Cabinet Weary and the Peloponnesian War

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Hello, everyone.

This is the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

Victor is an author, scholar, political commentator, and boy, he's got many hats as a philologist, classicist, you name it.

His latest book is The Dying Citizen, and it is about citizenship and the crisis that we're seeing in citizenship in the modern time.

If you heard a dog right now, that was one of my Queenslands.

So we'll

cut her some slack.

But stick with us because we're going to get into Biden's cabinet, the Peloponnesian War, and the word policeman, I guess I should say, with Rawl Dahl.

I hope I said his name right.

But stick with us.

We're going to listen to some messages.

We'll be right back.

We're back and this is the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

It is produced by John Solomon's Just the News and he is an investigative reporter and you can find lots of news on John's site.

Again, that is justthenews.com.

Victor,

I know we've talked about the cabinet, Biden's cabinet before and went through some of the failings, but we have recent stories

with Majorkas and Buttigig.

And I was wondering if you had new reflections on our current cabinet members.

Yeah, we've talked about a lot, but they've been in the news lately.

And

Alexandro Mayorkas is

under, there's been a lot of calls.

I was surprised for his impeachment.

I was surprised that Andy McCarthy in the National Review called for him to be impeached, but he basically said that would be a waste of time because he just follows orders and that Joe Biden should be impeached.

And the argument is that there are federal statutes that govern

who can come across the border, and you can't just walk across the border.

And yet, 5 million people have, with impunity, walked across the border.

And Mr.

Mayorka sort of gave the game away the other day when he was asked about this.

He used to say it was secure.

Do you remember that?

It's secure.

And then

when people would see this mob.

flow across every day, he kind of has given up that because, well,

I only act in accordance with our values.

That's what he said.

So you can see what that means.

It means that he is taken upon himself to ignore a statute, which is an impeachable offense.

If everybody did what Mallorcas did and said that I'm only going to follow my values, you can see where it would lead to.

No, you're in Utah.

No little spotted toad for me.

I'm not going to, I'm going to smash that little sucker and build my apartment building, as I said, over the top of him.

Even if he is on the endangered species list, I want to have a, you know, a Glock.

So maybe I'll just go pass a law and say, you know what?

In Wyoming, federal gun registration laws no longer apply because

I'm going to reflect the Constitution.

Well, you can see what would happen.

So all of these people on the left that are nullifiers of federal law feel that they can appeal to higher moral authority, but no one else can.

And that's what's so strange about it.

So he's a complete failure.

He's destroyed it.

And it's going to take years.

It's going to cost two, three, four hundred billion dollars

to accommodate all these five million.

And they add it to, they go into a hotel, illegal immigrants in New York, and they trash it basically.

And then they say, you know what, you can't keep trashing the hotel and getting free stuff.

And then they get demonstrate and they get angry.

We're going to go to Canada.

Oh, it's too cold.

So once you allow somebody to come into your country without audit or without legality or even without English or an education or means of support,

then they have contempt for you.

They don't see that magnomimity to be reciprocated.

They have a contempt.

They see it as weakness.

And that's what happens.

And he doesn't understand that.

He's been the worst Homeland Security.

I don't even know why we have a Homeland Security.

I thought we had other agencies that George Bush created it after 9-11, but he's been a disaster.

But

the elephant in the room is Pete Buttigig, isn't it?

Yes, I was just going to mention he's probably worse than Mallorcus, if that's possible.

Yeah, I mean, his problem is

that the sum total of his political experience was he was the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, what, 40,000 people.

His dad was a professor.

He was just a Notre Dame

campus town mayor.

And from what we can tell, he was a terrible mayor.

But he was appointed because he ran for president on the idea that he had done certain things.

He was educated.

He had gone to Afghanistan, even though he was not in combat situations there.

And he was gay.

And that made the first.

Remember, all these people are the first, the first, the first this, the first that, first Native American interior secretary, the first gay transportation secretary.

But

he had no ability other than to be, what, glib.

He's a talker.

He just talks, and he thinks he can string together sentences.

He's kind of like Kamala Harris, but they meet, I mean, they're not that pathetic, but he never does anything.

So he's...

you know, he's with his boyfriend on maternity leave.

I don't think either one of them was pregnant necessarily, but nevertheless, some, but when you usually have maternity leave, the male is there because the woman went through childbirth, right?

And it's very hard.

I'm not sure that that quite is the same, but who am I to judge?

But he's asleep at the wheel.

So on his watch, we had the

transportation department kind of implode.

We have these supply chain issues where our ports are crowded.

There are rail lines into the ports ports are not only crowded and dysfunctional, but often looted.

And then we had this huge holiday shutdown over Christmas because of weather and then a computer outage.

And then we had the Southwest Airlines disaster.

And then you and I talked about the four near misses in New York and Texas and Hawaii and LAX where people were either injured or almost killed.

And now we we have a rail car in East Palestine, Ohio, right on top of the border with Pennsylvania, that

he hasn't been there.

And FEMA, as we said earlier, didn't do anything for two weeks.

And so he's been pressed upon it.

And it's just

the first little glib answer he said was, well, we have thousands.

You don't know.

Let me tell you, I'm Pete Bajigan.

You know, you're so ignorant.

You don't understand the complexity.

But the fact is, you idiots, there's a thousand accidents a year.

So what is the big deal?

And then that didn't work too well.

And then he went back to his second little sanctimonious, self-righteous glibness.

Well, you know, there's two types of people who go to these things.

And one are just

the grandstanders, wink nod, wink, nod, Trump.

who is there today as we speak.

And then there's the people who really do something.

They only go there to implement these policies.

And that didn't work too well because he's not going to go go there at all, apparently.

He's just telling us, and then he was asked specifically by George Stephanopoulos in his one little puny question:

well, when are you going to go?

Well, I'll go, I'll go, but I'll go when I'm there to do something.

And then the third thing was he said,

as

the same thing with the, you know,

kind of like Cathago De Linda S.

with the elder Cato, Carthage must be destroyed at the end of every speech.

So, the end of every speech, these guys, it's Trump did it, Trump did it, Trump did it.

And that was with the Chinese balloon.

Remember, Trump did it first.

Trump did it first.

Well, now it's Trump took, he took the electric

extra heavy-duty electric brake requirement off tank cars, and that's what did it.

No, this is a different situation.

This was not oil and gas.

And so

he can't do anything because he doesn't have any knowledge of transportation and he

has contempt for the people there.

And should he go to East Palestine and he would go to a town meeting as most transportation secretaries would have already done, he would just give glib little answers about, well, that they were okay and it's all in their head.

And they would be, they wouldn't like him and they would be, and he doesn't want that.

He doesn't want to be told.

His idea is to get in a limo and then have the limo drop him off and then ride a mile on a bike with his tie and show everybody this is clean energy.

And indeed, right during the whole crisis, what was he attention on?

What was he sending press releases about?

How white hard hats working on transportation projects do not look like the community in which they're working.

Well, that's a real big issue, isn't it?

Or that the interstate highway project of the 1950s was predicated on racism.

And so he's never done anything other than demagogue the woke agenda.

And he thinks he's going to ride that way to the presidency.

The only tragedy, this is a tragedy because his nonchalance and incompetence have hurt so many people, but it has had one beneficial unexpected effect.

It's blown up his presidential chances.

I don't think this guy could run for president.

Nobody would vote for him.

He's so smug.

He's so self-righteous.

He's so incompetent.

And he's so arrogant.

And he hasn't done anything but left a trail of disasters in his wake that I think he's over with.

Yeah.

But

you're going to tell me it gets worse.

Yeah.

I was going to say, Buddha Judge and Majorca's impotence seems only matched by Blinken, if I'm

poor Blinken.

Blinken, Blinken, Blinken.

I mean,

we first met Blinken in March of 2021 at the Alaska Mini-Summit when the Chinese just looked at him and said,

you're not gonna,

we don't care what you say.

Just stop that crap.

We do what we want, and you suffer as you must.

And that's the way it's gonna be.

Got it?

And he just took it.

And ever since then,

you know, he

said that there's going to be, he really wanted to go to China, poor Mr.

Blinken.

He wanted to go to China.

He wanted to make a big break.

And then those stupid balloons, and he didn't know what to do.

So, when he said he had to counsel because

he never made the connection that maybe they let the balloon off so they would humiliate us before he went to China, thinking that he either wouldn't go to China, which would be good for them, or he would go

humiliated,

which would be even better for them.

But when he's saying, I'm not going to go to China, then he started to go, but we have so many things to work on.

Climate change, the greatest coal producer and polluter in the world.

So he's an incompetent.

And

you can see when he says that China's, that's going to be a red line should they start supplying Russia with weapons.

And they already are under the table.

But what would that mean?

What would he mean?

What would he do to China?

What would the United States do?

Would they bring all of the investment back?

I hope they would.

I don't think they would do that, though.

Would they expel some Chinese students?

No, they're not going to do that.

Would they expel Chinese professors that are here as visitors to see if they have ties like the Stanford neuroprofessor, neurobiologist who was a member of the People's Liberation Army?

No, it's just talk.

Talk, talk, talk.

Mr.

Talk.

Who else should we have in that?

We have Merrick Garland.

He's done so many crimes, I know.

Yeah, think about him.

He is the one that

lied about the teachers and basically

got a letter from the teachers union saying these guys are terrorists.

We want you to do something about it.

So he just clicked his heels and said, yes, sir, we're going to, yes, ma'am, we're going to do that.

So he sent the FBI to monitor.

parents that were worried that their kids were not getting a balanced view of the history of the United States, given critical race theory.

And then he inaugurated this idea, I'm going to get every one of these Trump aides, and I'm going to performance art in a humiliating arrest.

Steve Bannon, subpoena?

He's not going to be Eric Holder, who just stuck his nose out at

the Trump administration.

No, siri.

We are,

excuse me, not the Trump and the Biden administration, the Obama administration.

When he was subpoenaed about Fast and Furious, he said, no way, I'm not going to obey a congressional subpoena.

So

they went after Bannon, he went after Navarro, he went after Eastman,

and he was the one that, I guess, concocted the SWAT team at Roger Stone.

I have no

effort to defend Roger Stone, but why were the CNN crew waiting for the FBI to show up?

He was the one that

under his guidance, the FBI, I suppose,

stripped down or had Mr.

O'Keefe and his underwear in the hallway while they looked for Ashley Biden's incriminating diary.

He was the one that did the

worst thing of it.

He did the Mar-a-Lago raid, and that was really bad because he probably knew already that Joe Biden

had the same exposure in his asymmetrical fashion.

Then he made clear that once

they discovered or they were told that Joe Biden, you better be careful about a special counsel investigating Trump's use of security documents because the President of the United States, who was a vice president when he took out those documents and didn't have any prerogative to declassify them, has them.

Then he knew that they suppressed that until the midterms were over for their own political advantage.

And

he knew that he had a wink and nod.

cheek by jowl relationship with the FBI, that they pulled out and let the lawyers of Joe Biden first examine everything in a way they would never have done with Donald Trump.

And so we could keep going, but the worst was January 6th.

I mean, my gosh, he unleashed these federal prosecutors.

And, you know, all of a sudden we learned a new word in our vocabulary, illegally parading.

So if you were a person who showed up on January 6th and you did not get into the Capitol, but you were photographed or you were on video outside the Capitol, legitimately demonstrating, they would say that you crossed some kind of barrier and you were arrested.

I don't think anybody who burned down the courthouse and the police precinct and St.

John's Episcopal Church, they tried to burn down.

I don't think any of those people were even convicted of illegal parading on those 120 days of rioting.

So he will be known as the most partisan Attorney General that we've had in memory.

And he's really ruined the reputation of

the DOJ.

And that's hard to do when you had Sally Yates Yates and Bruce Orr and all the main players coming out of there

in the Russian collusion hoax.

Is there any others?

Yes, there is, because actually with the Secretary of Energy, Jennifer Granholm, I'm surprised we don't hear more from her since it's high on Joe Biden's agenda, this

alternative energy idea.

I think she can't.

She's,

what's the word?

She's entirely incompetent and she knows it.

And she was, I think she was a cable host for a while and she thinks she's photogenic and charismatic and laughs.

But

she's had some real rocky times because she came in with an administration that had self-sufficiency in energy production.

And then

She and Joe Biden job owned the fracking and horizontal drilling industry to cut production.

They pressured financial institutions not to loan them money.

They put Anwar off limits.

They canceled Keystone.

They cut back on federal leases, especially new leases.

She went

and basically did the

Cylendra.

Remember that?

That Solendra that was under Obama?

That was these.

huge subsidies in the infrastructure bill for wind and solar.

But she was.

I'm sorry.

Was she the energy secretary under the Obama administration as well?

No, she was,

I think she was a governor, right?

She was governor of Michigan in, I don't know, eight years,

right after 2003 onward.

But she, we know her because she was asked specifically,

I can remember it was on television.

It was a kind of a liberal guy, too, on either MSNBC or CNN.

He says, what are you going to do to increase oil production?

And she just started laughing.

She said, something to the effect, that's hilarious.

You think I have a magic wand?

Well, yeah, your magic wand could undo what you did with it.

Just take your magic wand and undo the magic wand that canceled Anwar and canceled Keystone and canceled new federal leases, and you won't have to drain the Strategic Petroleum Reserve before elections.

So that was, and she just started laughing.

It was so

funny.

So

she's another Pete Buttigig without, I mean, he's not, she's a little bit more photogenic than he is, I suppose.

But

I mean, she's incompetent.

Yeah.

And then we go to Deb Holland.

She's the interior secretary.

Yeah.

Well, she just puts all sorts of land off, you know, every time she's in the news, just I'm taking another 10,000 acres of federal property and making sure that nobody can ever lease timber or,

you know,

timber, minerals, oil, gas.

She's a Elizabeth Warren type, you know, hardcore,

hardcore.

I think she's from New Mexico.

She was a Native American.

So basically every time she appeared anywhere, she was always, this is our first Native American cabinet officer.

And then I think she,

I just know because where I live, there's a place called Squaw Valley, California.

And she was famous that she wrote some edict that everywhere in the United States, there was the word squaw.

She was going to make sure it was excised and Trotskyized.

Oh, wow.

Yeah, that's about it.

So all these people have one thing in common.

They were all selections to reward particular constituencies of the Democratic Party.

So

basically, two things happened.

One is

when Joe Biden was way, way behind in the 2020 primary and looked like he had not a chance in hell, the party elders by January, February were paranoid.

And they said, we've got a communist with Bernie Sanders and we've got a hardcore socialist with Elizabeth Warren.

And then we were left with people like Kamala Harris and Spartacus.

And

what in the hell are we going to do?

And they said, this good old Joe Biden, so he will carry any agenda and he will get elected if we keep him on ice so you can't find out that he's impaired.

COVID will help us.

We'll change the election laws.

We'll get him elected.

And he will carry the left-wing agenda.

And that's what they did.

But that required people to drop out.

And that was people like Pete Buttigig.

And he got something for that, transportation.

And then to the degree that it wasn't quid pro quos for these people, some of them had patrons

that got them.

It was ideology or it was identity politics.

Mallorcas had kind of a Hispanic name.

Buttigig was gay.

Holland was

Native American.

Becerra, I guess he's Hispanic, et cetera, et cetera.

It was not,

Biden didn't go, they didn't go through and say, Let's who is the most knowledgeable person about transportation in the United States today?

Who knows the most about the interior problems in the United States?

They don't do that.

It's unfortunate they don't.

And then they have

the other people that are incompetent.

They kept Christopher Wray that Trump appointed, and he's been the disaster.

He makes Comey look like Socrates.

And we've got Millie.

Millie's still there.

You think they would have fired him after the call to the PLA counterpart or after

he turned on Trump with a photo op

or after he told us Afghanistan wouldn't fall or after he told us Kiev would fall.

You think that, but no, he's still there, still sounding off, still wrong, wrong, wrong.

Well, Victor, this is the weekend edition.

So we want to get to some historical things.

And we've been on a journey into battles and wars in the past.

And this week we're looking at the Peloponnesian War.

But let's take a break first and come right back.

And we will start on the Peloponnesian War.

Welcome back.

Victor, so you have a book called A War Like No Other, which is explicitly on the Peloponnesian War.

So I know you have a bookload of things to say about it, but I'm curious how you're going to

circumscribe that down to something that we can get our hands on.

Well, we talked about the Persian War, and we're going to work our way chronologically down to Vietnam or maybe the Iraq War at some point.

We're all still alive.

Well, the thing about the Peloponnesian War, just as Herodotus is associated with the Persian, it's we have this wonderful historian, Thucydides, who is an Athenian general, and he was unfairly, apparently,

ostracized probably by the demagogue Pleon

for coming three or four days

too late to relieve an Athenian-controlled city in Amphipolis in northern Greece.

And he took that occasion then, as he says, to write a history of the Peloponnesian War from both sides.

And he was going to do it analytically.

So at section 122, he says that

I tried to find all the data I could.

I tried to find what people

said

through witnesses or what I heard myself.

But he does say, to the degree that I couldn't hear them, I put into their mouth what I think the occasion demanded.

And that's been controversial ever since.

But

his theme is that this great majestic city of Pericles in 431 renewed its war and had an earlier Peloponnesian war with Sparta.

And they are antithetical.

So Athens is maritime, it's democratic, it's Ionian, it's cosmopolitan, and Sparta is landlocked, its strength is its army, it's insular, it's parochial, and it's an oligarchy, and it's Dorian.

And the antithesis are so much that they're bound because each of them in their own way has power.

Athens has this huge navy.

Sparta has this SWAT team.

I guess it developed as an internal security force to keep down 300,000 Messenian helots that they'd conquer serfs, so to speak.

But it became the premier fighting force on land in the Greek world.

So in the proverbial elephant versus the whale, you can see that this war is not going to be easy to resolve because Sparta

will win battles on land and Athens will win battles on sea and they'll be at cross purposes until one side masters the forte of the other.

Well, Athens is supposed to be ingenious, brilliant.

Will they create a great army and march down like the great liberator Pamanondas did

50 years later?

and free the Helots and go into the city of Sparta and surround it with fortified democratic cities like Megalopolis or Mantinea

or Messenia.

Or will the blinkered unimaginative Spartans build a navy?

And that's what happens.

So he chronicles this war and he has it.

There's the Archadamian War, the failed strategies to invade Athens and destroy the countryside between 431 and 421, the terrible plague that kills a fourth of the Athenian population, and they get a deadlock, so-called Peace of Nicias.

And that's 421, basically to

421, 420, all the way down to 415.

And in that Cold War, they each try to hurt the other.

Athens invades Sicily.

Athens tries to get a coalition to go down to the Peloponnese at Mantinea.

But

the finale of that Cold War breaks out with, the end of the Cold War breaks out with the invasion of Sicily, and Athens then empties its empire, sends

40,000 people to attack what?

The largest democracy in the Greek world.

So here we have an Athenian democracy fighting oligarchies, supposedly in an ideological war in part, and it's attacking another democracy that's Dorian.

It loses, it loses almost every person, maybe six or seven thousand survive, and it's weakened, and then Sparta gets help.

Remember, in a war between these

powers, everybody looks at the pulse of the battlefield, like the Cold War with us.

And so everybody thinks, wow, Athens got weakened in Sicily.

I'll join Sparta.

And that means the Boeotians start to step up, the Sicilians step up, and most importantly, the Persians give them the money to build a fleet.

And so from 411 to 404 there's a series of catastrophic

losses for both sides in the Ionian Sea off the coast of Turkey.

And finally at Aegos Potomy the Athenians lose their fleet and at the same time King Aegis of Sparta is outside their walls and they submit and they lose.

Thucydides wrote

from 431 to 411, and then his history is unfinished.

So for those last eight years of that war, you're going to have to read Xenophon's Hellenica or Plutarch's Lives or Diodorus.

The thing to remember is he wrote in the three,

probably maybe the 390s or 410 to 390s.

So a lot of his history is problematic because the theme of the great power of Athens, the tragic, majestic Pericles city being destroyed by its own excesses in this war, didn't quite work because

after it lost the war, within 10 years it was back again when he was alive.

So we don't know to what degree he revised it or the scenes that he writes are supposed to be comprehensive or they're just emblematic of certain themes he wants.

He's a philosopher, so he picks and chooses what to include from the war's actual events.

And so we get these wonderful,

wonderful little

vignettes, the Pericles' funeral oration in the second year of the war.

You know, that was, look at the school of Hellas, look at her, fill your heart with love for Athens.

You get the Melian dialogue in 416, 415 about the doomed people on Melos and the argument for realism.

You get the horrible

deaths in the Asinaurus River at Sicily, where they're drinking blood and water after the destruction of the Athenian fleet.

And then, of course, the plague, which is a classic example of paranoia and early scientific inquiry about how a plague spreads and the medical symptoms.

So it's all there.

To boil it down, it's simply

a dilemma, and that is a democracy that is more imaginative and more diverse and more cosmopolitan

is also more unstable and

it's more prone to excess.

And a blinkered, unimaginative Sparta is able to concentrate on the end and supply the means.

And so it will defeat Athens at sea before Athens can defeat Sparta on land.

It's been very

famous because

This was the period in which Athens had been

governed by its first citizen, Pericles, who was elected for 30 years, and he dies in the second year of the war from the plague.

But then all these characters we know in later literature and in popular culture, Cleon the demagogue, or Alcibiades, the gifted man who

threw away his talents through his appetites.

Sophocles writing plays right during the war, Euripides, especially,

the

suppliant women, Aristophanes mocking the policies of the Athenians and the Lysistrata, the peace, the knights.

So everybody's there, all the great Athenians, and it's this last great gasp of Hellenism that the war both accelerates and emphasizes and yet consumes and destroys.

I wrote my first book was about the aftermath of the Peloponnesian War and whether it was all that bad, because many people had said the agriculture had been destroyed utterly through the five five invasions of the Spartans and then their permanent fort at Decali.

And I tried to show that that wasn't true, that there was no evidence for permanent destruction.

In fact, as growing up on a farm, it's very hard to destroy an olive tree or pull out thousands of vines or burn grain at any other time except a brief drying period when it's combustible.

And then usually it's harvested.

Finally,

Sammy, it's caught the attention of almost every famous philosopher.

Hobbes did a very famous translation of the

Peloponnesian War.

But lately, to make this relevant, Graham Allison, the Harvard political scientist, or I guess he's in government there, wrote a book called The Thucydides Trap.

You heard of that.

No, I mean, I have heard of the term, but I don't know what it means, to be honest.

Well,

it comes from some passages in the first book of Thucydides' history when there's a debate over what Athens should do and what Sparta should do.

And there's King Archidamus speaks to the Spartans and the Corinthians.

And then we have Pericles earlier setting out the Athenian view.

And he looked at that and he came up with a Thucydides trap.

And what he said was

that

when

in these speeches, there's some indication that Sparta is acting

as the

in fear of the upstart Athens, that if they do not go to war, and they start the war, because

De Ure, they crossed the border of Athens in May of 431, and the Athenians do not stop the war.

In fact, they act kind of passively by abandoning their country.

But in that, he said, they fear the Corinthians say that these Athenians are too restless.

They're getting more powerful.

You're getting more weak.

And so the idea is we don't stop them now.

We never will be able to.

And the fear of Athens, Thucydides says.

So Allison took those speeches and came up with a thesis that in wars,

when you have a status-quo powerful but static or ossifying

superpower and it is challenged by a new upstart,

then

sometimes

we have to be very careful because the status quo power will try to start a war before the upstart can take control.

And he applied that to China and the United States.

And we were the superpower.

We were the Spartans, so to speak, I suppose.

And China was Athens taking over.

And therefore, we would try to stop them before they got too powerful.

And it was sort of a warning to be careful against that with your China rhetoric.

And he went through the same thing.

There were tensions with the United States and Britain, for example, in the early 20th century, where people in Britain thought, you know what, we've been overtaken by American GDP in the future is going to be very dangerous.

There were people

in the United States that thought that the Soviet Union was

on the road to mastery in the 1940s and 50s, and we would have to have a preemptive attack before they had an overwhelming nuclear capability.

People said the same thing about Japan in the 1970s.

So I think it's a flawed idea.

It's too simplistic and it misinterprets Thucydides because when you read the totality

of the history, he gives all sorts of reasons why there was a war,

And they're all preventable.

And

it's a proxy war between Corinth and Corsaira, democracies versus oligarchies.

Then each side pitches in.

There's the siege at Potideia.

There's the so-called Megarian problem, Megarian decree, which is not mentioned, I don't think, by Thucydides.

But he's very tuned to the role of Megara.

So what I'm getting at is

when you read the funeral oration and Pericles outlines the difference between a free and unfree society, a Doric, Ionic, democracy, oligarchic, land,

sea, closed, open society, the antithesis is so market

and so distinct that it's almost inevitable that they're going to have a war unless some great statesman can prevent this.

this abyss from growing.

It's not because, you know, just because one speaker says, well,

what Thucydides says is, and what caused the war was the Spartan fear of Athens

and the Athenian fear of,

I should say, of Sparta.

So it was the idea that the Spartans were afraid that,

gosh, they've got a monster on their hands.

in this new reckless democracy that's taking over.

And people, Athens was growing.

People wanted to go to Athens.

They wanted to meet Socrates.

They wanted to hear Euripides.

They wanted to look at the Parthenon.

They didn't want to go down to Sparta.

And one point, Thucydides says, you know,

way in the future, if you were to look at Sparta, you would never think it's powerful because there's not going to be anything there.

And if future generations look at Athens, they see the Acropolis.

They're going to think it's much more powerful than it actually was.

So that kind of suggests you that these impressions

were important.

So I think what I'm trying to say is Allison took one truth and he made it the truth, but there were so many other reasons that they were so antithetical and doomed to fight.

And

when you have two powers and each has a particular area of strength and they emphasize that, then they're, as I said, they're at cross purposes.

Anytime a land power fights a sea power,

it's going to be kind of problematic because neither side can find a way to destroy the navy or the army of the other until they become more flexible.

He seems to make observations.

Like, I remember the war at Corsair, the civil war at Corsaira.

He narrates the war

and how Athens and Sparta took different sides, one the Demos, Athens, and Sparta siding with the oligarchs.

But then when he gets to the end of the narration, he starts to reflect on it and talk about the broader implications.

He does.

He says that words change their meanings.

That's the locus classicus of when you tear off, because of this bloodletting and

civil war, you tear off the thin veneer of civilization and you get human nature in the raw.

And that means brother kills brother and words change their meaning.

So the extremist always wins.

The duller wits always defeat the sophisticated because they think this can't happen or they're going to try to outthink you.

The duller wits just want to go kill you.

But a lot of people have called him, I think it was Robert Connor, called him the postmodernist.

And by that, they meant that his primary purpose was not to go, even though he claimed it was, to go year by year by year by year and chronicle the war.

He does do that.

But their point was that he's looking

across the terrain of the war to find a particular incident that will amplify his views on human nature, which are that humans are pretty awful, that human nature is unchanging, and that we are savage beasts and only civilization and culture save us.

And without them, then what happens?

Well, without them, a plague breaks out and people steal the bodies of their friend's dead father or the body of their dead sister and they put it on their fire, their funeral pyr because they don't have enough fuel.

Or they leave people in the street to be unattended because they're afraid.

And the people who were not afraid are performance already their virtue and they die.

Or the Middle Elenians, if you're a rabble democracy, you can vote on Monday to kill all the Mytileneans that were involved in the insurrection 150 miles away in Lesbos.

And then the next day, you think, oh, my God, we just voted.

Let's go not vote.

And then send out a second trireme to save it and cancel the first.

You're that volatile.

Or the Melian dialogues, you can say, you know what, Melians?

We've got the power.

We've got the ship.

Look at you.

So if you were smart and humane, you wouldn't be wiped out.

And they say, but Athenians, but if you wiped us out and we were a neutral, then everybody will hate you and they'll all join against you because you were so unjust and savage to us.

They said, Well, we'd like to believe the world works that way, and it would be nice if it did, but essentially it doesn't.

You know what they're going to say if we let you live that we're weak, and then they're going to start rebelling.

But if we crush you like a bug, they're going to start obeying us.

So that's, we don't want to do it, but that's what we're going to have to do.

And that brings up this whole question of if you're a Melian

envoy,

what's the,

what's the,

you know, what's the proper course?

Do you die on your feet or you live on your knees?

If the Athenians had had the same attitude that,

you know, the Melians did,

If they, I mean, they fought, the Melians fought and they died, and the Athenians killed them.

But the Persians told the Athenians the same thing at Thermopylae, the Spartans, and the same thing at Artemisium, and the same thing at Salamis.

You don't have a chance.

What are you doing?

But the Athenians said, screw you.

And they won their freedom.

So it's very ambiguous what you're supposed to do.

But that's another example.

And then the Sicilian expedition is just utter tragedy.

At the height of the city, they empty it and they send it on a wild goose chase.

And Thucydides, being the loyal Athenian, says, you know what?

For all the stupidity, if they had have at least followed through

and finished what they said they were going to do, they could have won.

I don't know if his text contradicts that.

So my long, windy point is he's a philosopher and he's trying to convey philosophical, eternal lessons by

blowing up incidents into morality or philosophical examples that may, that may, that may be not representative of their actual

actual importance into history and what i mean by that he

there was 31

funeral orations i supposedly at athens each year i don't know why he took one and said this he didn't tell us about the other ones i i know plataea

was wiped out but so was schioni and trioni uh toron tarone he didn't tell us anything about them He just told us about Plataea.

There was all sorts of revolts where they destroyed people.

Well, why Milos?

Because something came to his attention that

reflected a philosophical point he wanted to make.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And there's all those, you call them philosophical points.

I would call them interesting nuggets or pearls all the way through the story where he makes broad observations about,

as you say, eternal truths about war one against the other.

Yeah, it's and it's beautifully written.

The speeches, there's 130, I mean, yeah, 131 speeches in direct and indirect discourse.

And they're very hard to read in Greek because he's writing in the first generation of Attic pro stylists, and the language is not up to the level of thought.

So he has to invent words.

He has to have abstractions for which there is not a vocabulary with circumlocutions.

He has to use this thing we call in Greek the articular infinitive of purpose.

In the genitive case, it's very hard to read the speeches, speeches, but the regular text is pretty easy.

It's very well written.

He's got a very strange style that was not emulated by others.

Maybe Tacitus is the closest historian, and Polybius are considered Thucydidian.

It's a beautiful thing to read.

I wish all of you would read it.

And it's got some lines there that are just immortal.

That last line about the Sicilian expedition.

And such was the defeat of the Athenians.

It was total,

it was comprehensive, and few we returned, few of the many returned home.

So we ended events in Sicily.

It's pretty.

Yeah.

Well, you know,

you ended Herodotus by saying that it's an

example of, or it really set the model for

East versus West

powers.

How would you do?

Do you have a similar observation of the Peloponnesian War?

Is it?

Paradis tried to show the antithesis.

He was very sympathetic to the East.

He was an anthropological investigator.

So he was not prejudicial.

But you read that history, and there are very, there's great differences between constitutional or consensual government and monarchy, and

kind of

amalial rule versus individualism, or or totalitarianism versus individual liberty in the west and the same thing this is a primer on what is the best or most effective form of government is it an oligarchy or a radical democracy or is it to invest in an army or a navy and he's he's ambiguous but if you read it very carefully you can start to see where his sympathies lie and he says at one point in the revolution of 411 at Athens that they,

before the 30 took power, they had what they called the 5,000.

And these were 5,000 of the 30,000 citizens that had property of a particular size.

And he says that this type of democracy, which the critics called an oligarchy, was the best government because it combined the idea of consensuality with a lot of thousands of people making wills, but you had to have some qualification.

You just couldn't be a riffraft, so to speak.

And that he's, it's very clear he does not like direct democracy.

That is on any given day, two days a month, maybe, but even more sometimes, you can meet and then 7,000 people shout and yell and whatever they say is,

you know, let's go to Middle Energy and kill these people.

No, let's not.

Let's go out to meet.

No.

That kind of attitude

is very dangerous in government.

So he's anti-radical democracy, but he's more of a modified democracy of the type that Aristotle calls politeia.

Aristotle has his typologies of democracy, and he believed the most effective was a democracy, and I'm not being self-interested here, but of farmers, people who had to stay away from town, they were busy, they were independent, they were autonomous, those people,

and they weren't the majority, maybe half of the resident population, like Thebes, for example, when it became

democratic.

So yes, that's the antithesis between

oligarchy and radical democracy.

And

he's also very impressed with sea power.

He was an admiral.

So what he's also suggesting is that Sparta won because Persia gave it the money to hire crews and build a fleet.

It wouldn't have won without that.

And he's saying that Athens was strong because it was fleet.

And fleets allow you to import and and export goods.

It allows you to put troops anywhere you want them.

And it has an enormous amount of advantages over just a static army.

And I think you can see in World War I and II, there's some wisdom to that, that the

Axis powers, after, you know,

basically destroyed very quickly the Japanese fleet.

The fact that the British and the Americans had the number one fleet by the end of the war, British had the number one fleet at the start of the war.

And we were able to defeat Italy and Germany in four years, both times.

And Germany really didn't have a fleet.

Submarines in World War II and the fleet in World War I after Jutland was sort of negated.

But sea power was our great advantage.

It is today.

It's always good to invest in a navy.

He's a very big proponent of naval power,

and that's very important.

And

he also doesn't like radical democracy, but he always gives it its due.

It's the one type, because it's inclusive,

it can make blunders like no other country, but it can recover from them quickly.

So as soon as Sicily disaster thinks, after the disaster, you think they're all over.

And he says, no, as democracies always do.

In panic mode, they took the necessary measures to rebuild the fleet.

And the war goes on for, as i said it goes on for another 11 years

well victor um we need to take a break and i should come back

we'll we'll come back and talk a little bit about the rewriting of roll doll's um

books.

Wow, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Matilda, the Witches, James and the giant peach.

So stick with us and we'll come back to have a conversation on roll doll.

Thank you for sticking with us.

And Victor, so we have,

I just don't understand it because they want to change words like they want, I don't know what they want to change for black, but he does use the word black apparently, or man,

or fat, or crazy, or I guess female as well.

These are all words that shouldn't be used.

They might hurt somebody's feelings.

So they are going to rewrite the books to take, and that's just a subset of the words out.

And I was wondering what your thoughts were on this new endeavor by our publishers.

So many things that are bothersome about this.

I did a little bit in my three minutes in Jesse Waters on Tuesday night about this.

He asked me, first of all, they're so hypocritical.

I think Random House has the U.S.

rights and maybe Hachette or Puffin Books, the world rights or British rights.

But

so the publisher has this author,

Roald

Dahl, who's probably the most successful child's author.

Not, I mean, I shouldn't say teen author, but small children.

There has been.

And he sold, what, 250 million copies?

He's a very accomplished polymath, the Renaissance man.

He's married to Patricia Neale.

You all remember her from HUD.

She was in breakfast at Tiffany's, 30-year career.

I think he was married and had several children with her.

He was an RAF pilot, highly decorated, and fought in North Africa and Greece and was severely wounded.

I think it made him, he had to be medically discharged.

He had a terrible head injury.

So he was a patriot.

He was interested in science, cryptology, worked for the government.

He did everything.

But as a man of his times, he put things in there to blow off steams within his characters.

He made up words.

He was a very good stylist.

That's very important to remember.

He was a stylist.

So those books are, they're kind of like Dr.

Zeus.

They're very well written and they're clever and witty, almost like Lewis Carroll, some of them.

And so my point is that you're dealing with a giant of literature in that genre.

So we come along now in 2022, 23, and we say, you know what, we don't like to have our children reading fat.

There's some anti-Semitic things.

We don't mind that they go to school and they go to the library and there's a sexual manual about transgender with graphic illustrations or someone talks about burning,

removing breast or your testicle.

That's okay,

but you can't read about fat or have the word female instead of woman or any of these other illiberal ideas.

So that's number one.

It's ridiculous.

Number two, if these publishers find that they don't like the style or the vocabulary, why don't they just give up their rights?

Just say, you know what?

Mr.

Dahl is an insensitive bigot.

We want nothing to do with him.

But they don't.

Why don't they just say, you know what?

You know, encounter books is Roger Kimball's a great editor.

He's a conservative.

We at the Bradley Foundation help it out.

Why don't they just say, hey, Bradley, hey, encounter books.

Take this doll book.

It's what you conservatives,

you'll tolerate that.

But they don't because they want to make money.

Money, money, money, money, money, money.

So remember something about the woke.

It's pick and choose, pick and choose.

We're going to get rid of Junipio Serra Boulevard on campus, excuse me, Junipio Sarah's tiny little courtyard in front of the Hoover Tower, but not the huge,

no, not

Junipio Serra Boulevard.

That's something else.

And we're not going to change the name of Stanford because he was a robber baron who was an anti-Asian bigot.

See, they pick and choose.

So we're going to go after Mr.

Dahl's words, but we're not going to ban the book because he makes us a lot of money.

That's the first thing.

The second is,

where do you stop?

So, Solomon Rushdie weighed in, satanic versus, they almost killed him.

They stabbed him and probably robbed part of his eyesight not too long ago.

Are we going to go back when he's dead and said, you know what?

We're going to change all those references that we find to Muslims, and we're going to change them.

And the author is going to have no say because he's dead.

And we're going to be just like the censors in 1984.

Or,

you know, one of the best short stories by

Conrad, Joseph Conrad, is the N of narcissist.

You've read that.

And it has the N-word.

It doesn't mean in the modern American sense of it.

It's more

the word

black in Latin.

It comes from that.

It's not necessarily a put-down.

At least it was a put-down, but it's more of a descriptive word

in its etymological sense.

But are we going to take that out?

We can do that.

We've already gone after Mark Twain.

T.S.

Eliot, I think you could argue, was the greatest English poet, you know, based on The Wasteland and the Love Song of

J.

Alfred Prufog, Garantion.

Oh, that poem has a lot about,

not a lot, but at least two anti-Semitic lines in it.

And I think he wrote something called the Bedeker Guide to Burbankers.

That has some anti-Are you going to get rid of T.S.

Eliot?

How about Ezra Pound?

He was a Nazi and said all kinds of stuff.

But no, we're not going to do that, apparently.

But this is the main thing, Sammy.

So you've now established the principle that our moral superiors of the present

have so much more

ethical virtue and so much more wisdom than these awful people like Dahl or Conrad or Pound

or Rushdie, that they can

want to change words.

Why don't they just say, you know what?

I'll take a deep breath and not apply my standards of the present back to the past, but I will apply the standards of the present to the present.

So let's think of what is the word that is now considered the most offensive in the English language.

I think it's the N-word.

And who uses the N-word?

Ah, I'm going through the songs of Snoop Dogg and Kenya West and Jay-Z and I Card EB and I found it.

So I'm going to excise all of those words and they can't sing it.

How's that?

Or if we play them, it's going to be out.

Oh.

How about violence against the police?

Mr.

Kenrick Lamar was a guest at the White House.

He has hate the Popo,

police, police.

We're going to get rid of that.

And how about the misogynist language about bitch and whole and all that stuff, H-O?

Are we going to go through that?

So my point is, why don't we do that?

Because that affects us right now.

And that permeates.

Let me ask you a question.

As we're saying...

sitting right now in America and you are listening, how many people right now are reading a doll children's children's book versus how many people are listening to a rap song with bitch, or

n-word, kill the police, fuck this, this, who?

How many?

You see what I'm saying?

Yes.

And we don't do any of that because we're moral midget cowards.

And this whole woke thing is based on cowardice.

They've scanned the horizon and they go after the vulnerable and they go after them and they attack them and attack them and attack them.

And they don't have a systematic, disinterested standard

by which they can apply it to anybody.

It's always biased and prejudicial and hypocritical and paradoxical.

That's what I get angry about.

So yes, they feel really big that they're going to make even more money by ensuring Miss PC, suburban mom that lives in Carmel, that her son won't find the word fat in that story and he'll feel better about himself.

and she and therefore she will buy the next doll book and make more money for them.

That's how they think.

But

when he's walking down the street to school and a car goes by very slowly with the boom speakers and it's a bank the bitch and

she's not going to touch that.

No, I don't want to get involved with the rap industry.

It's a multi-billion dollar industry and I'll be called a racist and politically incorrect.

So, until they start doing that, once they start doing that and say we have a standardized code, we apply it to everybody.

We do not allow hurtful words in music or in lyrics or in books, and we're going to pressure people to stop it.

And

then let's see what happens.

But they're not going to do that.

Much less are they going to do it if it involves the Chinese.

If the Chinese tell the, if Steve Kerr and LeBron give us lectures about China, and I don't have any problem with it, and they're making $5 billion.

LeBron will make a billion dollars in his lifetime contract with Niki,

Nike,

but

the NBA will make $5 billion, I think, a year with its franchising with China.

And that's, you know, if you tell them,

hey, you guys.

You're going to have to stop that off because China goes into Hollywood and says for these joint productions that you think we're going to let our 1.4 billion person audience pay for it and we're invested in it,

we have control.

We do not want any dark-skinned actors.

Our people do not like them.

So if you're going to put actors, make sure they're light-skinned.

And they did that.

And Hollywood, for all of its bravery about saying that Donald Trump should be decapitated, burned alive, they didn't say anything.

They went along with it.

Yeah, of course.

Just like the NBA goes along with it.

So remember that about the left, everybody, that they talk a great game and they talk about moral virtue, but this is, they're not moral people.

They're opportunist and they have enormous appetites for the good life and they're selective and they're ideological.

And so, and that governs what word is permissible or not permissible.

If

Mr.

Dahl was selling one book a year, they would just say, oh my God, we have on our backlist, we have this guy named Dahl.

He's selling 15 copies a week.

He's got all this stuff like fat and

unkind references.

Let's just drop him.

They would.

But now they're saying, oh my God, he sells a lot of money and he's in a dying book industry.

He's making us a lot of money.

So we'll just tamper tamper with the text a little bit because the right and the conservatives, they'll bitch, but you know, they're living, let's live.

But those crazy left-wing people,

they might go after us and we could hurt sales.

So we'll get the best of both worlds.

We'll get to have his books and we'll kind of, you know, knead our brow and say, oh my gosh, we were kind of bothered by Mr.

Dahl, but

we really want to sell his books.

It's an insult to him.

Yeah, that was that was his brand mark: that he was a kind of a controversial heterodox who liked to play with words and

make kind of dark children's books.

And some, you know, he vote for, I think he wrote for Alfred Hitchcock and Twilight Zone.

And he doesn't deserve to have his work edited after he's dead, unless you live in the Soviet Union.

If this was Russia and he was going to be Trotsky, I could see it.

But he's got to put all this in context that these are the same people who they keep talking about McCarthyism for ad nauseam.

McCarthyism, McCarthy, ACLU is wonderful.

ACLU, free speech, free speech.

Linda Lovelace and Deep Throw, you got to have everybody's got to be able to see that.

These are the people.

And they were never for free speech.

They were for their type of pornographic

gross speech or anti-government speech or communist speech.

But on the other side, uh-uh, they want to use the totalitarian meekly to cut it off because they're not Democrats.

They're not progressive.

They're regressive, totalitarian, authoritarian.

Well, Victor, I have one more question for you.

And I know it's, I don't know if you can be fast on this because we're right at the end and I know that you have to leave.

But there's been some controversy over Tucker getting the January 6th, the Capitol Hill videos from the Speaker of the House, Kevin McCarthy.

And I was wondering what your thoughts on that, you know, that it somehow might be a compromise of national security, I think is the suggestion.

Well, the House is, the Speaker of the House is in control of the Capitol Police archives.

And it's as bad or it's not as bad as Nancy Pelosi.

So she had control of all of the videotapes, what, 40,000 hours?

And she decided that nobody could see them except

the January 6th Committee.

And who was on that?

No authentic Republican.

If you were a Republican, then there was only two, then you had to agree to basically,

you had to have voted for Donald Trump and you had to have no political career ahead of you, which both

Kinzinger and Cheney did.

They were politically inert and they voted for impeachment.

Therefore, they went along with this

Star Chamber investigation.

And so they had it, Sammy.

They had all of the tapes and they quoted from them and they mentioned them and they leaked about them selectively.

And Nancy Pelosi went along and nobody on the left said a word.

So now Kevin McCarthy has them.

And from what we understand,

he's going to release all of it.

But in the first release, he decided to let Tucker Carlson go through it first and then be the first to publish it.

Maybe he shouldn't, maybe he shouldn't, but he was just sending a message that this is what the January 6th Committee did.

They took a political, all-left-wing committee and took a monopoly and then told the public what was on it, what was on it.

And if you said, I don't believe that is the whole story, it didn't matter.

Nancy Pelosi was not going to let you see what was on it.

Now

Tucker has

some, and you know what he's going to show.

He's going to show, he's going to emphasize that there were people who have been charged that did nothing.

They're going to show that maybe Mr.

Epps is on there screaming and yelling.

There's going to be showing there might be, who knows, FBI people cheering on or leading FBI informants.

We'll see.

But the point is this, is whereas you could not get access to the January 6th

videos that the January 6th committee was using selectively, you will have access to these.

It's just a matter of time.

He's going to let them all out, but he wants to make sure that Tucker can have an opportunity first to show you that the January 6th committee was edited and selective.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So that'll be good.

Myself, I would have just thrown it out there.

I would just sort of, but he's kind of doing what I think the model was Elon Musk.

People said, well, why didn't Elon Musk just release it all, right?

Why did he have Matt Clybee and Barry Weiss and others,

Michael Schellenberg, be

vocal, orchestrate it?

And I think the answer is he wanted more attention.

So I think McCarthy is saying, once I let him be the initial conduit, it's going to cause a lot of controversy and attention.

And people are going to look at this

and see that it's not quite what the January 6th committee said it was.

Yeah.

so that will be interesting to see how that pans out.

Well, thank you very much, Victor, for all of your discussion, especially of the Peloponnesian War today.

I really enjoyed that.

Okay, and thanks everybody for listening once again.

Yeah, thank you.

And this is Victor Davis-Hansen and Sammy Wink.

We're signing off.