Wars, Politics and Education

When empires debase their currency, citizens who hold gold survive the transition.

That's not opinion, it's documented fact.

Trump's economic warning isn't speculation, it's pattern recognition.

The same signals that preceded every major currency crisis are flashing now.

Unsustainable debt, foreign nations dumping our bonds, and central banks hoarding gold.

But Trump's also revealing the solution.

The IRS strategy he's used for decades is available to every American.

It's how the wealthy preserve their fortunes when paper currencies fail.

American Alternative Assets has documented this strategy in their free 2025 wealth protection guide.

It shows exactly how to position yourself before the turbulence Trump's warning about arrives.

Call 888-615-8047 for your free guide.

That's 888-615-8047 or visit victorlovesgold.com.

The patterns are clear.

Make sure you're on the right side of them.

Hello to our listeners of the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

This is the Saturday edition where we look at something a little different, usually something historical and cultural.

I know that we have the Ukrainian war going on, and we're going to take some time on it, but we're going to do a comparison to the Finnish-Soviet-Finnish war in 1939 to 40.

We have a lot on the agenda.

We're going to take a little excursion into Greece and then talk a little bit about education.

So we hope everybody looks forward to that.

But first, let's listen to these messages and we'll be right back.

Like you, when I bought my last pair of shoes, I looked for stylish comfort and beautiful engineering.

And that might make you think Italian, but if you're buying sheets, it should make you think bowl and branch.

The colors, the fabric, the design.

Bowl and branch sheets are made with long-lasting quality, offering extraordinary softness to start and getting softer and softer for years to come.

Bowl and branch sheets are made with the finest, 100% organic cotton in a soft, breathable, durable weave.

Their products have a quality you can feel immediately and become even softer with every wash.

Plus, Bowl and Branch comes with a 30-night worry-free guarantee.

I've been sleeping like a baby in my Bowl and Branch sheets, which keep me cool on those hot summer nights, and they're the perfect place for sunrise and morning coffee.

So join me.

Feel the difference an extraordinary night's sleep can make with Bowl and Branch.

Get 15% off plus free shipping on your first set of sheets at bowlandbranch.com/slash victor.

That's Bullen Branch.

B-O-L-L-A-N-D-B-R-A-N-C-H dot com

slash Victor.

To save 15% off and unlock free shipping.

Exclusions may apply.

And we'd like to thank Bowl and Branch for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

If you're like me, you have a lot of product on your bathroom counter.

Well, I have found the secret serum.

And it's Vibriance Super C Serum.

The ingredients in this one bottle can replace your day creams, eye creams, night creams, neck creams, wrinkle creams, and even dark spot reducers.

Made in the USA with the highest quality ingredients including vitamin C, hyaluronic acid, vitamin B5, and vitamin E, Super C Serum delivers noticeable results.

Simplify your skincare routine, get a healthier complexion, and minimize wrinkles and aged spots with Vibrance.

I just began using Super C serum last week and I love it.

My skin feels so much better, soft, moist, and fresh.

And by the way, it smells beautiful like the orange blossoms outside my kitchen door.

Give it a try, and you'll love it too.

And if you don't find it better than your current skincare routine, you'll get a full refund.

Go to vibrance.com/slash Victor to save up to 37% off and free shipping.

That's Vibrance.

V-I-B-R-I-A-N-C-E.

Vibrance.com slash Victor.

And we'd like to thank Vibrance for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

We're back.

And Victor, I know that the Ukrainian war is weighing heavily on your mind.

And

you requested this actually today.

Quite often I do this topics for our Saturday edition, but you wanted to talk a little bit about the Ukrainian War and the Finnish-Soviet War in 1939.

And I think some comparison.

So why don't we go ahead and just let you shoot on that?

Well, we're trying to make sense of

this February 24th, 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.

And we're looking for examples.

And one of the best examples that can guide us,

mutatus mutandis, that's a fancy Latin expression for the necessary changes being made, i.e.

across time and space, was at the end of the month, November 30th, 1939, the Soviet Union in all of its glory, remember this was right during its non-aggression pact, the Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression pact.

So it was in league with Hitler and it invaded Finland.

Why did it invade Finland?

Remember, Finland didn't exist for centuries as an independent autonomous country.

It was either run by Sweden or was part of Russia.

And then during the Bolshevik Revolution of 1970, it broke away and got its autonomy.

And there were disputed lands where there were Finnish speakers, but the Russians claimed that they were of strategic importance.

They wanted them.

So ostensibly, they gave an ultimatum to the Finns.

This is important because it's, again, big Russia, small Ukraine, small Finland.

And it was easy walkthrough, easy walkthrough expectation.

And it was fierce resistance, fierce resistance.

And the end, I think, is very instructive.

So they invaded.

They invaded with over 25 divisions.

Eventually, they had over six or 700,000 people.

The population of Finn was like 3 million people.

It was half of the people were mobilized.

That means 18 to 60 and some women.

They fielded about, you know, a million and a half people.

And they had not all in combat units, but it was a nation in arms.

And they lost about 25,000 dead, wounded, or missing.

More than that with the casualties, but the fatalities alone were 25,000.

But when Russia went in there, it was...

It was very stupid.

It was the beginning of winter.

They were high that they were now partners of Hitler.

They had split split up Poland, remember in September, even though Stalin came late, he didn't meet his demarcation points with the Nazis.

He had a lot more trouble with the Poles than the Germans attacking from the West did.

But nonetheless, he thought, Hitler won't say a word.

He's bound in this non-aggression pact and the Allies can't do anything to Hitler.

So I'm just going to go take Finland.

So he called in the Finns and said, I'm going to take your country.

And they said, no, you're not.

He said, well, for now, give us this, this.

And they said, no.

So he invaded on November 30th.

And guess what?

It was one of the colder winters in history, 30 or 40 below.

The Finns were very well equipped.

They even got weaponry.

At this time, they were not in league with the Germans, so they got weaponry from the West, Britain, etc.

It was a cause celebrity, just like it is now with Ukraine.

Everybody wanted to help the Finns.

They expelled the Soviet Union from the United Nations, just as they're calling to do something, the United Nations, the League of Nations,

I should say, just as they're saying this now.

And guess what?

They fought all December, they fought all January, they fought all February.

They could not defeat the Finns.

They were skis, expert skiers.

They'd come out of the forest.

They'd go right through Russian troops.

They'd machine gun.

They'd mined their roads.

They knew the terrain.

They inflicted

about

250 to 400,000 casualties, probably over 200,000 dead.

It was just a slaughter.

And then finally, Stalin took it seriously.

And then in March, he really mobilized and he put a million people in there.

And they forced the Finns to surrender.

But they had a very interesting discussion.

And that was

Stalin did not want to keep fighting Finland, so he made a deal with this.

Karl Mannerheim.

And he's one of the great Finns, I guess the greatest Finn in history.

And he led the Finns' counterassault.

But more importantly, he in the deal that was made, they gave up these borderlands, but they made a deal that they would not go into Russian territory no matter what the situation was.

And I think Stalin had a premonition that either he was going to attack Germany or Germany was going to attack him.

Fast forward, siege of Leningrad, almost four years long.

Germans need the Finns.

They're allies of Hitler.

And he tells the Finns, you can cut off Lake Lagoda and you can attack Russia.

And they said, we'll help you, but we're not setting foot in Russian soil.

That was part of our agreement.

And after the war, when the Germans were defeated, Finland was all alone.

It was a world pariah.

It had been backing the Nazis for its own survival.

Stalin went to Mannerheim and said, you know what?

You kept your agreement when we were on our backs.

Even Stalin said, you did not take advantage of this.

So we're not going to invade and crush you like we could, but you're going to to be like Austria.

You're going to be non-aligned, no War Sol Pact, no NATO, and you're going to be neutral.

And if you're going to do that, we'll let you go.

So what does that tell us about the Ukraine war?

It's the same thing, that same Russian arrogance, same ignorance of Russian history that Stalin has, so does Putin, that the Russian army against the Swedes, against the French, against the Nazis, it fights superbly well on its own soil.

When it goes into Finland, when it goes into Ukraine, when it goes into Afghanistan, it goes into Poland, it does not fight well.

That's what the Finnish war, what we know is a winter war.

The second part of it, you know, was the continuation war when it was around Leningrad.

The second thing that's very important,

and I don't know if Zelensky understands that, Mannerheim never got carried away with the exuberance that he was the darling of the West.

The world turned on the Soviet Union.

They hated the Soviet Union because it was committing atrocities, because it had aligned itself with the hated Hitler, and because it was a big bully.

But he said to himself, these people will not back me when the winds change.

I'm going to be alone.

And we can only rely on ourselves.

And I'm not going to ask foreign countries to come in and fight the Russians, etc.

And so when he resisted and he was defeated, he told He didn't say, come and get us.

Kill every one of us.

We're never giving up.

He said, We told you, Mr.

Stalin, that we will kill a lot of you.

You want to come in?

You can defeat us, but we're going to kill so many Russians.

And you've got such a tenuous relationship with the Nazis.

And they are going to, at some point, be in the ascendant.

So it'd be better for us to be peaceful.

And they made an agreement.

After all the damage that Stalin had tried to do, they said, if we're on the ascendance, and we will be.

And then they predicted it.

And yet, Hitler was so exasperated, he flew in on Mannerheim's birthday in 1942 to beg him to close the ring around Leningrad and go in and take, he said, go take Leningrad.

You can have it.

Annex it.

We don't want it.

He said, nope, we're not getting anywhere on Russian soil.

We'll get anywhere we can help you as long as we stay within the confines of Finland.

So then after the war, of course, they were rewarded.

The same thing, I think, with Zelensky.

He can't get punched drunk and think, you know what, this is incredible.

We're the world's darling.

Everybody wants us to win.

He is up against the same odds that 3 million Finns were up against against the Soviet Union.

And that's 40 million Ukrainians or 45 maybe originally versus 145 Russians.

So, what he should do, I think, is to tell Putin, we're never going to give up when you're in our country, but we're going to make life so miserable for you.

You're going to pay a price.

Even if we can't win, it would be in your interest to stop.

And if you stop, we promise that we will not send Ukrainian forces into Russian territory.

We will not join the West to hurt you.

And we can negotiate the Donobos border regions.

If they're 70 or 80% Russian and they're really as pro-Putin as you say they are, well, let them take them.

They don't want them.

And maybe they'll hate you more than they hate us and they'll want to come back.

And as far as the Crimea, maybe we'll have a plebiscite or a demilitarized zone.

But there has to be a mechanism where he can translate this short-term spectacular success into long-term strategic advantage, like Mannerham did in the Finn.

Yeah, so did the Finns end up with Soviets, at least Soviet administration and Soviet, you know, I don't know, on their soil at all?

They just surrendered and then in the Cold War of 1940.

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

I just mean in this small war from 1949 to 40.

The winter war.

They did not.

They did not.

They kept their autonomy.

Mannerham kept control the soviets agreed that if you give us these and the irony was that the soviets came to them and said we want these borderlands that you took from the bolsheviks when you declared your independence they said no they're finnish speaking they said we don't care they were the czars they're ours we'll let you have yours and they said no come and take them and then when it was all over

you know, half a million people on both sides casualties, the Soviets said, see, we just want what we wanted in the beginning.

And then the Finn said, take it.

But if you come into Finland and we're going to keep going.

So Stalin said, okay, you fought so well.

We get the borderlands.

You get to be an independent, autonomous country.

Then they joined the Germans and the Germans, everybody thought, would crush the Soviet Union.

And even

in July of 1941, when Hitler was bragging that Soviet and, you know,

OKW was...

already bragging that the war would be over in 10 days, Keitel and all these people.

And guess guess what?

In a fit of triumphalism, they did not go into Soviet territory.

And the Germans were furious at them.

They said, only you can close the ring on Leningrad.

You've got to help it.

They said, nope.

And then it paid dividends later on.

They kept their autonomy.

And we call it Finlandization.

In other words,

they were...

neutralized by the Soviets, but they kept their autonomy.

And when, guess what?

When the war was over and the Soviet Cold War was over, they're an independent, prosperous nation.

They're very, what, a recent poll said they're the happiest people on earth.

Wait, they're the drunkest people on earth, aren't they?

And the most depressed people on earth.

They used to say that about all my friends from Reedley, California that were Finns.

They're, of all the Scandinavian peoples, I think, I'm not a linguist, a Scandinavian linguist, but they might be philologically the most akin to Swedes, but they surely had a long, long relationship.

Finland was part of Sweden, and the elite spoke Swedish, and the peasant class,

I suppose, spoke Finnish.

And Mannerheim was a really brilliant guy.

I mean, he spoke Finnish and Russian and Swedish and German and French and English.

And he lived to be 82.

But Zelensky shouldn't model himself after him because he was a millionaire.

And he grew up in the Tsar's army.

I mean, he was a very successful officer under Nicholas II.

And so

Zelensky has this tendency that in his exuberance to get the Western help, he shakes his finger at people and says, you've got to do this and you better do this.

And

you'll regret this.

And I'm thinking,

no.

Western leaders have

a billion people in Europe, the United States, in Canada, North America that they're responsible to not get nuked.

A billion.

And we're not going to get nuked over your war.

We're going to help you all we can, but not to the point where we're going to get nuked or get into a nuclear exchange with Russia.

Yeah.

So the model is then that a smaller country attacked by a bigger country should fight like hell to do as much destruction to that bigger military, the bigger country that they can, but not expect help from anybody.

And not to confuse tactical success with strategic finality.

In other words, the final verdict, if Russia wants to crush Ukraine, it can, whether it uses tactical nuclear weapons or just mobilizes every Russian there is.

But Zelensky's Mannerheim example is to make it such a hell to come into Ukraine in the cost-benefit analysis, Putin will not do it, but then give Putin an out the way Mannerheim gave Stalin an out by saying, okay, the borderlands are yours.

Take them.

And then we'll discuss Crimea and we'll have a plebiscite, which they would win.

But they have to do that because otherwise, I mean, Mannerheim could have fought to the last fin and inflicted enormous damage on Stalin, but he would have lost.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So better to find the point at which you can make a deal and maintain your own autonomy.

And I think they're getting close.

Once they achieve air parity in Ukraine, that is, they're able to knock down as many planes as they lose.

Maybe air superiority where they control the skies with anti-aircraft missiles.

Maybe air supremacy where a Russian plane can't take off.

At that point, they've won and the tactical.

And they need to to enter strategic discussion yeah okay all right victor let's go ahead and take a moment for some messages and come right back and we're going to talk about the cities of greece as models for political development and we'll be right back

So you just got back from summer vacation.

Maybe you might have even had to book two rooms because of your snoring.

Some vacation, huh?

Snoring can be an underlying cause of high blood pressure, heart disease, stroke, and even memory loss.

Here is my advice.

If you want every night to be a true vacation, you need to get yourself Zipa.

That's happy Z, spelled backwards.

Zipa is a doctor-designed mouthpiece that not only moves your jaw forward, but is also the only device with a patented tongue seat belt to keep your airways open and the snoring away.

The snoring can stop as soon as the first night.

Zipa was proven in a 600-patient clinical trial and sold over half a million units.

From now until the end of October, show your family you actually care by purchasing a limited edition pink Zipa.

Not only will you save $10,

but Zipa is on a mission to raise $50,000 for breast cancer research and they will donate another $10,000 to the Susan G.

Komen Breast Cancer Foundation.

Go to zyppah.com and use the code PINK

or text Victor to 511-511.

Put your snoring on a permanent vacation and help a worthy cause with the snoring device we trust by visiting zyppah.com and use the code PINK or text Victor to 511-511.

Remember, Zipa is happy Z spelled backwards.

Text fees may apply, and we'd like to thank Zipa for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

You might be wondering, when is the right time to add collagen to my diet?

How about today?

Calagen production starts to dwindle in your 20s.

By the time you've hit your 50s, decreased collagen contributes to wrinkles, sagging skin, and joint discomfort.

Native Path Calagen can help.

It's packed with only type 1 and 3 collagen fibers, the ones your body needs most for healthy joints, skin, bones, hair, nails, and gut.

Plus, it's third-party tested for purity with no fillers, no additives, and no artificial junk.

Two scoops a day of Native Path delivers 18 grams of protein.

Mix it into your coffee, tea, or any drink.

It's completely flavorless and easy to use.

Right now, get a special deal at a fraction of the retail price, plus free shipping.

Available at getnativepath.com slash Victor.

With over 4 million jars sold, thousands of five-star reviews, and a 365-day money-back guarantee, this is your moment to take control of aging before symptoms get worse.

Go to getnativepath.com slash Victor now.

Supplies are limited and demand is surging.

And we'd like to thank NativePath for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Welcome back, everybody.

Victor, I know that your training is in, obviously, in Greece, and that I wanted to talk to you today on, especially since we have all of those city-states and they had so many different political forms.

I wanted to talk to you today and do some comparison and also just really ask why it is that Sparta and Athens became the two different political forms in the West.

How does that work?

Well, that's a good point.

There were 1,500 or so city-states, and they range in size from a few hundred to 100,000.

living inside the walls and Athens probably had 100,000, maybe Syracuse had 150,000.

And all of our terms for government originated from this period.

So the word autocracy or the word tyranny or the word oligarchy or democracy, they all come from Greece because there was a wide spectrum of constitutional government.

And what is fascinating is the two antithetical models were the most powerful for 50 years and even more so in the cases.

And one model was what the the Athenians,

you know, isagoria, completely free speech and equality.

By that I mean each person that could fit into the ecclesia or the assembly, 7,000, maybe twice a month,

they had equality of expression and they could make a motion.

The agenda was referred to them by the bulley and upper house, it's true, but they then would discuss if they wanted to kill everybody on Milos or if they want to send out execute males over 16 on mitellini or they want later in the popular court kill socrates they can do it there's no constitutional guardrails in other words other than you know that you had to follow the supposedly the uh the bullets agenda and then they elected archons but

most of the offices were by sortition.

This was the original equity government.

In other words, they felt there was some kind of iron law of oligarchy, maybe that when you elect people for offices, as they do in the United States and Europe, always the wealthier, the more connected will always get elected.

So even though it's not foreordained, that's just the law.

You'll get oligarchs in control of democracy.

So

they use what they call sortition, that you were, everybody served.

There were 20,000 magistries

and boards, and you just got your lot.

And you could be an archon, but generals.

The board of generals had to be elected.

That was the most powerful job.

And the primary archon, Pericles, each year had to have a vote of confidence for almost 30 years.

But that was a model, and it was imperial, it was cosmopolitan, it was exciting.

It had over 150 city-states abroad and on the Aegean that were subject states of the Athenian Empire, the Arche Athenaeon, the Empire of the Athenians.

Okay.

And so people thought, well, that's an example of what the power of the Onwash really does, because there was a very low property qualification of the 20 to 25 or 30,000 citizens, depending on what period we adjudicate the population numbers.

There was a large middle class of hoplites.

There was an underclass of rowers.

They had a huge imperial fleet.

It was a redistributive economy.

But there was an antithesis 180 miles to the south.

The Spartans were not cosmopolitan Ionians.

They were inwardly blinkered Dorians.

They were not Democrats.

They were oligarchs.

They were not seafaring cosmopolitans in that sense, but also maritime powers.

Mahon's doctrine that manages of sea power in history, they were hoplite armies.

Everything about them was antithetical.

They were landlocked.

Their port was 19 miles away.

Okay, so they had a very different government, but it was the really the first expression of what would become the roman system and from the roman system through the enlightenment montesque spirit of laws and separation of powers and then the founders and it was there was an assembly every spartan male over the age of 18 could vote that was a lower house like our house of representatives there was the gerusia gerusia is geron is an old man so it's it's akin to latin sinex where we get senate from.

The Gerusia was their senate, and then they had ephores that were adjudicators or overseers, kind of like a supreme court, made sure the laws were followed.

And then they had an executive.

It was a hereditary monarchy, sort of like the British system, but there was two.

the Aegeid kings and the Europontids, two families that had a king, and they were the executives, but they were subject to oversight by the Ephors and indirectly by the Gerusia and the popular Assembly.

And that system then was what influenced, and there was a similar one in Crete, that's what influenced the Roman Republic, the Res Publica.

It was not a democracy.

So when we look at the descriptions of how this government worked, whether it was in Aristotle or Thucydides, or later in Cicero, the consensus in antiquity was that the constitutional republican system was more stable.

And even though it was less representative representative, and it was less volatile, and it was less material and less exciting, but it was more long-lived.

And I think you could make the argument that it was.

We're not getting, I'll just finish by saying we're not getting into the crucial area of who got to vote.

In Athens,

there was a low property qualification.

So the number of adult males who were free that were not voting was very small.

In Sparta, you had to be born to two Spartan parents.

And what that percentage of the resident population is probably about 40,000 people, 10,000 adult males probably voted.

And everybody says, see how restricted, well, you start from nothing in Persia, nothing in Egypt, nothing in Gaul, nothing in Garmania.

So any incremental increase in representation is a progress.

And so one other thing I think is important, they had a very different idea of exploitation.

Chattel slavery is that an individual free man owns the person of another.

Slav from the Slavic word, you know, mostly a white slave during the Ottoman period.

People come from Slavia or Slovakia.

And that was the root of the word.

But doulos is the word.

in Greece and it refers to somebody who could be owned.

And that was in democracy.

That population of slaves might have been over 100,000.

Think of it.

They worked in the Athenian mines.

They were potters.

They were, I think I made the argument in one scholarly article that almost all, every farmer of 10 acres or more owned a slave.

In Sparta, they didn't do that.

They had an entire serf population.

In other words, they conquered the nearby and more fertile valleys of Messenia on the other side of Mount Tyegetus, you know, what today we know as Kalamata, Mount Athomi, and the ancient Hellenistic or late fourth century, I should say, city of Messenia.

And scholars have argued over ever since, which is more exploitive, having serfs or having slaves, which leads to quicker abolition, which is more repressive, to have categories of freedom rather than just free versus slave.

Can you have democracy without a slave class?

Because you need to free up people for the time to participate in a pre-industrial society.

So the chattel slavery allowed people to be more democratic whereas serfs.

One thing I'll leave you with is it required if you're going to enslave 300,000 people, 250,000, who knows, in Messenia, the wealthiest farmland in the Peloponnese, then you need a police force.

And that whole rite of passage and the Sisatia, the group mass and the whole grooming Spartans from how to steal when they're little boys, then they're separated from their families.

They go into that rite of passage to be Spartan hoplites.

That started out as a swat team, an internal Gestapo force to hunt down wayward serfs or helots.

Helot is the Greek word heloti, just mean those who have been taken.

And they were assigned a plot, their family plot, and they probably had to give either somewhere between one sixth and a half of the food to Sparta.

Look at the circular situation.

They gave the food to Sparta.

They trucked it over, drove it over the hills.

Then Spartans did not have to farm themselves to the same extent as others.

So then they could practice for war.

And the more they practiced for war, the more they became internal surveillance, excellent soldiers to keep that rest of the population down.

But the more that they were away from home on constant duty, the fewer children they had, the more emancipated women were then at Athens, even.

They could hold property, they could compete, they could even walk around, supposedly in certain games, topless.

And then, as another artifact of unintended consequences, that internal police force turned out when Greece began to experience foreign occupiers or would-be invaders like Xerxes or Darius or Xerxes.

They fought very well against non-Greeks and non-Helots.

So the whole Spartan mystique developed and evolved in ways nobody could have predicted from this weird idea that one of the few city-states conquered another whole area and didn't quite enslave them like other people, but they made them serfs in perpetuity until my favorite man of antiquity, Apamalonis, freed them in the winter of 370 BC.

Yeah.

I was going to ask you: so, how I know that you're doing some work on Thebes for a new book that you're writing.

How does Thebes compare to those two cities or even Corinth?

Well, they were the big players.

So, who were the players in the Greek world?

By players, I mean who had the fleets, who had the armies, who had the biggest populations, and who do we associate with notable Athenian?

So Phaedon of Argos or Lycurgus of Sparta or Socrates of Athens

or Pamelonis of Thebes.

Well, there's about five or six of them.

There's Sparta versus Athens, the main players.

And then there's the commercial and most ideally situated city-state, Corinth.

Not that old adage.

The journey to Corinth doesn't benefit everybody.

You can end up broke or mugged or getting a venereal disease of some sort, maybe if you go to a Corinth, wide open city.

And then there's Argos, the traditional rival of Sparta and the Peloponnese.

And these are all have ancient pedigrees.

It's no accident that they have Mycenaean relics or archaeological sites.

So when the Mycenaean era collapsed during the Dark Ages, people rediscovered.

that, you know, these are the places that you hear of myths being created to explain monumental architecture in the Peloponnese or Tholos teams at Thebes or something.

And there's Thebes, and then of course there's Syracuse across the ocean, the biggest of all Greek city-states in Sicily.

But Thebes is different.

It's the smallest of the main players, probably only 35,000, 40,000 people as residents.

It's landlocked and it's got this mystical mythology that goes way back.

In the Dark Ages, these myths were created to, again, make sense of what little they know know from the oral tradition or from artifacts about a monumental Mycenaean civilization's collapse.

But think of it.

Seven Against Thebes, Aeschylus' play, the Oedipus trilogy, Oedipus so-called Rex, or Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonia, and

Antigone, and

most of the famous heroes, Heracles, he's from Thebes.

We have Euripides' Bacchi about King Pentheus and the Bacchamps and the rites up on Mount Cathyron.

So there were all these things that are happening, but unfortunately for Thebes, most of them were play acted.

These myths were recombodulated by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and maybe 50 other playwrights whose names we have, but works we don't on the Athenian stage.

So their view was pretty bloody, right?

Pynthias gets his head cut off.

Antigone commits suicide.

Oedipus puts his eyes out.

So Thebes has kind of a dark reputation as this old, shadowy place where weird stuff happened.

And it really influences a lot of Greece, but they're kind of, they're weird people.

They're landlocked.

They have this big, marshy lake, Lake Copaeus.

They eat eels.

They're just weird.

And they have a mythical prestige to them.

And then they finally become democratic late, much later than their surrounding city-states.

And they become so-called, they live in an area called Boeotia or Boeotia, whichever way you want to pronounce it.

And they become very powerful for about 10 years under the Pamanongas, the most powerful state.

They out-punch their rank.

They become pre-eminent, even though they have a small population.

They don't have a port accessible as Athens.

And then Alexander wipes them out in 335.

He comes in and he says, you revolted.

You're the spiritual leaders of Greece.

You broke the deal that you were all subject now to my father.

And I'm going to wipe you out.

I'm going to wipe you out to the last home.

I'm going to kill everybody in battle.

And the survivors, 30,000, I'm going to sell you into slavery.

And the only thing that's going to be left are a few

holy precincts and the house of the poet Pindar.

They're most famous for

Pindar the poet and Hesiod the poet.

Yeah, was it a radical democracy like Athens?

No, it was in a constant state.

Thucydides used the word dynastia in a deprecatory fashion.

So it comes out of the Dark Ages as an oligarchy.

And then as other countries broaden their oligarchies to what they call politeia or polities that are broad-based, pretty good governments, it's laggard, it laggers behind.

And then by the

Peloponnesian War, it has an oligarchy, kind of a narrower, but it has a revolution in 379 BC and it becomes radically democratic under a panel.

But not the word thing that saves it, it doesn't have a lot of slaves.

It's not a commercial power.

It doesn't have a lot of industry.

So it's still a rural, it's a pretty tough customer.

When the Boeotian Confederacy is formed over a 50-year period, I think they crush, they devastate Orkomenos.

They

level Plateau.

They level Thespii.

I once spent, you know, a whole month, I went over there and I took a map and

I drove a little Fiat car and I went to all of those federated cities: Thespiae, Thisbe,

Astra, Home of Hesiod.

It's a really weird place.

Lavatia, if you go there to modern Lovatia, it's a very strange place.

Kind of scary.

It's very beautiful, the Oracle of Trephonians.

Yeah.

Was Corinth a very cosmopolitan place?

Yes, very

that's what it sounded.

Remember, it was wiped out by Gaius Mummius the same year as Carthage in 46, but it was the oldest in the sense that it had a series of tyrants and it was located in a nexus where it controlled all passage, six miles wide at the isthmus.

It controlled all the land passages from the Peloponnese to north and back.

And it did have eventually have a wall there to let people in and out.

And then more importantly, the east-west maritime traffic.

So there was only six miles and they had something called the Diolkos, the dragger strip.

So a ship would come from Asia Minor, unload its cargo, and either wagons would take it to another ship, or they would simply put little wheels on the ship and drag it across the Diolkos, six miles.

And then you saved about 150 miles by not having to go around the Peloponnese.

You could go straight then into the Gulf of Corinth and then out the Gulf of Canor toward west toward Italy.

And then I think in the 1880s or 90s, the French dug a huge canal and they didn't use locks.

So when you look at it today, it's kind of scary.

You look straight down.

It's so deeply cut because the elevations were not the same.

But they got away with not having a lock.

And if anybody goes to Greece, there's daily or hourly little excursions.

You can go through the six mile.

Yeah.

You can see

it's very nice to do that.

Yeah.

Doesn't Corinth have some of the more spectacular, you know, archaeological dig?

It does.

Yeah.

Yeah.

There's a temple to, as I remember, a temple to Zeus there.

There's a Roman and

a Greek theater there.

You can see the Bima where St.

Paul lectured.

It's got the nicest, I think the nicest on-site museum of any site in Greece.

It's probably the best catalog, preserved, and tourist-friendly.

That's primarily due to,

in general, the American School of Classical Studies as one of its three digs, each foreign school, the French, the British, et cetera, get a concession where they get to operate a dig in conjunction with the Greek government.

And Corinth is, along with the Athenian agarathon that rotates, sometimes Nimia, et cetera.

But Corinth was traditionally for 100 years excavated by the Americans.

Sherman Williams painter, a wonderful man named Charles Williams and Nancy Bouchidis, they were there when I was there.

They co-ran the excavations.

They did a wonderful job of writing about it in the American School publication, Hesper.

But then it was required for every member of the American School of Classical Studies in the spring to excavate in Corinth.

And I excavated there in the

summer, the late spring of 1979.

It was so hot that I had developed a kidney stone.

I finally had to be two months later, it wouldn't pass.

I flew home because it was so hot there.

Yeah,

we were excavating, three of us there.

It was very, It was very interesting and instructive to learn archaeology.

You had to have notebooks.

You had to catalog pottery.

You had to learn architecture.

I'd also had a course earlier, my first time I went to Greece with William Dinsmore Jr., who taught us a lot about Greek architecture.

You know, now that you're mentioning archaeology.

I've always wondered because I know at the, and this is way off from Greece, it's on Crete, obviously, but the Minoan site, they always complain about what Arthur Evans did there.

Do you know what the specific complaints are about his?

He's the founder of modern archaeology.

He discovered an earlier civilization in Crete that we know was in Thera and other places.

We know that it was not antic dated the Mycenaean Greeks.

We know later from the decipherment of Linear B that its script, Linear A, is not the same.

In other words, Linear B was Greek.

The Mycenaeans were Greeks.

linear a is some type of semitic languages language but we don't have enough examples on clay tablets and we know that this earthquake that destroyed minoan civilization in thera must have had a deliri deleterious effect on crete because shortly after the mycenaeans came down and took it over and they

xeroxed a lot of the palatial customs, the linear A tablets, and they adopted to their own purposes on the mainland and they ran it in Crete.

But that original civilization was found by Sir Arthur Evan,

mostly near Herakleon at the famous Canasso site, but also at Thaistos and Hagia Triada.

There's about three or four major sites.

But what he did was he spent his entire life and his fortune as an early archaeologist restoring what he thought it looked like.

So he would excavate a pillar and he'd find 10% of it.

He would reconstruct the pillar.

And he did that on the basis of mythological descriptions of King Minos.

And he really believed these were accurate, that there was a King Minos, there was a Minotaur.

And then, more importantly, he had frescoes where the people, Cretan women, were shown inside a palace so he could see the structure.

So if you go to Kanassos, he reconstructed.

If you're a purist and an archaeologist, you say, well, he reconstructed it in the wrong way.

We know now that portico, that bridge, that walkway is not right.

right yeah and if you're a tourist you don't really care you just think this is gives me a sense of what the minoans are and then secondly we have from his notebooks descriptions of he was trying to decipher this linear a

and people didn't understand it was mud brick that had been baked and so there were several dozen i can't remember the exact number of linear a tablets that were inadequately stored and when rains came they melted they were destroyed so people today have said, Had he known what we know as archaeological scientific scholars, we could have excavated that on according to modern principles, and we might have had a better chance of deciphering linear A, or we could do what we did at Phaistos and show things what it could be, or what we see at Thera.

But you have to judge people on some part on the mores of the time.

And the bottom line was he was a man who devoted his entire life going out into what a really wild place Crete was in those times and suffered a lot out in the field.

He did what he thought he could do to promote the study of antiquity.

Yeah, and he sure did a lot for that, that's for sure.

All right, so let's go ahead and take a moment for some messages and come right back.

And speaking of education, we're going to talk a little bit about the traditional liberal education.

We'll be right back.

Welcome back, everybody.

Yeah, so Victor, this is something that interests me.

I definitely have a passion for the education system and a good education.

And so I thought I would ask you today, because we're always talking about

what education is not today, and the indoctrination is not teaching contemplation, but programming people instead.

And we refer to this old-time liberal education, not liberal as we see it today.

And my word for it is a humanist education.

I was wondering if you could give us a description of what a good humanist education would be.

And then what's the value of it?

Like, what does it do for a student?

Well, remember that humane letters or liberty, libertas in Latin, it means not the same as Freiheit in German.

It means liberty within the context of sophisticated government or civilization.

So the idea was you were going to have a university system, and it grew up out of medieval scholasticism.

And then during the Renaissance and the age and on into the Enlightenment, it was the idea that you were going to have centers of learning.

And originally they had two purposes.

Number one, to preserve classical antiquity.

They had understood that during the Dark Ages,

the

advances in science and astronomy and

chemistry and literature and history had been lost, but those texts were still there and they could rebirth or have a renaissance.

Again, if there were sinners that were protected, then it took over the work of the medieval church that was primarily interested in copying manuscripts to ensure religious doctrine or to use pagan philosophers like Aristotle to enhance understanding of Christianity.

But then when these universities grew up at Bologna and Pisa and Paris or Oxford or Cambridge, then these became enlightenment areas.

And all the Enlightenment meant was you were going to explain natural phenomenon, not necessarily through custom or tradition or religion or superstition.

And you were free to do that.

So if you thought that, you know, walking under a ladder didn't mean you were doomed, or if you saw that you didn't believe that a God was responsible for an eclipse, or when you have pus on your hand, it wasn't because something you did wrong.

That inquiry was unfettered supposedly by religious dogma.

But the early Renaissance and probably the early Enlightenment was a way of elucidating faith in Christianity.

And by that, I mean they understood that not all elements of human experience were explicable by pure ratio, unless you were an atheist and a Jacobin.

in France, for example, or a nihilist.

By that, they meant this is the tools that we have developed, philosophy, rhetoric, literature, history, physics, math, metaphysics.

And within these fields, we can progress and work on, as Aristotle said, the work of younger, older.

Each generation builds upon the work of the other, and we can find answers to things.

And some of them are going to be manifested in scientific progress.

But there are elements that will always remain mysterious.

Why did that person die?

This person didn't when there was an accident.

Why does this person born with a birth defect when her parents were noble?

And this person who was a rogue and a a convict had a perfectly formed child.

Those are the mysteries that call in religious experience and require faith and belief.

And so that wasn't at odds necessarily completely to the medieval church.

But as it came out of the Enlightenment, and that is these formal disciplines were filtering into society at large and they began to have the universities where people actually went there to the universities in large numbers originally again to elucidate or to hone their religious understanding of the Old and New Testaments, but later to become liberally educated.

What did that mean?

This is Wendy answering your question.

It meant two things.

Number one, the university was going to teach people an inductive method.

And by that is

you were going to look at the world around you and then empirically catalog

exempla and examples, and you were going to form a conclusion about them.

You were not going to be deductive.

You don't just say all ducks have green feathers.

And then, when you see a duck with yellow or white or whatever, green, you say, oh, he's not a duck because he's not all green.

No, what you do is you say, there's a mallard duck, or there's a wood duck, and they all have different colors.

Then, inductive, you say the family of ducks can be multicolored.

See the difference?

You use the examples to go, and that teaches everybody.

And the idea was that if you teach people how to be inductive, when you read literature, you don't necessarily identify with somebody that looks like you or

you like.

You try to suspend prejudicial thought and just analyze the traits of the character and what the novelist is trying to do.

And then dispassionately, you analyze the text.

You don't deconstruct it by saying, I want to go into every text, Faulkner or Hemingway novel, and find out who's the oppressor and who's the oppressed, and then critique the author for insidiously revealing his power master.

That's anti-enlightenment.

That's anti-inductive.

The second thing that liberal education was supposed to do is because life is short and art is long.

There's so many things to study and you're so brief.

You can't just put your head in a book your whole life.

You have to be selective.

You only have a choice.

So there's certain classics texts.

It doesn't mean they're older.

Class is just a word for a fleet in Roman.

It means select.

And it means that certain things pass the popular muster across time and space.

A group of people who have spent their entire life, they've given up normal lives.

I mean, they're not, they don't know how to fix their car.

They don't know how to wire their house.

They do not know, if you want a gas, many of them are helpless.

But you get them on Shakespeare and they can say, you should all know Macbeth.

You get them on Sophocles and they say, I love the Philoctetes, but read the Antigone.

You get them on Euripides and they said, you know, the Andromeda is kind of a weird play, but, you know, you better read the Bacchae or the Medea.

So this group of scholars, and same thing with science, they selected a...

canonical group of texts and the idea was in literature, in philosophy, and then they also had areas of study, architecture.

They came up with this idea that every student that was liberally educated would have a referent, a referent.

So they would could say, you know what?

Life's not fair, but I'm not a narcissist and I don't think I'm the only one who suffered.

I remember how Antigone was a noble person and out of jealousy and spite, they destroyed her, even though she was the moral superior to men.

So even though I'm a woman and I'm being oppressed, I understand that there certain people who have been here before and I can learn from.

Or when they read Homer's Iliad, they said, you know, God, the race doesn't go to the swift, does it?

Achilles is the best warrior.

He kills the most Trojans.

He gets the most loot.

And guess what?

They take it away from him.

And Agamemnon and his incompetent brother Menelaus are not nearly the warriors, but they got all the power.

And then he's so mad, he's going to go, pow.

I'm not going to play with this marble game with you guys.

It's rigged.

I'm taking my marbles home.

You take your marbles home and Patroclus gets killed.

And there's consequences to playing the wounded fawn.

So he has to go back out in the arena and he kills Hector and he's going to get so angry that he's going to desecrate the body.

But then what does that do?

When it just makes Priam and Andromache and all these noble Trojans, what's the purpose of mutilating a corpse?

Because Hector.

did that to Patroclus.

So there's a learning and there's an evolutionary idea and morality and all of this.

So you read these canonical texts, you have these reference reference for the rest of your life, you combine that with the inductive method, and then you unleash these people into society and they're capable of being supposedly better plumbers, better truck drivers.

Even if you, you know, you don't need a BA, you can do it online.

And that's why I have a lot of confidence in this new online instruction.

And, you know, during the 50s, it was that.

post-war idealism.

So everybody were out where we lived in the country.

There was this guy called the Great Books Peddler.

He was some like

failed high school teacher.

He's wonderful.

He came in and said, Mr.

and Mrs.

Hansen, do you want your children to be enlightened and liberally educated?

I go, what the?

Well, here, don't worry, we have something called the World Book Series for $4 a month.

Your children can be scholars at home and then they can gravitate to the great books of the Western world.

And here they are.

And for your young ones, the beginners, there's something called, what was it called?

Child craft book?

It was a red version.

Childcraft, I don't know what it was, but it was a watered-down world book.

And then they said, and you know, although I don't sell the Encyclopedia of Batonhau, it would be good for you to have reference at a little more exception.

And my parents ended up, I remember my dad would say, hmm, $4 here, $3 here.

We had our whole house was full of these self-improvement series.

They were wonderful.

And so that's what I would read them all the time.

Finally, my dad said,

Are you ever going to have a cigarette?

Are you ever going to have a drink?

Are you ever going to go out and play sports?

Be a normal kid?

Because I've worked you to death.

And when you work, you don't have a normal life.

You got to date.

You got to enjoy life.

You're just a sour puss reading with your head in those books.

Come on, your brother doesn't do that.

He's normal.

He's successful.

He was really trying to think.

I remember when he goes, Why did I buy all these books?

So it was a good it was a that was what liberal education was supposed to be and look what we did with it we created this self-educated and formally educated wonderful centers of learning we had this conversation 50 years ago harvard yale princeton they'd still had i mean they had a lot of problems and when the civil rights movement came the same idea was that we were and i was imbued with it because when i started at cal state fresno in 1984 i was this missionary zeal i looked at my students i said they're 50 Mexican-American.

They're 20% children of the Oklahoma, as I said, diaspora.

There's a lot of Southeast Asians from Cambodia.

This is wonderful.

These guys are, there's going to be so much innate talent here, and there has been so little opportunity for exposure.

I'm going to do this.

And I did that for 20 years and tried to give everybody a liberal inductive education.

And I don't know if it failed or not.

The program is still there.

Yeah, you really built a huge program there.

That was a very successful program.

I don't know.

I paid a familial price, you know, getting up at six in the morning and coming home at eight at night.

And, you know, your head trying to publish when you're teaching some years five classes a semester, 10 a year and different, or five different preps.

Yeah.

And anyway, but that was the idea.

And it's really sad that we have a deductive education now.

It's not Enlightenment.

It's not Renaissance.

You go to a Stanford, Princeton, Harvard, Yale, and when you take your general education, you start with the idea, we're going to prove that the United States is racist in this class.

We're going to tell you that Chinese civilization is better than Western civilization.

And we're going to do this because you've been brainwashed.

Well, they weren't brainwashed.

If you read Will Durant or all these popular accounts, they're very...

fair in assessing Indian or Chinese contributions to the West.

They're Westerners, so they concentrate on the West, but they're not exclusionary.

That's a myth that the left has created.

In any case, it's died now.

So there is no free speech in the university.

There is no inductive education.

A student knows that they cannot say certain things.

They can't say that they identify with a particular character if it's politically incorrect.

And they don't have a lot of reference because they take these courses with a DASH studies.

environmental studies, Asian American studies, Black studies, women's studies, leisure studies, peace studies.

And then they can't study certain things either.

Like you're not going to, I mean, how many colleges or universities have a history of warfare?

None, none.

I had two, even in high school, I mean, I had two wonderful teachers, a Mr.

Hodges that was a history teacher, and a Mrs.

Hearn, but it's a literature, and poor agrarian Selma.

I remember Mrs.

Hearn said, we're going to read.

the great books, even had this series of great books we read.

We read Chekhov, we read the Aeneid, We read Dickens.

And then we would get these words.

And she said, well, how are you going to understand that?

You need to get your little vocabulary list.

So you'd write all the words you didn't know.

And then I said to her, Well, I have to keep flipping.

She goes, Well, then you've got to get index cards and make little vocabulary cards to build your vocabulary.

And then she would correct her grammar, diagram sentences.

And then Mr.

Hodges was always, we will do no multiple choice.

I think multiple choice actually.

I've never given a multiple choice test in my entire life.

I always looked down on it.

I was snobby.

I said, they're just robotic.

You should put them through a scantron.

I now regret that because I realize that you can BS in these modern essays more than you can on a

very fluent, brilliant rhetorician and say nothing and be more impressive.

And you get on a multiple choice.

I really recognized that when I had my son was at Cal State Fresmo and he took these history classes and they were, gosh, they were taught by my colleagues.

I'm not in the, I was in the foreign language, but they were scantron.

I thought I'd always made fun of them, but they had things like the Constitution was ratified in 1776, 1783,

1787, 88.

And then you had to know something, you know what I mean?

And

Lincoln's cabinet was da, da, da, no, and they gave names, whereas you write an essay, which is important to hone those skills.

But they got a wonderful education doing that.

He did.

And then I had two children that went to the University of California and they did essay work at the so-called higher level, but it wasn't higher level.

I think the Cal State Fresno history program that my son took was comparable to the UC campuses that my two daughters went to.

Yeah.

Well, if you run into anybody from Europe, you usually find that they have, I think it's just simply better writing because I think in their K to 12, whatever they call it, but their K to 12, they really make them do things like diagram sentences.

And they're very, you know, going to teach them grammar.

And I don't think in our K to 12, they teach them grammar.

No, they don't.

We diagram sentences.

I had Mrs.

Wilson, my eighth grade English teacher, she would diagram a sentence.

And she was, I think about her now, she was kind of a bulldog looking person.

And students didn't like her because she bit you almost if you were incorrect.

You didn't, your subject and verb didn't agree, but she gave us education, which brings up a final

summation is that the point of this was Socratic.

Now, I don't mean Socratic in the sense of a dialogue back and forth.

Oh, that happened, but a psych that I am smart because I know what I don't know.

And it was the idea that you're introducing people to this wide world of knowledge.

And all you're doing is giving them the skills, the vocabulary skills, the inductive methodology, as I said, the reference, and then they can function in society.

But if they want to satiate their curiosities, they now have the tools of how to go to a library, how to read, how to interpret a text, how to

understand what's important in a history, how to say to themselves, this is really important to have a critical relationship with the author.

So when you read Herodotus or you read Thucydides or you read Xenophon, you just don't read it.

You say, this author lived in a particular time, has a particular emphasis.

And why is he mentioning the Melian dialogues?

But he doesn't mention the Megarian decree.

So you become interactive with the author and you can assess them on merocratic or at least disinterested points rather than just emotion.

And that's very important.

And out of that comes you're humble because you say, oh my god, I've read one play of Aristophanes in Greek, but there's 11 of those suckers.

Or wow, I've read three Euripidean plays, but my God, there's 19 of them.

Or I've read the first book of Gibbon's history, but it goes all the way into the Byzantine period in 1453.

So contrast that today with these people know nothing, these students.

All they're taught about is who is a victim and who's a victimizer and who in the past was a bad person, how you can condemn them, shout them out, and all of these contemporary issues that have no basis in fundamental knowledge.

If they want to study transgenderism, read the satiric con.

Look at the etymology of transvestin.

What does it mean in Latin?

And they don't, and because they don't, they're arrogant.

So arrogant is the twin of ignorance.

Arrogance is.

If you are not ignorant, you're humble.

If you're ignorant, you are arrogant.

When you look at those pictures of those students that, was it Christakis, the Yale professor, they got around her and they screamed and yelled at her about five years ago during Halloween over a costume?

Oh, yeah.

Or they went into the Yale Law School and shouted down a speaker.

Or you see the people at Middlebury that they are the most arrogant,

ignorant, self-righteous, but sadly limited people.

And that's because they're not educated.

And this is the great crime of higher education.

They take a quarter million dollars from families they put families in debt and then when they get that bachelor's degree it is no certification or even suggestion that that person has reference to the learned world or is inductive it's just the opposite that's why all of you people out there that are not in college I'm not encouraging you not to go to college and you're self-motivated and you're listening to internet lectures and you're enrolling for online classes and you're just reading and you're consulting with people, even if you have to pay for tutors.

That is something that is our vocational training, you're learning these skills.

Don't ever be intimidated by these modern universities.

They're not universities anymore at all.

They're just part of the progressive agenda and they're political.

They're sort of like communist universities in the 1930s or maybe national socialist universities in the late 1930s.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, thank you, Victor, very much.

I think we're going to call it a day here.

Shut Victor up.

No, not at all.

That was a good

call to arms for education.

I liked it.

Okay, everybody.

Pick up the text of the Bacchae or the Antigone and see what you think.

All right.

Thank you very much.

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

Bye, everybody.