A Pageant to a Soldier's Training

Flu season is here and COVID cases are still climbing across the country.

When people start getting sick, medications disappear fast.

And that's why we trust All Family Pharmacy.

They help you prepare before it's too late.

Right now, they've dropped prices on ivermectin and mabenzazole by 25%.

Plus, you can save an extra 10% with the code VICTR10.

You'll also get 10% off antibiotics, antivirals, hydroxychloroquine, and more of the medications you actually want on hand.

Whether you're fighting off a cold, protecting your family from flu season, or staying ready in case COVID makes its way into your home, having a few months' supply brings peace of mind and control.

They work with licensed doctors who review your order online, write the prescriptions, and ship your meds straight to your door.

Go to allfamilypharmacy.com/slash Victor and use the code Victor10 today.

Hello, and welcome to our listeners at the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

This is the weekend edition, where we step beyond current news stories and politics to look at things from the past.

It's always a really exciting episode, and my favorite, I confess, because Victor is a historian above all other things.

He's a classicist too, so it always is very interesting.

Today we're going to look at Cortez's defeat of the Aztecs.

Victor has written about that in a book called Carnage and Culture.

And then we're going to take some time to look at the Benghazi incident in 2012 when the ambassador was killed.

And the annex, which was a station not too far from the ambassador's residence, had to defend itself.

And we will be doing that after we hear a word from our sponsor.

I knew we all had two ages, our actual age and our internal biological age.

What I didn't know is I've likely lowered my biological age without even knowing it.

Here's the thing.

Because Americans eat so many processed foods and not enough fruits and veggies, many, perhaps most, are 10 plus years older on the inside than their actual age.

They're ticking time bombs.

A major university study suggests how to slow aging and diffuse that biological time bomb.

Participants slowed their aging by drinking field of greens.

That's all.

They didn't change their eating, drinking, or exercise, just Field of Greens.

When I started Field of Greens to replace my multivitamin, I was amazed.

After about two weeks, my energy improved.

I've been exercising more, and my overall wellness feels great.

Each fruit and vegetable in Field of Greens was doctor selected for specific health benefits.

cell health, heart, lungs, kidney, metabolism, even healthy weight.

It's wonderful knowing Field of Greens can slow how quickly I'm aging.

And I encourage you to join me, swap your untested fruit, vegetable, or green drink for Field of Greens.

While there's time, check out the university study and get 20%

off when using promo code VICTOR at fieldofgreens.com.

That's fieldofgreens.com promo code Victor.

And we'd like to thank Field of Greens for continuing to sponsor the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

Welcome back.

And I would like to remind listeners that Victor is the Martin and Ilya Anderson Senior Fellow in Classics and Military History at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marcia Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

Victor, how are you doing today, by the way?

And this is the weekend edition, so very good.

So good to hear it.

I'm excited to hear your account of Cortez's defending himself and assault, I guess, as well on Tenochtitlan to fight against the Aztecs and defeat them within two years.

And then we'll take a look at Benghazi as some ex-military security personnel were forced to defend that annex for an entire night before they were able to get out.

And I think that they're both remarkable for the incident that both of them had to fight their way out of, or at least defend themselves in a small enclave at one point.

And they're both remarkable for the training of soldiers

and just that expertise that these soldiers must have had because the numbers were superior in both cases of the enemy assault.

So let's start first with Cortez and the Aztecs and your account of how Cortez defeated the Aztecs in two small years.

Very extraordinary, especially given that he came all the way across an ocean to do it.

We're talking about the invasion of Mexico from the Caribbean at Veracruz and the March Inland.

between 1519 and 1521 by sort of lesser nobility, nobleman, Hernán Cortez.

And he's a very interesting guy.

And I think, you know, he'd left in his teens to the New World.

And then he'd, I think he'd been in Cuba under the Velasquez governorship for a number of years.

And then anyway, he raised the money and he had heard of fabulous wealth and a fabulous civilization in the inland of Mexico.

But although there had been people who had seen it, nobody quite believed it.

So he had almost no information.

So he sailed the short distance from Cuba to Veracruz and and he prepared to march inland.

And he did.

He had about 1,100 men, and the famous story that he burned his ships because it was either, you know, success or failure, but not retreat.

And so the thing to remember about his conquest was it was probably absolutely impossible.

We have Bernal Diaz's first-hand account, among other later accounts.

So pretty much what happened, we have, at least from the Spanish point of view, there were two requisites.

You had to have have a military genius who had had really no military experience to speak of before, like Hernan Cortez, who was a larger-than-life figure of Themistocles in his cunning and his ruthlessness as well.

And then you could not have destroyed an empire of 4 million people had not you had the Tlaxcalans

and

the Tabascans and a whole series of

the Totonacs, I think they were called, indigenous people who had been subject

to Aztec oppression.

And by subject, I mean they, in various wars of rebellion and unification on the part of the Aztecs, their people had been enslaved and brought to Tenochtitlan, Mexico City, and then

sacrificed, human sacrificed in a horrific fashion.

So there was a great hatred of the Aztec Empire, and Cortez manipulated that that brilliantly.

So even on the initial assault or entry, he had a thousand tlaxcalons with him.

And then he went in and he had a very good propaganda that only a person that had horses or these huge mastif hunting dogs or Spanish steel blades or Spanish armor, highest quality steel in Europe, or gunpowder, or cannons, or this strange language, or these priests.

All of that had to be beyond the comprehension of Montezuma and the Aztecs, and therefore it had to have a divinity element in it.

And there had been reports how they got there to Veracruz.

People in the Native American community had transmitted village to village.

People had arrived on these god-like ships that had sails, et cetera, et cetera.

Okay, anybody would think it was supernatural.

But after a while, that novelty wore off, and there was a series of revolts.

And Cortez then was faced with a two-pronged challenge.

He had been recalled on the one hand by the governor of Cuba and by extension the crown, and Navarez had had a huge force to attack him in his rear of Spaniards.

And then the Aztecs were now onto him and they were attacking him.

So he retreated.

all the way back to Veracils, left some of his men under very ruthless but brilliantly lethal commander Pedro Alvarado.

And the long and the short of it is after defeating the Spanish contingent, he won them over.

And then he brought a huge force of about 2,500, got back to Mexico City, saw that it was an open rebellion and Alvarado had massacred, not that he hadn't himself, and there was a huge fight.

And it was famously known as the Nochitriste, the terrible or sad night, in which about over half of his force, or at least about a thousand people, were killed trying to get across the waterway.

Remember, Tenochtitlan, Mexico City was built on a lake.

And so he had to retreat in utter defeat.

He was almost wiped out.

He got back and then he regrouped.

Everybody thought he was over done with and he got a larger force.

And this time he came up with a brilliant idea that he would be a maritime commander, that he would build lightweight ships.

and then label them, dismantle them, bring them over the mountains into Mexico's city's lake, reassemble them, and then fight on this sort of Venetian-like causeways and waterworks inside the city and destroy it.

And he did.

And he did all of that within two years.

But the point I think you're making is that

the asymmetry of the odds are staggering.

I mean, he probably never had in the field at any one time more than 2,500 Spanish conquistadors, although he had hundreds, if not a few thousand indigenous people, but

he was outnumbered.

So how did he do it?

And I picked this chapter in Carnage and Culture over two decades ago to show the advantages of the Western way of war.

So he had superior technology.

Steel is much better than obsidian.

He had a military tradition that you find and destroy the enemy and annihilate them.

in the Claude Switzerland terms, not you stun them and knock them out and tie them up and then transmit them back to Mexico City, pass them through the ranks for fodder for human sacrifice.

That's a very inefficient way of fighting.

They had horses, the enemy didn't.

They had dogs, the enemy didn't.

They had gunpowder, the enemy didn't.

And even when they ran out of gunpowder, they were sitting on a veritable field of the ingredients of gunpowder.

So they went up to volcanoes and they found sulfur and they found saltpeter and they created their own own gunpowder.

If they needed to make a bronze cannon, they found tin and copper.

So they had that Western tradition of induction and the scientific method.

And that gave them enormous advantages.

It explained why Montezuma was not in Barcelona.

He did not have the navigational equipment, the expertise, or the military dynamism to get there.

But why a Spaniard, we're not talking about morality, and we're not talking about preordained history.

We're just saying that all things being equal, the West had an advantage.

It meant that they could have a bad commander, they could have bad weather, they could do stupid things, and they could still win given their military traditions and their technology and their organization and discipline vis-a-vis the Aztecs.

The Aztecs had no margin of error.

Had they had a brilliant commander, Had they unified the indigenous people, had someone been able to capture Spanish weaponry, and they did, and they could emulate them or fabricate them, and they could not, then it might have had a different outcome.

But when you read Bernal Diaz's Conquest of New Spain, you want to read this hating Cortez because he's supposedly the archetypical European mulauder, bandit, conquistador, forcibly introducing foreign religion to indigenous peoples, bringing with him everything from whooping cough

to new strains of malaria to, of course, smallpox.

But when you start to read about it, it becomes very complex.

I mean, he's dealing with people who ritualize cannibalism, who ritualize human sacrifice, not just human sacrifice, but a magnitude that approaches maybe some of the death tolls at some of the minor, if I could use that obscene term.

the satellite death camps of the Third Reich.

I mean, we know from the Aztecs' own records that so many people were killed about 30 years before Cortez arrived and the bodies were dumped in Lake Tenochitlan that people had to flee the city because of the putrid smells and infection that followed.

And so when you start to see the dynamism there, the Aztecs were murderous people.

And if today it's very odd for me to see a lot of the romance that surrounds them, especially in the Mexican-American community, when they have other indigenous peoples like the the Plaxcalans,

that while they engage in human sacrifice, they did not institutionalize on a continental scale mass death and they rebelled against it.

And you would think that that would be a more suitable ancestor to choose if you were going to romanticize, you know, pre-Columbian Mexico.

And then when you look at Cortez himself, it's very hard to see how he did it.

I mean, he's pulled down from horses.

He's clubbed.

He's surrounded.

He's got people trying within his own circle and Cadre trying to kill him, to assassinate him.

He's got Native American allies that decide to,

you know, change sides and they almost wipe him out.

He has the idea of ships.

He has to build them.

I mean, there's nothing the guy can't do, whatever you think about his morality.

And then he ends up very badly in his late 50s.

He's

stripped of all of his conquest, the spoils of war, so to speak.

He goes back to to Spain.

There's a lot of anger and dissension and disagreement about his legacy among the Spaniards themselves, especially the Catholic Church.

There's fights between his heirs about which property is which, and he ends up not a very happy, healthy, or well person.

He dies in Spain in his early 60s.

Well, Victor, that seems like an extraordinary leader in Cortes and extraordinary endurance in the soldiers that came with them, the conquistadors that came with them.

They believed in, I think it's important, just as the Aztecs fought fiercely and they did believe that they would perish unless they got suitable numbers of live captives that they could sacrifice to the pertinent or relevant gods, whether that was for harvest or for release from sickness or for prosperity.

And they needed to take out the beating heart, literally, of the body and show it to the throng that was assembled.

They did believe in something, as Macabre is, but the Spaniards did too.

They lived in the world.

Remember, this is 1521,

and we're only about 30 years after the Reconquista and were after the Inquisition, but were also in the middle.

I mean, Lepanto is still coming up.

in 1571

and another 50 years.

So the Spanish Empire is engaged in a lethal struggle with Islam in North Africa, especially, but in the peninsula of Spain itself.

And it has created these Castilian warriors that, by any fair measure, were probably some of the fiercest warriors in the history of military conflict.

And they believed in certain things that their duty was to save souls and spread Christianity for the benefit of their own soul and the benefit of souls yet not converted.

And they believe that Spain, especially vis-a-vis France, but especially Britain, had a foreordained mission to bring civilization to where it wasn't there, had a very different view of civilization than Britain or France, but nevertheless, that was their view.

And they believe, because of the unique position of the Iberian Peninsula, that they had two mission.

One was to make sure that Islam did not come through the Mediterranean and destroy Western civilization on their southern flank.

And because they had Atlantic ports, they would discover the New World.

And remember that those two phenomena were very closely intertwined.

The reason that Columbus left Spain and Portugal and the successive explorers was they were convinced that Islam barred the way to transcontinental trade, that the old silk routes, whether it was through Afghanistan or Eastern Asia Minor, et cetera, et cetera, onto China and India were now impossible because of the Ottoman Empire.

And the Ottoman Empire was dynamic and it was taking the Balkans and it was going to come into Italy and it was going to come into Western Europe.

And so they needed routes to China and India.

And they had a theory going back to classical science that the earth was round.

So whether it was going down to the Cape of Good Hope or whether it was going the other way, what would eventually be Cape Horn, whatever it was, it was an idea that we've got to be independent and explore a new world and therefore seek autonomy and continue prosperity without worry of the Ottomans.

But we have to keep the Ottomans out of Europe.

And so it was successful.

And that pressure allowed certain European countries that had Western ports.

I say Western, but ports on the Atlantic, Britain, France, Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands.

There's no accident that the focus of classical leverage power and influence went north.

I know a lot of it's to do with the Protestant Reformation, but a lot of it's to do with the wealth and bounty of the New World.

And they were particularly adept at utilizing it because they were oceanfaring peoples.

And the people in the Mediterranean who had to fight Islam as a rearguard action, especially in Italy, they were galley-bound people and they were creating a type of maritime warfare that was dependent on the calm seas of the Mediterranean, rowing, one or two masks only, and they were utterly unable and unprepared to go out in the Atlantic and sail in the way that the Spaniards, the Portuguese, or the French or the British were, or the Dutch.

And so it was kind of tragic.

And so he was a member of that second generation of Spaniards who followed Columbus and were intent on magnifying the power of the Spanish crown of Iberian civilization, Spanish language and Catholicism against its perceived enemies, which were, you know, the Protestants, the Jews, he thought, the Muslims.

The medieval and early Renaissance Spanish mind was sort of characterized as there's enemies on all sides of us, and we've got to go to the new world to get the resources to prevail back in Europe.

And oddly, they had the military talent, the technology, et cetera, to really master a huge part of the world in that 16th century in which they were conquering.

I think that was what we talked about.

It is.

And last time we talked about Italy, and I had a couple of emails say, how can you talk about, I was talking about that to another person, and how can you talk about the Italians?

as sophisticated people given their dismal record in World War II, maybe not so much World War I, but that's a misreading of history.

If you look at Venetian or Florentine or roman renaissance genius they were the pillars of scientific excellence yeah and especially as it came to quality of cannon and firearms you know after the battle of lepanto which was a crushing victory for the west the venetians for example looked at captured ottoman cannon and they looked at the metallurgy and even though the the ottomans had copied venetian designs they said we can't use it it's not up to our standards that the cannons will blow up up after an insufficient number of shots, and they junk them.

So the Spaniards, and the same goes through with the quality of Spaniard metallurgy, especially steel and military tactics and the tertio.

So because of their constant fighting with Islam in the Mediterranean and with one another, and until the Protestant Reformation and until the discovery of the New World, Western civilization was still a Mediterranean-focused civilization.

yeah it was and after that it was no longer you know when you go to eastern europe today and someone who lived in greece off and on maybe for three years and you talk to people they still feel in a very strange way that eastern europe got a bad rap not just the cold war or not just as greece as battleground between east and west but going back to the Byzantine Empire and the idea that certain people in Europe were the bulwark and slowed down Islamic aggression or Ottoman aggression and allowed Western Europe to have a buffer zone that would allow them to explore and become wealthy.

And they're still sort of embittered because they became a garrison state in a way that the West, they feel, didn't have to be in the same way.

They were more open to experimentation, religious diversity,

as I said, the Renaissance, the Reformation, discovery of the New World, but the people in the old Byzantine Empire and what was left of it after its collapse, and it was under Ottoman occupation and was constantly fighting and rebelling, they feel they had their only hope was doubling down.

They had to be rigid.

They had to have one Orthodox religion.

They couldn't leave.

They had to fight and confront Islam from the east.

And that 500-year struggle, even though it was mostly marked with defeat before the 19th century, they feel was successful in keeping the West safe.

That's a different view.

Yeah.

Well, Well, I hate to return to specific examples from all of those global issues because I think the modern example that we wanted to look at Benghazi might not have so many global implications, although it might.

But I would like to hear your commentary on how these ex-military actually, security at the annex, were

able to

defend themselves once again against superior numbers.

I know that they probably, if they were here, they might feel like, well, we didn't succeed in saving the ambassador, which was an unfortunate thing in the Benghazi incident on 9-11 in 2012.

But they were still extraordinary in their defense against the numbers in Benghazi that were trying to kill them.

It was all a very strange situation.

It almost reminds me sometimes of how that noche chiste that Cortez's men fought themselves out of the city of Tenoch Chitlin.

Very similar.

I mean, that's why I wanted to pair those today.

Well, they were similar in the sense that the four people, the ambassador and Sean Smith, and the two ex-SEALs who died at the annex, but especially they and their associates, they were very Cortez-like, not in their aims or missions, but in their defiance of the great odds that were against them.

And remember, they had a lot of things going against them.

We've got to remember: this took place on, that started on the anniversary of 9-11.

So people knew, as there had been on most 9-11s, there was a tendency in the Islamic world for riots and for uprisings against so-called colonialists, i.e., Westerners, like embassies or annexes or perceived CIA groups.

That was number one.

Number two, what were we doing there?

That was another controversial situation because the Qaddafi family was in the process of reform.

Not that Muamar Gaddafi, being a murderous thug, was capable of it, but he had westernized autocratic children, and they were starting to reach out to the West.

And they were doing things like, let's open up.

Sabratha or Leptis Magna to archaeological discovery and reinviting Italians in or bringing in cell phone companies, or taking areas that were rich in natural gas and allowing European companies to exploit them, or telling the Maltese that you can build a Corinthian hotel in downtown Tripoli and have actual sovereignty to it.

So, this was a very fluid and promising situation for the first time in 40 years in Libyan history, since mid-60s, late 60s.

And then we went in there and got caught up with this missionary Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice, Samantha Power,

were going to ride the wave of the Arab Spring and bring the Upper West Side or Berkeley to all of these places.

And it was disastrous.

So we went in there and created chaos with the bombing with the French.

And then we removed to Qaddafi without any idea who would replace him.

or that his children had been serving as a transitionary movement, perhaps.

And we created chaos.

And then 9-11 came, and there was an uprising, supposedly in Egypt.

And supposedly it was over a video.

And supposedly, the video was a Coptic or Coptic-related renegade filmmaker that had been on minor probationary status in the United States.

And he made a video that was very critical of Islam.

And this was an election year, Sammy.

Remember that Barack Obama, September, October, November, it was less than 90 days, just two months, essentially, and he was going to be up for re-election.

If you look at the polls, they were dead even.

So factor all that together, what these few people were up against.

And how does that factor out?

It was in the interest of the U.S.

government not to allow this mess that they had created to get out of control.

And so one things they did, they did not listen to warnings and beef up security because to do so they thought would invite further aggression in an election year.

They had about a 12-hour window that there had been forces in Sicily, even drones, armed drones.

They didn't send any of them there.

When the CIA-related people, the contractors and the ex-SEALs came from Tripoli, they did it almost on their own spontaneous, innovative idea.

And I think they even paid $30,000 or so to commandeer this jet and to fly there.

So the long and the short, you're talking about 10 or 15 people at most in the annex after failing to save the ambassador and Sean Smith and being run over at the so-called embassy.

Then they went a mile away at the annex, and it was sort of like Michael Walsh has talked about last stands, about heroic people at Thermophili, the Alamo, et cetera, et cetera, for whatever reason are able to create feats of impossible daring and courage.

And in this case, it was successful.

They held off hundreds, if not thousands, of attackers at that annex.

And they allowed the 30 or so people in the CIA to survive and eventually, within a few hours after the hostilities ceased, to get out to the airport and get home.

And they lost two of them.

But they didn't get any help when they should have had help.

from American military forces that are either inept or were not allowed to send somebody the three or four hours that it would have taken to get somebody a team or two.

And remember when they said, well, we didn't have time to get the adequate force, these guys had no adequate force.

It didn't matter.

When people heard that the embassy was in trouble, they just went over there and they were outnumbered from the beginning.

When they heard that the annex was going to be in trouble, they went back there and they were outnumbered and they fought tenaciously.

And they were up against all sorts of, I don't know who Ansar al-Sharia was.

I only remember the name because as a farmer, there used to be a pesticide called Ansar.

It was arsenic-laced, as I remember, pretty powerful.

And it's outlawed now, probably, but we used it a lot.

And my point is, this strange Ansar al-Sharia,

we don't know whether it had al-Qaeda affiliations or not, but it was a premeditated attack.

And that was against the narrative of that election year.

In other words, the Obama administration did not want a narrative appearing that there were warning signs that their embassy and annex were under manned and there was going to be an Islamic attack on them.

And they, for reasons of political utility, did not beef up that presence.

Or when that presence proved in actuality to be insufficient, then swarmed in reinforcements and had a big incident right before the election.

And they might not have wanted as well people to ask, well, what in the hell hell was there a CIA annex anyway in this mess of post-Qadhafi Libya?

And maybe it was to do what?

To round up all of the dangerous weapons that Gaddafi had acquired and to buy them and then to give them or get them out of there?

Or were there other NATO allies, maybe Turkey that were involved somehow, and to stop some of that?

So there was a lot of exposure in an election year, and they did not want that.

And so what did they do to prevent that?

And this is very important because we never really gave them for all of the investigation.

I think there were six investigations.

My view, they were all poorly conducted.

But nevertheless, we didn't give them any support for these various reasons.

And then after they perished and we tried to find out how the four were killed and what was the text to it all, we were lied to.

Susan Rice, remember, infamously went on television five times.

and swore up and down that this was a spontaneous riot due to some right-wing video maker who had offended Islam and who had kind of, you know, earned this animus and they were trying to do their best in America.

They jailed that guy on a trumped-up probation charge.

And so their narrative was the right wing in America caused these deaths by creating an Islamophobic environment that swept the Middle East.

And there was this thing in Egypt and protest in Damascus and everywhere else.

And Benghazi was therefore.

And that was a lie.

It was a lie in this sense that whatever was going on elsewhere had nothing to do with these premeditated attacks by shock troops of Ansar al-Sharia, who brought in mortars, heavy machine guns, and they coordinated the attack on the annex and the embassy.

And it was not a spontaneous riot in reaction to a video, as Susan Rice and others had claimed.

And so in that context, these people were not going to get any help from the administration.

They were not going to get any psychological support later, those who survived.

They were not going to be seen as heroes.

They were going to be seen as, you know, people in the wrong place at the wrong time.

And, you know, the right did this to you because they allow this video maker to do this.

And then we're going to have an election.

And of course, the right wanted to make hay out of it.

So we got that testimony by Hillary Clinton, you know, that really infamous remark.

What difference does it make if they were killed in a spontaneous riot or if they were killed in a premeditated well?

It makes a lot of difference because if it was premeditated and you had knowledge and there had been requests to beef up security, and then these men might have had adequate resources to enhance their last stand, as brave as it was, and maybe nobody would have been killed.

But it was a sad day, but it can't be seen separate from the context of the election year.

And what was even more disturbing about it was we had, and I don't want to mention names, but we had high-ranking officials in the military and intelligence community who, when they were brought in to testify, whether secretly and it was leaked or openly,

parroted that administration narrative.

And to parrot that narrative, you really had to say that a bunch of guys were rioting all over the Middle East because they were mad at the American right and the Islamophobia.

And then somebody said, hey, I happened to get a GPS mortar.

You did?

Well, how the hell do you use it?

Well, I don't know.

You can, anybody can use it, learn it in four minutes.

Wow.

We just shot the annex.

And

we killed, you know, I think his name was Tyrone Woods.

He was a heroic daughter.

He was at Glenn.

Doherty and Tyrone Woods.

We killed these two brave people.

I was just a lucky shot.

We've never used them.

And there were actually people who testified to that that said, oh, anybody can use them in very little time to be trained.

That's absurd.

And we had, remember that guy, Carney, Jay Carney, the press secretary, he went out there and just flat out lied.

as soon as you know this was a spontaneous riot so these guys had nothing going for them other than their own courage and they were not bent in a Cortez-like mission on gold and glory and etc.

They were bent on trying to preserve human life and their American fellow Americans.

And they were trying to save the ambassador.

Everybody loved the ambassador in Libya.

And he was a benign, a good figure, benign as far as they were concerned.

For our purposes, he was a wonderful ambassador.

And Sean Smith was a very loyal companion.

And how they died, the manner in which they died and the reason they they died.

People still to this day think it could have been preventable.

But had we not had Tyrone Woods and Glenn Doherty and the other groups of small number with them, they would have been completely wiped out.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, let's have a word from our sponsor and then we'll talk a little bit about maybe the technology or the soldiers' training.

That's what I'm more fascinated with in the West.

So we'll be right back.

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

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

The colors, the fabric, the design.

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

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

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

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

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

So join me.

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

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

That's Bolin Branch.

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

to save 15% off and unlock free shipping.

Exclusions may apply.

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

Welcome back.

And Victor, I wanted to ask you about the, you know, sometimes we see these training, for example, of al-Qaeda or, you know, other militaries that are not Western.

And they don't look quite like they could do what the men in Benghazi were capable of doing with all of their specialized knowledge in tactics and strategy and where to position themselves in the annex and the different types of weaponry they have and that you know what I mean like really specialized I find that I think our culture really admires people who get that specialized and who can really anticipate what the enemy is going to do and that kind of thing.

And we don't see that in these non-Western society soldiers trained so well like that which you know thank god we can you know use the superiority in our soldier training and i was wondering you know because you can give those libyans all the military arms that the annex people had but they would have still lost against those guys in the

start with the idea You know, I wrote Carnage and Culture about this very topic, and it was severely criticized, but I don't think it was refuted.

I remember what the theme of that book was, and I used 10 iconic examples, things like Rourke's Drift or the Battle of Salamis, etc.

Usually when Westerners were outnumbered, it didn't mean that the West was always going to win, and they didn't against non-Westerners.

And there were a lot of disasters, but what it meant was it being the Western military tradition, it gave them advantages to fight in unfavorable landscapes at great distances with enormous logistical or numerical disparities.

And what was that it?

Well, it was about seven or eight things.

It was the classical tradition starting in Greece and Rome of inductive thinking and empiricism, that you had a scientific tradition that was not censored by religion.

or fable or custom or tribal concerns.

And it can be very destructive.

And so what I'm getting at is most, not all, but almost all of the great leaps and bounds in military technology were Western, whether it was gunpowder that was imported as a firecracker from China, and then it was used in a very sophisticated manner with corn, gunpowder, and

metallurgy advances.

So that very soon the Chinese were trying to buy gunpowder weapons, even though they had found gunpowder.

at least before the Westerners.

So the West had this ability to make superior weaponry because of its scientific tradition or borrow elements from other groups and improve upon it.

And today,

that tradition remains.

So the Chinese say that they have a superior civilization and much more venerated and with a longer pedigree.

Maybe so, but if you look at Chinese soldiers and weaponry, you can argue that the entire basis for their missiles, for their automatic weapons, for their new aircraft care is all westernized.

Same is true with Japan, the same is true with South Korea.

So people, when they westernize, they use American, European, or Western weaponry, and they improve on it if they can, but they improve on it in a Western fashion.

And then when you look at the discipline, what you're talking about, that goes back to the phalanx and the legion and the tercio and the Renaissance.

And it basically suggests that the warrior cult of scalping or getting counting how many people you kill or individual feats of bravery or hit and run attacks or night marauding, is not, or cavalry, marauding, mounted troops, is no replacement for infantry, men on the ground, in formation,

in which your bravery is assessed on the basis of how well you kept the line, the phalanx, the legion, that is, how well you protected the man on your left or right, and you created group solidarity, and you followed orders.

And so, once you could establish that system and you could inculcate those values, then that also along with the technology gave you greater advantages.

And when you mix into the

context free market capitalism, then that meant not only did you have the scientific and military tradition, but you had the wherewithal, the labor and capital, to send these forces, whether it's Kitchener all the way into Africa to avenge the death of Chinese Gordon or the British Army into Zululand or

fight the Boxer Rebellion in a way that not since the Ottomans did any non-Western power have an ability to get into the heart of Europe, which at that time

was trisected between Orthodoxy, Protestantism, Catholicism, and was divided, but in a way that Islam was united.

But what I'm getting at is, so there was this military tradition of discipline and a definition of courage as following orders in service to the order and the formation.

And there was a military tradition and scientific tradition that gave you superior weaponry.

And there was an economic tradition that gave you a greater chance to be better supplied.

And that, and I could go into other things, but there were other auxiliary traditions.

That explains, as I said, why Cortez was successful in Mexico City in a way that Montezuma would have failed had he gone to Madrid.

He couldn't get to Madrid.

And by the same token, in the middle of the Civil War, where 700,000 Americans were killing each other, you would think that Native Americans, all of the Western tribes would unite and say, you know what, we can take St.

Louis now.

But they didn't.

because there was no sense of political statecraft in the way there was in the West of nationhood, the word nation, Nario, that didn't really exist in the same

way among non-Western peoples.

None of this meant that necessarily the West was morally superior.

It didn't mean that victory was preordained.

It didn't mean that there would be stupid commanders.

It didn't mean when you're faced with a Saladin or a brilliant non-Westerner, you wouldn't lose.

It just meant that you had options

to deploy forces all over the world in engagements.

Maybe it wasn't wise to be there, but you had an option of winning.

And that was not the same.

That was not true of people who did not have capitalist economies, that did not follow the Western scientific tradition, and did not define courage and battle by Western notions of discipline and formation and chain of command.

And so that's what it was about.

And you can really see that the difference today doesn't mean that the United States is going to win in the streets of Baghdad or they're going to win in Kabul.

It means one of two things, that they have the ability to get over there.

And if they want to fight a Western way of war like they did in Fallujah, they can win.

But at what cost and in what cost of benefit analysis is it worth it?

What do you get when you destroy Fallujah?

and you destroy the al-Qaeda or the Bafist or who are there rather than

do coin and counterinsurgency and all of that.

The same thing with Afghanistan.

The United States had the firepower and the organization and the money and the science.

Had they wanted to take over Afghanistan, they could have done it.

But for what purpose?

What moral purpose?

What practical purpose?

What military purpose?

What political purpose?

And so they are very adapt and flexible.

Our counterintelligence and counter-terrorism and asymmetrical forces, whether whether they're Delta Force or Green Berets or Ranger, whatever special elite forces they are, they can fight Al-Qaeda's type of war.

Al-Qaeda can't fight our type of war.

But it doesn't mean that we should fight it.

And it doesn't mean that we're going to do as well when we fight their type of war.

So most of the story of the 19th and 20th centuries is non-Western people drawing Western forces in to asymmetrical conditions and landscapes where they're A, outnumbered, B, the local population is hostile, C, they have enormous lines of logistical challenges, and D, they don't have enough of their superior weapons

to make a difference, and then making them fight on terms of the host.

And when that happens, they can lose.

But it doesn't mean that the enemy can do the same.

They cannot go into the West without becoming the West and defeat the West.

So whatever we think,

no Iranian army is going to land in the United States.

And if the Iranians are going to defeat Israel, it's because they're going to get weaponry from the Chinese or North Koreans that are copied from Western designs through trade or espionage.

And universities in Beijing, at least for a while longer, will not have the same traditions as Caltech or MIT.

I'm not saying, or Georgia Tech or something.

That doesn't mean that our universities are becoming more mediocre and less scientific and more weaponized and political.

They are, and they're catching up, but we'll see.

For now,

we're the inheritors of the Western military tradition.

And that explains why our brave soldiers did so well in Benghazi, and it explains why contestadors could do so well in Mexico City.

It wasn't foreordained.

It's just an advantage that Westerners have.

Yeah.

And there's something in the culture that you get so many of these young men that are so talented and so well trained in everything that they need to do, what to anticipate.

And there is.

There's a great misinformation that's given about soldiers and soldiers' families.

It's very tragic because we are in American decline, I think, now.

And one of it is cultural decline.

And one symptom of that cultural decline is an insane fixation on race.

And not even race, it's fundamental.

I mean, we're all Americans.

I don't mean that people who look different from one another have very different customs and traditions, even though we have the largest number of immigrants in the world per year.

What I'm talking about is superficial, manufactured anger among different groups.

It's kind of like fighting over the chairs on the Lido deck.

It's this anchor person wants that job from that anchor person.

This diversity czar wants to be vice provost.

This actor wants seven commercials rather than four.

It's mostly among our elites.

But in this conundrum, when you have the Secretary of Defense getting back to military matters, and he says that he's going to ferret out white supremacists, and he's in a racialized climate, and he's giving lectures about that the American military will look in every aspect like America.

And then you have General Milley with his, you know, looking over his shoulder to make sure he's not fired for, I think, legitimate reasons saying that he's reading Professor Kendi and understanding white rage when they both deep down inside know that there is not a conspiracy of white people in the military.

If anything, it's interested in transgenderism and allowing transgendered people fairness.

It goes out of its way to make sure that pregnant women can continue to operate in the military.

It makes sure that gays can be married and be gay openly.

It makes sure that through affirmative action programs, that people who are so-called marginalized or non-white have some consideration that's favorable when they're promotion and attention.

Okay, so if you're going to go down that route, why would you not realize that there is also a tradition among the American muscular classes of the middle and lower classes, especially to want to fight for their country?

I don't know if it's a Scotch-Irish heritage or what it is, but there are families in the middle class that generation after generation after generation,

their children join the military and deliberately gravitate toward elite combat units.

And the same is true of the Hispanic community and the Marines.

I can tell you that so many people I went to high school volunteered to go to the Marines.

But when you look at the death, and we've talked about this a number of times, the deaths, if you want to go and use the calculus of the left and say, we're going to look at everything through the lenses of gender and race, and you look at, you know, 35% of the country are white males and they're dying at over well over 70% in Iraq and Afghanistan.

And yet you're going to target those people and you're going to say, these are negative people.

These are suspect rather than saying, why is that?

Why do these people continually volunteer?

And why do they die in inordinate numbers in god-awful places like Afghanistan, like Iraq, like Libya.

Why do they do that?

And why do young first, second generation Mexican-American kids really want to join the Marines, which is another frontline combat unit?

And we don't do that.

Instead, we just try to divide each other and then demonize supposed white males.

And so what I'm worried about is if you do that enough,

And it's part of the larger environment where you're from Kyle Littenhouse to

this parade where you're saying that all white people are evil.

And that's what a person like Joy Reed is doing when she celebrates diminishing white demography, or she keeps saying white supremacy, white supremacy, whiteness, whiteness, whiteness.

And they all do that.

All of these anchors do that on those channels.

Then if you're going to so demonize them, maybe they'll just say, okay, I'm not going to be in the military anymore.

And who's going to step up?

I don't know.

Maybe we'll have, I think maybe the left should say, you know what?

White males are so toxic.

And after Secretary Austin is done with his investigation and after General Milley has gone through the rosters, they have determined that in the way that the Obama administration, I think it was Janet Napolitano or someone said that the chief threat for terrorism is returning veterans from Iraq.

Okay.

So maybe we've determined that this is not a

demographic we want to entrust with our security.

So then I'm going to say, then, who's going to take up the slack?

Is it going to be women?

Is it going to be gays?

Is it going to, you know, again, we're identifying people by their race and gender, not in my preference, the way the left does, though.

Are it going to be African Americans?

Are they going to have this huge, diverse military that's going to be overwhelmingly in combat?

and will die at the numbers that the people they replaced did in god-awful places like Fallujah or Taji or Kabul or Kandahar.

We'll see.

But right now, just as an observer looking at it, I think it's absolutely suicidal for the top echelon of the U.S.

Air Force, Navy, and Marines and Army to denigrate and cast under suspicion white males who for generations have volunteered to serve in the most hazardous positions in the U.S.

military on behalf of their country and got very little monetary recompense for it and did it for love of country and tradition.

And why you would want to denigrate that tradition, I don't know.

I really don't know.

That's not a good path ahead in that, but I would like to say that here on this show, we're not denigrating that.

In fact, we're celebrating and we are very thankful for the training of our soldiers and the soldiers throughout the military.

And so I think that we want to mark that on this Thanksgiving weekend.

Victor, we have to to go.

We're at the end of our time.

So thank you very much.

Thank you for having me and thank everybody for listening again.

I hope I didn't get off on too many tangents, but this area about military technology, last stands, East and West, I have written a lot about.

And I get kind of frustrated sometimes when I feel there's so much false knowledge and false information.

promulgated in the public square by the media.

Yeah.

All right.

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

Thank you.

I knew we all had two ages, our actual age and our internal biological age.

What I didn't know is I've likely lowered my biological age without even knowing it.

Here's the thing.

Because Americans eat so many processed foods and not enough fruits and veggies, many, perhaps most, are 10 plus years older on the inside than their actual age.

They're ticking time bombs.

A major university study suggests how to slow aging and diffuse that biological time bomb.

Participants slowed their aging by drinking Field of Greens.

That's all.

They didn't change their eating, drinking, or exercise, just field of greens.

When I started Field of Greens to replace my multivitamin, I was amazed.

After about two weeks, my energy improved.

I've been exercising more, and my overall wellness feels great.

Each fruit and vegetable in Field of Greens was doctor selected for specific health benefits.

Cell health, heart, lungs, kidney, metabolism, even healthy weight.

It's wonderful knowing Field of Greens can slow how quickly I'm aging.

And I encourage you to join me.

Swap your untested fruit, vegetable, or green drink for Field of Greens.

While there's time, check out the university study and get 20%

off when using promo code VICTOR at fieldofgreens.com.

That's fieldofgreens.com promo code Victor.

And we'd like to thank Field of Greens for continuing to sponsor the Victor Davis Hansen Show.