The Classicist: Wake Up to Woke

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Hello, ladies and gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis Hansen Show, The Classicist.

I'm Jack Fowler, the host.

I am the director of the Center for Civil Society at American Philanthropic, the author of its new newsletter, Civil Thoughts.

Why didn't you get it?

It's free.

CivilThoughts.com.

You can sign up there.

More importantly is the namesake of this show.

Victor Davis Hansen, who is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Busk Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

Victor, today we will be talking about your recent American greatness pieces, Recall the California Ideology, Biden and the Left-Wing Standard of Attacking Presidents, two pieces.

And you also have on your website, victorhanson.com, which we'll talk about a little more later, Historian's Corner, original content, where in this series you've done, you talk about some of the mythologies that you call mythologies of World War II.

Maybe we'll talk about another thing or two on the website and we'll get started right after this important message.

We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen show, the classicist.

Victor, I'd like to begin where we sometimes now end, and that's by reading a review of a listener that's put on iTunes.

So this is a five-star review from a gentleman named Bryce, who calls himself a U.S.

slash Canadian patriot.

And this is what he wrote, Uncommon Perspective.

And I'm reading this because it ties into something you've written.

He wrote five stars.

I listen to all of Professor Hansen's podcast, including Scholars and Sense.

His ability to discuss any subject.

and correlate them with world history is fascinating and his knowledge of military history is unparalleled.

Would Professor Hansen share how he went from being a generational Democrat to becoming an independent and what that looked like?

Many influential scholars began as Democrats and later became independents or Republicans, which is intriguing conversion of thought.

Victor has a new column at American Greatness.

That's amgreatness.com.

You should go there to read it.

The column is titled, Recall the California Ideology, and it begins this way: California once was run by alternating conservatives and mostly centrist Democrats.

True, paleoliberal governors like Pat Brown greatly expanded the welfare state, but they also believed in pushing integration, building freeways, dams, aqueducts, and power plants, while preventing forest fires, directing the mentally ill into state hospitals, and ensuring the state enhanced the housing, timber, oil, and gas, nuclear, and agricultural industries.

So why and how would anyone deliberately destroy that heritage?

Victor, I think this ties in with what Bryce, U.S.

Canadian Patriot, was saying.

Would you want to talk about your column?

Yes, well, we have a recall and it's Tuesday, so we're just three days from it.

Had the election been held maybe three weeks ago, I think Larry Elder who will win the candidate part of the recall, but that won't be applicable unless Gavin Newsom gets less than 50%,

51%.

And I thought that might be possible, but now he's poured millions of dollars into it.

He's not running on his record.

He's not saying to Californians, I built the Temperance Flat Dam, I built the sites reservoir, I built Los Banos Grande, just like you wanted me into in the 2014-15 water bond.

And therefore, we had 10 million acre feet.

And that's what's keeping us alive because he didn't do it.

I

widened the 99 all the way from Red Ruff down to the Great Vine, six lanes.

There is no more death traps between Visalia and Tulare or Madero and Merced.

I did that as prom.

He didn't.

He's not saying we used to be number eight, nine in school rankings, test scores nationwide.

We're down about 43.

I got us back up.

I took on the teachers' union.

I allowed us to have charters, more charter schools, homeschool.

No, he didn't do that because he didn't do it.

He didn't say to us, I've got gasoline affordable.

This is a great state.

We've got about the third largest oil reserve in the United States.

We have about $3 a gallon.

He didn't do that because it's up to about $5 a gallon.

And I can go on, but you see what I'm getting at.

He can't run on what he's actually done.

So he's running on this.

Larry Elder is a white supremacist and blackface.

I'm quoting directly his surrogates of the Los Angeles Times.

And the Trump Republicans, the Trump Republicans, the Trump Republicans are trying to destroy our beautiful state with all its half a million homeless people and all of its

20% below the poverty line and our beautiful 27 cents a kilowatt peak time electricity rates.

He wants to destroy all that.

That's what the campaign is about.

But there's a little wrinkle here, and that is that he has been very liberal.

He and Jerry Brown before him in this nearly 11, 12 years of governance, that they've been issuing ballots out to anybody who walks into a government office.

PMV, get a ballot.

Unemployment office, get a ballot.

Social services, get a ballot.

And people just say, you know, I'm Joe Blow.

I'm Joe Ego.

I'm Joe E.

And that ballot is sent to their home.

So you talk to people, especially in my community, and people have three or four ballots that come.

Many of them are Mexican-Americans, and they're targeted as his constituency.

But what would happen if all of that fluidity and all of that get out the vote were getting out Larry Elder votes inadvertently?

I'm not saying it's happening, but Larry Elder seems to be onto something by his last-minute appeal to Latin American and Mexican-American voters.

And why would they be mad?

Because they don't like people who eat at the French laundry with lobbyists and without masks and tell them and lecture them.

They don't like people who put their kids in prep school that are open year-round where they take your kid out of school and then you have to lose your job to stay home and Zoom with him.

And they don't like people that don't give a damn when they can't turn on the air conditioning, when it's 108 in Bakersfield and they have to go to the local Target of Walmart to get cool, or they have to drive from Fresno to Mendota on a dangerous road or from, you know, Tulare to Visalia on a very dangerous road and they're paying four and a half dollars gas because somebody in Palo Alto or Atherton you know feels that it's not right that we're burning any fossil fuels or they don't like it when they're lectured about carbon emissions and they look up in the skies above Fresno and they see a haze a whole summer long last last late last summer now from forest fires tons of carbon emissions pouring down in the central valley from a policy of not daring to log a dead tree because we have to let it be mulch.

It's an ecosystem.

So, all of these utopian bromides that the coastal corridor has,

their deleterious effects fall on people that are poor.

And these grandees like Gavin Newsom are never subject, as I keep saying, to the consequences of their ideology.

And so, that's the great

mystery.

All these people who are being pandered to and who should vote liberally and often, maybe they will vote liberally and often against Gavin Newsom.

That would be really an irony.

Yeah, I think also, Victor, this is, I'm going to extrapolate an anecdote, but Barry Weiss, you know, the former New York Times reporter who left over,

excuse me, columnist, who's no conservative, but left last year over its growing insanity.

She writes for Substack,

and she had a piece about Whittier College.

I don't know if you've heard about this, but that's a college Richard Nixon graduated from.

And it's over 50% Hispanic, but only 4% Black, I believe.

And last year, got a new school president, a Black woman.

I forget her name.

Part of the reason the story, Barry Wright, wrote this, was because Jeff Bezos's ex-wife, who's been throwing gobs of billions around as a crazy left-wing philanthropist, wrote a $12 million check to this school, which is actually underwriting this new president's tyranny.

I mean, a black only,

think black to the exclusion of all else.

And it's going over like a lead balloon with the, well, with many communities, but I think with the Hispanic and Latino community who are the population of this college.

And to me, it's also, I don't know, that's an anecdote, but I think it...

there's also a sense that, you know, Black Lives Matter means Black lives matter.

It doesn't mean Brown lives matter.

It means Brown lives don't matter as much, right?

Hey, I thought we were all minorities.

Weren't we all minorities?

Wait, wait, am I a second-class minority all of a sudden?

No, I didn't hear BLM say we're going to start capitalizing

brown, you know, like black.

And

the numbers that identify themselves as Latino is almost as big now as the 12% black.

And this was supposed to be the new version of Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition.

That's what diversity is.

We keep saying beating this dead horse.

Obama said, you're diverse now.

You can be from India.

You can be Latino, you're Asian, but you have one thing in common.

You're not a despised white person.

And they were 30% and you're eligible.

We don't care if you're Megan Markle or Michelle Obama.

It doesn't matter if you're Beyonce.

You are oppressed.

You are victimized.

And that's how he divided the country.

But within that coalition, there's a lot of people who say, I don't like this.

And what's really scary about all this is that when you start going down these abstractions,

whiteness, and it's always in a pejorative context, it's always the collective,

and that's applied to individuals.

You suffer from whiteness, you, you who they know nothing about, don't know a person's ideology, they don't know their history, they don't know their tragedies, but they are whiteness, then the logical correlation is,

okay,

So if whiteness is so bad and it's infected, then why are these people coming across the border in 2 million strong?

Why are these people falling off wheels in the middle of the skies over Afghanistan with just a glimpse to get into this horrible place where 70%

of this toxic whiteness?

And why are you so desperate, AOC and the squad, to let them in when you should be saying, don't get near this place?

Let me tell you, where's Ilyan Omar saying, you know what?

I came over here from my beloved Somalia.

at paradise and when i got here i saw all this mess and i don't want you to have to suffer the racism I did.

So I'm going to go down to that border and say, please, please, don't come in.

They don't do that, do they?

And then

they're saying to us, oh, by the way, all those guys that were overrun at the Battle of Bulge and stopped the so-called von Mundstedt offensive, all those guys at Terror that were right rotting in the

tide to take that island to stop a a Japanese military monstrous machine that butchered 15 million Chinese, they suffered from whiteness.

And so did those guys that marched in to Georgia and the Carolinas with Sherman to liberate slaves.

They'd never seen a black person in their life up in northern Michigan.

What made them want to go all the way to Georgia and free slaves and destroy the Confederate Army?

But never mind, they're whitened.

So we've got to be, I think the listeners, all of us, have to be honest.

This woke movement is racist.

It's Neanderthal, it's toxic, and people have to get the moral courage to say that.

It's not just a passing, it's not like just me too, it's worse.

It's McCarthy on it.

It's judging people by the color of their skin, and it's nothing to do with real problems.

It created a Jacobin myth, and the myth was African Americans are dying in the streets because of racist.

George Floyd

is not representative of what happens to African Americans.

Of the 11 million or so people who are arrested every year, the number of people who are African American who are killed while in police custody is not overrepresented versus the number of people arrested.

If there are hate crimes in the United States, and there are,

African Americans are not the victims most commonly of hate crimes.

They are most commonly the perpetrators of them.

If there is rare interracial crime, white on black, black on white, and that's rare, it's only about 3 or 5% of all violent crime, it's not whites that are inordinate overrepresented.

It's African Americans.

If you look at unemployment in 2020, it was the lowest African American unemployment since we started to record it.

If you look at wage gains for lower lower-middle-class Americans over the last three years, African Americans had stronger growth in wages than did whites.

If you look at college enrollments, it's 40% male, it's 60% white, 60% women.

And the people who are not getting into college now are white males.

They're not going.

And that's just a demonstrable fact.

So that was a complete fantasy.

We had a rogue cruel officer Sheldon, and he arrested somebody who was a felon.

And one of his specialties was female abuse, like putting a gun to a pregnant woman's belly as he broke into her home and resisting arrest while he was trying to pass a counterfeit bill.

And out of that tragedy, we created these mythologies for a BLM movement.

And what did we do then?

Just think a minute.

Where is Miss BLM,

Patrice Queller?

Well, she's on house number four, Jack.

She's in Toponga Canyon.

She's retired now behind her 35,000.

And where's Professor Kendi that General Millie?

Well, he's doing Zooms just like I am.

The difference is I'm not charging somebody $20,000 for medieval pennants to feel bad about themselves.

$330 a minute is what Kendi charges.

Ah, what happened to Tanahisi Coates, the philosopher that told us that we were hopelessly racist.

Well, he's writing Black-themed comic books and turning them into Black-themed comic movies, and he's a multi-millionaire.

And where's Barack Obama?

Well, Barack Obama, because he had such strong talent in the movie industry, we all knew that he was a great screenwriter and screen producer.

As soon as he

left his perch, he got $50 million from a white producer, owner, founder of Netflix.

And that helped him translate into a $14 million Martha's Vineyard Estate.

And the Netflix person is doing what with his money?

He's the largest donor, one of the largest donors, to destroy Larry Elder.

And what is Barack Obama doing to help his boss, whom he's working for?

He's doing commercials against Larry Elder.

So this whole woke thing is

a bunch of corporate, academic, legal, celebrity, media elites who are fighting over the deck chairs on the Lido deck.

That's what they're doing.

It's not, hey, 7,000 African American.

Yes.

7,000 African-American citizens have killed each other this year, last year.

And we're going to go into that inner city and we're going to make sure that the DA and the chief of the police and the mayor and the city council start enforcing the law and giving them good schools.

And they don't do that because these are all woke people.

And so this is what's so strange about this whole thing that we Americans of every race are just supposed to sit there while this small group of careerists in corporate world, head of

American Airlines, Delta Airlines, Coke, Disney, Beyonce, Jay-Z, Megan Markle,

Kaepernick, good old LeBron, billionaire, why they tell us how horrible we are, why they go off, they get rich on the way to the bank, to put it.

That's what it is.

And we've got to stop it.

And then we get the military.

They're woke and they don't tell us,

I am so upset about the white rage and the white supremacy.

And we don't have that at Raytheon.

We just don't do that at Lockheed.

How about just one, just one man?

Why don't we just say one?

retired four-star general and he says this, I am not going to go onto a corporate military contractor and teach them about the labyrinth of military procurement where my former colleagues operate in the Pentagon.

I'm not going to enrich myself because for to do so would be to capitalize or monetize all of that public service for my own private benefit.

Can't we have one of those people say that before they talk about white rage?

It's an enormous distraction.

Wow.

And it's a deliberate distraction and it's a careerous distraction.

And people got to wake up to it.

We need to get woke, but woke to the dangers of woke.

Yeah.

We, on our previous, when we did a podcast with National Review over a year ago, we had Shelby Steele on talking about what killed Michael Brown.

And we don't need to go into this again, but I do want to, I would encourage our listeners to go find that.

It took a while for Eli Steele and Shelby to get that up on Amazon.

But it talks the fundamentals of the things you were just discussing, which of course predate George Floyd.

And as Shelby said to us, and I believe he said on the documentary also, you know, the questions of racism and the real life in his own life, that's, if he had to draw up a list, it was number 18.

This is all.

BS.

It is the use of race as a means to power.

And the worst thing you can do, Victor, as you know,

to a white person of some,

you know, with

a degree or a law firm, et cetera, an elite, is to accuse them of being racist.

They would take my car keys, take my kids, take the house.

We've talked about all me racist.

We've talked about this before because, believe me,

that young white girl in a bicycle that had a gorilla mask.

And she threw something at Larry Elder and tried to get in a fight with him because I guess she's so worried about a black conservative not being racially

having authenticity.

She's not tutoring black kids.

She's not in the ghetto.

She's not trying to do things that cramp her lifestyle.

That whole Antifa iconoclastic movement, that whole BLM is upper class.

These were not working kids from, you know, northern Illinois that

they stopped their welding at two o'clock so they could go out to a BLM or Antifa concert.

These were not loggers, apprentice loggers that were saying, hey, everybody, time to climb down from 150 feet up there with this 24-inch chainsaw.

We got to hit that Antifa riot.

It's not.

These are pampered middle class and upper middle class people.

And they're doing it not because they feel real grievance, because they sense that Americans have no confidence in their own culture and won't defend it.

And they feel that if they can tear it down, there's going to be an opportunity for them to to be part of the rebuilding, the socialist rebuilding.

And people, I think they're just going to have to say, we owe something to people who are dead.

We're not going to tell those people, those ghosts that are floating around that died at Bella Wood, or that died at Shiloh, or you know, died at Okinawa or Iwo Jima, or died in a B-17 that got blown over up over Schwineford.

Hey, you guys,

you were suckers.

That wasn't what we were.

You just, ha, we don't even care.

No, we don't we owe us we owe it to them and i know you know there's a good term in latin non hic porcus not this pig it's not going to be this pig i'm not going to do it i don't think you are i don't think a lot of people we know we're not going to say in the 233 years

233rd year of our republic guess what this was a lousy country and we am glad we've got geniuses like maxine waters and chuck schumer and nancy pelosi and the presidents of our university and the Silicon Valley bunch like Mark Zuckerberg and the Google people because they

are absolutely right.

And I'm going to join.

I don't think so.

Well, Victor, let's move on to some other piece you wrote last week for American Greatness.

It's titled Biden and the Left-Wing Standard of Attacking Presidents.

And this is how it begins.

As Joe Biden entered office in January 2021, there still roared a left-wing revolution, awoke madness spreading through popular culture and Congress, much of which he indirectly has aided and abetted.

It has redefined not just politics, but the rules of the presidency.

And the eventual casualty of these radical shifts in protocols and customs will be Joe Biden.

Victor, will you explain why Joe Biden will be the victim of these changes?

Impeachment used to be a very rare thing.

And that's why the founders were very very careful.

It could only be in the House by a voice vote, I mean, one vote majority, but it had to have two-thirds in the Senate.

And that's why we only saw Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton impeached.

Neither one had a, Johnson did have a somewhat chance of being convicted.

And what they did not want, as you read in the Federalist Papers, they did not want it used.

in a president's first term.

So Donald Trump comes along and out of hatred toward him, it's very ironic now because the first impeachment was about in a phone call that he made because he was worried that offensive weaponry that was in the pipeline that he approved that Barack Obama would never approve was going to a country that was corrupt and it was corrupt with Hunter Biden.

And that got him impeached.

Nobody said he stopped it.

Nobody said they didn't get the equipment.

Nobody said that it was less impressive.

They agreed that it was more impressive than what Obama had promised.

Okay, so now they impeached him, and then they impeached him, and they did not impeach him for high crimes and misdemeanors or treason and bribery as stated in the Constitution.

They impeached him for obstruction of Congress.

That's what every president does.

They obstruct Congress, whether they like it or not.

In abuse of power, that's what they all are accused of.

I don't get pulled over by the Highway Patrol and say, hey, Victor, we're going to write you up for abuse of power and obstructing Congress as if they're real crimes.

So that's what they did.

And they impeached him.

Then they turned around and did it again and said,

you were inciting a riot, basically, an insurrection.

And we don't need to get onto that, but there was no arms were ever found.

The only person that died was an unarmed military veteran with a distinguished record, was shot in the neck, unarmed, by somebody who was not immediately identified.

And the officer sicknik who lay in state as a victim of Trump rage was died of natural cause.

They could go on, but that's where we are.

So they took the President of the United States and they impeached him twice.

That had never happened.

They impeached him without a special prosecutor.

Robert Mueller wasn't even a special prosecutor.

They impeached him without a

Ken Starr type report.

There was no report.

They did not have hearings.

They did not have lengthy cross-examinations.

They rushed it through.

And then the second time, they tried him when he was a private citizen.

Okay, this was all done in a manner we've never seen before.

And so now Joe Biden has made a phone call, hasn't he?

He's made a phone call to the Afghan president, and he's told the Afghan president to lie.

He said, even if things are as bad as they are, I want you to lie.

And I want you to lie, I guess, so that Joe Biden can get his political objective.

That is a big rally on today and say that Ain got out of Afghanistan.

And then he implies

that

exactly what he accused Donald Trump of, the Democrats, he's implying that we might cut off air support.

He said, well, we want to help you with the air support.

And they did cut off air support.

Is that an impeachable offense under the low bar standard?

Absolutely.

And then we heard the 25th Amendment, that Donald Trump was crazy.

Remember, we had psychiatrists, Yale, Ivy Lee, Grandee, Vandi Lee come in and say, Donald Trump should be restrained.

He's crazy.

And everybody clapped at her congressional testimony.

And then we had Rod Rosenstein and Andrew McCabe, oh, this guy's crazy.

Let's put a wire and see if we can find him saying crazy things and get the cabinet to get rid of him.

So Donald Trump took the Montreal cognitive assessment.

Does anybody think that Joe Biden would pass that?

I don't think he knows the difference between a picture of a rhinoceros, a hippopotamus, or an alligator.

I don't think he could pass any of them.

What I'm getting at is low bar impeachment, it applies to Joe Biden.

Promiscuous use of the 25th Amendment, it applies to Joe Biden.

And then the media has told us that Donald Trump was rude in press conferences.

He didn't answer.

He had more press conferences and impromptu meetings, and all of a sudden, what?

We don't hear anything except he is so cognitively impaired, he's giving away the prompts.

I'm not supposed to talk anymore.

That's what they tell me.

Well, they gave me this list here to call on.

I can't talk.

That's what they tell me.

If Donald Trump did that, they would say that he's non compos mentes immediately.

So we have standards, we've had all these very low bars about invective.

And where are the generals now?

I mentioned that earlier.

Under Donald Trump, we have a new rule.

It says the Code 88 or Chapter 88, Codicol 88, of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, it doesn't apply anymore with Donald Trump.

So all you retired generals and admirals, go to it.

Call him a fascist, call him a Nazi, call him Auschwitz-like, call him a liar, call him Mussolini.

Say all you want about your commander-in-chief, no problem.

And now, Joe Biden just inflicted the most humiliating disaster on the American people in 50 years.

And it's a military disaster, among other things, and not one of those people will come out and say a word.

And so that's what I was trying to talk about.

The Democrats and the left created this standard.

And by this standard, Joe Biden will be boomerang because there are no rules anymore.

We'll see if the Republicans pick up the House.

If the Republicans pick up the House, All they're going to have to say is, what is the standard about a presidential phone call?

Let's go back and research how you guys voted.

Oh, Biden meets it with the Afghan impeach.

What's the standard about cognitive disability?

Oh, let's go look at the 25th Amendment.

And that's not even getting into the vaccination mandates and telling people, you know, you're going to have to do this and have to do this.

And maybe the Supreme Court will just have to wait on my power.

Victor, once upon a time, there were some great generals, right?

And

General Patton.

I should have found it before the beginning of the podcast,

the speech you gave gave about shooting that paper hanger, Hitler.

But you have,

you are a military historian.

I'm confident all our listeners know that.

Your most recent military history book, approaching, maybe it's even surpassed 100,000 sales now.

The Second World Wars came out, I think, 2017.

Yes.

Just a tremendous book.

You,

and that word, those words, wars is an important

thing.

It's a bit of a different twist to how people consider the conflict, actually conflicts in the plural.

So you've gone into this on VictorHanson.com.

And as I mentioned earlier, this is a lot of this is a privileged material.

Folks should subscribe.

It's exclusive content.

But let's talk about some of this anyway.

And you have right now, part three,

for all I know, may continue a little more.

But there's a three-part series so far under your historian's corner feature.

And it's about some mythologies of World War II.

And one of the mythologies you bring up is a question.

I think one of the mythologies was that

the war, well, there was a war that Germany won from 1939 to 1941.

And then there was a second war ensuing that, which we can talk about another time.

But point before us here that we should discuss is part three, where you write, did the Soviet Union really quote unquote win the war?

So Victor, would you talk about the mythology that you see in this particular aspect of that great

conflict?

Plural.

It was very popular in the 1960s and 70s.

And in the 70s, the Soviet Union subsidized a great project called the Great Patriotic War.

And it swept Europe.

And there were translations in Italian and German and Greek.

And everybody thought, you know, well, we didn't do enough diligence in seeing who won the war.

And it was predicated on the idea that the Soviet Union killed two out of three of the probably five and a half million Germans, both civilians,

not civilians as much, but soldiers, probably three and a half million soldiers.

Two-thirds of them, 66%, died on the Eastern Front.

And that was true.

And then the end of discussion.

But

if you look at it very carefully, you start to see how could they do that?

Well, they did that from a variety of reasons.

First of all, we talk about moral culpability.

Soviet Union until June 22nd was aiding the Third Reich.

By that, I mean they had created a Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact on August 23rd, 1939, in which they gave enormous amounts, up to 30%

of their food and oil and iron, precious metals to the third reich so that they could better do what?

Destroy France, attack Britain during the battle of Britain?

Yes.

And they were perfectly happy under this Marxist dialectic that these Western countries, the democracies, and Hitler would destroy themselves and then he would march in, Stalin, and take over.

And then the unthinkable happened.

Hitler broke his word and invaded the Soviet Union.

And all of a sudden they said, second front, second front, you've got to invade immediately.

You've got to make it.

We may have been trying to kill you and giving Hitler stuff, but now he's our mutual enemy.

We may have been butchering Finns, but now he's our mutual enemy.

So you've got to help us.

You've got to invade.

And then take the pressure.

That was their argument.

And we listened to it.

And so what we did was we sent experts, Harry Hopkins and others, over to the Russians, and we said, look,

you are very good with your large caliber artillery.

The T-34 tank is excellent.

You have a lot of industrial base and you're moving it over to the Ural on the other side of the Urals because you're afraid of Moscow.

Fine.

But what can't you do?

What can we do that will free you up?

And they gave us a list.

We need rubber.

We need radios.

We need heavy clothing.

We need food.

We need aluminum.

We need airplanes for ground support that you may not like, like the Ara Cola.

We need aviation fuel.

And then we said, okay, how are you going to get it there?

Well, you've got to go into Iran and have a coup

and get rid of the old Shah and put the new Shah and then build a road.

And so you can supply us as we fight Army Group South.

And then the British have to go way up above the North Pole, the Archangel, and they've got to bring us stuff to help Leningrad.

And then you've got to somehow go through the North Sea and supply your stuff.

And oh, by the way,

On April of 1941,

we signed a non-aggression pact with the Japanese.

So, after Pearl Harbor, they can't be our enemies.

They're your enemies.

So, when you want to put this stuff from Portland and Seattle and San Francisco and San Diego on Liberty and later freedom ships, and you ship them to us at Platistovic, don't worry.

They'll go right by Okinawa.

They'll go right through the South Pacific.

They'll wave their hand wherever they see it, and it won't do a thing to them because we're not going to fight them.

because they were nice enough that they wouldn't invade from the east when we were almost ready to give up moscow and so we were able to transfer a quarter million siberian troops to save moscow because the japanese made a deal with us in accordance with our non-aggression pact so think of that for a minute so here's somebody who tried to destroy the west then he's attacked by this nut hitler after supplying hitler and then he's made a deal with the japanese so that the Japanese and he would mutually benefit as each fought different wars.

And the Japanese are our enemies and he has no solidarity with us.

Okay.

And then we're giving him 20 to 25 percent of all of his war needs.

And it doesn't stop there.

Then he says, well, you've got to invade.

And we said, there's no way in hell you can invade occupied France.

the so-called Atlantic Wall in 1942 and 1943, but we can help.

So in November of 1942, we invaded North Africa.

And with Montgomery victorious at El Alamein, we caused the greatest surrender of Germans in one time in North Africa.

250,000

greater than Stalingrad surrendered en masse in 1943 and we closed out that.

Did we take a breath?

No.

We thought, well, maybe Italy is Churchill's right.

It's assault on the belly of Europe.

So then we invaded Sicily and we took Sicily and we killed a lot of Italians and Germans.

And then we went into the worst thing.

This is like a nightmare going up the spine of Italy.

No one is right mind does that, the Apennese Mountains.

But we did it.

And we were going to try to get up into the Ljubljana Galp and meet the Soviets.

And it was a god-awful disaster.

And then somebody said, well, you've got to stop all of these U-boats.

They're torpedoing the Archangel.

They're torpedoing the North Sea.

They're torpedoing all the supplies to Britain.

So we built hundreds of destroyers and destroyed our escorts and we refitted B-24s and we destroyed 75% of the U-boats.

And of course, somebody said, well, the Americans in the United States, the British have this first and second fleet.

You've got to destroy, you know, the Bismarck and the Turpitz and all these surface ships.

And we did.

Oh, by the way, and you've got to clean the the Italians out of the Mediterranean.

And we did.

And then they said, we're just not able to fight the Japanese.

So you're going to have to go into Burma.

And the British did.

And then we did along the Burmese-Chinese border.

And we're going to.

And the Soviets said, you know, you're going to have to feed the Chinese.

We can't.

So we fed the Chinese.

We flew over the hump, and the Burma Road was still closed.

And then we went into that god-awful Guadalcanal because somebody had to keep Australia in the war because it was going to be cut off from New Guinea and Port Moresby.

So we did that.

And then we decided, MacArthur decided, I think it was a folly, but he wanted to do it.

He wanted to go cartwheel, so to New Guinea, around the Java Sea, invade the Philippines, and then go to Japan.

And then Nimitz said, no, the Marines and most of the Navy are going to go to Guadalcanal, and then they're going to go to Tarawa.

And then we're all going to bypass Revolve and truck, but we're going to keep going.

And we're going to go to those God-awful Mariana Islands.

And we're going to go to Iwo Jima and Okinawa.

And then we're going to bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, and win the war.

And that's what we did.

And the Soviets didn't do a damn thing.

So then, under the alt agreements, you know, three weeks before, the Soviets said, well, we've had a nice breeder now.

We lost 22 million people, and they did.

But it was because of the abject incompetence of Joseph Stalin's earlier interventions and allowing his huge circlements at Kiev and outside Moscow.

But my point is that there was no gratitude ever.

400,000 GM and pseudo-vapor trucks we gave them.

Every P-39 AeroCoba with a, I think, a 20, 30 millimeter cannon they used successfully.

We gave them the aluminum for the Yak fighters and MiG-FI.

We did everything they needed, and yet they never said anything other than you owe us.

And then we look back at the war and we think, hmm, the Soviet Union broke its word.

to all other five major combatants.

It was an ally to five combatants, Three were fascist and two were democratic.

When it was allied to the Germans and the Japanese and the Italians, it kept its word in case the Japanese almost to the very end.

When it was allied to the British, it saved it and the United States had saved it.

It broke its word repeatedly, especially in Eastern Europe when it denied free elections and in the post-war settlements.

And for them to claim that they were the primary winner because they killed two out of three Germans when the British were the only country, the only country that started the war on September 2nd, 1939 and went six years into September 2nd, 1945.

It was the only country that either did not invade another country or was invaded by another country.

And the United States fought after it was attacked, it fought all the way to the end.

And remember, the Soviet Union from August 23rd, 1939 to June 22nd, 1941 was a staunch ally of the Third Reich and helped it to try to kill as many Westerners as it could.

So that was what this essay, it's in the Ultra collection, and that was part three of World War II.

And I have three more that are coming out.

And they try to address this idea that we have to feel bad about something we did to the Germans or the Japanese, or we need to give.

great thanks to the great Russians who saved us.

All of that is exaggerated.

The United States fought, you name where there was a war, whether it was feeding Chinese or risking your life to supply the Russians or sinking oilers coming from, you know,

what is now Indonesia, Tokyo, if you're a submarine or a marine dying in Okinawa or Iwo Jima or B-29, B-17.

They didn't do any of that.

They had no strategic bombing.

They had no surface fleet.

They had no U-boat fleet to speak of.

They did not fight any of the Japanese theaters at all until the very end of of the war.

They never, ever sent troops outside the Eastern Front.

And they had it rough, but they did not win World War II.

Remember that Noel Coward song, Victor, Don't Let's Be Beastly to the Germans.

So

maybe that could be the, we'll do a podcast on this series.

I think that might not be a bad idea.

And we'll use that as the intro.

Speaking of upcoming podcasts, I think we should commit to our listeners to do one or two exclusively on the upcoming book, The Dying Citizen.

Again, that's out, I think you said earlier, October 5th, the first week of the year.

October 5th.

Yeah.

I'd like to do that.

I think it's going to be very timely because I was writing it when things got bad, but I was allowed to have an epilogue to update it as well.

Oh, we think.

So a lot of this stuff.

All this stuff that we're seeing from the border to Afghanistan to critical race theory, they have one thing in common.

It's occurring because the citizen has lost his powers, his constitutional prerogatives, his economic clout, his influence,

his special place of a unique landscape between secure borders, reverence for the constitution, and he's being attacked from the pre-modern forces of tribalism and no borders people and the destruction of the middle class to the post-modern administrative state.

legalists, activists, the evolutionaries that want to change the system, the constitution.

And then finally, you know, the Davos, Davos, great reset, cosmopolitan globalists, that we're all going to be citizens of the world and

to rub shoulders with the WHO,

International Criminal Court, and all that stuff.

Yeah, as they send us off to prison.

So, Victor, that's really about all the time we have.

Again, Victorhanson.com.

Please visit, please subscribe.

and you'll find the link there for the dying citizen.

Please consider purchasing the book.

Also, I don't know that there's a link there for the Second World Wars.

There probably is.

If not, find it on Amazon.

Folks, if you have not read that book, you're doing yourself a disservice.

And if you're not a history buff, you surely know one in this.

It would be a wonderful gift for anyone.

We,

oh, me, Jack Fowler, please consider subscribing to civil thoughts at civilthoughts.com.

That's the new weekly newsletter, email newsletter I write.

Thanks for listening.

If you do listen on the iTunes, please do give Victor the five stars.

He should get 10.

They only allow five.

And I guess that's about it.

Victor, I wish you safe travels.

I know you're leaving Hillsdale where you've been for a couple of weeks.

Again, I hope you don't have any more.

You've had enough tormented air travel to last anyone's lifetime or several people's lifetimes in the last few months.

Hope you have safe and pleasant travels.

And we will be back again soon with another episode of the Victor Davis Hansen Show, The Classicist.

Thanks for listening, folks.

Thank you, everybody.

I appreciate it.