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Welcome to the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

This is the Saturday edition where we do news and a little bit of history.

We are going to look at a bevy of things things today.

We've got the difference between Latin and Greek on the agenda, aircraft carriers, the invasion of Russia, and perhaps a little bit more, but at least we'll try to get through those things.

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Welcome back.

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

He's available at his website, victorhanson.com, and you can subscribe either to a free subscription or to a paid subscription for his ultra articles as well, which amount to about 2,400 to 4,000 words a week.

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Victor, what's on the top of your mind today?

What's on the top of my mind?

Yeah, the news.

I mean, maybe any thoughts on the Ukraine, Michael?

Yeah, I wrote something.

I think Ukraine is winning.

And in the sense that they're holding out every day, they hold out.

The financial situation with sanctions gets worse for Russia.

And they have created a new modality that with these shoulder-fired javelins, which I think now are in plenitude up to the many thousands, and with these surface-to-air missiles,

they can sort of bypass, because they're not an offensive, they're not an offensive army in a sense.

They're not going into Russia.

So they're a defensive system and they can destroy with you know a two hundred thousand dollar investment in three men they can destroy a tank that's a couple of million dollars or more with five men and they're been very good at they're getting up to near 100 tanks wow and russia now according to some reports has committed not just the 200 000 that we're mustering but it's drawing people from all over from western russia northern russia to send them in.

And I don't think they can win.

The only thing I'm a little worried about is, and I said this before, I don't see the advantage of a no-fly zone because Russian planes will still be able to shoot missiles from Belarus or from Russian airspace.

I don't see the advantage even of

bringing them MiGs and MiGs will be somewhat new to the Ukrainian pilots.

They still have, I guess, they have 30 or 40 of their own MiGs.

And I just think it's just another excuse for Putin to do something.

And I don't think they need it right now.

I don't think we need to send them warthogs.

I don't think we need to assassinate them.

All of these are, they sound good and sound bites, but the point is keep the pressure on, keep the sanctions on, alienate Russia from its allies

and pour in the stingers, the javelins, the food.

the military and humanitarian and medical aid and let the Ukrainians win.

And I think they're going to win.

A couple of final thoughts.

You know, I don't quite get this demonization of all Russians.

I know that Putin is probably popular, but what does that mean in Russia?

That if you protest, you're going to go to jail.

If you say something, you can be killed.

If you're a dissonant politician, you will be killed or imprisoned.

Polls are conducted by the state.

But this idea we're canceling ballets or symphonies or we're going through everybody's past, it's kind of like World War I, when I think Nebraska or a couple of states banned the teaching of Germany, or we put Japanese in detention camps in California and some other western states.

We did the same thing with Italians.

I don't get it.

So, and then the other thing is I don't get the left

suddenly creating this idea of treasonous, you know, these women on the view keep calling about putting people in jail for their opinions, or Tucker Carlson should be

detained, or I mean, yet this is a free country.

And when people said that they were wanting to go down to Cuba, a country that housed Soviet missiles pointing at us, I don't think any of us in the traditional side said, let's put them in jail.

Or when people during Vietnam, Jane Fonda went over there and sat in a North Korean air battery.

So I don't think that that's a wise thing.

So keep the pressure on.

No need to give Putin a reason to act a little.

He's a wounded tiger.

Wounded tigers are dangerous as they die.

He's bleeding.

Don't give him an excuse.

Keep hitting this eggshell with hammers on every side and we'll win.

Yeah.

And you know, my impression of the war in general, as well as or things I've been thinking about, is the Ukrainians are turning out to be much more dogged than was expected.

I mean, we didn't have any sense of a strong military response and yet these Ukrainians are just like

mountain fighters.

Yeah, it's sad.

They're like Finns in 1939 or the Russians in Yugoslavia.

I know we had this poll because we thought, well, we'll see if Americans are going to be like Ukrainians.

They may ask Americans and they identified by age and party.

And so I think it was 60-something percent, 65% Republicans said they would fight for the country if they were invaded.

I think it was like 30 or 45.

And the youth thing was a Democratic left-wing Antifa type stereotype.

No way are they going to fight for anybody but themselves.

And that means they would run to Canada.

So that was important.

I think the weird thing is, I think it would be provocative to put them in NATO.

But if in theory you could, you would think that they would be the better NATO fighters than the NATO people we have.

Maybe you could trade them for the Belgians or somebody.

Anyway.

Yeah.

All right.

So let's turn to the agenda today.

I know that your specialty, of course, is the Greek language.

And then obviously you were also trained in Latin.

And I think some of our viewers and our listeners and I also would like to hear you on the difference between the Greek and Latin languages.

There's a lot of misconceptions.

Most people learn Latin and classics.

And, you know, it was sort of an elitist profession at one time from prep schools.

I never had any Latin.

They didn't offer it in my rural high school.

So when I went to University of California, Santa Cruz, I really wanted wanted to take it, but it was too late.

There was a sequence.

So in the summer of 1972, I went to Yale for their Intensive Language Institute and took Greek.

I think it was 10 weeks.

I had a wonderful teacher, John Madden.

And then I came back and took Latin.

And then I had advanced placement.

So I had a very narrow education.

All I took for the next three years as an undergraduate were Greek and Latin language.

And I went to Greece one year for my junior year.

And then when I was in graduate school, the program I was in at Stanford was not archaeological or historical or literary.

It was philological.

That just a fancy word for saying you studied Latin and Greek.

And when you looked at the ancient world, you did it only through Greek and Latin texts.

You had courses in composition, how to write in Latin and Greek, and PhD exams were in grammar or philology.

So it was a very narrow education.

As I think I've said before, I had a member of my family said, very impressive, Victor, like a dog that can dance on two legs.

But what's the purpose?

And I think that was from Samuel Johnson.

But what I'm getting at is there's a lot of misconceptions that Latin is the easy language and Greek is the difficult.

But maybe because I learned Greek earlier and probably better,

I came up with the opposite impression.

Thing to remember about the languages, the Greek vocabulary is huge.

I don't know what the exact number in Liddell and Scott, the classical lexicon is, but it's got to be up to about 170,000, 200,000 words, comparable to English.

And Greek literature is a living language.

So it goes through the classical period to Byzantium and all the way into the modern period, Katharepes of Greek, and De Monichi.

But my point is that the thesaurus of the Greek languages, when I was using it as a professor, it was 50 or 60 million words of written Greek.

And now I think they've got through the Byzantine period, it's about 90.

Latin is much smaller.

I think the Oxford Latin Dictionary or Lewis in short is probably 80,000 entries, much smaller vocabulary.

Now, that sounds everybody's going to say, well, that's good.

Well, it just depends on whether you have one word like dukes, leader, that can mean leader, general, statesman, or you have a number of words in Greek that can mean the same thing.

And the beauty of Greek is that each word in the dictionary has only one or two meanings, not four or five, and they have their cognate.

So if you take general, stratagos,

camp, military camp, stratopadon, army, stradia,

soldier, stradiotes, and you go do that with Latin.

It's general, dukes, soldier, miles, castrum, camp.

You see what I'm getting at?

There's no etymological commonality, so they're very hard, much more difficult to memorize.

Greek gives you a second chance.

It has an article.

So if you don't know, there are some feminine second declension nouns or masculine first declension nouns, but you have an article.

So you can say, oh, wow, polites looks feminine, but you say, ho, polites, the citizen, wherein Latin has no articles whatsoever.

And some people will say, well, you see where I'm getting at?

It's where they want a complex, very exact language that has less ambiguity, but more to memorize, versus an easier, smaller language that doesn't have these distinctions, but it tends to be more confusing.

It takes more skill, I think, to be a great Latin scholar.

Same thing with accents.

So when you look at a Latin word, you really don't know where, when you're first coming into Latin, how to pronounce it.

Greek gives you that circumflex and grab and acute accent.

And I know it's hard to memorize them and all that, but once you have the accent, same thing with long and short vowels.

There's an A and an I and an E, but in Greek, there's an alpha and iota, but there's two what we would call O's, omega and omicron, and then we have eta and epsilon.

So you know whether it's E or E or O or A,

and that helps a lot.

Again, the same idea.

Just very quickly then, the grammar.

It's very similar in the sense that it's what we call the inflected language, that words change their meanings depending on how they're used in a sentence.

That's all you have to remember, a noun or an adjective, if it's the the nominative or what we call the subject in english or the genitive or what we call the possessive or the indirect object or the dative or the accusative or the direct object it will change its name and it will an adjective will change its spelling on the basis of its case or how it's used grammatically whether it's singular or plural whether it's masculine neuter that should be a good non-binary word or feminine and latin has an extra case the ablative, which is really handy if it's an adverbial case.

But again, Greek is a little bit better because it doesn't have an adverbial case.

So it uses the article with the dative, for example, or genitive to show an adverbial relation.

Another thing I think is really neat about Greek is when you talk about moods, you're really talking about commands or the imperative mood or the subjunctive mood, you know, things that are not fact or orders or commands.

But in Greek, you have the optative mood.

And what that means is, well, the wishing mood, oh, would that be true or something?

But when you go into past time, there's not a sequence of tenses.

You don't have to memorize all these different tenses as you do in Latin.

But in Greek, you just either use a subjunctive.

He said

that he would go, optative would go.

He says that he will go.

Subjunctive, depending on the tense of the main verb.

And then the secondary verb reflects that.

We call it a sequence of mood.

I could go on and on there's articular infinitive versus the gerund for prior but the key to remember is the difference in the two languages are latin much smaller vocabulary no article no accent no long and short different spellings a english uh alphabet more or less all basically and greek has a slightly different a few letters are very different than English and Latin.

And it just depends on

if you have the time to learn Greek.

And once you learn it, it is so specific and exacting that there's less ambiguity.

The word order, for example, resembles English, subject, verb, predicate.

It's not like Latin, where you can have the direct object and then the verb and then even the noun last.

So it's much easier word order.

But if when you first study it, you just see Latin.

Oh, this looks like English.

Oh, there's not a lot of vocabulary.

Oh, there's no article.

There's no accent.

It's easier.

But But in fact, boy, if you want to read some difficult Latin, try reading Statius or the poet Statius or the satirist Juvenal or even Tacitus.

This elliptical style is very hard.

You can just zoom right through Caesar or Cicero or probably Livy too.

But when you go into Greek, The only really difficult Greek that I find are the odes of Pindar, some of the longer speeches of Thucydides, like the funeral oration,

and there's some incomprehensible choruses in Aeschylus' plays but otherwise Euripides you can read that like English once you get going in Greek or Lysias or Xenophon or Herodotus and once you understand the Ionic dialect Homer the final thing I'll say is that Greek is because it's a world language it was a globalist language in a way that Latin it's a much older language it has Mycenaean roots and even prior to that and it's an Indo-European language but to the degree that Latin reflects Greek, it's not because they have a common subgroup apparent, it is that Greek greater influence filtered through Western Greece into Italy.

But it's a universal language, it's older, much more literature.

That's what I'm getting at.

It's, you read the New Testament, I think it's common to say if you know three or four years of Greek, you can go through, say, the Gospel of John like English.

So what I wanted to ask is the english language i know that they say shakespeare used and had a vocabulary of over 800 000 that sounds small in comparison to what you're talking about 800 000 are you sure yeah that's what at least i found in one source oh well i think i always

well i always thought the oed was about 200 000 words and maybe

that's a huge vocabulary and greek was about 180 but i think you're probably including all these archaic words that have gone out of use.

Oh, well, yeah.

They always told us when we were students, when you have 500 to a thousand words vocabulary, you can start to read with a dictionary or you can speak.

And I think they've done linguistic tests or philological tests.

And most people that are non-native speakers,

they can get by with a thousand words.

And remember, there's a difference between your active recall and your passive.

So if I say to you, what's the word for friend in greeks

you have to produce philos but if you see philos on the page you say oh i know that that's friend so your active vocabulary and what you have to produce when you're speaking has to be bigger than your passive vocabulary that when you're reading by yourself and you see all these words and when you see them in context your mind turns on says, I know that word.

But when I ask you to reproduce it in the abstract, that's why they always used to teach.

I think it was very valuable to write in Greek.

I had a wonderful professor, Lionel Pearson and Anthony Robich, all these Europeans, and they would, in British, and they would say, we'd come in and he would say, oh, we have a glorious sunset.

Oh, students, the walls are beautifully white today and glittering.

Write that in Greek.

And then once in a while, he would give us a passage.

He wouldn't tell us.

He'd say, oh, they marched to battle and they defeated the enemy in a terrible den or something.

And we would try to remember how to put those words with mixed success.

And we would write it.

Then he would give us, that was an actual English translation from, say, a passage in Xenophon or something.

Then he would give us a Xenophone.

We could read it easily, but to write it.

And that really developed a bigger vocabulary and it'll let you understand how the Greek mind works.

And now we've gotten rid of that entire method of instruction.

So it used to be a very important component.

And when I was teaching at Cal State, even though I only undergraduates, many from what we would call marginalized people from dire circumstances, I really taught Latin composition.

And to some students that were advanced Greek compositions, I can tell you, we were turning out some great Latin and Greek scholars that did very well in graduate school and PhDs.

And I think one of the keys to that is we stress composition through Sortner and myself.

And I think that composition worked well for when you wrote the end of Sparta, your novel, where you could.

I tried to do that, yeah.

I tried to write everything in Greek and then translate it into.

And when somebody said, well, how do you know how they spoke in Greek?

Well, I could go through things like Alcophon's letters or Aristophanes' exchanges or some of the dialogue in Euripides that emulates what the poet or the playwright thought was language of the day, because most Greek, as in Latin, is a little bit more elevated.

All right.

Satyricon's a big, that's an exception.

It's got colloquial Latin in the dialogues at least.

Yeah.

All right.

Well, let's take a moment for some messages and then we'll be right back to talk about aircraft carriers.

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Welcome back, Victor.

Our next subject today, I know that it's kind of not in a theme at all, but we wanted to talk a little bit about the significance of aircraft carriers in World War II and even all the way up to today, our current aircraft carriers.

They seem to be the central part of a military to some extent in the modern age.

What are your thoughts on?

Well, they're very controversial.

And there's, I mean, they've only been around, I think the British created the first one around, I don't know, 1912 and R.

Langley was the first.

It was sunk, but 1917.

So just consider them a hundred year or a one century phenomenon.

There was nothing before them.

I don't know if they're going to continue as they are.

A lot of naval historians are pounding the table to get rid of them for the variety.

The reasons are that they got bigger and bigger and bigger.

And that Nimetz class

is

1,100 feet long and 105,000 tons of displacement.

They're huge.

And this new Gerald Ford, I think, is up to, it's got cost overrun because of the catapult system, which it's replacing.

But I mean, my God, it's up to 13 or 14 billion and so a lot of people in the navies say well why don't we just build small ones and get 12 or 13 of them and displace them given chinese ability to send anti-aircraft carrier rockets right above the ocean that can pierce holes in their armored hulls and that's kind of going

yeah sounds like a good idea actually well it goes back to world war ii when japan had the biggest aircraft carrier force in the world.

And in the Pacific, at Pearl Harbor, we really only had the Lexington and the Saratoga and the Hornet and the Enterprise.

And we got the WASP came

and they were all sunk with the exception of the Enterprise.

And we were then got the Essex class.

I think there were 27 of them that came in.

They were beautiful, wonderful, best carriers in the world all the way through the Korean War.

But my point is, to catch up quickly, they started building what they call light carriers.

So a fleet carrier in World war ii was 28 to 38 000 tons the ones that were built on battle cruiser hulls in the 20s and 30s but even that they thought took too long so they started coming out with these things called escort carriers they were like i don't know like a light cruiser hull and they would seven eight thousand tons and they would put 20 helcot fighters or 15 and they just spread them all they built over 145 of them they were very uncomfortable supposedly they pitched but that's the idea I think we're getting back to is that, you know, you've got to get these huge carriers and they have to have these reinforced hulls because the planes are getting so big and heavy in the ordinance.

So where a carrier in World War II that was 25,000 tons could carry 100 planes, our big Jerry Ford or Carl Vinson or Ron Wiggin may only have 70 to 80 planes.

So you're getting fewer planes because they're so heavy and they need a bigger platform and then they're so vulnerable.

So, you know, there's a crisis in Taiwan.

We send in the Stennis or the new Gerald Ford and they sit out there and then say at two o'clock in the morning, a Chinese battery sends 5,000 small eight-foot-long missiles all skim across.

How can they stop that?

And if they take that thing out, that's 14 billion, 3,000 people.

And so I think what we're getting to is drone carriers or drone ships, spread out your assets cheaper, more,

rather than invest so much capital and labor in such expensive but small number of craft and such small number of ships.

But it's, you know, the thing about it is I think Kissinger and others thought they were great diplomatic tools.

So Americans are negotiating with the Philippines over a base or they're in tense negotiations with North Korea.

And suddenly this big mammoth pulls in and everybody sees it.

You know, it's got all these planes and they're all on patrol and they've got a carrier escort group and everybody, oh my God, I don't, this is, so it's kind of a shock and all diplomatically.

They're like the battleship.

It was very hard to give up the battleship, the battleship lobby, because they were so beautiful and impressive.

And so there are values for carriers other than military.

They're psychological weapons as well.

And, you know, I had a whole chapter on them in Second World Wars about the main carrier battles.

The thing about it is we lost four of them by the end of 1942, and then we never lost another one.

We had the Benjamin Franklin was really hurt badly at Okinawa, but we never lost one again.

And finally, we were up to, I don't know what it was.

It was like 40 fleet carriers, 100 something

escort, eight or nine light carriers.

It was just a huge number of carriers.

I kind of explained it in the book how they used frontline fighters for the Hellcats and then the Wildcats.

What do you do with them?

You put them on the light carriers.

You have the Dauntless dive bombers that are replaced by the Helldivers.

You put them on.

So they were using every asset we had as a plane became less effective.

We didn't just junk it.

We put it on light carriers.

It was a brilliant way of doing it.

And I don't know if that age is coming to a halt, but boy, if we have two big American carriers that went into the Black Sea right now, I'd be very scared.

That's a very small sea for such huge ships.

Just finished in 2003, when I was teaching at the Naval Academy, Admiral Henderson, a wonderful man, asked me, they called him Harve Henderson.

He went to Harvard and he wrote and said, why don't you come out on the

USS John F.

Kennedy?

It was the last fossil fuel carrier.

All of them are nuclear.

We have 11 of them now, huge, 11.

And at that time, they were decommissioning the next year, the Kennedy, and they had certain things about it that you'd never be able to do.

They had a beautiful captain's room made of teak, as I remember, and that would be flammable today.

So I went out there for the trials.

And the idea was that if you were going to qualify, you had to, off the Georgia coast, land and you try to hit.

the middle cable, not the first, not the third.

I'm not kind of getting it wrong, but I stayed up all night in the room talking to the pirates and watching them.

And some people, one or two didn't make it in a sense, they could not hit that cable.

One of them even had to go into the catcher's mid, another one had to go to Georgia.

But most of them were just, almost all of them were flawless.

And I got a real great respect.

And in the morning, we all had to kind of hold hands, so to speak, and walk the entire deck.

It's like a football field to find if there was, you know, debris, glass, metal, so that it wouldn't fly up when the plane took off.

You really get a shock when you land, when you hit that cable.

And when I went away, they gave me a broken tail hook.

I think I still have it on my fireplace, but they were wonderful people.

That was a really good experience.

Yeah, the more you're talking, the more I'm thinking, well, maybe a whole bunch of different ships is not a good idea because you need to transport a load of aircraft somewhere in the world.

You're going to get much more on a big carrier.

But remember,

you got to remember that the Navy guys are very, very smart.

So that's a good point you made, Sammy.

So they said, well,

we have the answer for you.

We have nine transport carriers and they are 40,000.

They're bigger than most fleet carriers of every other country.

And I think we have nine.

We have a couple of these two new America class.

And they're used by the Marines a lot.

So they transport four or five thousand Marines they can and they have vertical takeoff and landing.

so they don't need a catapult or a tail hook to land most countries in the world i think the only people that do it are the french and maybe they don't quite do it like we are what i mean by do it is is to catapult a plane off with a you know this steam pusher that pushes it off at enormous speed and then when you fly in the hook hits the cable and yanks it back most of them have vertical takeoff or they have those banana ramps you know they go woo go up.

But the problem with that is you use so much fuel taking off and landing by, you know, your engines going up.

And ours are so much more efficient, but they're very hard.

They're very hard to train people how to use it.

And so that was the British invented it and we kind of took it over and mastered that art.

Nobody else can do it.

The British now are building, I think that Queen Elizabeth and the Prince of Wales, I think they're 70 or 80,000, 70,000.

They're really big.

The British are very proud of them.

And they're really a great asset to the West.

Yeah.

So how do our either allied or not so friendly countries, how do they compare an aircraft carrying out the corrections?

Oh, they're just, it's not even close.

Yeah, I think China's got two under construction, maybe one.

I think they bought that old Russian.

The Russians have two, but they break down all the time.

And that design where you take off and then as you go down, the

deck curves up.

so it's kind of slows your speed and sends you straight up it's not as efficient as what we're doing yeah and you know we have now with the british with these two new carriers and the goal i think there's another french carrier i think macron's been bragging he's going to make four or five someday but the west is pretty well there's all those every year they make those weird pictures from the air where they show the best British carrier, the best couple of Americans and the best French.

It's kind of like this is the muscles of the West.

And it looks pretty impressive when you think that a carrier group has five or six nuclear submarines on the flanks.

It's got frigates.

It's got a huge thing.

The biggest problem they have is, boy, you get into a lake like the Mediterranean and it's hard to turn that whole thing around and get, you know, in with strategically safe spaces on your flank.

Yeah.

Anyway, it's something that I,

yeah, it's, we'll see what happens in the years to come, whether drones or cheap missiles.

I mean, that paradigm we're seeing now of a man with a javelin taking out a complex system.

I hope that doesn't apply to a ship.

Can you can imagine that 20 guys could be on the shore hiding in rocks or something?

They see the Gerald Ford come in and they shoot a shore-to-ship shoulder-fired missile at night.

and hit the right place under the waterline or something.

My, that could take out $11 billion.

So I'm sure we're worried about this.

Sounds like we should be, but it also sounds like the aircraft carrier is a testament to American ingenuity just the same.

So I like that part.

It is.

I'm sure we have, we have a lot of, when you go on those carriers, they have a lot of defenses that can spot things.

Let's then turn to the topic of the invasion of Russia, which has historically been a very difficult thing.

As many people who have only touched on history know, the Mongols and the French attempt to do it, and obviously the Germans in World War II.

And maybe you know of some other efforts to well, I only do, Sammy, because in our age of identity politics, as you know,

I have turned into an ethnic chauvinist.

I'm a tribalist now, and I want to re-emphasize my Swedish roots.

And so I've always started with the invasion, the modern invasions of the great Charles XII,

who defeated Peter the Great and went into Russia in 1778.

And the Swedes, of all people, there was such a thing, remember that, called the Swedish Empire.

And it was the Baltic area, Denmark, Norway, and they had defeated Russia.

And they had this megalomanic idea that they were going to go to Moscow, Swedes.

And they got pretty close.

The reason you know about this is if you read about Napoleon's invasion of 1812 in his memoirs, what was he reading?

He was reading accounts of Charles XII.

And at the Battle of Poltava is when it all fell apart and the poor Swedes were destroyed and they had to go.

I think Charles was, he had to go to the Turks for help.

And then he ended up, he got killed later.

He was a tragic figure.

He never married, had no kids, died in his 30s, but it was a disaster.

And it was a disaster.

This was the paradigm that I'm so windily trying to get to.

that man for man, the Swedish army was better.

And the problem is that when they got into Russia, there were no cobblestone roads, i.e., think of 1941.

And the weather was terrible.

Napoleon has this great thing in his memoirs, and people talked about it, that you see birds die and they would just freeze and fall off as they were marching.

And they'd never seen that before, even in the harsh winters in Europe.

And that happened in both Charles Charles and Napoleon's 100 years later, the invasion of 1812.

And then there was the distance and the weather and the scorched earth policies of Peter the Great, which was followed by Alexander I, when you retreat back into Mother Russia and you burn everything.

And then you get into that famous line of Army Group South in World War II.

where that colonel was saying,

no enemy ahead, no supplies behind.

And what he meant was, we're off on a wild goose chase to the Caspian Sea to get the oil, you know, Grozny, but we have no way of getting back because Russia's swallowing us up.

So that was a great invasion.

Of course, the famous one was

Napoleon's of 1812.

There's that famous chart that a French marshal military analyst, I think it was, and you see how it's calibrated by the size of the army versus the miles inside Russia versus the date.

And it looks like a cone.

And so when he finally gets to Moscow, that wonderful army of 650,000 is down to 300,000.

And he gets there in, what, September?

And it's a mild winter, but they burn the city and there's nothing there.

He's kind of trapped.

So he tries to take off back and then the winter really hits.

And by the time he gets back, it's, you know, that.

cavalry and it's just been decimated by the way it's down to about 120 destroyed the the army of France.

Remember that famous line of my men would not want their emperor to freeze, so off he went and left them.

Yeah, he was six days back to France.

I know the military obviously took much longer.

I know it swallowed and destroyed them.

So, what was he reading?

He was reading Charles XII.

So, then when Operation Barbarossa went June 22nd, 1941,

they went in there.

And what were the Germans reading?

Mannstein and the rest of them,

Van Lieb and Guadarian, they were reading Napoleon, who was reading Charles XII.

And they were said, not going to happen to me.

We know that there's going to be a bad winter.

We know there's bad roads.

We know the rails won't match up.

We know they'll do scorched earth.

And what did they do?

They did everything they knew they were going to do and it didn't matter.

And so,

you know, three weeks they gobble up half of four weeks are into Ukraine.

They have the greatest encirclement in the history of warfare outside of Kiev.

The Germans did.

And they swallowed up about 700,000 Red Army troops.

And then they were in celebration, the Germans were.

And then all of a sudden, you know, Gwuderian came down from Army Group Center to help them.

And he was on his way to take Moscow in August.

So everybody thought, this is great.

The Kiev pocket, pocket, we've won the war.

No, you didn't win the war.

There's more Russians.

There's 12 million Russians in the army.

And so then they go, by the time he scoots back and goes back 200 miles to Moscow, Moscow is being defended.

And he never did get to Moscow, that mythology of the German army, that they were at the first subway station, or when the sun was in the right place, they could see.

the glitter on the Kremlin spires, but that's as close as they got.

And then the weather was the worst weather in 50 years in the winter of 1941.

And then all sorts of things happened.

It was very clear that the Japanese were never going to invade after their own non-aggression pact of April 1941.

And so 200,000 of the Eastern Red Army troops, pretty good, came with winter wear.

They had white camouflage.

They took the Trans-Siberian Railroad.

They arrived in Moscow just in time.

Army Group Center sputtered.

They didn't, Army Group North surrounded but could not take Leningrad.

Army Group South got all the way with the Romanians, but they didn't take Sevastopol that summer.

And they paused.

And then the generals came to Hitler and said,

you don't have enough men to conquer Russia.

And he said, this is the greatest expedition in the history of warfare.

It's bigger than Xerxes.

I have four million.

I've got Hungarians.

I got Romanians.

I've got Finns.

I've got Italians, I've even got a division of the Spaniards.

This is huge.

And they said, it doesn't matter.

They've got this new thing called a T-34 tank.

Guadarian explained.

Hitler said, if I had known that, I wouldn't have invaded because it could blast any Mark II, III, and IV to pieces.

And so that was part of the impetus for the Tigers and the Panthers that came on that next year.

But my point is, why would you want to go into Russia?

And Napoleon had defeated Russians at various battles and thought that they, same thing with Charles XII.

The Germans had said to themselves, same thing, history, nobody listens to history.

They thought, you know what?

Those damn Ruskies, they were supposed to divide up Poland with us.

And we went into Poland.

They were late, as they always are, thinking we're going to do the rough stuff and they're going to get the spoils.

But then when they came into eastern Poland to divide the country, the Poles fought like they did against us, but they really did a lot better against the Russians.

So then the Russians go,

they go into Finland in November, and guess what?

They've got 500,000 of them as casualties, wounded, missing, and dead.

And the Finns did this.

And then people are saying, Hitler's saying, see, see, see, my generals don't know what you're talking about.

They read Napoleon, they read Charles XII.

This is a new army.

And the generals come back and say, no, no, no, no, no.

Blitzkrieg won't work in Russia.

The roads are bad.

The railroad gauges are different.

The summers are hot, but the winter comes on and then the fall rains.

And then you've already missed out Meinfuhr because of Yugoslavia problem.

We could have gone in in

mid-May and now we're going back to June 22nd.

And it's a long way to Moscow.

And then Hitler says, no, no, no.

In World War I, the Eastern Front was successful.

And we got, you know, 50 million Russians, a million square miles of territory.

And the generals say, no, no, that was a dumb thing to do because you had the Western Front almost cracked wide open and you had a half a million Germans still there on garrison duty, where if you take them all over, not just half of them, not just 500, but the other 500,000, you would have won the West.

So this argument went back and forth.

But in the end, this is very important for us to realize.

The Russian army, you do not want to go into Russia.

you will lose no matter what the state of the weapons are, what century you're in.

Weather weather never changes, the roads, the Russian mind never changes, the scorched earth never changes.

And there's a corollary to that, Sammy.

What's this?

And that is once a Russian soldier leaves Russian territory, he does not fight like he does on his home soil.

He does not do well in Poland.

And the Poles beat them in 1920 when they tried right after World War I to annex Poland.

The Poles defeated Russia.

The Finns would have defeated, they defeated against overwhelming odds and got a pretty good armistice by April of 1940.

And they didn't do that well when they helped to Spain, volunteers and equipment.

And

after the German army, everybody says, well, they defeated the German army.

The German army killed seven, seven Russians.

to every German they lost.

And everybody says, you know, well, they killed two out of three Germans in World War II.

They did.

But the Russian people and the army lost 20 million people.

They killed about 7 million Russian soldiers.

It was a bloodbath.

And the Germans, even with their hedgehogs and even they got to the point where a Mark IV tank that in every category was inferior to a T-34, it could blow up a T-34 just because of discipline.

greater rapid fire, more intelligence on the weakness of the T-34, etc.

So wonderful technology Russia can produce.

The Katushka rocket, the T-34 tank, wonderful fighting Elan on their home seal, but they are not good expeditionary forces.

And where are they now?

They're expeditionary forces inside Ukraine, which is no longer part of Russia.

They may know it.

They may have Russian speakers.

They may be familiar with the mindset of the Ukrainians because they're former Russians in a way, but they're outside of their territory and they're an expedition army and they're going to lose.

So Victor, let's go ahead and take a break to listen to a few messages and then come back and finish up on this topic.

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Victor, I wanted to ask, and I know you were kind of onto this, the Russians coming into Ukraine might learn something from all these things you've been telling us about the invasion of Russia, because it seems to me that was the second impression I've had from all of the news we've been seeing lately on this war in the Ukraine is that they seem to have been attacking that city Marikol

relentlessly and it seems like it's almost raised to the ground and yet I don't get the news maybe it'll change today but I don't hear the news coming out that it's been taken by the Russians it hasn't it hasn't and it's it's becoming a staling grad by that I mean Russians are pouring into it and the more that they raise it and use artillery strikes and their planes are not using, you know, 15,000 feet smart bombs or 10,000 feet.

They're going in low because they're afraid of missile strikes.

They get near the horizon.

So they're not anti-aircraft missiles.

And so they're not accurate.

So they're just carpet bombing or area bombing as the British called it.

And we know what happened when the Germans did that in Stalingrad.

All you do is create rubble.

All that means is that mechanized troops can't go anywhere when they try to invade.

All you do is create wonderful opportunities for ambushes by the defenders.

And then what do you do?

Who wants a pile of rubble?

And so when Putin gives these crazy talks on TV, that he's going in there to say it's,

you know, it's that caricature.

It was never said, but I mean, the caricature of Vietnam, we had to.

destroy the village to save it.

And that's what his mentality is.

And

boy, you know if they only have five or six hundred stingers one thing i notice when i look at any clip online or on the news or whatever you see some guy in jeans walking around with a 200 000 javelin launcher and a projectile for 80 000 in it so i'm just thinking to myself that place must be full of 10, 15,000 of those things.

And so what that means is you get those long columns, they're going to blow up the first tank and the last tank.

And then, what do you do?

You can't get out.

You're just going to sit there and get blown up.

And then you've got those Turkish drones coming over.

All these macabre stories are very tragic when you're reading about,

you know, either Russians have portable crematoria where they're burning their corpses, or guys are just walking away from their equipment, and then they're shot and killed, and dogs are eating their corpses.

Part of it's Ukrainian propaganda, but enough of it seems to be true to be really eerie and sad.

This is what I think Americans need to look at this.

I understand that Russia is, Putin is an evil person.

We're all on the Ukrainian side, and Zelensky

is doing a wonderful job, but those conscript kids that are 18 or 19, when you listen to them,

and those interrogations,

they had one the other day on a podcast that said, the meals they were issued were seven years old.

Oh my God.

And they were pickles canned pickles and they were potatoes and onions and

tasty yeah and he didn't he didn't really know i mean everybody says putin outfitted a new mobile army that's as good as ours it's tragic these kids don't know what they didn't even know they were going to go in there for two days i mean these are not those creepy Chechnyans that brag about how they're going to eat Ukrainians alive and those guys, you know, from Chechnya.

These are just conscripts.

And a lot of them have relatives in Ukraine because some of them are, you know, saying, you know, my uncle lives there.

And it's really sad what's happening.

So this is another reason why I'm absolutely baffled by the left, because the humanitarian left, if you go onto The View or you look at CNN's coverage, or you look at those crazy people on podcasts, they are bloodthirsty vampiries.

We're going to cancel that symphony.

We're going to kill those kids.

And I'm thinking, Putin is a monster, but it's tragic because Russia is a wonderful place.

It has great literature and symphonies and ballet.

And, you know, it suffered a great deal from its own communist,

murderous dictatorships.

And it suffered a great deal from the Nazis.

And you can make fun of Social Nitson, but what he was trying to say was that there was something about Russia and orthodoxy and the suffering of the people and its distance from cosmopolitan Western Europe that was valuable for civilization.

And there is.

And this idea that now the left of all people

have turned this in from a tragedy that we should approach it by Zelensky is a hero.

The Ukrainians are heroic.

We're going to flood that country with weapons.

They're going to win.

We're going to really punish Russia.

We're going to have to punish the Russian people by extension.

But we want it over with and we want a negotiation negotiation where maybe they get the Donbass and that eastern borderlands that are 80% Russian speakers.

Maybe you can have a plebiscite to find the future of Crimea international vote.

I think they would vote for Ukraine.

And then I guess Zelensky says, I'm not going to be a part of NATO.

And that's the agreement.

And then Putin goes back and says, oh, well, I got back the borderlands, i.e., and let him deal with the real truth that comes about what an idiot and murderer he was.

And then Ukraine can join the EU.

But this idea that, oh, it's going to be part of NATO and it's going to be westernized and we're going to put a dagger right at the heart of Moses.

This is crazy.

And it's so weird and a disconnect because we hear all these lectures from the left about the humanitarianism.

And then you see what they're doing.

in this reversal, this projection.

We are in this mess, Sammy, because nobody deterred Vladimir Putin.

He is weak.

He's conventionally weak.

We could have reminded him that he was weak.

We could have said to him, don't go in there because they have 10,000 javelins we sold them.

Don't go in there because we have calibrated sanctions.

For every 10,000 people you put on the border, we're going to sanction you further.

Or we're going to have

missile defense in Europe.

We didn't do any of that.

We impeased him.

Yeah, forgive me, but I don't think Putin is any cleverer than Hitler, if you ask

i think you would have deterred hitler i think that the french army the incredible bulwark of europe remember what was it called you're the french scholar the armée de terre that that stopped him at verdun

shall not pass churchill said we always have the french army it collapsed in six weeks but it was three million people strong with the reserves it could have won the chart tank we've talked about that was better than the mark iii and four IV.

But what I'm getting at is we dismantle missile defense.

Oh, Vladimir, will you please help us with the WMD in Syria?

Get back in the Middle East.

Oh, we can't sell javelins.

That would be provocative.

Oh, we're going to push a jacuzzi button.

Oh,

NATO, you shouldn't have to pay your 2%.

Oh, we're not going to

cut our...

This is Obama now.

Oh, the Biden family needs some money.

Go over to Ukraine.

So we screwed up and we didn't deter him.

And he thought we were weak when we weren't weak.

And then Afghanistan, right?

The sad thing about Afghanistan is not only did we greenlight North Korea, Iran, Putin to start launching missiles every week, but I don't think we're up to the $80 billion we left there to you.

I mean, we're going to spend 10 billion total and Europe's going to spend 10 billion, 20 billion.

That's a lot, but we left 80 billion in Afghanistan.

Maybe we could just go to the Afghans and say, look

we'll make a deal with you guys we left 80 billion of crap there we'll give you 40 billion and just ship it all to ukraine and that might be a good way of doing it okay well victor i think we're at the end of our time and i know people have not complained but marked well don't have an end of time let victor keep talking but i understand they don't want victor to keep talking he's going to get out of hand

But I understand today you have painters outside your house and they are being very quiet right now for you and they need to be using their

happy.

I have a 150-year-old house and at the age of 68, an idea came into my mind.

You have spent every dime you've had in this money pit.

And you've remodeled this ancient house and the interior and you did the foundation, but you did not listen to your father.

And he said, Victor, a house is five things.

You start with the foundation, the water system, the septic system, the wiring, and the roof.

And I have it beautiful inside, I think.

And I did the foundation, but the roof, a guy from DirecTV started bouncing like a trampoline.

And he said, you have no plywood.

And I went into the attic and half the old roof was in the attic.

That was 17 days clearing out the attics, rebuilding the joys, putting on plywood, putting the top top roof I could get.

And then I thought, I'm done.

And then they said, no, look at that wiring.

It's knob and tube wiring.

And all it's got, and there was a charred two by four.

I thought, okay, I'll get.

And then these guys, you can't find anybody to work, Sammy.

So they come and say, I will work.

And they're wonderful, but they have to pay them cash on weekends.

And they come to you and say, remember that beautiful bathroom you've apparently put in?

Or that looks really impressive, that bedroom, but your electrician 10, 20, 30 years ago took that Romex and he tapped into the maiden feeding line, which was knob and two.

So now you got to cut out the wall and find it.

And so that's been going on week six.

And then a gutter guy says, I can't do anything with the gutters because your molding and thing has to be completely replaced.

I'm not going to put a gutter on a slightly rotten.

So I'm in that.

And then I thought, okay,

I have five outbuildings you know my grandparents sheds I've rebuilt them I thought I was done with them no their roofs had to be all replaced and then somebody said to me one of the electricians well you have a barn that uses a studio and all of your buildings have wiring coming out from the house and your house you've got it all remodeled with these new things and guess what your brain that operates this flabby body is a knob and tube demented system.

So you got to fix that.

And then I'm fixing it.

And then they suggested, well, you have a 200 amp box.

That was really impressive, Victor, for the 1970s, but this is 2022.

So I think you need a three or 400 amp box.

And I thought, hmm,

but

I know I have all these weird little buildings and but there's nobody there.

So they're not using the electricity.

And they say, well, someday there will be when you sell it or you die or something.

So you've got to do it right now.

So now what I'm doing is I think that I've got to all these buildings not only have to be rewired, but I got to get double the circuits.

I got to get PGE to get twice the juice or I'm going to be in trouble.

So it's just endless.

And I thought I had a foundation.

So now I'm talking to the ghost of my dad every day.

I said, Dad, I did the entire roof.

I rebuilt it.

I got the joy.

It looks beautiful.

I sucked out all the dirty, quote-unquote, asbestos.

I don't think it was asbestos, but it looked that way.

And I got it all out.

I'm getting it all wired.

I will get it wired.

I've had half of it re-plumbed.

I just need a new couple of new delivery systems from the pump.

I have a brand new pump.

I have a new well.

I have solar panel.

And now I'm getting down.

I did the foundation.

So that's where I am.

I'm upbeat.

I'm halfway there to make

a house.

Halfway there.

And the Ukrainians are halfway there to win their war.

And thank you so much for all of your discussion of aircraft carriers and the invasion of Russia.

I don't know how we got off on so many topics.

We did.

It was a real potpourri today.

I loved it.

Somebody said to me, I know a writer is going to say to me, you know a little bit about everything, but nothing about one thing.

Not true.

Are you going to be a fox?

Yeah, are you going to be an Archilicus hedgehog?

You know, when he said the fox knows many things, the hedgehog one

and MAGA, one big one.

Yeah, and Isaiah Berlin wrote the paint.

Copied that, of course.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay.

All right.

Thanks, everybody.

Okay.

Bye.

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