

Probably, well, the Korean War, there's a million Chinese killed, and it was a quarter million Koreans, and we lost over 35,000.

So it was probably more death, but it wasn't right on Europe's doorstep.

It's the greatest loss of life in Europe since World War II by far.

And so we've really made a big gamble.

Joe Biden doesn't know what he's doing, but he should get a speech, and then somebody should give him a shout of Previgin or whatever, Adderall.

And so he comes to and he says just once:

I think we need to save Ukraine.

It's the biggest gamble since World War II.

Here's what I propose.

We are 33 trillion in debt, but I'm going to write them a check ultimately for a half a trillion dollars, and we're going to give them everything they need, and they're going to destroy all the Russians in Ukraine, and we're going to keep our missile defenses and our deterrence up, and the Russians aren't going to do a thing.

They're not going to threaten us with nuclear weapons, and there's going to be a constitutional.

government and we're going to have such a full arsenal, we're going to supply anybody who needs us, i.e.

Taiwan.

That's what they're thinking, but they don't have the wherewithal to do it.

Yeah.

The ends are not.

The means don't match the ends.

Okay.

Well,

same goes for Russia, I have a feeling, too.

So

they must be having trouble

with their own

arsenal.

They do.

They're running short of everything, and they can't get sophisticated computer weapons because of the boycott embargo doesn't mean they still won't win though they define winning and the japanese

yeah that's true and the japanese not the japanese i meant the chinese are loving it both ways depleting the u.s arsenal depleting russia's arsenal if you were a chinese

if you were a fly on the wall of a chinese strategic meeting right now, a general would be saying to Qi, well, this is very good.

We've got got to make sure it prolonged because here's the thing: we have serious border disputes with the Russians.

When we look at the riches of Siberia, they don't have anybody there.

They have 144 million people.

They have a lot more territory than we do, but we have a billion point four.

So, the more Russians that are killed here

and the poorer they get is good for us.

On the other hand, it's also good that our plans are shaping up for Taiwan that the United States is exhausting its arsenal

and it's getting risk adverse.

And we're seeing that NATO will not be able to continue this.

So if there's something going on in Taiwan, the reaction will be more like Mr.

Macron, who says he's not going to follow, even though he's a NATO member, any U.S.

initiative to save Taiwan.

That's good.

Everything's looking up well.

And Joe Biden.

is non composmentes.

He's inherited Chief of joint chiefs, Mark Milley, who remember called one of our people up and said, anytime Donald Trump seems erratic, I'm going to warn you in advance.

So everything is looking pretty well.

We just have to make sure this thing continues.

That's what's happening.

And with that, yeah, that is what's happening.

So we'll see how

it all pans out because history never goes so smoothly into the future.

So we'll, if that makes any sense.

Or was that a Kamala statement?

History going into the future.

Depends on you stop there you say history goes into the future which goes back to history which means that history and the future are connected and the connection is between history and future

future history connection back and forth front and rear all together

you can do that you're kamala

that's brilliant well with that brilliant statement i would like to thank you as your listeners would as well.

So, thank you, Victor Davis-Hanson.

Okay, thank you, everybody, for listening.

This is Victor Davis-Hanson and Sammy Wienka.

We're signing off.