The Fall of Constantinople and Current Military Matters

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Hello, podcasters.

You've joined the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

This is our weekend edition, and I know that a lot of you out there listen for a little reprieve from the news and a look into history.

And we'd like to tap Victor's extensive historical knowledge.

And these last few times, or we're on a March of the history of warfare.

And I did say just a little reprieve.

We will have some current news.

And today there's going to be a lot on the current military situation in various places around the world.

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

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We're back at the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

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

Victor, I know that we'd like to start off the

podcast with a little bit of positive.

And I thought maybe

I noticed some ads by the Trump campaign and

I was very impressed.

What do you think about them?

I was too, because,

you know, these ads that he's been running against Ron DeSantis, I know that his handlers feel that they've done damage because of the polls.

I don't think they have because I think the polls are premature to a candidate actually announces.

And he's not following the Rudy Giuliani mode of skipping primaries.

We've got a long way to go.

This is only 2023.

We're not even into the mid-summer or the fall when we usually start to heat up a year before the election.

But those ads that Trump,

he didn't go into attacking DeSantis from a bizarre left-wing position.

He was attacking him on things like both in ads and both in speeches and both in tweets about going after the crazy Disney people, or he was attacking them on Social Security, or he was attacking them on gun control and abortion.

It was from a left-wing

perspective, and the left-wing media was giddy about it, partly because they, yeah, they were.

They were encouraging it.

But the, but this particular ad, it was brilliant.

It showed the world in chaos, and it had nuclear Putin, and it had all of our adversaries overseas, and the crime at home, and then it had Biden mumbling, and Biden tripping on air force, just these images.

It was more image-orientated, the images of just chaos.

And they were very well chosen.

Whether they were the Antifa or all, they were very well, they were not, they were representative.

In other words, they were not warped.

They were representative of what's actually going on.

They showed things overseas that were chaos, and then they showed this in-net president.

And I thought, and they weren't about Trump to the very end.

And then it was very low-key and understated.

I thought it was very effective.

Yes, they look, they're very, they're going to be, that ad is going to be very impressive.

Well, let's move on then.

I have a series of military matters to talk to you about current.

And then after we go to our next ad, we'll go to to Constantinople.

But what do you make of this Sudan situation in a civil war where they seem to have taken a bio lab?

And the other thing I didn't understand was that we have 19,000 Americans in the Sudan, or at least that was the number that I heard.

And I'm not sure how accurate that is.

But what do you make of that situation?

I can't figure it out.

I mean, there's the government, right?

And it's supported by

the Egyptian government, who has a geographical, obvious interest in it for stability, because of the Nile River, and et cetera, et cetera.

But then the people who are pushing it, pushing this revolutionary rival general, are the Emirates that are not known to be particularly revolutionary and the Wagner group with the Russians.

So I don't quite, I don't think any of us understand the coalitions that are involved other than it's just

two warlords, and they're destroying, I guess, there's a bio lab that has some affiliation with the WHO to monitor, I guess, strains of cholera and measles, which given the history of what we've experienced the last three years, seems insane that any international organization would have any part whatsoever in putting a lab in a third world country or in China.

It's just a prescription for mass death.

And then the second thing is Sudan is Sudan, right?

I mean, this is Khartoum.

This is where the great Mahdi was.

This is where, you know, the battle of the

last charge of British mounted troops, Lancers, was at the Battle of Omadarn in 1890.

I mean, it's just got a history of radical Islamicism and instability.

And I just hope that Joe Biden does not do what he usually does, and that's grandstand about he's going to bring in an airlift of thousands of refugees, that all they want to do is a better life.

And he's got, as he did

in Afghanistan, where he didn't bring in the people who had fought loyally for us.

Most of them were not on those planes.

It was just every man for himself.

And then he transmogrified them into wonderful refugees who were going to get ethnically sensitive food when they landed.

And we've heard all these bad stories about what happens when you bring people en masse without audit or background checks.

So I hope we don't get, you know, 300,000 300,000 Sudanese who say that they want a chance at democracy or they want to have a chance, they love the United States.

And then we go down the Omar, Elan-Omar pathway in the case of her and her Somali experience, where no sooner do this community come here and then all of a sudden they voice all these anti-American

romides.

I didn't think it was as good as I thought.

I was surprised how dirty it was, all that stuff.

And yet she married her brother, basically married her brother in a sham marriage to get into a country that she then summarily trashed.

So I don't, I guess what I'm saying is that on all immigration that is not done legally and through channels and diverse and measured with audit is a disaster.

It's a disaster, whether it's across the southern border or it's these refugee mass influxes, because we are not equipped psychologically, culturally, or civilizationally to impart from a position of wisdom as the host and moral superiority, to be frank, to say to the immigrant, you chose to come here.

These are the protocols and traditions of the United States.

They're 233 years old.

This is what we do in the United States.

This is our common language.

This is our common culture.

This is our common borders.

This is the respect for law.

Now, if you want to come here, you're going to have to change.

That was

the bitter bargain or the tough

contract that we made with all immigrants.

But in the last, you know, 30 or 40 years, it's just we don't really believe in ourselves.

Oh, yeah, come across the border, fly in, trash the United States.

We'll help you trash it.

We don't dare assimilate or integrate or intermarry you because who are we to save my cultures any better than your so it's a disaster.

We're not equipped for it.

And we should just stop it.

We should just go back to having measured, merocratic, diverse legal immigration, maybe 300 or 400,000 a year, and take in electrical engineers from India or doctors from Kenya or entrepreneurs from South Africa or scientists from Switzerland or whatever it is, but have some criteria because we have proven that when we bring in mass numbers of people who are impoverished, and the first thing they do is not

obey the law by crossing the border.

The second thing they do is not obey the law by residing illegally here.

The third thing they do is usually get some type of identification that's falsified to perpetuate those first two crimes.

Then it's downhill.

It really is.

Into entitlement programs.

Yeah, it is.

It's just, and then what we do is we start that whole mechanism where the left in books and articles writes about the new demographics, the new majority, where they brag and brag and brag that the so-called white population or the European-based or the Republican or conservative, they're waning because of

a new onslaught or a new group of people

that are going to be the future, as if they're always going to be democratic.

And then when somebody like Tucker Carlson objects to it, then they say, oh, he believes in the great replacement theory.

Well, no,

you created the great replacement theory.

You were candid and you were bragging and boastful and braggadocious that you said that you were going to replace people by call it the new demographic.

So when somebody on the conservative side says, yeah, that's what they're doing.

Oh, he's a paranoid old white guy that believes in the great replacement theory.

It's just, it's just absurd.

Yeah, I know that.

The left has become the masters of these mass immigration, uncontrolled immigration that are.

The only thing that will stop immigration, there's only one thing.

We are incapable of doing it.

If you get DeSantis or Trump in there, they will try.

They will try to finish the wall.

They will try to stop catch and release.

They will try to deport.

But they will be under enormous pressure from within their administration, from a corrupt bureaucracy and Homeland Security.

And they will be attacked by judges.

They will be attacked by the Pentagon.

And they will be attacked by people in their own party, the Rhino open borders, cheap labor corporate lobby.

And so the only thing that will stop it is if immigrants come in.

and they see that this chaos is exactly what they're fleeing from and they don't like it, as we're starting to see in California with second and third generation Mexican Americans, or as you see in the first generation from Venezuela or Cuba, who are fleeing communism.

And then they turn out to be conservative.

Well, you know how the left reacts to that, the condescending, patronizing left.

Well, we are champions and we're noble bicoastal wealthy elites.

And we pat you on the head and say, you know what, you've got to do.

You vote for us and you admire us and you worship because we're so kind.

We give Juanita our used car and we give her, you know, we give her our used clothes and when she cleans and works for us.

But if you don't appreciate that and don't vote as we tell you, then we don't want you here.

And that would close the border.

So, Victor, let's turn to another military matter.

We have Russian fighter jets flying over a U.S.

garrison in Syria where we have approximately 900

U.S.

military personnel there.

I was wondering your thoughts.

The papers said that they went over, they flew over that garrison, which is very close to it

every day in the month of March.

Well, there's a lot of aspects to that story.

Remember, under Trump, we had that same base or one near it, and the so-called precursor of the Wagner group decided.

on a green light from Vladimir Putin that they were going to go in there and attack it.

And Trump was asked by the Pentagon for the reaction.

He said, obliterate them.

And they did.

I mean, they killed 200 to 400 of them.

We have the transcripts of these people just frantic that they're being slaughtered by American artillery.

And so

we know that that is a vulnerable place.

So he never did that again, is my point, did he, Putin?

He looked at the last administration and said, oh, my God, they got out of the missile, the asymmetrical missile deal that I had.

Oh, my God, they are sanctioning more oligarchs.

Oh, my God, they gave javelin missiles and offensive weaponry that Obama forbid to go to Ukraine.

Oh my God, they're flooding the world with cheap oil.

That's bad for us.

Oh my God, what are we going to do with this crazy Trump?

He's just killed some people.

He killed Baghdadi.

He killed Soleimani.

So they were behaved.

That was the only period, not George W.

Bush, not Barack Obama, not Joe Biden, that Russia did not go beyond its borders.

Okay, now

they look at Biden and they think, you know what?

The Chinese sent a balloon across the continental United States.

And he was so weak, he let it go, and then he lied about it that it had no significance.

Then he got dressed down in Anchorage the first three months in the third month of his administration, where they just insulted them.

They left all this gear that we were buying on the black market in Afghanistan.

They had the pride flag flying at the billion-dollar embassy they abandoned.

They gave up Bagmam Air Force Base that had 300 million bucks invested in it.

And these people, incredible.

When we cyber-attack, they say, Vladimir, please put hospitals off your list of attack targets in the United States.

And when we mass troops on the border of Ukraine, they say, well, if it's a minor invasion, we won't care.

So they know that and they're probing us.

But Syria is a very dangerous place in addition to that because

they're sending now these pro-Assad fighters that had been fighting ISIS.

And,

you know, they're aligned with Hamas, they're aligned with the Assad,

Assad, they're aligned with Hezbollah, they're aligned with Iran.

And

they're going into Ukraine as mercenary soldiers.

And then, second,

it's also, we have a, this is what's so weird about this administration.

It's so arrogant and chauvinistic and ignorant.

So there has been a very careful

relationship between Israel and the Russians.

Partly it's based on some points of mutual agreement.

I mean, there's a lot of Russian-speaking Jews in

Israel, and they have contacts with Russians.

There's a lot of Russian businessmen, and there's a sort of an affinity with the Russian enclave in Cyprus and Israel.

So my point is this, is that

they had a working relationship.

So when Hezbollah

would shell Israel, Israel would go into into Syrian airspace, which was de facto not Syrian airspace.

It was controlled by Russia.

And they were allowed under careful guidelines to hit various Hezbollah missile sites.

And then we kind of blunderbuss come in by, oh, you know,

Putin is, and why isn't Israel boycotting?

Why aren't they on the team?

And you think, well, wait a minute.

So they can't do much for Ukraine.

And the Ukrainians have a long history of anti-Semitism.

You know, if you want to go look at Baba Ar or what happened in 19

summer of 41 to 43,

it wasn't Russians necessarily who were at the spearhead of the anti-Semitic bomb gomes and executions.

It were Ukrainians.

So there's not a lot of goodwill there is what I'm saying.

And yet the United States expects Israel to just abandon whatever workable relationship it had to stifle Iranian-sponsored influence in Syria.

And they're not going to do it.

And, you know, you talk to some Israelis and they'll tell you that the Israeli pilots go up to hit the targets and the Russians come, you know, they monitor them, but they'll wave to them.

Like, okay, as long as you get that terrorist guy, that's okay with us.

Don't worry about it.

And then they handle the Syrian reaction to it.

But if you want to, so it's a very volatile situation.

And because we're weak right now, people, as Reagan pointed out, when you're weak, it invites aggression.

So this didn't happen under Trump.

It didn't happen in Ukraine.

It didn't happen with the balloon.

It didn't happen that China is now the broker.

China has invested how much?

Zero, nothing in Ukraine.

So they are now posing as the honest broker to broker a peace to get international diplomatic stature between Russia and

Ukraine.

But they didn't do anything.

We gave $140 billion

and we're treated like nobody.

It's just incredible.

It's so

you know, we're going to talk about war at the end, but it's very depressing to write this last six months about the last two centuries of the Byzantine Empire, which was a great empire, and see how insidiously, serially, continuously it was attenuated when it was a decline that was a matter of choice.

It wasn't fated.

And then to see the fall of Constantinople and then to be watching something in real accelerated time while you're writing it is really Orwellian.

It's bizarre.

But I feel like I'm writing about the fall of Constantinople, but I'm also writing about watching the fall of the United States.

because the cities are just in chaos and all of these bizarre cults and fads that have have suddenly come out of nowhere, whether it's these

Antifa people and these goon outfits, or it's

this whole transgender obsession and fixation.

Where did it all come from?

And why so quickly?

Jennifer Grenholm was on

testifying today and she was assuring everybody that the Pentagon was going to go green.

And I'm thinking,

well, what are you going to run an Abems tank on batteries?

Is that what what you're going to do?

An F-16 on batteries?

Do you know that when you came into office, we were the world's greatest producer of natural gas and oil?

We were perfectly, completely immune from any pressure or threats from either our enemies or our allies in the Middle East.

And in just two and a half years, you and Joe Biden destroyed all that, canceling Keystone, canceling ANWARC, canceling federal leases, jaw-boning frackers and horizontal drillers, and then draining the strategic petroleum reserve, begging Venezuela, begging Russia, begging Iran, begging Saudi Arabia.

Please pump more oil, that dirty, filthy substance that you guys love so much, but we hate, even though we have more of it than you do, but we won't get our hands dirty unless it's refined and you send it to us.

And does anybody really think that on spaceship Earth at an oil well in Venezuela, or one in the Caucasus, or one in Venezuela, or one in Iran can be extracted, extracting oil under greater and better environmental auspices than we do here?

I doubt it.

I doubt it.

Yes, but can I bet?

Why don't we pump it when we can do it cleanly and they can't?

And

we use what we pump and not tell them to give us your oil, even though they're charging us a lot.

And we don't care about the environmental consequences of how you extract it.

Yeah.

Well, can I back up just one second?

Because while you were talking about Syria, I was thinking, my impression of the last 20, 30, 40 years is that Syria fought with Israel over the Golan Heights.

So they don't like Israel, but we are on Israel's side.

So what are we doing with a garrison of 900 U.S.

personnel inside of Syria?

That's what I didn't really get when I was listening to you.

Well, originally.

Originally, they were going to be

observers, spotters that were training people to fight this.

Remember what happened?

Obama pulled, when he left office, he just abruptly pulled everybody out of Iraq.

And when we had those beheadings and that, and then all of a sudden ISIS just swept through and they took almost a half of the country.

And then they were in Syria.

Then there was this revolutionary

fervor where

the sort of, I don't want to call anybody in the Middle East moderate, but they were anti-Assad revolutionaries fighting this corrupt Assad government.

And in that Sturman Drang, this ISIS explosion poured over the border.

And then everybody got into it.

Kurds, everybody, Turkey.

But my point is that at that point, Trump, who didn't want to get involved, he needed to bomb what he said the SHIT out of ISIS.

Remember that?

So he put observers and a few hundred troops more in Iraq and in Syria.

And their job was to train people to fight radical Islamicists,

keep out of the civil war, and to help guide or to help direct U.S.

airstrikes when necessary.

And it worked because we destroyed ISIS in Iraq.

And

so it's been pretty quiet.

So Syria shares with us a desire to keep radical Islam.

Well, we can't say that.

We can't say that because we hate the Syrians, supposedly, the government.

Although Nancy Pelosi, at the height of the Iraq war, went over just to embarrass George W.

Bush and said she really thought

Assad was a great guy.

So

she did.

Yeah, I know.

I remember that.

So we have an ambiguous relationship with Syria.

It was always considered the most volatile, radical, anti-American country of all those who were participating in the so-called peace process.

That being said,

we were, I think in the case of Obama, he thought, remember, he said that during the Arab Spring, where he got involved with

Susan Rice and Hillary Clinton, and they wanted to bomb Gaddafi's sons out of power.

And we were having a reforming Qaddafi family where the sons were westernized, starting to replace this lunatic dad.

And there was some stability.

And when the Arab Spring came and there was a lot of radical Islamists involved to take advantage of this chaos, we bombed.

And look at Libya today.

Well, the same thing happened in Syria.

There was an Arab Spring, which Obama, typical Obama, come on, you guys, you know, it's going to be a revolution.

Go ahead and do it.

Well, don't count me in.

And so he did kind of what George H.W.

Bush did in the first Gulf War.

When Bush urged the Kurds after the peace settlement or the peace negotiation to rise up against Saddam, and then they did, and then we didn't do anything, and they got slaughtered.

Same thing in 1956 in Hungary.

It's very dangerous for an American leader to tell anybody to rise up against an illiberal regime unless you're going to help them.

And so that's what we did in Syria.

And then we found out that Assad, we thought, according to Obama, that he was going to fall very quickly.

But of course, he didn't.

He just wiped out that opposition, and then he turned his attention to stopping the radical Islamicists, which he kind of had used now and then when he found useful.

But we didn't want to say that Assad was an anti-Islamicist,

although he was.

He was a Baathist,

the Syrian version of the Baathist Party, which was originally a Marxist, secular organization.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, let's do the last subject for contemporary warfare.

We haven't heard a lot, at least from you,

on the Ukrainian war.

And I remember the last thing we heard was that there was going to be a spring offensive.

And I'm not sure whether it was Russian

offensive.

There's always a spring offensive in Russia when the rain stops, the mud dries out, and then people go at it.

And they always go at it with the idea that winter comes in late October or middle of October, so we better hurry up.

So the campaigning season is very short, and it's very important to get in there as quickly as possible.

But from these leaked Texera, that was his name was, the guy that leaked all of those Pentagon intelligence reports, there doesn't look like

the spring offensive was going anywhere.

And what we're watching now is that we've spent about $140 billion, or we're scheduled to spend.

The Europeans are exhausted.

The world's going into recession.

And they are, it's like Verdun in in World War I.

They are expending ammunition and it's not like a 150 millimeter shell of World War II.

These are very sophisticated, smart shells that are very expensive, thousands of dollars per shell.

And they don't have enough of them.

They're shooting 30 shells versus 100 or 150.

And so they're very well equipped, but that's one problem the Ukrainians have, that the supply line is starting to draw out.

But a bigger one is that now

this has been going on for over a year, and they've lost anywhere from 130 to 150,000 dead, probably 200,000 wounded.

And the original NATO force, NATO-trained Ukrainian force is extinct.

It's dead.

It's buried.

And the Russians, you know, everybody says, well, you know, they trided the Russians and the Russians have lost 300.

Yeah, the Russians.

Russia makes war like it's a body grinder.

They are a body grinder, a human-being grinder.

There's a very famous passage in Ike's Crusade in Europe where right at the end of the war, in the closing battles, he met Zhukov and he wanted to talk to Zhukov.

And he was talking about German mines and how effective they were.

And Zhukov says they're not effective.

And Ike says they can take out American tanks.

He said, well, if you don't treat it right, what you do is you send all your your

your convicts and all your criminals and you just send them through the minefield and they blow up and then they clean the minefield and you take your tanks.

Ike editorializes about that, but that's what they've been doing.

So we got all excited and said, oh, wow, the Wagner group, 40,000, that creepy group, the Ukrainians pretty much wiped them out.

Yes, that was the point.

They sent them in.

and shocked troops and their purpose was to kill six to eight thousand ukrainians and lose 40.

and then putin what did he think

i got A, empty the prisons, good.

And B, I killed another seven or 8,000 Ukrainians.

They can't afford.

And that's their strategy, isn't it?

That was a strategy they used against,

oh,

I guess the Swedish king.

They used it against Napoleon.

They used it against Hitler.

They used it against the Finns in the Winter War of 1939.

They used it against

Poland in 1922.

They just send in all of these troops, and they're incompetent.

The generals are crazy.

Their logistics are bad.

Everybody says they're the worst-led troops in the world.

And to the degree they're outside their borders, they're incompetent.

And then it just drags on and drags on.

And they pour troops in.

Everybody says, well, it's not the czarist empire.

It's not the Soviet Union.

It's pittly

tiny, weeny little 144 million Russian Federation.

Yes, but that's 144 million people.

That's not nothing.

It's big.

And Vladimir Putin is prepared to lose easily a million soldiers in there if he can take Ukraine and go down as, you know, Vlad the Impaylor that got back Ukraine, or at least parts of Ukraine.

That's what he's going to do.

So I get really angry with the Never Trump and the left wing.

And I'm very pro-Ukrainian.

I don't think that Russia had any business going in and violating those borders.

Any ancient border dispute they had along the Donbass or in Crimea, they could have adjudicated.

But when they went in, I thought we should support him with defensive weapons.

But I got really angry at these people in the Washington Post.

I won't mention names.

I know some of them.

New York Times on left-wing TV, some people at Stanford University.

Oh, they're going to win.

These people are...

This is Lincoln.

This is Garibaldi.

These people are one.

And you just sit there and then, you know, it's like, do you ever read history?

Do you ever see what the Russians do to people?

They wear them down.

They wear them down.

And that's what they're going to do with the Ukrainians.

They're going to wear them down.

And finally, the Ukrainians are going to say, we need more drones.

We need more artillery shells.

We need more patriots.

And we're going to say, we're in a recession and Europe's in a recession and we don't have it anymore.

I'm sorry.

And then they're going to say, well,

what do we do?

And we're going to say, well, no one should negotiate.

I guess we don't want to help you, so get the Chinese to negotiate.

I guess this is what the Biden is doing.

They're barnstorming the country how much this is a war of liberation.

And remember that

Lloyd Austin just pontificated in between

boasts that they were seeking out white rage and white supremacies among the ranks.

He said, well, the purpose of this operation is

to attrite the Russians and to weaken the Russians, which is one of our existential enemies.

So we're having a proxy war.

He just laid it out.

And you think, okay,

so you're going to take all of these Ukrainians and you're going to send them into the Russian meat grinder and get chopped up like hamburger.

Because if you have a country like Ukraine and you've had 8 million refugees have left the country and the economy is destroyed, and Vladimir Putin is systematically taking out power plants, roads, infrastructure, dams, plants, and he's killing 150,000 of your soldiers and he wants to kill another 400 or 500.

And he knows people are tiring, and he knows the Russian people cannot stop him.

Then

isn't that the strategy all along?

Didn't anybody see that coming?

I did.

I'm not a very smart guy.

I could see it coming.

I mean,

when Oberkommand OKW said in the 11th day of the war,

Halder and Keitel were bragging that one could say with certainty that the war in Russia, Operation Barbarossa, is finished and that the Soviet Union has been defeated.

That was 11 days after they went almost 800 miles.

No, they weren't defeated.

They weren't defeated.

And Napoleon said, you know, I got to Moscow.

No, you didn't.

You got to Moscow and then you destroyed your army.

One out of seven people came back that left that grand army that went in from Poland.

600,000 of them went.

And about 100,000, if that came back.

The Swedes had the same experience under Charles XII, had the same experience.

The Russians will chew their own arm off to get out of things.

They will.

And

that's what we got ourselves into.

And that's just the

optimistic take of the...

No, it is because

we have created this weird new axis of Russia and China and Iran with that little lapdog, North Korea, yapping around with its missiles.

And then we've taken valuable allies like India that's now buying Russian oil and Japan that's buying Russian oil and the Saudis that have kind of made a non-aggression pact with the Iranians and the Turks that are selling Russian arms and buying Russian oil and has the largest army in NATO, except for us, that basically is not an ally anymore.

And we did all of that the whole time why we said,

Trump tore everything up.

He ruined the world.

No, he didn't.

You inherited a stable world.

And in two and a half years, through your deliberate, I guess it's deliberate weakness, you've made our neutrals join the enemies.

You've made our allies distance themselves and you embolden our enemies.

And that's hard to do.

But man, when you don't say anything about a Chinese balloon that travels the continent, or you get your face slapped basically at at Anchorage by the Chinese, or you leave a big embassy and an airbase and kind of a Walmart of weapons for the terrorist of the world, or you tell the world you're going to go after white supremacy and white rage in the ranks and promote transgenderism when the world says, wait a minute, we fought those Americans in Korea.

We fought those Americans in Vietnam.

We fought those guys in Afghanistan.

We fought the Iraqis, as I remember right, the white male guys died at double their numbers in the population.

They're pretty good fighters.

So why would you attack them and call them racist

and white supremacists and make sure that they don't enlist anymore?

And they're not.

And so the world knows all.

They're not stupid.

They look at all this and they look at that.

Jennifer Granhelm today and talking about making the military run on green solar batteries.

And they think these people are insane.

They're insane.

They took the greatest military in the world and they're neutering it and they're turning it into some social organization where the Pentagon top brass kind of nod, what do you need?

Yeah, we'll go by, we'll get biodiesel, $28 a gallon.

Sure, we will.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

We'll get transgendered subsidized surgeries.

Yep.

Well, yep, we'll take people out of combat units and fly them back for abortion.

Yep.

Absolutely.

We'll have diversity training, equity training, inclusion training.

Well, that all comes at a cost.

That means if you're doing all that, you're not doing something else.

And you're not bringing people in that want to fight.

So a certain type of American, a Jacksonian, that great-grandfather, grandfather, father were fighters.

They're natural fighters.

I went to school with a lot of them, both Hispanic and poor white.

And there's a certain type of person that likes to fight, and they gravitate to the Marines,

101st, the Rangers.

And whatever you say about them, that's the backbone of Americans' military.

And you don't want to ever alienate that group because they're precious people.

And I see them all the time.

And

I can remember there's a guy, if I could diverse, there's a guy, I'll say his name.

His name was Jimmy.

He was from Oklahoma, very poor.

And he had little arms, but they were like steel rods, you know.

Yes.

And

there was a guy, I won't mention his name, I think he's still alive, who was on the football team and lifted weights.

And he was Mr.

Big Man on the

campus.

And he started pushing Jimmy, but Jimmy had nothing to lose, right?

And Jimmy grabbed and jumped on his back and it was like some type of spider with

claws and he got up.

Straight out of the hobbit.

Well, yeah, he put his hand around his neck and he almost strangled him and you couldn't get him off.

And then that he was trying to thrash him.

And then finally we it was kind of broken up.

And Jimmy turned, I remember he said to me, I did pretty good, didn't I?

Didn't I?

And I said, well, is that the first, I do that every week.

This, that's exercise for me.

I love it.

And this big, tough guy with big, bulging muscles, he looked like Arnold Schwarzenegger.

He didn't know what to do with Jimmy.

And you went, I remember Jimmy, everybody said, you know, everybody talks about poverty, but I lived in a.

90% Hispanic community with 90% Hispanic kids.

And we all, the Hispanic guys and us, we looked at that house that Jimmy lived near

my fourth grade.

I went to school with him from third grade and there were no windows.

I mean,

it was very, very cold.

And his mother was sort of an alcoholic and his brothers and they all lived in that house with no windows.

They were broken and they had nothing.

They had nothing.

And there's a lot of people like that.

And to call them names, the lower middle white working classes, to call them names and to insult them and say things like deplorable and irredeemable and chumps and dregs and clingers and then ask them to go into Godforsaken places like Holman Province or Basra or Taji and then say, go and die for this nation-building enterprise of ours that we dreamed up in, you know, the think tank.

You can't do that.

So that's what I'm worried about, this weakness all around, and the world knows that.

They were the most feared fighters in the world.

I'm not being racialist at all.

Mexican-American guys guys are some of the most feared Marines in the world.

They are.

But

also, whereas the white male from basic, I don't mean the white male being white.

I'm just being descriptive of a social economic, and I mean the white male

from the lower middle classes of rural America, upstate New York, Bakersfield, California, northern Florida, whatever.

They just,

they have that Scotch-Irish tradition of battling and fighting.

And you don't want to, you don't want to lose that asset.

And why are you issuing it?

Because a bunch of very well-educated beltway generals who want to appease left-wing people in the Congress and the corporate mentality are already thinking that they can get promoted by promoting the Millie Austin agenda, and then they're going to revolve right out to a big corporate Raytheon or Lockheed or something and make more money in one year than they have in their entire life.

Or maybe they'll go like James Baker.

He made 50 times more when he left the FBI's general counsel and got 8 million from Twitter.

Wow.

Okay, Victor, you're making me think that we're at a turning point

in some way in our history, perhaps right now, but

in 1453 was an even bigger turning point.

So I would like to turn to that.

You're listening to the Victor Davis-Hanson show.

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

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So, Victor, Constantinople and the fall of Constantinople in 1453 is probably or arguably one of the most significant events in modern history.

And so we were going to look at that today.

I think what it does in modern history is turn the interest of the European Western continent to finding the East by going west, if that makes any sense at all.

But how does Constantinople fall?

Well,

it's a tragedy, and there's two narratives about what, I guess, is known in the Greek world.

You know,

I remember being in Athens in my apartment.

I was only 19 in 1973, 74 during the coup, and my landlady was walking in, and she started crying.

And she grabbed me and she said something.

This is mavre trita, trité, mavre trita.

I said, what is that?

It's Black Tuesday.

And I said, what is Black Tuesday?

She spoke a little English and she said,

well, this is when Constantine XI was marbilized.

And I thought, what?

Well, the doors were broken open at Hagia Sophia.

In rushed the Janissary, 7,000 of the remnants were in there hoping that the archangel would come and save them with a sword.

And he didn't.

But Constantine, who was...

killed in the fighting, beheaded, his head was stuffed with straw and sent to Egypt as a trophy by the Sultan Mehmed.

But nevertheless, they believed he was marvelized and he will he's in suspended animation and he will come back.

So it's a very sad day in the history of the Greek people.

And basically the Byzantine Empire was 1100 years.

So whatever we say about decline, we're talking, we have to be perspective, was one of the most successful long-lived empires in history.

But during the Fourth Crusade in 1204, it was sacked, detoured.

We've talked about that by the Franks and the Venetians, and it never recovered.

Fast forward to 1453, in a city that had a million people, it only had 50,000.

And they had been wiped out by the Fourth Crusade.

They'd been wiped out by the bubonic plague that hit Europe.

They'd been wiped out by the rise of these crazy Seljuk Turks that had been

transmogrified, metamorphosized with a group of other tribes into Ottomanism that were, you know, sort of jihadist Islamic warriors.

And they lost all of Anatolia.

They lost all of their eastern province, they lost all of northern Greece, they lost all of the Balkans, they lost all of Thrace.

So by 1453, it was just the city of Constantinople, a little bit around it, and then they had kind of two little enclaves, one in the Crimea and one on the Black Sea, and then they had the Peloponnese, the Morea.

There were only 2 million Byzantines.

And when Mehmed came in on April 6th, 1453, he had 88, 90,000 jihadists.

And they only had, on the walls, they only had 8,000 defenders.

And so Constantine and the Orthodox people said to Europe, well, you know, you sacked us two and a half centuries.

Can you send people?

They're coming, they're coming.

And they said, well, there's no Byzantine Empire left.

It's just your city.

And we do business with, we Venetians and Genovese do business with it,

the Muslims.

We can handle them.

They They said, no, we can save the city.

And some of them did come.

The Genovese sent 700 really brave people.

The Venetians sent some galleys.

And they held out from April 6th all the way to May 29th.

There's two narratives in the modern historiographical context.

There's the Gibbon, Arnold Toynbee, kind of Stephen Runciman version that they were doomed.

They were absolutely doomed.

If it hadn't been on May 29th, they would have lost it someday.

And then there's another narrative.

No,

they withstood Mehmet's father in 422, and they stopped that siege.

And

two days before the final breakthrough of the inner wall, outer and inner wall, they had the greatest fortifications in Europe, the Theodesian Wall.

If you go to Constantinople, you got to see parts of it.

There's no way anybody can get through them.

They're a series of bunkers and walls and pavilions, and there are death traps.

But they had stopped them.

And finally, there was a big fight among the

advisors.

The Grand Vizier said, you know what, we can't win.

We've got to go out.

We've already lost 20,000 men.

It's time to quit.

And Medmed, who was 19 years old, the Sultan said, well, what do we do?

And they said, we can take it.

So the radical Turkish contingent said, take the Christians, who were either serfs or slaves or subjugated peoples from the Balkans, send them in.

And they sent them in all morning and they were wiped out by the defenders.

And they said, then send in

the Turkish peasants from Anatolia.

And they did that.

And then

they had cannon, they had the big bombard, and they said, keep blasting the walls.

And after seven or eight hours of constant fighting on the walls, they sent in the janissaries and the elite of the elite.

And they still couldn't take the city until Mr.

Giostestiani was wounded.

And unfortunately, the Genovese panicked and 300 of them picked him up and carried him out to the Golden Horn.

And when people saw that, they panicked.

So they left the outer wall.

They went into the pavilion.

They tried to get through the inner wall before the Turks got over.

They gave up the defense and it just, it was just panic.

And then the janissaries rushed in and Mehmed said, for three days, the city is yours.

And

then they took over.

And of course,

within about a month, the city was deserted.

Most people left.

And then Mehmed tried to get people to come back and make it an Islamic city.

But that was the end of Hellenism and Asia for good.

There was about maybe a million Greeks spread out from the Black Sea all the way down to the

Anatolian coast all and then in the Morea, the Peloponnese, that fell seven days later, seven years later at Mistros.

It was wiped out.

And so that was the end.

And for Greece, it was 370 years, 1460 to 1821, before it was liberated.

And the little footnote to it was

there was this idea.

It was called the

Megali Idea,

the great idea.

And once Greece was liberated and the Ottomans were falling, people said, we can reconstruct the Byzantine Empire.

All we have to do is stick together and recreate a Greek language and Orthodox church and have our own country.

And they got it.

And so systematically at the beginning of the 20th century,

they got Crete back.

They got a lot of the Aegean islands back.

They got Macedonia back.

They got a lot of Thrace back.

And then they bet on the right side in World War II.

The Turks bet on the wrong side.

And the Allies occupied Constantinople.

And all of a sudden, Mr.

Benezelis said,

we can make the whole Byzantine Empire.

We've got all of this land.

Give us Constantinople.

That'll be the new capital, not Athens.

And we have the coast of Anatolia that have been Greek for 3,000 years.

This was the embryo of the pre-Socratic revolution under Tales and Axameter and Aximenes.

It was the birthplace, along with the Eastern Aegean, of the lyric poet movement, Sappho and Acreon.

You name it.

It was the birthplace of Hellenism, Homer, Herodotus.

So the idea was in 1918, 1919, they had Smyrna.

And actually, they had a reverse migration.

People fled,

flowed into Smyrna.

There was almost a half a million Greeks there.

And so it was almost realized, I don't know if they had the manpower to sustain it, but then the Ottomans crashed.

And unfortunately for the Greeks, they had this new secular movement, and it was nationalistic.

The Ottomans had been ecumenical, had been, you know, worldwide.

It was like the Comatern, only Islamic.

We are the representative of Islam, not these new guys under Kamal Ataturk.

They were, we're Turkish, we're secular, we're Western, we're not Muslims, and we're going to stop all the old protocols.

So they went after the Armenians, they went after the Greeks, and when the Greeks tried to expand from Smyrna and go into Anatolia, the British and the French just said, you know what?

I've had enough of this.

This is getting out of hand, and we're going to pull support from the Greeks.

And they did, and they stopped arms shipments, they jawboned them, they turned Constantinople back over to the Turks, and the Turks came in and they slaughtered, they killed over a million Armenians and Greeks.

Not that there weren't barbarities on both sides.

I'm not trying to take sides, but there's some very graphic 1922.

It was terrible.

And the

second time I lived in Greece for a year, I stayed in Osios, Microsoft, Microsoft, Assios, Asia Minor Street, that area around Zografu in Athens, where that was where the big group of refugees came.

And even as late as the 70s, that had been 50 years.

So there were people in my neighborhood that would come up to me and tell me what it was like to have a little farm outside Smyrna, or they had grown up in Cappadocia, or they

had been in the Crimea,

and they had all been.

in the great exchange of populations.

A million of them had to leave.

So it was very sad.

But.

but um

you know since you've brought it to the modern age what what happened in cyprus i know that it's split by the turks and the greeks

well that's a tragedy we're very culpable about that i mean cyprus it was greek it always had been greek i mean that was the salmas and and famagusta and the and then during the fourth crusade

As you know, when the Franks and the Venetians detoured and they sacked with the wink and the nod of the Pope, they sacked Byzantium.

For 50 years, they had

the Franco-Cratea

in Constantinople.

And then

the Byzantines came back and got back their city, but they lost so many.

They lost all of these very lucrative areas, and one of them was Cyprus.

And they lost Crete and Noplion.

And the Venetians kind of had it.

posts and that was pretty much until the 18th century and then the Ottomans pushed the Venetians out and they occupied these places.

But they were an occupying force.

So Cyprus grew up as 80%

Greek and 20%

Turkish, roughly, right, into the modern era.

And

there was this idea, a part of the great idea, that the Aegean would return to be a Greek lake.

So along with having the coast of Ionia re-Hellenized, they were going to have Cyprus back.

And when that failed,

then Cyprus became an independent country with a very elaborate Lebanese-type sharing of power between a minority of 20% Turks and 80% Greeks.

And if you went to Cyprus, as I did before the 74 war, it was...

I mean, I'm going to offend people who were sympathetic to the Turks, but if you look at the economic development of

the two different parts of Cyprus, it was quite stunning.

Greek predominantly was flourishing and Turkish Cyprus was not.

And then there was this idea of a gnosis.

It's a Greek word for we're going to combine Cyprus with the mainland.

It was kind of a right-wing idea, and it kind of took hold.

And in 1974, there was a mini-revolution, and that gave the Turks an excuse to unleash the Turkish army, which invaded Cyprus under the guise of

protecting the Turkish minority.

But what they did is they grabbed the most Greek areas of Cyprus, the wealthiest, and then they ethnically cleansed and slaughtered the Greeks and pushed them back into the more undeveloped areas and declared something called the Republic of Cyprus, which was Turkish, the Turkish Republic of Cyprus.

Nobody recognizes it except Turkey today.

And then you've had these 80%

of Greeks that were put into areas for the most part that were impoverished.

And then fast forward 50 years, and guess what?

The most populous, the most prosperous, the most secure, the most developed area of Greece, which was abandoned, I shouldn't say which was forced out, the Greeks were forced out from, the Turks took over.

It's not now.

And the areas that were undeveloped, that they pushed the Greeks into, is flourishing.

But

it's a very unstable.

And one of the tragedies is that Erdogan has been sending Turkish settlers into Turkey

to, I mean, into Cyprus to change the demographics so that it eventually will become Turkish.

But there's twists to it.

So a lot of the Turkish population in Cyprus,

who has grown up with Greeks and remembers a period when they got along somewhat and they see how the Greek-speaking areas of the city are prosperous, they're not really that hot with uniting with Turkey.

They would like to have some type of arrangement, at least some of them would.

And it will never unite with Greece.

More danger is Mr.

Ergoyan, what he said, I think it was three weeks ago, he said, the Greeks are going to wake up in Athens and they're going to see Turkish missiles coming out of the sky at them.

He's an Ottoman.

That's very important to remember about him.

The Kamal Ataturk tradition was to create a Turkish nation.

And his criticism, he hated the Ottomans.

He said, the Ottomans are not Turkish.

They've got Italians, they've got Jews, they've got everybody.

You know, as I said in our earlier broadcast, the mother of the Sultan was usually a European.

Most of the grand viziers were European.

There was a large Jewish contingent that left Spain to their, and the message of the young Turks and the nationals was, we're going to have Turkey for Turkey.

And they were, they adopted the European alphabet and our lettering, they got rid of Islamic script, they got rid of the Fez, they got rid of a lot.

They made Hagia Sophia an international museum,

etc.

And stopped it being a mosque.

And they were a big ally of the United States.

They westernized.

And then Erdogan came in with the Islamist revival and reversed that.

and said, no, we're not the children of Ataturk, we're the children of Medmed and the conqueror of 1453.

And so once again, Hagia Sophia is a mosque and they're anti-American and they're anti-Greek and they threaten people.

And he likes that.

Yeah.

Can I back up again?

It sounds like.

I got to confess, I'm a Philhillean because at 19 and 20, I moved for a year of study in Greece and I went back for another year.

And then I probably

For 20 years in my life, I went there each summer, every other summer, and I've stayed at long periods there.

So I am

prejudicial.

I'm pro-Greek.

And I've been, but in my defense, I've been all over Turkey.

I went to Turkey when I was 19 the first time, and I've been all through Anatolia and the interior and the coast.

That's what we like about you, Victor, is you're a, would you call it a Phil Greco?

Phil Helene.

Phil Helene.

I am.

I like, I like,

I mean,

they're very, they're very, there are certain peoples in the world, their culture, their religion, they're very accomplished.

And when they come to the West, i.e.

Western European as immigrants or United States, they are sometimes unfairly stereotyped because they're so ambitious and they're so adroit in commerce and they're so capable and they put a high value on family.

on

familial reputation, on achievement.

And that's been the story of Jews in the United States that's been the story of Armenians in the United States that's been the story of Greeks in the United States and so I

when I see Greek Americans that they're they just have an enormous level of achievement and I can say the same thing about Armenians that I know very well And

they're both endangered people.

They got to remember that.

They come from parts of the world that are very dangerous, and they have a long history of persecution by Ottomanism and Islam.

Whether Jews or, well, I should say that Jews were treated pretty well in Constantinople, but with the founding of Israel, there's not, you know, there's 11 million people.

They're on the razor's edge.

So are the Armenians, and so are the Greeks.

That's why I've always tried to write that we should be very

supportive of those three peoples because historically they've enriched civilization and they're very accomplished and they're very vulnerable because they don't have a lot of numbers.

numbers.

Yes.

So could I take you back just for a moment to the Ottoman Empire?

It lasted 600 or over 600 years itself, so it was quite a long-term.

Would you explain that

by the nature of its army?

You know, is that what allowed for the enduring empire?

Well, they were much more successful than the Arabs.

They were Eastern tribes that had been pushed into Anatolia by the Moguls.

And when they came in, they were inter-tribal

factionalism and they united under what would become Ottomanism.

And they were warriors.

They were nomadic warriors from the beginning, but they were, I guess, they were like the Japanese.

They were willing to

borrow ideas without feeling inferior about it if they thought a particular weapon.

So they were open to trade with the Venetians, or they allowed the Genovese to come in, or they were welcoming the Jews that were escaping the Inquisition, or Greeks

that were conquered were allowed to participate, at least in the early years.

Later in the 17th century, they became,

there were pomegrans and persecutions.

But in the early formative years,

they had a very insidious system that is so bizarre, but you can see that it's almost, I don't know whether to admire it or be horrified by it.

But the De Ver

Sherme, they had this,

as I said earlier,

this method of recruitment where they would go into Balkan and Greek villages and they would select the oldest child, male child, and they would say, we'll put him in the janissaries or he will be trained.

And

he was into a madrasa and then he was into military training.

And that was required.

And if they resisted, they'd kill kill the family.

But then the family almost felt, well, maybe that person, it's kind of like those stories of lost kids, you know, and the searchers that are taken away by Native Americans.

It was the same idea.

Maybe he'll remember his parents and give us preferential treatment next time they come in.

But they made the shock troop.

All these people did, the Janissaries, they were Europeans for the most part.

They got special privileges.

They wouldn't let Turks,

very many of them, enlist.

And they did the same thing with beautiful young women.

They took them out of the villages, southern Russia, around the Black Sea, Greece, the Balkans, and they put them in this huge harem.

And for the aristocracy to have multiple wives and girlfriends, but the result of it was that the lucky or unfortunate one that actually married one of the many children of the son of the sultan,

if that's...

if that person eliminated his rivals or was more talented or whatever the particular circumstance, and he became sultan,

His mother was a European.

And so that was very strange because they were waging a war against Europe with shock troops that were European at birth and

sultans that, in many cases, were half European themselves.

And remember, they would then have liaisons with a person in the harem that was usually not Turkish.

So the bloodline, if I could be so gross, would be less and less Turkish, if you know what I mean.

It's a half and then a quarter, then an eighth.

And then on top of all that,

the janissary recruitment system and the harem, then they were open to the West.

So most, not all, but a lot of the Grand Viziers were not.

were not Turkish.

So their idea was if you convert to Islam, you will be more fanatical.

I'll give you one example.

When they attacked Islam, the head of the Turkish Ottoman Navy was an Albanian.

And the Grand Vizier was Turkish, but there were rumors that way back in his bloodline, he had been French.

And then,

and so

they enlisted a lot of people that were Greek.

The architect of the bombard, the big cannon,

whatever we want to call it, the Hellespont cannon, the Dardanelles, that was effective in knocking some of the walls down, was created by a Hungarian.

And so they were very open to Western science.

They were emulative.

Yes,

if you look at the metal content of Venetian cannon on galleys, it had pure bronze, no doubt about it.

And if you look at galley designs, they were more effective.

But when you look at what the Ottomans did, they just took a Venetian galley and a Venetian cannon, and they copied it.

And they made more of them.

And so it was very hard to stay ahead of them technologically because they had no inhibitions about absorbing things.

And once they got to Constantinople, they were on the window of the West.

So on that siege, even before, though, on the siege, they had more artillery than the Byzantines.

They had more gunpowder than the Byzantines.

They had more Christians fighting for them.

or at least people who were born Christian than were on the walls of Constantinople.

Yeah.

And that was what's so ironic about it.

Very sad to think about this whole Byzantine culture.

It was an outpost culture, finally.

It had been the Eastern Roman Empire, and it was the wealthiest part, and it survived the collapse of the West.

So from 500 to 1204, it was booming.

It had ups and downs, but it was massive.

It had all the way down to Alexandria.

It had all of today's Middle East.

It had all of Syria.

It bordered Iran.

And it was all of North Africa.

It had most of Italy back.

It had an enclave in Spain.

And it was trying to reform the entire Roma.

And

they were never called Byzantines.

They were

Roma IOA, the Romans.

That's what they were known as, even though they spoke Greek.

So it was a very fascinating culture.

And

the Greeks today, although they're very proud of their classical culture, because of their religious

observance, it's the Byzantine culture that's more ubiquitous via the Catharevisa formal dialect that you still see.

And it's very funny.

You can read Byzantine Catharvisa and it's almost like classical Greek.

I've been translating some of these documents and I can read mnemonic Greek but with difficulty.

But when you see something in Catharevisa, it's just like classical Greek.

Wow, that's fascinating.

Well, Victor, we have to go to a break and we'll come back and talk maybe a little bit about farming.

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We're back.

I would like to remind everybody that we are a part of the John Solomon's Just the News.

And so we highly recommend that you go to John Solomon's website.

He's an investigative reporter and has

come out with some of the most revealing of either problems or issues in Washington, D.C.

So his website is a great news source.

And that, again, is just the news.

Victor, I know that your listeners love to hear about farming.

And I know that you had a topic that you wanted to talk on today.

So I'll just let you go with it.

Well, I think what we're trying to do, Sammy, is that we're trying to go one in 10-minute burst, tell a history of military history.

So we started with the Persian Wars, Peloponnesian Wars, Alexander the Great, Roman conquests, Roman civil wars,

barbarian invasions, rise of Islamicism, the Crusades, and then we went into the Byzantine Empire today.

We'll go into the Hundred Years' War, which was simultaneous to the fall.

But one of the things I thought we'd do is just for five or six minutes, get a glimpse of what America used to be when it was 90% farming and what degree did that create the American frontier character and what degree have we lost it?

Because now we only have 1% of the population is involved in agriculture.

Although there's about 10% that live on farms, even if they're not farming.

And one of the things I think is very important is that

our modern mentality is that we feel insulated from nature and we feel

that

everything is at our beck and call and we have lost any sense of

fragility.

What I mean by that is

if

you're at work and you don't like things and you go to HR and you expect something to happen.

Or if you do a good job, you go to your boss you want to raise.

Or if you're dismissed, you feel you have rights and you can sue.

Or

you're planning to buy a home or a car and you look at your pay stub and it says, you know, $3,300 a month and it's there every month.

Just wipe all that away with the agrarian mind.

You're out on a piece of land, and you're responsible yourself,

and you have no idea what you're going to make.

It's like most business people, but it's even worse because most business people have to fight the market, labor, and the bank, and the insurance company, and all in the regulatories, and the government.

But farming has a different element, it has nature.

So, what do I mean by that?

I mean, I can remember

the great

1982 rain.

We had just picked 109,000 trays.

We had borrowed over $200,000 for the harvest.

The weather report said partly cloudy in September.

It was a late year.

And all of these raisins, if they took a half inch,

they were ruined because, you know, the sand would get into them on the ground.

They were on paper trays.

And all of a sudden, my twin brother called me up at one in the morning and said, That hurricane down in Mexico, mister, just turned.

I go, what?

It just turned.

It's going to be here in eight hours.

So you get on the horn and I'll get on the horn and I need 20 men from you and I'll get 20.

Well, where do you get 20 men?

So, you know, you get your mother who's a judge who's in her 60s.

My father had both knees operated on and you get

everybody out there.

And then you go call up anybody you know.

And all of a sudden, you call up every labor contractor.

and some guy says well hilario will help you but he wants 30

40 per thousand trays to be rolled and you say oh you have to roll them in a ball okay well the problem is hilarious 15 miles away so you drive over there in the middle of the night and get him and then bring him and you got to give him food and take care of him and that's what you do and so

And then we saved 90% of the crop.

Most people didn't.

And then I can remember just

we said, well, we don't have enough money to thin this Santa Rosa orchard, but we better borrow more because the Santa Rosa price is pretty good.

So we did, and we got the plums every eight inches apart.

I was on a ladder for, I think, eight days.

And then all of a sudden, everything went well.

We were right into June.

They were beautiful.

They were what we call a 3-4, a big size.

And guess what?

A storm came.

Who's ever heard of a storm coming in California in early June?

It not only came, this big black cloud came and it hovered over our area and it hailed.

It hailed for 10 minutes and they were the size of pellets and they ruined the entire crop.

Completely ruined.

And it was, that was it.

And you think, and then it cleared up and it was sunny the next day and you think, I just lost $70,000.

And it was stuff like that.

So you couldn't count on anything.

And that made you entirely self-reliant.

I've never been more self-reliant than myself.

And then when you look at health a different way, if, you know, if when I got mononucleosis, I just, I had it for about a long time.

I called up Cal State and I said, I can't get in there today.

My gland.

Oh, there's no problem.

You got plenty of sick leave.

But if I was out on the ranch and I got a strep throat and I had to furrow out, you know, 40 acres on an old Oliver tractor and I had 101 temperature, if I didn't do it, who was going to do it?

Nobody.

So you get out there and you do it.

It wasn't corporate farming.

That's that's what I'm saying.

The American, it was small, entrepreneurial, owner-operated agrarianism.

And it's very, very tough.

And you can't count on anybody or anything except your own muscular strength and your knowledge and your will.

And so when you meet those guys, and there's still a lot around,

they're like nobody else in the world.

an independent farmer.

I mean, they do physical work, they're mathematicians, they're accountants, they're weather forecasters, they have a whole folk tradition they've inherited, and they look at the world in black and white because it either happens or it doesn't.

So it's not like, wow, you know, maybe, sort of, kind of, maybe on the one hand and the other.

No, there's nothing.

You either get the crop or you don't.

It's that simple.

And, you know, they have to borrow money all the time.

And

I really admire them.

But I can remember some days

that I was thinking, I would think, you know, I finished all the PhD

requirements in just two and a half years at Stanford.

I learned to write in Latin and Greek pretty well.

I got aced my Greek and Latin exams, my Roman history, Greek history, Greek literature, Roman history.

I passed my French and German exams.

I did my orals.

I was out basically in four years.

And then I came home.

because I thought I should, you know, farm and help.

And it was like night and day.

My dad would say,

you know what, you broke that tandem.

Would you go weld it?

I said, I don't know how to weld.

Well, you better learn.

And I would learn to do it.

And then he'd say,

that shed over there.

And my dad was a college administrator and a farmer.

So he wasn't just some guy that was yelling at you.

He was very learned and educated.

He said, you know what?

You got to go over there and fix that roof.

And I said, well, what do I do?

Well, I don't can't, you got to do it.

So I learned how to, you know, do joist and I built a roof.

And then one day, you know, the spray rig blew up and I got covered with surfland and paraquat and my arm turned all orange and I could taste fish in my mouth.

I got ill.

And then all of a sudden, I saw a guy on the alleyway.

He said, well, you know, when you got a piston pump and you're at 200 pounds.

and you get a needle break, the stupidest thing in the world is go look at that needle break because it's going to get bigger.

So that's what you did.

You left it neutral.

You went over there to see that thing squeeze and it just blew up.

Plum got you all pesticide.

Happened to me eight years ago.

You know, that kind of stuff.

Or then my dad said, be careful with the sulfur machine.

Your uncle went blind.

Victor Sr.

looked in that sulfur machine in the 40s and took out his eye.

And I thought, wow, you can get hurt.

I remember my brother came in one day and I said, what happened?

Oh, I just lost my finger.

I just took off the tip of my finger on a grinder.

And that was every day.

I think every relative was hurt.

My father fell on a hay rake when he was,

I think, a teenager and impaled him.

And his father came out on the farm and he was stuck on a hayrake.

It had gone all the way through his liver.

And my grandfather cut off his finger farming, my Swedish grandfather, when he was, I think he was 76.

So it's a very dangerous thing.

And anyway, what I'm trying to do is relate all of these challenges.

I hope in this series of five minutes or more, I can talk about the art of irrigation or cultivation or pest control or fertilization, because I think people will be interested in how they get their food.

And one last thing, you're the steward of what you do.

So you live on the farm.

You don't own 10,000 acres and live in town.

You live there.

So you have to be a steward.

I'll give you one final example.

In the 1950s, there was a miracle,

DBCP, a miracle chemical, and it was called Nemagon, Get Rid of Nematodes.

And we had a lot of sandy soil.

When I was a little boy, it came into really popular use in, I think, the early 60s.

And my grandfather would say, oh my God, I got to get that Nimagon.

They shanked that Nimagon on.

That old vineyard was 60.

It had one ton of raisins.

The next year, it had two ton.

It killed every nematode.

And it was like a miracle.

And my mom, who was really ahead of her time in terms of

the environment, said, anything that can do that, dad, you got to be very careful about.

Well, you know what happened?

There were some people up at Livermore in the factory.

They all went sterile.

Not all of them, but a lot of them went sterile producing it.

They did a lot of studies.

They may have overreacted, but they found it got into the water.

And so when I came back from Stanford,

a guy came out from the county and said, we got to test your DBC level.

And it was high.

And all of a sudden, oh, they changed it.

It was one part per billion.

Then they said it was one, you know, a thousand times,

they changed it by a magnitude of a thousand, just by parts per million.

And then all of a sudden, I had to, you know,

drill the well deeper down.

And, but my point is that if you put something on your field,

if you want to put parathion on, you know, Zygon B, I used to call it, or you want to put

some type of sophisticated systemic fungicide

or you want to just you know spray a bunch of weeds and leave the spray rig out there then you're you're talking about polluting your own life your kids your wife your family and that means a lot of people who are farmers they're they're natural stewards and for the government not to trust them i know you have to you know have to have some regulation but to go after these people like they do is crazy because they're the only people that are pumping their own water.

They get rid of their sewage.

They live there on a windy day, if they want to spray a toxic chemical, it goes into their home.

And

how many beehives should you put on an almond orchard?

Well, I got stunned the other day, and I'm going to recalibrate that because it almost killed me.

But the point is, there's always a reaction, and there's always a consequence, and that embeds the mentality of a farmer.

But when you see these people in urban environments, there's always a way to contextualize or to exempt yourself.

There is no exemption in farming.

No.

Well, Victor, we're at the end of our show.

And this particular end, we have two people.

We lost two of our good ones in the past week.

Kathy Gramer died on April 20th and John Rayson, April 24th.

I know Kathy was,

it was more than that she was pleasant, kind, or even a straight shooter.

And she had a great sense of humor, but she really loved this country.

I really like, she was an individual who was very very generous.

She was entrepreneurial.

She had a healthcare advisory business, and she went almost every single tour that I did for 17 years with Al Phillip to my military history group.

And I really liked her.

I used to love talking to her.

She had a good friend, Marilyn.

You know, Marilyn, Sammy.

Yeah.

And she was, the two of them, I got, my daughter really

was very fond of both of them that passed away, that helped us on the tour.

The other one was John Rayson.

He was the director of the Huber Institution.

Remember about the the Huber Institution when it turned from an archival service

to a think tank under the auspices of Herbert Huber when he was an oxygenarian.

He got very angry at the Stanford nexus and he decided that he was going to step in and restore the conservative feides of his institution and make it into a think tank.

He hired Glenn Campbell.

who was a very brilliant young

economist.

And he was a director for 30 years.

Then

he was relieved or retired.

And then the next person was his assistant, John Raysian, who was going to be an interim.

He's very young, but he stayed for almost 30 years.

So we only had two directors until just six years ago.

And he was a saint because he was one of the most empathetic, kind, but he had a vision.

Boy, there's dogs in the background.

But anyway, I'll just finish up with I worship John Raysian.

He would call me and he'd say, Victor, we got to raise some money.

Where are you on today?

Are you down on the farm or you're in Palo Alto?

I'd say, John, I'm down at the farm.

He said, well, you meet me in Los Angeles

tomorrow, and we're going to go talk to a donor who wants to help spread liberty and save the country.

How's that?

So we'd go talk to somebody and then he would, he was just wonderful.

And he always expected results.

What was so weird about him?

He said, if you're, when he interviewed me in 2002, he said, if you come to the Hoover Institution, I want you to write books, scholarly books, but that's not enough.

I want you to write commentary, articles, and be an observer of the contemporary scene on the conservative side.

And then he would say, but I'm going to call on you to do your responsibility.

We don't exist in a vacuum.

There are people who are very generous that give their hard-earned dollars and they appreciate

a competent Hoover Institution that reflects their values.

So you're going to meet with them.

And then he said,

you just don't go off in a corner and write.

You have institutional responsibilities.

So the fourth thing I'm going to ask you is to start a program and to participate in the life of the institution.

And he said to me, I'll never forget.

He said, if you do all that and

you understand that there are generous people who are making your job possible, and you are both a scholar, but you also interact with the country because you have a mission and obligation to the country, then all good things will follow.

And I said, now, what would that be, Tom?

And I'll never forget.

He said, well, from time to time, you're going to find Stanford University angry at you because you will write a conservative column and some alumnus who's very left wing will say, not in my name.

I don't like that, Stanford.

And they will

complain against you and they will ring you up in the faculty senate.

And then I was in his office and he patted

a steel helmet, a military helmet he got from the military.

I said, what is that?

Why are you doing that?

He said, I wear that when I go to faculty senate meetings for income and flat.

And he said, now, the only rule is, Victor, I don't want to have to do that too many times.

So

be careful because I'm not going to ever defend you if you're in the wrong.

But if you're in the right, I will fight to my last.

living breath to give you academic freedom of expression.

So he had a wonderful wife, Claudia, had a wonderful family.

He died at 73 of kidney failure.

He had some health problems at the end.

He was beloved.

Everybody.

I've never seen an administrator that had a vision.

And he brought in John Taylor.

He inherited Tom Soule of genius and

he really allowed Tom Soule to do what he needed to do.

He brought in Shelby Steele.

Gosh, he brought in so many good people.

When I first got there, it was like I was a dwarf among giants.

And then I walked down there, and there were a sudden, I turned the corner.

There was Robert Conquest, the great Soviet scholar.

And then I turned, and there was Shelby Steele.

And then Tom Sowell used to come in, and I'd see him.

And then there was the great economist, John Taylor, and John Cogan.

And it was just wonderful.

And he made that possible.

I was a professor.

I was living on a farm and I was a professor at Cal State Fresno.

And then I remember, I won't mention this person's name, but another administrator, then when I had this interview and I walked out, he said, well, this isn't going to last long.

We don't have affirmative action for Cal State professors.

You're in the big league.

You're in the big leagues.

I thought it was very off-putting, but John was never that way.

And I told John that.

He said, well, so-and-so, he said, I don't pay any attention to him.

You're working for the Hoover Institution.

You make requirements for an appointment.

I'm going to get you an appointment and you're going to do what I ask you to do because that's the right thing to do and you're going to like it here and he was absolutely right i've had the best 20 years of my life oh that's wonderful well rest in peace yes i i feel bad every day i think about him and i almost break out in tears he was such a kind person and i owe him so much i owe him i think i in some ways i owe him a third of my life oh my gosh Well, with that, Victor, and your dogs, we better

end the program here.

So thanks to all of our listeners.

Thank you, everybody, for listening once again.

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

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