Three Wayward Generals and Ancient Rome

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Hello, and welcome, visitors, to the Victor Davis Hamilton Show.

We hope that we have a great show for you today.

This will be airing on Christmas Eve, so I hope everybody is enjoying their Christmas holiday

or has enjoyed it.

Usually we do a news roundup, but we're going to kind of look at some of the things in the military this show, and then we're going to look back in history for a second because we always talk about how

the ending of the Roman Republic was important to us and that you know maybe there are some things that are similar when we see or perhaps if we're seeing the end of our own republic so i wanted to sort of explore the end of the republic of Rome, and then maybe we'll give Victor a little bit of time to talk about his books today as well.

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Welcome back, and I I would like to remind our listeners that Victor is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow in Classics and Military History at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marcia Buskie Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

How are you doing today, Victor?

Very well, Fammy, very well.

All right.

So, we're on our Christmas holidays and we're coming to the new year.

I hope things are going well for you and for our listeners.

We always have some very serious subjects to talk about and today is no less.

We have three generals who wrote in the Washington Post

that we need to worry about insurrection in 2024 and they seem to keep doing this.

I wanted to start with that and then maybe to look back at ancient Rome.

And I have a little quote from the article that was written for the Post.

I thought it was something very interesting that they said.

They write this, all service members take an oath to protect the U.S.

Constitution, but in a contested election with loyalties split, some might follow orders from the rightful commander-in-chief, while others might follow the Trumpian loser.

Arms might not be secure depending on who was overseeing them.

Under such a scenario, it is not outlandish to say a military breakdown could lead to civil war.

And I found this interesting because these guys are really the ones just talking about civil disorder and the potential for civil disorder and that they might be willing to start it.

It would almost seem like the way that they're writing this.

There were two guys that I in the Washington Post,

Anderson and

there were three

Anderson and Taguba.

Yeah, well, they're all pretty liberal guys, but this is highly ironic that for a variety of reasons.

One is the timing.

So we have talked on various VDH podcasts about this sudden, and I brought it up on Laura Ingram as well.

Suddenly, the last two weeks, the Democrats have these talking points and they're circulating all through their media constituents, the Pentagon, celebrities, that democracy is in danger in 2022.

It may fall in 2024, but Trump.

But in January 20th, they were saying it was resilient.

And it was wonderful.

And it got rid of the odious and atrocious Trump.

And the system worked.

And they were praising democracy.

And then suddenly, in August, Joe Biden, given Afghanistan, the open border, the inflation, the critical race theory, the price of gas,

he imploded.

And he was non-compost mental

on the airwaves.

And suddenly they looked at the Virginia elections and the New Jersey close elections and they looked at Joe Biden's polls and they looked at congressional retirements on the Democratic side and these races.

And they said, oh my God,

we're not just going to lose the midterms.

We're going to lose it like historically, like 1938 or 2010.

Therefore, democracy must be broken.

It doesn't work.

Trump ruined it.

And that tells us two things, Sammy.

One, they have no beliefs.

It's just about power.

When they're in power, democracy is wonderful.

When they're out of power or they're threatened with losing their power, then all of a sudden democracy doesn't work and people are trying to destroy it.

But they don't believe in democracy.

They only believe in democracy as a mechanism to perpetuate their power.

But when it turns on them, and it has now, they don't like it.

So they say to other people, they project that dislike onto other people.

Oh, we got to do something.

What would do something mean?

What?

No voter ID laws at all?

Nationalizing the ballots?

Getting, instead of 64% absentee ballots and early voting, getting 100%?

That's what they're after.

They're terrified.

The second thing is

they have no agenda.

Why don't they just run?

Why don't these people just say, we were the guys that let in 2 million illegal aliens?

We're going to let in 2 more million.

Or we got up to

6.9% inflation calibrated per annum.

We're going to get 12 because we like destroying capital and printing money and giving it to people who don't have it.

Or you like critical waste theory and you like the new segregation, we're going to even do better than that.

Or we think that Stephen Chu is right.

We want to get about $10 a gallon for gas.

Why don't they just be honest?

But they can't because nobody wants their agenda.

So then they're going to lose and now they blame the system.

And these are the people, remember, that are trying to pack the court, get rid of the filibuster, get rid of the nine, get rid of 233 years of the Electoral College, get rid of 50 state union, 54 states, 52 states.

These are insurrectionary revolutionaries.

And so that's a windy background to these three generals.

All they're doing is piggybacking on to what their talking points arrived in their email.

when they said, you know what, maybe you generals could get in on it and show us the military angle to this.

So that's one irony.

The second irony is who has been talking about insurrection and conspiracy and overthrowing the government?

It wasn't the right, it was the left.

Victor, that's quite a charge, you say, but here's some facts, data.

Why don't these three generals say the following?

We disapprove of a letter that John Nagel

and Lieutenant Colonel Yehrling wrote.

in August of 2020 when they call upon General Milley to intervene if Donald Trump said he won or the election was contested.

Number one, that's not the military's purview.

Number two, General Milley is an advisory.

He's not in the chain of command.

And then we had General Milley, who doesn't even know his job limitations.

In one instance, he called up his Chinese counterpart and made policy and said, you know what, if I believe Donald Trump poses an existential threat to you, I'm going to get on the phone and chip you off.

And then he called in his subordinates quite illegally and said, all orders about possible use of nuclear weapons go through meat.

No, they don't.

That's illegal.

Illegal.

And so when Nagel and et cetera, wrote to Milley, they were asking him to do something illegally that he did in other venues.

And that's not all.

Donald Trump was not president for two weeks.

I think it was 11 days when Rosa Brooks, a very distinguished jurist in the Obama Pentagon, wrote an article in foreign policy, and I beat that article to death.

But basically, she said, he is intolerable, and we got to get rid of him.

How do we know he's intolerable?

He's only been in office 11 days.

But she said, we can get the 25th Amendment and say he's crazy.

I don't hear her saying anything, by the way, now about Joe Biden.

You can't remember his name sometimes.

Doesn't even know who his Secretary of Defense is.

makes up words.

Okay.

And then she said, the second is impeachment.

That was very pressing of her they did two impeachments they did a second impeachment without the chief justice of the supreme court presiding and they tried to try and impeach president when he was a civilian which is probably unconstitutional and they had no special counsel no special report no witnesses and so she you know endorsed those two but then she said there could be a military coup where officers say we're not going to do what the president says This was in the climate that would soon transpire where we had anonymous who said in another New York Times op-ed, we are trying to obstruct the president of the United States.

We will not carry out his directives within the bureaucracy.

This is at the time when Admiral McRaven said we should get rid of this president, quote, the sooner the better.

Admiral McRaven, we have something called a schedule election.

That's what military officers do.

They swear an oath to the Constitution and the four-year changeover in power.

They don't use words like sooner the better.

Sooner the better.

And then we had Joe Biden right in the middle of a turmoil and the riots in the Capitol, where he said, well, we have four chairmen of the Joint Chiefs.

He was talking about Colin Powell, Richard Myers, and others.

And he said that they're going to go to the White House and get rid of Trump.

Well, they have no right to do that.

They're retired.

Then we have something called the Uniform Code of Military Justice that says that no officer and no retired officer shall disparage the commander in chief.

And that was written, of course, during the turmoil of the Korean War, when basically General MacArthur said that Harry Truman should not be president when he was.

Okay.

And how did they press that argument?

Our retired officer corps said the following about their current serving president.

These are four star admirals.

That he was, I'm quoting directly now, he was a liar.

He used Nazi-like tactics.

He was a Mussolini.

He was no different than the people who put Auschwitz cages from his practices on the border.

He was crazy.

He was just, and I could go on, but they violated every tenant of Article 88 of the Uniform Code.

Nothing happened.

I could go on, but what I'm getting at is when these three generals write this, they're not only doing it to enhance the democratic talking points, paranoia that they're going to lose.

So they want to, what do they want to do about this?

They want to drum up hysteria and they want to project their past insurrectionary ideas onto somebody else.

And then they want to tell everybody, basically, they want to tell everybody this.

You hate us because of the border.

Okay.

We screwed up with gas.

We accept that.

Yes, we inflated and the inflation is terrible.

Okay, you got a point.

And we humiliated the United States and Afghanistan.

True.

And China and Russia are on the move as a result.

Yes.

And we've divided the country by race.

In fact, we haven't done anything right.

However, however, we have two issues.

January 6th, we're going to beat that horse again.

And Donald J.

Trump, wherever he is.

So these three generals come out on queue, on spec, and say, Donald J.

Trump.

And January 6th.

It's an insurrection.

Biden may be, and the subtext is Biden may be horrible, but he's not an insurrectionary.

So that's what they're doing.

And the irony is that whether it was the retired officers disparaging a commander-in-chief, or whether it was a former Pentagon jurist calling for a coup if need be, that was okay,

or if you have two retired officers imagining that General Milley should intervene after an election, or General Milley should break the contract or the law that says that the chairman of the Joint Chief is limited as to an advisory role.

I could go on and we can even get into the Russian collusion hoax when the Democratic Party, i.e., Hillary Clinton, DNC, Perkins-Coey, Fusion GPS, hired a spy, not a very good one, a retired one and hadn't been to Russia in 12-something years, who concocted and made up a fake dossier and then used all of his contacts.

All of his contacts, whether it was Victoria Newland in the State Department, or Bruce Orr in the DOJ, or James Comey, who had him on the payroll as a contract advisor or whatever.

And they did everything from wipe cell phones clean to leak private memoranda with the president of the United States to forge documents to fake a FISA applicant.

And what was the purpose?

To destroy a political candidate and then to destroy a presidential transition and then to destroy a presidency.

That's a coup.

And who was knee-deep in it?

Military people.

Michael Hayden.

Michael Hayden said at one point, not just that General Michael Hayden, retired CIA director, said at one point that Trump was Auschwitz-like.

He retweeted a picture of Auschwitz and said, this is the Trump's policy at the border.

And then he said that Trump supporters that were unvaccinated should go to Afghanistan, not come back.

And James Clapper, I think he was a four-star general.

And what was he doing?

He was going on.

CNN every night and claiming that Donald Trump was quote unquote, quoting directly now, a Russian asset.

And then he was called into the House Intelligence Committee under oath to say, do you have information of those things you're telling the public?

Can we hear them?

We want you to state under oath that Donald Trump is a Russian asset.

And he didn't.

He didn't.

So he was just admittedly lying, just as he had when he lied under oath and said that the United States Agency, the National Security Agency, does not spy on American citizens.

And when he was caught lying, as we remember, we've talked in the past, he said, I gave the least untruthful sum up.

These three generals are writing in the Washington Post, which really is no longer a disinterested news agency at all.

It's just a megaphone of the Democratic Progressive Project.

But these three generals have been contacted by their liberal friends to be a force multiplier of these talking points because Biden and his agenda is unpopular and they're worried about they're going to get wiped out in the midterms.

And they only have two things things that can distract the American people: Trump and January 6th.

And in that op-ed, they combine both and try to suggest that Donald Trump is an existential threat unless we do something pathetic.

You know what?

I'll just finish with this.

Okay, I have a question, but also.

Let me just say, though, Sammy, what percent of the American people in a recent poll said they have no longer trust or confidence in the U.S.

military?

Take a guess.

The most esteemed, 45%.

45%.

Now, why is that?

It's because of three or four things.

One, they cannot barely be not the men in rank.

People admire, they adore, they honor the people who fought in Benghazi and Iraq.

And Hollywood's made a lot of money in telling stories of ordinary sergeants and corporals and privates.

No, no, no, it's not the enlisted men.

It's not the non-commissioned officers.

But the officer corps cannot find a strategic strategy that can win.

They've been put in some horrific places.

They have political guardrails that are not fair to the military.

They've been subject to abuse in the media.

But nevertheless, whether it's Libya, whether it's Iraq, whether it is Afghanistan, we don't have a General Sherman or a General Grant that we go through all these mediocrities and finally we find the guys that want to win.

We haven't had that.

So number one, the people have lost confidence in their ability to win a war.

Number two, they cannot deter China that's on the move or Russia that's on the move.

Number three, they're woke.

If you really believe that climate change and white supremacy dash white rage are the existential threats of the United States right now, you're absolutely unhinged.

And yet that's what our Secretary of Defense, General Austin, has said.

And that's what General Milley has said.

And so people say that these guys are woke, they're they're politicized, and they do it for careerist reasons to keep their job.

And number four, no sooner do they retire from the military at a very high rank and a very substantial retirement than they go right into

a defense contractor boardship or as a military procurement lobbyist, where they monetize their years of experience of procurement in the Pentagon.

And a cynic might say that that post-service billet is so lucrative and so cherished and so wanted that in their last years as four-stars that they predicate or they massage their public statements, whether it's about white rage or climate change or whatever it is to fit the corporate ethos.

So this whole thing has lost.

It's not me, it's not the critics, it's not late Rush Lembaugh, it's not Fox News, it's not anybody, it's not Breitbart, It's them.

It's the generals, the officers.

They have lost themselves.

They've done a great disservice to this country.

I'm not talking about all of them, but I'm a large number of them now.

And how can they regain their reputations?

Don't get involved in domestic politics.

Just say that's not my purview.

Anytime I say something, I'm going to alienate 50% of the people in the ranks and 50% of the public who pays my salary.

I'm not going to do it.

Number two, I am going to not go onto a defense board or as a lobbyist for five years.

Number three, I'm not going to cater for promotion or something to the congressional pressures, and I'm not going to say things that have no military utility.

Number four, my chief mission is that the United States has deterrence and battlefield readiness and preparedness.

It's not a social activist agenda.

And do that and the American people will love them again but they're and i don't know the connection but a cynic again would say because they're not winning and they don't have strategic thinkers they can use this wonderful military that's been given to them by the taxpayer and the people therefore they get interested in other things that are extraneous yeah and there's probably lots of examples about departments in the government that almost seem disconnected from the whole idea that they get paid by the American people and not by their various departments these days.

But that's a different story.

I wanted to turn to something you said earlier about these three generals that actually wrote this article that they're trying to drum up hysteria.

My question is just, do you think that it's going to work?

I don't think so because each day that's not January 6th is one day away from a buffoonish riot.

Buffalo Head or whatever his name dies four years in prison.

Maybe he deserved a a year, but four years to be a total buffoon.

So everything we knew about January 6th gets worse and worse and worse as far as the media and the left.

Remember, we were told that Brian Sicknick state, the late officer who died the next day, was killed and bashed over the head with a fire extinguisher, and therefore he was going to be an honored hero, used politically in a very cynical fashion by the left.

That was a lie.

He died of natural causes.

So

that has discredited.

We were told that people entered the Capitol armed and as armed insurrection.

Nobody inside the Capitol was arrested with a firearm, either using it or possessing.

We didn't hear the officer's name, unlike every other officer in the United States who lethally shoots an unarmed suspect, who shot and killed diminutive, petite, 14-year-old military veteran and unarmed Ashley Babbitt for the crime of breaking and entering through a window.

And so I could go on.

So the information about that, and they won't release the

15,000 hours of videos.

And then when you look at the congressional committee that's investigating it, all the Republicans, as usually as they're allowed to pick their own minority representatives when they're in the minority, they were rejected.

Does anybody think that Lynn Cheney is representative of the Republican Party now, who's on the headlining the idea that it's bipartisan.

It's not true.

Can I interject here?

Because you're kind of going in the direction that my next question is:

do you think that the media that I don't know speaks the truth or is oriented towards the right agenda, meaning the right-wing agenda, does it have a voice?

I mean, you have Fox News, but

there's so many other issues.

So

that's why

it's going to work.

Well, they have two issues.

They have Donald Trump and they have January 6th.

And they tied the two together and they said, everything's not working.

We got to go back and dig up Donald Trump's presidential corpse and beat it and beat it and beat it.

And we've got to go get January 6th.

And I know we lie all the time.

The latest was Adam Schiff.

Yeah.

He doctored an email.

He doctored an email to make it look much more damaging than it was.

And so, yeah, well, it's working in the sense that Joe Biden's polls got down to about 37 or 38.

And in left-wing polls, which are about all of them except three or four, he's back up to about minus seven, up to 45, probably approval, 52 negative.

So they brought him back a little bit, resurrected him a little bit.

Yeah.

But I think they're headed for a big, big loss

a year from now.

I think they know it, and it's going to get worse and worse and worse.

And what's the reaction to all of this?

All of a sudden we have parlaire has been resurrected, the Nunes Trump new social media platforms are being announced.

It's not rumble is everywhere.

So what's happening is people are saying these people are toxic

and we've got to wake up.

So if they have Twitter, we'll have something.

If they have Facebook, we'll have something.

And until they behave and are disinterested.

So I think there's going to be a pushback.

And you can see it almost in every direction.

You look at the Wall Street Journal says that if the election was held today, Joe Biden would only win 44 to 43 percent among Latinos, the strongest constituency of the Democratic Party that went 60, 40 just a year ago.

Come on.

So

something's changing, but it's hard to change when they control all the levers of influence and communications.

It sure does.

And it seems like most of the government is

bent to the left as well, if I can put it that way.

Well, I'm glad you mentioned coup because my next topic here is a little historical.

I know we do this every once in a while.

But, you know, we often look at the Roman Republic, as I was saying, as a example or a pattern that might be followed for the end of other republics, meaning our own.

And I take this because you and Jack actually were talking in one of your podcasts and you said that, well, there are corrupt leaders destroying the Republic.

And I thought, well, let's take a look at Rome.

Is there any similarities between the Gracchi and Sulla versus Marius, Caesar versus Pompey, Octavius versus Mark Antony, and our current

generals and leaders of our military or security forces, such as Clapper and Brennan and Comey, or even these military generals here.

I mean, do we find any parallels or this just very different situations in different republics?

There are

parallels, unfortunately.

And Rome's problem was that it was an Italian agrarian republic.

And it was fairly small.

It had been consolidated through a series of inter-Italian wars.

And by the third century BC, it had united the Italian peninsula.

It had a few social wars to clean that up, but it was looking at the Mediterranean, particularly in Spain, Greece, and North Africa.

So then, what followed for the next two centuries were a series of wars of conquest.

And because of that,

money poured in, slaves poured in.

Italian agriculture that had been agrarian and homesteading started to disappear to Latifundia.

That is, people bought up land as people were on service.

You know, if you were a farmer, you had 16 years as a legionnaire.

And when you came back, some guy had consolidated your 10-acre farm into 1,000 acres with slave labor, a slave

from Carthage or North Africa or even other places,

Gaul.

And economically, socially, culturally, an Italian republic started to look at a Mediterranean and soon-to-be worldwide empire.

Roman constitution system was not designed for that.

What do I mean not designed?

You would have to have people control these provinces, legates,

provincial officials, and they would have within the realm of their power as a subordinate, a population, a level of wealth and power and manpower greater than in Italy.

And so when Caesar got a command to essentially conquer Gaul, he was looking at a territory and a population and potential wealth as great as the entire Italian peninsula.

And so from 59 to focus on the last phase of this, Marius and Sulla had not solved what to do.

And there were certain people that were benefiting from this, and I guess we could call them early globalists, and there were certain people that were not, like the Gracchi, and they represented the Italian agrarian classes

and the increasing poor in the larger and larger cities.

And

Sulla represented the senatorial and the optimates, and these people were really benefiting.

And along with the new men, the new men were people who,

this was another strain on the Republic.

They didn't have status by birth.

They were not aristocrats, but they were oligarchs.

And by that, I mean that they had made money in this new type of economic activity.

Just because you owned a thousand acres and you were the seventh generation of the senator didn't make you rich anymore.

Some guy who had a fleet of merchant ships that went back and crisscrossed the Mediterranean, importing and exporting, could buy you out.

We see all these people later in Petronius' satiricon at the dinner at Trimalchio's house, that Cana Tromalchionis.

So what I'm getting at is the system started to break apart.

In 59,

Caesar, for five years,

10 years actually, but for five years of constant fighting, went to Britain, he went across the Rhine, but he consolidated Gaul.

And while he was doing that, people were very worried that he had an army and his legions were not inside Rome.

They were out on the frontier.

They were sleeping on the ground.

They were fighting

quote-unquote barbarians.

They weren't man-to-man comparable to the Roman legions around Italy.

They were 10 times better.

So people said in Rome, this guy's got all this money.

He's selling a million slaves, and he's got this army.

What are we going to do with him?

So he got to a a situation where he's posed such a threat that he had to have partners.

And his partners were the so-called first triumvirate.

And that was Caesar and Pompey and Crassus.

And the idea was that each of us have different constituents, but we'll hold together.

So, Caesar was the popular group, the middle classes and the urban populations.

And Pompey were sort of the new men, Ciceronians, and the establishment, and Crassus was the old guard.

And each of them promised to keep their forces in check and to use their assets to rule by three.

Not that they were going to formally get rid of the Senate, the tribal councils.

They were just going to manipulate them, warp them, and have a facade.

And that lasted for 10 years.

And then they had agendas.

And unfortunately, Crassus was killed at Carai fighting the Parthians.

So that you lost one of the three.

And I say unfortunately, not that he was a good man, he was an awful man, but there was a stability inherent in his presence.

So then you had Pompey, and then it crystallized into two factions.

And if Caesar was confronted with either crossing the Rubicon River with an army and surviving, but breaking the law, they're bringing legions across.

when he was not authorized by the Senate, or being arrested and probably executed by Pompey's forces.

And he chose to cross the Rubicon.

From that point is what I'm getting in this windy diatribe.

From 49, when he crossed the Rubicon to when he was killed in 44, assassinated, there were five years of constant civil war in which finally Caesar defeated Pompey and had established, I guess we would call it a principate, but it was the Senate was there and there were all, but he was, remember, Caesar was not a vindictive guy.

Clementia Caesarus, he said, the clemency of Caesar was on his coins.

So he went through the motions of being sort of a Napoleonic figure that was going to, you know, modernize the calendar and did a lot of good things.

But he was assassinated by senatorial conspirators.

So that was round really three.

You had the first triumvirate, and then you had Pompey, Caesar's wars, and then you had a brief regnum of Caesar.

And then he was killed.

And then what do you do with his murderers?

They say they restore the Senate without strongmen, but the two losers were going to be his adopted grandnephew, Octavian, and the thug and best friend of him, Mark Anthony.

And so those two then fought for two years and defeated at Philippi the senatorial assassins.

Okay, so Brutus is dead.

And what happens?

Anthony.

and Octavian go at it.

Anthony's strong, tough guy, good orator, superb commander,

gets involved with Cleopatra.

And Octavian's a young 18, 19, 20-year-old who comes on the scene, sickly,

sort of never quite there at the battle, but turns out to be a shrewd and brilliant manipulator of people and understands politics far better and poses as a savior.

What I'm getting at is they fight.

And all the way down to the Battle of Actium.

So from 49 to 31, you have 18 years.

And then finally, Octavian, of all of the people that are dead, and Lepidus is put out to pasture, but Crass is dead, Caesar is dead, Cicero's dead, Pompey's dead, Anthony's dead.

And this young guy that nobody thought would do anything is going to rule from 31 all the way down to 14.

So he's there for 45 years, and he creates a stable system.

But the point is that the United States is

two points.

It's not there yet because what we've been talking about the first 20 minutes, a military coup is not going to happen.

People won't put up for it.

And these military officers have almost destroyed the reputation of the military when 45% of the people say they have no confidence in it by their constant politicking and invective and smears and character assassination and exceeding their constitutionally or legislative prescribed duties.

And if they keep doing it, what's worrisome is our foreign enemies are going to think that we have no deterrence.

So I don't think they're going to be able,

nobody, left or right, is going to be able to have a coup.

It's not going to happen.

And people, I think, understood.

We almost had a coup with Christopher Steele, I think.

We'll see how John Durham, how successful he is at calling people to account.

Yeah, well, it seems like.

But

it's the same domestic problems because the United States now,

after 75 years of being a global superpower, winning the Cold War, it had a very similar Roman idea about world conquest and put a quarter million people all over and what, 180 bases all over the world.

If you count little installations, there's probably over a thousand.

Huge diplomatic corps.

give trade concessions to Europe, Japan, get them back on their feet, give them to China.

And that whole paradigm doesn't work anymore.

It hollows out the United States.

It creates two cultures at home, just like it did at Rome.

The Latifundia people, these are the Facebook people

and the DC inner, you know, deep state and the Wall Street and the corporate boardroom.

And so that has to be addressed.

And I hope we can do that.

And that was what was so weird about Trump was.

He was the only candidate of 16 other candidates that had three or four agendas that nobody even had thought of.

He was the one that said, we got to get tough with China.

They're going to try to destroy us.

And then he said, you know, we're not going to write off the Middle West, the industrial sector.

We can still make things.

And we're going to produce really cheap energy and get these guys back their jobs.

And we don't have a nation if we don't have a border.

We're going to stop illegal immigration.

And we're not going to carry Europe on our backs and be blamed for it anymore.

And

that hasn't disappeared.

So I think we were making peaceful changes.

And the Republican Party was no longer the party of John McCain and Mitt Romney and all of these, I don't know what, they're nice people, but my God, they're all wealthy.

They're all interested in capital gains cuts.

They're all part of the bipartisan Washington establishment.

And they really don't have anything in common with cultural conservatives or middle class people that aren't doing very well.

And the Republican Party has been rebranded and recalibrated.

So I'm not thinking we're going to have a revolution that we saw in Rome, although we're suffering the same tensions.

Our system, our Constitution is so much better than the Roman Constitution, which had a lot of weaknesses in it.

I was looking at what the generals say, and you would think that they have a sense that there could be some civil war, at least they're,

but they don't ever say how it would happen.

They don't say

how it would happen.

All of the generals, I haven't seen any generals.

I've seen generals sign letters, which I don't think they should even do that.

But I've seen conservative generals say, you know what, there were irregularities in overriding state legislatures in the voting.

Yes, there was.

And I've heard them say the law is not being enforced.

I haven't heard any saying, I'm calling all my retired people I know and get them active again.

And that's what the left is saying that they're doing.

But if you really, the left is so much more diabolical and slick, because

When you have people like Clapper and Brennan on national television telling everybody that their president of the United States is a traitor, treasonous Russian asset, or when you sick the FBI,

or people like James Comey and he leaks presidential memos deliberately and then lies to the president so that he's not under investigation when he is, or you're hiring a foreign national to interfere in an election, Christopher Steele, that's against the law.

Or when you're erasing cell phones to hide information, or you're doctoring court affidavits to frame an American citizen, or you're lying under oath to the Senate if you're Brennan and Clapper on four occasions, or if you're Andrew McCabe and you're lying to a federal investigator four times,

or you're spending 22 months and after the first month of your investigation, you know, there's no rush of collusion.

If you're Robert Mueller, if you're Robert Mueller, you don't even know what Fusion GPS is or Christopher Steele's dossier, or so he testified.

Yeah.

So that's what I think a soft coup is.

And I think that's what they did.

Yeah.

So we seem to have generals that are dabbling a bit in politics.

They got to stop them.

They haven't got private armies.

That's the big thing.

We don't have province.

What we would see is somebody who was CENTCOM commander or somebody who was African commander, and he would have under his direct control, say, I don't know, 350,000 troops, carrier battle group.

nuclear codes or something.

And then he would be saying, I'm going to go to Washington with my army.

That's not going to happen.

No, yeah, that's, I was going to say, the Roman generals were also politicians.

That was one and the same thing.

I mean, we do that.

Yeah, we don't quite mix the two during the time.

When we have people like MacArthur who wanted to run for president or Curtis LeMay, they try to do it in retirement or, you know, Wesley Clark or people who've run for president.

They do it after their tenure is up.

What we have to be worried is, we have to be worried, though, when you have people with enormous power not being held accountable for breaking the law it is against the law i mean that literally for the chairman of the joint chief to interfere in the chain of command and to give an order to subordinates that he has no right to give and should not be followed and he did that and it is against the law for retired generals to repeatedly disparage and smear and slander the commander in chief.

And there's a reason for that law because they have subordinates and former friends in high places.

And if these people say, General so-and-so and so, an admiral says the president of the United States is a Nazi, he's a liar,

then they may on their own feel that they should not obey an order.

And so that's why those laws are in effect.

If you're not going to enforce them, you shouldn't have them.

Yeah, but we do seem to have the same conditions in the Latifundia, or at least the very wealthy class, and immigration coming in from all over the place that often is part of the thing that's Rome is accused of, well, not Rome is accused, but it's believed that helped to lead to the end of the Republic as well.

So we do have some of those conditions.

I also noticed that there were criminal cases that became political, such as the Milo case for the murder of Publius Claudius Polcher.

And

that's an interesting thing.

That's a catalyst.

That's an interesting thing.

Yeah, and Solace.

I mean,

that's the subject of the Catiline conspiracy is the subject of Salas's Catilina against Catiline.

And then Cicero's against Catiline.

And so we have trials.

Another one is Cicero prosecuting Veres, the corrupt provincial governor of Sicily.

And we had that in Greece, too, with the trials of Alcibiades.

And that's inherent, I think, to a lot of Democratic or Republican or constitutional systems.

But you're right, there are similarities in the sense that when you go from an agrarian republic like the United States was originally to a world power, then it's going to gain influence and power and money, and that's not going to be evenly distributed among the people.

And if you don't have watchdogs over that, you're going to create people that have power globally that are not subject to Roman law.

So you could make the argument that Marcus

Crassus was wealthier than anybody in Rome and had more power, and he wouldn't obey the law.

And Caesar had an army of tough veterans that you couldn't stop.

When they crossed the Rubicon, Pompey had more resources.

Why didn't he stop them?

And he didn't stop them because the 10th Legion, man for man, was better than anybody in the world because he'd been fighting Germans and Gauls and everybody for 10 years.

But when you look at today,

when you look at global wealth, Mark Zuckerberg took $415 million and poured it into pre-selected precincts under the guise of nonprofits, where they basically displaced the registrars and public employees and put voting boxes and they put people out on absentees, ballot dissemination.

They did everything as if they were public employees and it worked.

And they didn't do it evenly.

They didn't get out the vote in poor, you know, counties in Appalachia or Utah or anything.

they pre-selected them to warp the vote and they bragged about it in a time magazine article and so yeah we have these globalists just like the romans did and they have enormous power that transcends political power and they're very dangerous people

and we saw that with michael bloomberg that just had no aptitude for national office but he was worth 70 billion dollars.

So he blew a billion dollars to convince everybody that he was inept.

But if he hadn't been inept, it would have been very tricky, you know, for somebody just to come in.

And so the Democratic Party has done something that is very dangerous.

It has allied themselves, it's forsaken the working classes, doesn't care about them anymore.

And it's allied themselves with Hollywood, Wall Street, the corporate boardroom, Silicon Valley.

And that's where the money and the media.

And they feel that these people, these oligarchs, can give them power

precludes popular support.

And I say that seriously because if you look at their, do you really believe, Sammy, that when they started down this agenda in February, a bunch of Bidenites, they called in the squad, they called in Bernie, they called in Elizabeth Warren, they called Kamala Harris.

They're all sitting around and saying, let's open that damn border.

And let's get 2 million and people will love this.

No, they're not that stupid.

And then they said, let's get, you know, let's cancel ANWAR and cancel Keystone and stop federal leasing of new gas and oil.

And let's jawbone tell those frackers that, you know, they're going to be out of business in 10 years, more regulations, higher taxes, and we're going to go pressure banks not to loan to fossil fuel companies.

Did they think, wow, people are going to love this when gas climbs to $5 or $6 a day?

No.

they're not that stupid.

They did all, I could go on about all of it, but they did things like that because they said this, we just got to get the information out.

Just as Facebook and Twitter wouldn't let you talk about Hunter Biden's laptop right before the election, they can massage these issues.

That's what we do.

We own the National Press Corps.

New York Times, when the moment Trump came on the scene, Jim Rutenberg wrote and said, we can't be disinterested anymore.

So did Christiane Amenpora.

She said the same thing.

And they all said that.

We got to be anti-Trump.

Jorge Ramos promised that he wouldn't be a true journalist in cases of immigration.

He was just going to toe the line.

So they felt they had such power that they could ram these issues through, even though they knew they were going to be unpopular.

What they didn't count on was that knowledge of them did leak out to the public.

And how did it leak out?

Because people started to, their lives were affected.

When they went to Kmart, Walmart, there wasn't anything on the shelf they wanted.

When they went to fill up their tank, they couldn't afford it.

When they went to Portland or Seattle or San francisco or in los angeles they were assaulted and crime was everywhere and you couldn't hide it and so that's how word of mouth personal experience and all of that overwhelmed them more so than even fox news or conservative social media exist could do and so that's saved us so far that they were so bad

that even their propaganda I think we're going to look back historically and this, I don't know why the Republicans say this is jimmy carter redukes jimmy carter was kind of a snooty guy but he was not a mean-spirited person

he didn't say you're a junkie he didn't say you ain't black he didn't say put you all back in chains he didn't say great negro he didn't say hey boy when he was talking to about an african and he was from a much different time

and he did change i didn't vote for him and i'm glad i didn't he was an in-up president but he did have the Carter doctrine that said the Soviet Union shall not gain new acquisitions in the Middle East.

And he beefed up the defense budget.

And before he left office, he brought out old Paul Volcker and said, we screwed up.

You better break the back of inflation.

And they raised interest rates.

So you could disagree with the guy, but he was not non compos mentes.

That's Joe Biden.

We're at a new level here.

Yeah.

We are, but we don't see it going down the road of the Roman Republic.

I don't think so.

Not yet, at least.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, we're coming to a break here to have a word from our sponsors, and then we're going to come back and talk a little bit about your books.

Thank you.

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welcome back and this is the victor davis hanson's show and i'm sammy wink and we talk about a lot of things political cultural current but also historical and kind of finished up with the roman republic and the current antics of military generals in our own military, which doesn't seem quite comparable in power, which is a good thing to all of us.

But we want to turn now, Victor, to your books.

And I know that you've written 26 books, and they're many and varied.

And I was wondering if we could talk maybe a little bit about the first four of them: one that you wrote while you were a graduate student, in fact, was your thesis, I believe.

And then the other ones that followed, and they all were on agriculture and war.

The first one is warfare and agriculture in classical Greece.

The second, the Western Way of War.

The third, Hoplites, in which you were an editor, and then the fourth is the other Greeks.

And if you could give us a short synopsis on each, it would be really nice.

I could do that very easily, I guess.

But I was in a philology program where the emphasis was on textual criticism, Greek and Roman text,

Latin literature, Greek literature.

And most of the theses would reflect that training as a philologist.

So I didn't want to write on those things.

I didn't want to write on the manuscript tradition of Sophocles or grammatical peculiarities and Herodotus or the use of this.

I wanted to write on something about, I knew something about, and I knew a lot about agriculture.

So I decided, I went to a thesis advisor, very gifted classist, Michael Jameson, said, you know, I'm reading all this stuff in Thucydides in our seminar, and they keep talking about attacking agriculture.

The Greek word was dean

and poptane, you know, to ravage or to cut or to burn, all of these things.

But then it's very hard to cut down an olive tree.

And how can you burn grain unless it's dry and it's combustible?

And, you know, you can get when you're planting one meter apart, you can get 2,000 grape vines per acre.

How could you tear them all out?

And so then what I decided was that when I looked at modern literature, everybody said that Thucydides was right, that the Spartans had destroyed Attic agriculture and that they did it two occasions, during the Archadamian War and the so-called Decalean War, and that made Athens rather impotent.

But then I started to look at the evidence and Athens was not rather impotent after the Peloponnesian War.

It had a remarkable recovery.

I've noticed too that when you actually counted the days that the Spartans were there, they weren't there more than about 150 days out of a 27-year war.

And then when you looked at Thucydides himself, he says the weirdest things.

He says, they attacked and ravaged the countryside.

Next year, he says, and then they attacked the things they hadn't attacked before.

I thought he said they attacked them all.

So the point was it was an effort to use practical information about the difficulty of destroying crops, apply it to ancient evidence, and then suggest at the end that A, agricultural devastation is hard in a pre-industrial world, and B, in the Peloponnesian War, the weakness of Athens was not because it lost its agriculture, especially in the post-war period.

And then I went in the post-war period and got all sorts of forensic speeches where people talk about their big olive orchards, even though they should have not existed if they had been destroyed in the war.

And the only concession that Stanford made very quickly was they said, you're a philologist, not a historian per se, so we want philology.

So by that, they meant your first chapter has to be on the vocabulary of agricultural devastation.

So I went through the whole lexicon lexicon of Greek and Latin words.

And it was very good to do that.

Anyway, they published my thesis, but it really didn't matter at the time because I was farming.

I decided, or the field decided for me that when I left, I was going to go farm.

My grandparents had a and my on both sides, we had 180 acres and

we were kind of shorthand.

My parents needed help, so I came home and kind of remodeled the house I'm sitting in right now, such as I could, and farmed.

And then it was published.

And it was kind of well reviewed in small journals, but I forgot about it.

The second one was why I got a job five years later at Cal State Fresno.

And I wanted, I was very influenced by John Keegan's A Face of Battle.

It is describing a battle, how it happened to the people in it rather than the strategy and tactics.

So I called it, you know, the Western way of war, but this emphasis was twofold.

One, what was it like to be a hoplite in a phalanx?

Did you defecate?

Did you bleed?

Did you scream?

Did you yell?

Did you panic?

How did you fight?

Did you press people with your shield?

Or did you have

two or three feet between you, as some people had said?

Were the phalanxes skirmishers or were they packed?

What did the ranks four to eight do?

I mean, you can't reach anybody with a spear.

So what were you there for?

Were you there for replacements?

Were you there to add bulk or pressure?

power or momentum by pushing with your shield, the so-called oftes mos in Greek.

And so so all of these questions had really not been talked about from the point of view of the soldier.

So the Western way of war, infantry battle in classical Greeks, was an account of what was it like to be an ancient Greek battle?

And what does it say about Greek culture that had these stage, I don't want to say staged, but rather formalistic collisions between phalanxes.

That book got on, you know, the history book club.

And so it, it sold very well for a guy who was, you know, at the time it came out.

I had just been hired after being two years as part-time a professor.

I had five classes a semester and I was teaching Latin and Greek and history and everything, humanities.

So it really helped me.

And then a publisher asked me to follow up and get other scholars to discuss things.

So I wrote, I edited a thing called Hoplites, and that was, you know, what was it like to fight?

ancient battles and there were people who contributed this is what generals did this is could you hear them yell or not they didn't have you know public address systems.

Were they at the front all the time, some of the time, maybe the time?

What was the spike on the back of the spear for?

I wrote an article at that.

Everyone has something called a Sturex.

And was it to jab people in the ground?

Was it to stop the spear from rotting?

Was it to poke people?

And maybe all three combined.

So these were the practical aspects.

How heavy was armor?

How hot was it?

I even got some students at Cal State Fresno in the summer, you know, the best students as far as physical specimens to put on armor and then push each other.

And they were dead after about 10 minutes in the heat.

I picked a 95 May Day.

And so it showed me that all these people that said they fought for hours and hours would be physically impossible.

Why did people wear armor and not just fight as skirmishers in Greece?

So there was cultural and social reasons why phalanxes were armed the way they were.

They were landowners, they were agrarians, they wanted to get it over quickly and decisively and get back to work.

And how many people died, how many were wounded.

So all of those practical things were further explored in hoplites.

And then lastly, of these first four,

I wanted to write about the agrarian nature of Greece.

And the other Greeks was kind of a, I don't know, it was a weird book.

It was a huge book.

It has footnotes of ancient authors in the text.

It has footnotes at the end and it has footnotes at the bottom.

It was for the the free press, a commercial publisher.

I think the editor was kind of surprised that it was scholarly, but it also had a personal anecdote.

You know, if I got to a passage where they said farmers were worried about devastation and burning grain, I went out and tried to burn grain at different times of the year to see if it was possible, stuff like that.

But basically, the argument was: ancient Greece was not a bunch of philosophers or a bunch of sea captains or a bunch of intellectuals.

It was they were possible because they had

a very secure system

of hoplite warfare that was the domain of landowners, and landowners had specialized in vines, grapes, and grains, barley, and wheat.

And that allowed them to spread their labor throughout the year to protect against natural disaster through diversification rather than specialization.

And it gave you everything you need in the diet, from olive to olive oil to wine to grapes to barley to bread, everything.

So it was an argument that once they mastered this Mediterranean triad through sophisticated grafting and plant selection, et cetera, they created bounties, surpluses, and with private property, which was the grounding.

of early constitutional history.

The first constitutions in the West were based on the protection of property and inheritance of the middle class.

So the theme to finish was Greece invented agrarianism, it invented the idea of the mesoi or the middle class being chauvinistic as superior to the wealthy and the poor.

It invented the idea of constitutional government.

It invented the idea of decisive warfare, the Western idea of annihilation rather than skirmishing.

Not that they weren't adept at both.

And I had chapters to that effect.

And it was trying to take agriculture and show how it worked in the ancient world and then how it was reflected as sort of the arbiter of all social, cultural, political, and military aspects of Greek life.

And that's why I called it the other Greeks, because most people hadn't thought about people in the countryside.

The nice thing about that book was that I had to read a lot of classic books that had been sort of neglected, a lot of them in French.

but a lot of them, some in German, but a lot of people maybe between 1880 and 1920 that had similar ideas that wrote on one aspect and i tried to do a lot of research also what i did was i took the new thesaurus of greek language the tlg

and i searched every single word in the then 55 million word corpus words for you know vine or vine steak or olive stump or anything.

And I got a huge core.

I think in my living room, I had about 700 pages.

And I would go through, they're all in Greek and I'd go through And so, if you go to that book, there are references to literature about farming and the glorification, the beauty of farming.

I don't think people had been familiar with because nobody ever read a lot of these texts.

Some of them were even untranslated, they've never been translated.

And so, I had a lot of new research material in the other Greeks.

But the reason I think it

the Western Way of War sold very well.

This is the biggest book.

I think it was the best book I ever wrote, but it did not sell well

because I was unsure of the market for who wants a trade publisher, who buys a trade book with all of this information in it that's scholarly.

Plus, you know, you don't want to read footnotes, as I said, at the bottom, at the back, in the text, and then be told how to prune.

They don't jive.

I was very lucky that the great classicist Bernard Knox reviewed it very well, and it had very good reviews.

I liked that part about it.

And then the University of California, about three or four years later, came and said, we like warfare and agriculture, the Western way of war, and the other Greeks, and we're willing to put them all into paperback if you revise them and have an epilogue and you talk about all the current literature in academic sense and then give that to outside readers.

So all three of those books are still in print through UC Press.

Oh, wow.

I was just thinking that they would make a good collection.

Yeah, all three of them are.

Hoplites, I think, might be out of print.

Yeah.

But those were the first four of what I guess was 26 books.

It was very hard to write them in one way because for those four books, I was living in this house, and I was one of three people responsible for 180 acres of farming.

And then I have to drive 28 miles up to World Presno, and then I was teaching four to five classes a semester with no teaching, no TAs.

And these were like 200 students, and I had three children.

And so it was a lot.

It was a lot.

I just remember, it was very fun to do that, but I remember in 1984 to 1995

with no sleep whatsoever.

I mean, literally three or four hours maximum.

And I was just obsessed with it.

And I got kind of ill, very ill for a while.

And I think that might have had something to do with it.

But I hadn't yet decided to write on topics outside.

ancient Greece and I would do that for the next 10 years.

All right.

Well, Victor, thank you.

That sounds like there's an amazing consistency in your research and then also just the amount of research.

I understand that your books, especially The Other Greeks, is maybe all of them, are among your peers in your discipline, among the most cited of books that people use when they're doing.

Could I just interject?

One reason I know is that after I wrote The Dying Citizen, but more importantly, after that book, The Case for Trump came out, we can talk about that later sometime.

I would get emails and they were like the following.

You don't know me, but I know you now, and I took your other Greeks and threw it away.

Or you disgust me.

You were a good classicist and you wrote a really good book, The Western Way War.

I really, but now that

you wrote that Trump did something good, you should be ashamed of yourself.

You should have stuck at Fresno State as a classicist.

I got at least 30 of those and some of them signed their name and they were classicists that I

had at least least i was familiar with their name yeah and kind of amazing because academics are pretty timid people but for them to get so angry and to say that there must have been a little i don't know a theme because i had about four and said i threw your book against the wall

like you know okay

either that there was a theme or they're just all similar people right they're all made up Yeah, well, it seems like they wanted to forsake you as a classicist, but at the same time, use your works.

I see it referred to.

I saw a lot of people.

One of the things that classicists, but academics do is that when you don't like somebody, but you think they did something of value, you, and I don't want to mention any names, but what you do is you take their sources or their lines of research, or if you're writing about the, let's say, the degree of middle class people, evidence for middle class people in the phalanx, and you find some obscure, what a scholar will do will take those footnotes or take those sources, but then in the footnote, they'll say, see Alcafron's letters or see Alien or something.

These are obscure authors.

However,

Victor Hansen can't be trusted.

So that means that I didn't get them from him.

He can't be trusted on this matter.

And I've always tried to do that when I don't know a source.

and I don't know a source and I run across it and somebody I think is not just parodying that source but actually found that source, I will always say I'll cite that source and I'll say see so-and-so for discussion until they found it.

Yeah, all right.

Well with that anecdote, Victor, I think we're going to have to call it a day here.

Thank you so much for all of your interesting comments on our current military generals and on the past Roman generals.

And your books, those first three books sound perfect for anybody who's interested in more things from you and haven't read the earliest things that you've written.

And so, thank you very much.

Thank you.

And thank everybody again for listening.

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