The Classicist: The Value of Studying the Classics

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Ladies and gentlemen, this is the Victor Davis Hanson Show, The Classicist.

We are recording on Friday, June 5th, in the year 2021.

Today's program is going to really match the title of the program, The Classicist, the namesake of the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

That's Victor Davis-Hanson.

He's the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution.

He's also the Wayne and Marsha Busk Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

Victor is a farmer, a classicist, a military historian.

He's an essayist at American Greatness.

He's the editor-in-chief of the terrific Hoover Institution online journal Strategica.

I encourage all our listeners to go to VictorHanson.com.

That's his private papers website.

And a lot of what we will talk about on this episode and other episodes of The Classicist is the original material that Victor writes there.

I'm Jack Fowler.

I'm the co-host.

I am the former publisher of the National Review, and I'm the director of the American Philanthropic Center

for Civil Society.

One last note or two.

VDH's Morning Cup, if you're on Facebook, go find it.

It's terrific.

You'll be directed by Victor to new material every day.

If you're on Twitter, follow Victor at VD Hansen.

And when you go to the website, victorhanson.com, look for the link for The dying citizen that's victor's forthcoming book it's going to be out in october it's going to be pretty darn consequential victor today on the classicist we're going to be talking about classics uh no latin or greek language requirement uh for classics majors at princeton university let's talk about what's going on there is this a pandemic that is going to infect maybe it's already affected other institutions and American places of higher learning.

I'd like to talk to you a little bit, Victor, about your own experiences as a student studying the classics and then as a teacher of the classics.

We'll stick with Greece a little bit and talk about Greece in World War II.

You are the author of the Second World Wars, and I think it would be interesting to get your perspective on the Italian and German campaign against the Greeks.

Also, Victor, there on the private papers website, there is a,

there are two pieces that I'd like us to get into.

One is Eeyore's Cabinet, and that's about the endless lies we are being taught in America.

And the other is your more a positive spin on things, Optimism Inc., where you actually talk about, I'll call it the thrill of being ostracized in the age of Trump.

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So Victor, hello, my friend, and let's get

to it.

I would like to start just briefly.

My former colleague, National Review Brittany Bernstein, and this has now been in a lot of places there writing about what's happened at Princeton.

Quickly, here's what she wrote.

Classics majors at Princeton University will no longer be required to learn Greek or Latin in a push to create a more inclusive and equitable program, an effort that was given quote-unquote new urgency by the quote-unquote events around race that occurred last summer, according to the faculty.

And Victor, if you will indulge me a second on American greatness,

Amina Milanik, who's now writing there, she

does a piece on this also, and she quotes from the new statement put out by the classics department at Princeton.

It's just give me half a minute here.

I want to read this piece, and then I'd like you to just weigh in on all of this.

And this is what the faculty at this department is now saying.

Why have they done what they've done?

Why have they done this, made this decision?

They say it's to articulate a clear, forward-looking, and inclusive vision for our field.

There's some gobbledygook in here.

You'll have to decipher it for me.

Once devoted to the appreciation of Greece and Rome as exemplary cultures, often seen in what was perceived to be their, quote, splendid isolation, unquote, classicists now study a broad range of synchronic and diachronic relationships and pay close attention to exclusions.

In terms of synchronic relationships, we investigate, for example, how ideas and forms of expression circulated between Greece, Egypt, and the Near East, to what extent the Romans and their North African enemies shared the same cultural models, models, how ancient people related to the natural and built environment, and how the beginning of literature compare around the world.

In terms of the diachronic perspectives, we investigate, using a variety of theoretical frameworks, how classical texts have been transmitted and received in later cultures.

I guess that would be you and me here in 2021.

We specifically consider how the cultures of Greece and Rome have been instrumentalized and have been complicit in various forms of exclusion, including slavery, segregation, white supremacy, manifest destiny, and cultural genocide.

Victor, we've come a long way from declining verbs in Latin from puela, puela, puelam.

What do you make of this?

I'll call it madness.

Maybe madness is the wrong term, but tell us what you think.

Well,

there's three issues very quickly.

There's the issue of is what they said about Greece and Rome true.

And then there's the issue: can you have a classics program, and especially a classics major without knowledge of Greek and Latin?

And then three,

what's behind this?

And very quickly, let's be clear: there is no concept of whiteness in the ancient world.

That term,

you know, aspro in Greek,

doesn't exist.

And so what do I mean by that?

I mean that if you're a slave and Caesar conquers Gaul, you can be blue eyes and blonde hair.

It doesn't matter.

If a Roman woman in the first century AD wants to slum and look like a barbarian, then what does she do?

She wears a blonde wig.

and she puts white makeup on because she's a Mediterranean person and she wants to look like a barbarian that has no civilization.

So the same is true of Greece.

So every country is ethnically chauvinistic, but in the ancient world, neither slavery or success or intelligence

was ever gauged by race.

And this is clear to everybody.

A great African-American classicist, Frank Snowden Jr., I wish that these people at Princeton would read what he wrote.

It was a very accessible book, Blacks in Antiquity.

And he wrote another book about prejudice in the ancient world.

And he confirmed not only were the Greeks and Romans not prejudiced against darker skinned peoples from Africa, but going back to Homer, the original or the first literature of the Greeks, they felt that the Ethiopians were noble people.

And so that's one thing.

So this idea that we're going to become racist because we're studying Greece and Rome because they were racist.

Then the second part of that, the corollary is, well, it was expropriated.

And what they mean by that was in the 15th century, 14th and 15th and 16th centuries, the nexus of power in Europe shifted from the traditional Mediterranean, Greece, and Rome centers to Northern Europe and Scandinavia and the Atlantic coast.

And it transferred Jack for a lot of reasons.

One is the Ottomans took...

Constantinople in 1453 and they pressed into what had been the Byzantine bulwark, and that was lost.

And so, people in the Mediterranean were panicked.

And so, people started to explore ways of getting to India and China.

They couldn't use the land routes when the Byzantines had protected them, and they no longer were there.

So, we had the great age in the 15th and 16th century of exploration.

And any country with an Atlantic port that could go to China or then later the New World, whether that was France or Spain or Britain or the Dutch, prospered.

And anybody who was locked in the Mediterranean, whether that were the old Florentine Republic or the Papal States or Venice, suffered.

So the Ottomans made a difference.

So did the discovery of global navigation by sea in the New World.

And also, let's be frank, it was the rise of the Protestant Reformation.

And that gave a new economic explanation of Christianity.

So if you are going to be wealthy, I'm just trying to be caricaturing Calvinism a little bit, but a person who was successful and wealthy was no longer the problem of a rich man getting to heaven is harder than a camel going through the eye of a needle.

He must have been blessed by God to be so industrious.

So that Protestant work ethic,

that started in the Protestant Reformation was centered in Northern Europe.

And then, guess what?

The classical legacy then was appropriated or absorbed by these new dynamic places in Britain, in France, in the Netherlands, in Germany, in Sweden.

And these were white people.

And they made the idea that this culture that they had taken from Italy and Greece, and what is that culture?

It's rationalism.

It's the scientific method.

It's private property.

It's

basically pre-capitalist economics.

It's tolerance.

All of that then became absorbed into the larger European tradition.

And those people, at certain times when they started to leave the European continent, they no longer were the wild-eyed barbarians that the Romans said these Germans in the Tottenburg Wald or these Versingeteriks Gauls are really nasty people.

Or when you went in and saw what were the Picts or the Scots,

these people, you know, they paint their face purple and they use crazy chariots.

They're barbarians.

It was no longer true.

And so what happened is that classical idea of of people that were less civilized transmogrified to, well, we went to Africa or we went to New World.

And guess what?

People that we saw there did not have the same level of architecture or written language or scientific method.

Or if they did, they would be coming from Mexico into Madrid or they would be coming from West Africa and sailing up.

you know, the Rhone River or something.

And so they then fashioned an idea that their culture was superior.

And

then they said it was not just cultural but racial but that that was an element but it wasn't the element because also embedded in the classical tradition was the socratic method of induction it was self-criticism it was self-reflection when you look at classical literature what do you find thucydides a general an athenian general does he write an athenian propaganda take on the Peloponnesian War?

No, he's very, very critical of Athens.

What do you read when you read Petronius the Satyricon?

A devastating tuck down on the decadence that affluence and leisure contribute to in the late empire.

If you read a poem of Catullus, is it, what, celebratory of the late Roman Republic?

No, it's about the decadence of self-centered, selfish, sexually obsessed men.

And so what I'm getting at was a very self-critical culture.

And the same was true about race, and the same was true about democracy.

So for every racist, there was an anti-racist.

For every Democrat, there was an anti-democrat.

And that's why we're so self-critical in the West in a way that China is not.

That's why we're saying today we want to be transparent.

And what's why people hated Donald Trump more than they did the Chinese, their own president.

And that would get you killed in China.

And everybody who wanted to find the truth about that lab leak somewhere is

they were deplatformed, disappeared, canceled, dead.

And so that's what the truth is.

So then the question is, well, since classics was sort of centered on tracing the classical legacy in Greece and Rome, and that required a lot of disciplines that were very difficult, archaeology, epigraphy, the study of text on stone, art, philosophy, philology was the key to it, because to study these things in depth, you have to know Greek and Latin because a lot of these texts are not quite the same in English.

You don't get a sense of the language or the vocabulary usage or the history of the language or the style of the language if you're reading it in English.

And more importantly, when these critics said, well, there were this culture in Egypt and there was this culture in Persia and there was this culture.

Well, how do they know that?

Is there these great old kingdom novelists?

Were these democratic debates recorded in Persepolis?

No.

What we know about it comes from the only culture in the Mediterranean that had free expression and had literature that was divorced from religion and state.

And so that's ironic.

And so, but the question is, why are they doing it?

They're doing it because they feel that the people who studied Latin and Greek require a level of discipline, they require a level of leisure, I guess, or income, they think, and therefore it's not as accessible because there's a hierarchy or a requisite, just like an SAT test or an ACT test.

They want to get rid of all requisites and make it radically democratic.

In other words, you can be a classic scholar, but not have to learn Latin and Greek.

It takes too long, it's not fair.

You didn't go to prep school.

And I can tell you that it's totally erroneous.

I grew up on a farm out here, and I went to a high school that was probably rated in the bottom 10% of public high school.

And my friends in high school, there were about three initiatives that people took.

One was to beat people up and one was to drink as much as you can and one was not to be a candy ass pussy punk wimp nerd.

And so it was a brutal, really a brutal atmosphere that I went through.

But I had good parents that encouraged learning.

So when I got, I was a freshman at the new UC Santa Cruz campus and they had a wonderful classics department.

And I started taking a class in translation, the professor said to me, well, if you really are interested, you've got to learn Greek and Latin.

But I said, I don't even know what they are.

And I'm 18, it's too late.

It's not too late.

These kids that have it in 12 won't know it any better than you do in two years.

And so I did intensive Greek at Yale.

I studied Latin day and night.

And by the time three years later, I won a full-paid scholarship to Stanford University in a philology department.

Why?

Because you're a freshman at college and classics, becoming a classicist is not on your agenda the day you want to.

No, I just happened to take a Western Civ class from a gifted professor, John Lynch, and he said, you're really good at it.

Maybe you should take Latin.

I said, why would I want to do that?

I didn't even know what it was.

And yet when I started taking it, I did pretty well.

He said,

but

you need to get Greek and Latin, and you need to get degrees.

I said, how can I do that?

I'm already 19 now.

He said, well, you're going to go to Yale and you're going to learn it in the summer, intensive.

I said, yeah, but that's for graduate students in their 30s or something.

He said, doesn't matter.

You can do it.

And I came back and I took advanced Greek and Latin my second year.

And same thing.

He said, now you can get a scholarship and go to Greece.

So for me, it was an equal opportunity discipline.

And believe me, I did encounter classicists, ironically, from places like Princeton that were snobbish and did name drop their prep schools.

But when I went to Stanford, in 1975, it was very interesting.

There were four

entry students, first-year students, and that program was one of the only philological classics programs left, even in 1975.

It was philology, philology, philology.

You're going to take intensive Greek literature readings, one play a week of Aeschylus for 10 quarter weeks.

And then you're going to take at the same time, you're going to read the whole text of Tacitus's animal.

And then the next quarter, you're going to go into Livy.

And then the next quarter, you're going to read all the plays of Aristotle and then you're going to the same time you're doing that you're going to learn how to write fluently in Greek and Latin for three quarters and then you're going to do it in Latin and then

In addition to that, you're going to start taking your PhD exam.

Three hours of sight reading in Greek, three hours of sight reading in Latin.

It means they just hand you a page and say translate from anything of the 52 million words in the corpus of classical Greek and more in Latin.

And then in addition to that, they're saying you're going to have to write maybe the San Francisco Chronicle, maybe the LA Times, you're going to have to translate that into Latin or Greek, and you've got one hour to do it.

And then they're going to tell you, by the way, you have to learn French and you have to learn German to read it because there's

important scholarly work that has not been translated into English.

And then, in addition to that, you're going to have to take 12 seminars and things like the use of the subjunctive and optative in xenophon, or the manuscript tradition of Aeschylus' suppliants, or the inscriptional evidence for the Athenian Empire.

And then when you do all that,

you're going to have to take these tests.

One three-hour Greek history, one three-hour Roman history, one three-hour Greek literature, one three-hour Latin literature, your French and German one-hour exams, in addition to what I mentioned, the language.

Then you're going to

write a thesis.

that has to be on a new topic that could be publishable, and then you're going to have to defend it, and you're going to have a three-hour oral exam in addition.

So that was what a PhD was, but it was based on you couldn't do that unless you had Greek and Latin.

And the people who were in class with me, guess what?

One was a Vietnam veteran who was severely wounded, one of the bravest, most brilliant people I ever met, Lawrence Woodlaw.

And he was a genius.

Did he ever learn Latin and Greek in prep school?

No, he went to one of the roughest schools in Michigan or New York, actually.

He was from the Bronx.

And then another was Jeff Sellers, a very fine student.

He went to Wesleyan.

He was a Polish kid that worked in the steel mills.

And that's who we were.

And there was no privilege.

There was no prep school.

And that's what I liked about classics because it was based on achievement and not reputation.

And what made American classics especially interesting was that unlike the European tradition that was aristocratic, all of our great classicists were just kind of iconoclastic.

They were from all different backgrounds.

And when I started a classics department in 1984, I was farming and there was no classics at cal state present it was a huge university 12 15 000 at that time and i started teaching latin and then they let me teach another and then latin literature and translation and then an advanced class in livy and then why can't you teach greek okay i need another person i hired bruce thornton the very well-known column

and that's what we did and what who were our students were they what what the Princeton students are no what i'm getting at jack is these were students many of them were undocumented but most of them were either of three different groups.

They were children of the Oklahoma diaspora, poor whites from Tulare, Bakersfield, et cetera, or they were poor Mexican-American kids, or they were Asian from the Hmong diaspora that centered in San Joaquin Valley.

And we taught them.

And we did, did we say you don't have to know?

No, our attitude was this.

We're going to teach Latin and Greek till it comes out of your ears.

If you want to do this, we're going to be able to write it.

We're going to teach you to write in book.

We're going to make sure you have French or German or Italian.

We're going to make you give lectures to the class without notes.

We're going to make you talk without an accent.

We're going to have perfect diction.

We're going to give you an education that is better than you can get at Stanford or Harvard or Berkeley at the undergraduate level.

And then we're going to go beyond that and we're going to make you more competitive.

And if you want to go to law school, if you want to go to medical school, if you want to get an MBA, you want to get a teaching credential, or you want to get a PhD,

we will do all in our power to make that happen.

And we had about 50, 50 in 21 years I was there that went to the Ivy League or universities like, I think we sent four to Stanford University graduate program and more to Berkeley and UCLA and USC.

So what I'm getting at is classics was a gateway for people.

And for these very wealthy and titled Princetonites to decide that, well, we don't think that our students can do this.

Well, they did it at Fresno State, and it was, and so they can't do it.

Well, they can't do it because you're not telling them what classics is.

You're telling them that it's racist, that it's culpable, that it's too hard for you, and we're going to baby you.

It's like, as I said, it's like a physics professor saying, you don't really need math to learn physics.

That's what saying that is.

And why, Princeton?

Because Princeton now wants to be, by design, the nexus of woke classics.

They have this Daniel Peralta, Stanford PhD.

He was an undocumented resident and he makes a big deal out.

He wrote a book about it.

The irony is he's Caribbean, but he came to this country undocumented.

And this country did everything as it should for people who work hard.

He worked very hard.

He got a degree.

He went to prep school.

at no cost.

He went to Stanford PhD program.

Princeton hired him.

He was promoted very quickly.

And guess what?

During this metamorphosis, he decided from at one point being giddy at about how wonderful classics was because it incorporated people like himself and music and it gave explication and all these other fields.

He decided that he had to decolonialize his mind.

And it just happened accidentally.

for no

sensible reason that this was the woke moment.

So then he decided that he was going to be the avatar of classic wokenism and talk about how he was victimized.

And then he bullied Princeton.

And there was the Joshua Katz incident where a very distinguished classicist took this idea on and said, you know, when African-American students come into an office and they demand this and that, that's wrong.

And he used a word that was kind of tough.

He said that this was a terrorist-like incident when they occupied people's office and obstruct people.

And they went after him.

And suddenly it became a cause celeb to say that you didn't like this distinguished classicist who was a gifted leader, and they're out and

they turned their attention to him.

And it just sort of, as the left does, it evolved.

And so they decide we're going to be the first classics department, guess what, to abolish Latin Greek.

And notice the field jacket had avenues to accommodate people who did not want to learn Latin Greek.

I had a daughter, a late daughter, Susanna Hansen, and she took Latin at the University High School, public school here.

And she learned Latin, but she didn't want to continue.

So she went to college at Myoma Mater, UC Santa Cruz, and she didn't want to make, she wanted to major in history, but not classics.

So she didn't want to learn Latin and Greek and take that effort.

Fine.

But they had something called the classical studies minor.

And that meant if you took X number of classes in Greek history, Roman history, Greek in translation and didn't require any Latin and Greek, you could could get an enriched view of history.

I thought that was very wise.

So, we have classical studies minors, and anybody's welcome to take them.

And you do not need to have Latin or Greek.

You can be an art historian and minor in ancient art history or something.

So, this is a sensational view.

And I'll say one last thing.

There will be a lot of students in that classics department who went to Princeton because they went to prep school or they were interested in classics and they want to get a PhD.

And privately, after all of the public megaphones saying that you don't need to know Latin and Greek for classics, they will study Latin and Greek because, and some of them will be African American and some will be Latino.

Because if they want to be a classics professor, they know that you can't abolish Latin and Greek for classics majors at the undergraduate level.

And you surely can't abolish them at the graduate level.

And you surely can't be a Latin teacher without knowledge of Latin and Greek at the undergraduate and graduate level.

Victor,

between the time you took your first course, you're 18, when did you finish with your being educated formally?

And was there an overlap in there when you started teaching?

No, what I did was very strange.

I went to UC Santa Cruz because it was a new UC, and my dad just took a little compass on a map and he said, you know what, this campus is 160 miles away.

It's new.

It's got a good reputation.

It did at that time.

I got three boys.

You're all going to go to UC.

Guess what?

You're all going to live together and save money and you're all going to go there.

I had no idea what it was like.

It was kind of a whacked out, but I was very lucky.

When I got there, I didn't like the hippie 1971.

The draft had ended, and everybody who turned 18 took a draft number.

So so the campus violence had cooled.

But I bumped into these Yale professors and these Berkeley professors, John Lynch, Gary Miles, Mary Kay Orlandi, the great, supposedly great Norman O'Brown.

And I took classics.

And then I went to my advisor and he said, you know what?

At that little rural school, you took all those advanced placement tests.

I said, yeah, I did.

He said, you have a whole year of college credit and you have all of your required classes done already.

So I went to the classics people people and said, Good, you can take more classics language.

So I took nothing but for three years, and then I won a scholarship to go to a program in Athens.

And so when I was 20, I applied to graduate school.

My parents said, you know, we need you to work on the farm.

You got to stay within 160, 180 miles.

So go down to UCLA or Berkeley or Stanford.

And my advisor said, apply to these places.

Stanford offered me four years of free tuition, a salary, and I went there.

And I didn't, you know, I kind of, I didn't fit because I was going every weekend back home and helping my grandfather and my parents.

I remember when the rain destroyed our raising cop, I flunked my French exam because I never had learned French and I was learning it as I was driving with those cassette tapes.

Oh, sure.

And that's, I had to take it.

I passed it the second time easily.

But the point I'm making was it was kind of unusual.

So I just just had a,

in my office at Stanford, I had a little list that said Greek site translation date first

at the end of three quarters, Latin site translation into four quarters, Greek history exam, Latin history, a Roman history exam, Greek composition exam, French exam, German exam, 12 courses finished, and I had a timetable.

And I remember I had a professor, I won't mention his name, he called me in one day and he said, you know, this is two years and two quarters and you finish faster than anybody, but I'm very worried about you.

And I said, why?

And he said, well, you think it's like hurdles.

You just come here to get done.

I said, yeah, that's the idea.

And he said, well, usually we create intellectuals and we have people who go to the opera and

they go to the opera in San Francisco or they want to spend a semester in France learning to speak French or they have some knowledge of symphony, but you just go home home and farm.

And I said, that's right.

I want to get out of here as quickly as possible.

And he said, why?

And he said, because I don't want to be damaged by you people.

And that's what I thought, because I didn't get along with that climate.

But I was very, very lucky.

There were people that sort of thought they liked eccentric.

So they liked Larry Woodlock because he's a Vietnam veteran.

He was a wounded green beret.

And they allowed him latitude.

And I had a friend, Mark Edwards, and Edwin Spauffer that were wonderful.

And my thesis advisor, Michael Jamieson, all these people are now deceased, but he came to me and he didn't like what I was doing.

But he did say, you know Latin and Greek very well, and you've learned the secondary languages and you did everything they wanted, but let's make your weakness a strength.

Because I'm interested in agrarianism in the ancient world.

So you know how to farm.

So when you go to Greece, let's get a thesis.

at the American School of Classical Studies.

So I went there my third year and

I wrote a thesis on the warfare and agriculture in classical Greece.

And it was published and then I got done.

I got done in four years.

And how old are you?

25.

Wow.

The problem was that after four years of graduate and four years of undergraduate, I really hadn't lived any.

I mean, I was a monk as a undergraduate.

I just stayed in my bedroom and studied with my two brothers why they, you know, they had normal lives.

They were biology.

One was in they,

and we had renters that we rented to.

My dad had got this little house, and he thought, you know, we'll pay 21,000, you'll take in renters and make the $150 mortgage.

You guys will save me money.

Well, that's what we did.

But I didn't have any life.

And then I was always doing intensive things.

I thought to catch up, go to Yale with graduate students when you're 18 to learn Greek, or go over to Greece with Ivy League students

when you're 19 to Athens.

I'd never been out of Fresno County.

And then then in graduate school, and I was married, I married somebody that, you know, we went to high school together.

We never went to college.

Wonderful woman, Carol.

And so we went to the American School of Classical Studies together.

And she was, we were both 24.

So it was always catch up.

And then all of a sudden, I was kind of burned out.

So I came home and I said.

to my dad, you know, I'm 25.

I have a PhD.

I think my thesis will be published.

But my advisor says I should have done all this.

And he said, well, what are you going to do?

I said, Well, there's a part-time job in Colby College or back east.

And they went, Why would you want to do that when you got 180 acres that needs to be tended to?

And your brother left graduate school and he's sacrificed.

And your grandmother's 93 and she's living alone in that run-down house.

And you need to shape up, Victor.

You don't want to be a narrow person.

You know how to, you know anything about electricity?

You haven't driven a tractor since you're 18.

We got some horses.

Do you still remember how to ride?

And I said, No.

so my grandmother was 90 at the time and so she was living alone so we took care of her and i had this old house and next thing i knew i started to remodel it i learned plumbing electricity i put the roof on i painted it i farmed 12 hours a day and then all of a sudden when i was 29 my wife said we have three children we have no health insurance They've all got crooked teeth.

They're going to need braces.

And you're making $6,200 a year.

And your farm is in debt because it was and I was so that's when I went back at 29 to Cal State President was the closest campus there was and then I started teaching and then I thought to myself if I keep farming and I just teach I'm not going to be able to support my first salary I think full-time was 21,000.

So I started writing and I started speaking and I started doing other things as additions, but I never forgot what classics had done for me.

It gave me a free education.

And I was kind of like a pet that was adopted, kind of like a mongrel that was adopted by thoroughbred professors.

And they were,

I can remember Mark Edwards saying, now be prudent, Victor.

You get in class, you know, you, and I remember one saying, you don't really pronounce words very well.

So we're going to get here some flashcards, and these are terms I want you to know, Greek spellings and pronunciation.

And then I had another person that said, you know, when you talk about ancient agriculture, don't talk about pruning or driving, you know, or planting or any of this.

We understand that's pragmatic, but you can bring that in subtly because we don't want to think you're just a hired hand.

So I resented that at the time.

Yeah.

But when I look back at it, they were all good people.

And I owe a lot to them and especially John Lynch, an undergraduate professor at Santa Cruz, Mary Kay Gamlin, wonderful.

Victor.

All these people, I don't know what I would have done.

Yeah, well,

I didn't know you back then, but I can't imagine you in any mongrel kind of way.

Well, let's um, let's move on.

That was fascinating.

Can we talk a little?

Put on your military historian cap and let's stay in

Greece, modern Greece, though.

So, I wanted to been, and I think in these classicist uh podcasts from time to time, uh, we should explore some of the uh your strengths there in military history.

So, I'm curious to

hear your take on Greece in World War II.

And on this point,

your book, which is a tremendous book, again, folks, it's the Second World Wars.

It came out, I think, four years ago.

Was it sold about 90,000 copies, Victor?

Something.

Yeah.

very acclaimed and considered a refreshing or well I don't know if you can buy refreshing not new just new and unique perspective on looking at the Second World War but it's wars in the plural.

So,

among those wars, was Italy's invasion of Greece, which was followed up by Germany's invasion after the Italians flopped, was that one of those wars that did really not rise to that level?

And then the second military-related question is: of the thesis that Germany was distracted by Mussolini's Greece fiasco, so he had to shift there, quote-unquote, you know, take care of Greece, delaying the invasion of Russia.

And that's why Germany lost in Russia had to do with Greece.

I don't know that Russia really was ever conquerable.

I think that's another subject matter.

Just because you might invade the capital, Moscow, and

I don't think that would have meant the end of communist power there.

So was the Italian-Greek war a war of your Second World Wars?

And does that fit into that theory that the war there really costs Germany?

Well, everything you mentioned is under dispute still to this day.

But the basic narrative was that Mussolini and Hitler were not allies in the sense of the British and the Americans, and even the Soviets later on.

They did not consult.

So when Mussolini invaded Albania and then wanted to go into Greece, he didn't tell Hitler about it.

But on the other hand, when Hitler invaded Russia, he didn't tell Mussolini about it either.

Mussolini felt that that had distracted and broken, distracted German interests in the Mediterranean.

He felt that he had a guarantee that the Germans would help him take, for example, Malta or would help him go from Tripoli all the way to the Suez Canal.

It would have been much better had they listened to Mussolini ironically.

So there was distrust there.

So, yes,

he didn't consult.

And so, when he invaded Greece, he went into Albania in the summer of 1940, and then he got bogged down.

And the Greeks on the northern border were fantastic fighters.

And so on October 28th, he went into Greece.

And he said, I'm going to take over your country.

And the Greeks, Metaxas, the dictator, said, oki, no.

So to this day, October 28th is okie day in Greece.

And it's an iconic phrase that suggests that the Greeks will never be pushed around by anyone.

And they fought brilliantly, brilliantly.

And the italians got not just bogged down but there was a real question that the greeks would be able to not only stop them from entering into the plains of thessaly but could push them back to the adriatic all the way out of eastern europe so to speak or all the way out of the balkan and so hitler had a problem that as he was planning operation barbarossa And remember, Jack, that when the Blitz basically ended for all practical purposes in late 1940 and maybe a little bit in early 1941, Hitler didn't have war.

He wasn't fighting really from January, February, or March.

He was consolidating forces to go into Russia.

And then Yugoslavia rebelled and he bombed Belgrade.

And he felt that his southern flank to his rear needed to be addressed.

And more importantly, that the British Army had not only survived Mussolini's attempt to destroy it in East Africa, but had was thriving and was on the verge of destroying Mussolini.

And there would be then the Mediterranean, he was not going to get Suez.

The Mediterranean would not be a conduit to Axis trouble.

The British still had the two choke points at Gibraltar and Sueb.

And so he decided as a sort of sop to Mussolini, I will save you.

And so in April, I think it was somewhere around April 6th.

It had a weird name, I think, Operation Merida.

I think that's what it was.

And anyway, he went in, and this was Blitzkrieg, and the Greeks had no air support.

And then a very disastrous thing happened for the British.

They were on the verge in April 1940 of destroying the Italian army.

they would have chased them all the way out of Libya.

But Churchill decided that for historical, cultural, and emotional reasons, that Greece should be saved.

And he sent about 40,000 troops and air cover.

But he sent it too late.

And so what happened was not only did the Greeks lose, but two divisions, crack divisions, were rendered combat inoperative, and they evacuated.

And then on the end of May, I think it was May 20th, the final battle was in Crete.

That was the first airdrop of a large magnitude that we'd seen, paratroopers.

And it was a horrendous battle.

The battle for Crete, the New Zealanders, and the British colonial troops, and British troops.

They took a lot of hits from the Luftwaffe by sea.

They were in air range of Italy, and Crete fell.

So, then the question is: how do we assess this vis-a-vis Operation Barbarossa?

And there's two schools of thought: one is

that Hitler postponed the June 21st launch because his flank was insecure, that he had to make sure that Yugoslavia was not in turmoil, that he had to make sure that Mussolini was still an ally and could control things and would not be destroyed by the Greeks.

And he had to make sure that he felt that Greece, being very rich in foods, would help supply Army Group South.

And indeed, it did.

They stripped the Greek people and starved a million of them to death.

So there were assets there as well.

And that meant that he started started a month late.

And that month would not have mattered in most seasons, but unfortunately, that was the coldest winter in 50 years.

So when Army Group Center got outside Moscow in early December, and the proverbial spires of the Kremlin were visible to the Wehrmacht, and they were at the first subway station.

So they claimed they had this terrible winter storm.

And that was the end of the German offensive.

That's one exegesis.

The other exegesis is, you know what?

Given the spring rains and the difficulty in transportation, they wouldn't have done very well in May anyway.

And when you look at Hitler's thinking, it was, well, we have three and a half million people.

It's the greatest invasion greater than Xerxes' invasion of Greece.

And all he did was count his own troops.

He had severely underestimated the Soviet capability.

And he had done that.

for a variety of reasons, logical reasons.

They fought in Finland in 1939, remember just a few months earlier, and the Russian Red Army had done, they'd lost a half a million casualties.

And they were supposed to win by November 1939, and they didn't really get out of there until spring 1940.

They had executed 30 to 40,000 of their own officers in the purges of 1938-39.

They had been distracted along the Mongolian border against the Japanese.

And so, in his way of thinking, the Soviet army hasn't done very well.

And what he didn't understand is that the history of Russia is the czarist or the Red Army or any army doing superbly on its own soil and not so well as an expeditionary force.

That's the first thing he didn't understand.

The second thing he didn't understand is that he thought that it was primitive in terms of technology and industrialization.

It wasn't fully Western and he didn't realize that not only Germany buy expertise like the Christie tank chassis from the United States, but there was a long tradition of Russian science.

So when he got into the Soviet Union, he learned very quickly that this new tank coming off the battle lines, the T-34, was superior to the Mark I, the Mark II, the Mark III, even the Mark IV, and probably the

tiger that was to appear in about a year and a half.

And he had no idea that the Soviets could create 155 millimeter artillery at five times the rate that the Germans could.

Well, Victor, that's fascinating.

And it's some, I think, for my, since I get to ask the the questions,

obviously not going to ask now, but I would like sometime soon to discuss the Finland campaign.

I think that's a fascinating little war.

I'm going to make it call an audible here.

We're on the Victor Davis-Hansen show.

We just have a few minutes.

uh left and i wanted to talk about two things that were on your private papers that's victorhanson.com uh one of them is a regular there are two regular features one is called eeyor's Eeyore's Cabinet, and that's kind of the Victor look at things where the glass is not 95% full, but it's 5% empty.

And then it's Optimism Inc.

is another regular

semi-regular feature, and that's the 95% full.

But let's talk about, let's hold off on the Eeyore

component because Eeyore's cabinet, it's called lies and more lies, but it's part one.

So I assume by next week we'll have part two, and we can talk about the full full lies and more lies at that point.

But you do have in Optimism Inc., which was published the other day, it's called the Exhilaration of Being Ostracized.

And, you know, I find myself exhilarated when my horse

wins the quinella and

those kinds of when a child is born.

But yeah, I guess there's some thrill to be had

by rejection.

So here's the very beginning of what you wrote in this piece.

And there are several examples of what you're getting at.

And it's titled, Has Any of This Happened to You?

And then you begin, Reader, confess the following.

If you voted for Trump or even were suspected of such, has at least one of the following things happened to you?

And you have about seven things here.

Victor, what prompted you to write this and see the jewelry?

Why don't you tell us about one or two of these things that might have happened

to our

Trump supporters and how there's uh some exhilaration from that i think it must have happened to you since you're a trump supporter it is yes it i've i've been yeah i've been so what happens and all you people out there listening you know what it is that you you're not you know that vocal but people you're not ashamed of voting for trump given the success that kind of substantiated your instincts but what happened to you and what happened to all of us is you get this what text email phone call and and it's either from a close friend that you maybe haven't kept up relations with quite as in the past, or it's a cousin, family member, maybe it's even a daughter, son, parent, grandson, who knows?

But without any introduction, they say, you make me sick.

You are horrible.

How dare you?

I'm never going to speak to you.

I'm not going to reply.

I'm not.

And you think, wait a minute, I didn't contact you.

you contact me.

So, what is all this about?

And then you start thinking, Did I ever do that when this whacked out person voted for Obama?

No, because you know, live and let live.

That's not the totality of a person who they vote for.

But these people then suddenly decide that, you know, and I had people that were saying to me, Well, you've got a responsibility.

If you want to redeem yourself in my eyes, you've got to go on Fox News and without warning, spring it and say, you know,

I'm sorry, I was deranged, I'm sick, and Trump is evil.

Can you imagine that?

That's how you do.

Or if some of you wore a maggot hat or you had a Trump sign or a Trump bumper sticker, have you ever had minor gratuitous violence?

But me, it was walking in the Reagan airport and a guy came up, Antifa looking.

kind of a white guy with a black hood and sweatshirt.

And he said, I got to talk to you, man.

I love your, I think we had just started our podcast right and i said yeah okay and he said and he started walking along me and there was a black guy next to him but he wasn't they weren't connected and the black guy gave me looked at me like don't talk to that guy but then as i started talking he hit my head and i had a baseball cap and knocked it off and said f you haha you idiot and then he yelled Trump sucks, die, die.

And then he jumped.

And this other guy ran after him, but he he was really big and this young guy was very thin and he just slid down the elevator, just like in the movies.

And then the guy came to me and said, hey, I got a picture of him.

And I said, man, you know, that is so neat that you did that, but you don't have to.

I don't care.

And stuff like that has happened.

And that's another thing that I asked the reader as well.

And so this was sort of the strange thing

about the woke movement, the Trump movement, that a lot of people on the left took it upon themselves to think that the rules of courtesy, politeness, they no longer matter because of what they call the existential threat of Donald Trump.

Victor, you, I recall a piece I wrote along those lines of manners,

an elite neighborhood outside of Boston, you know, someone buying signs for every house and expecting, and if you didn't take the sign, you were immediately ostracized.

So I guess initially the dynamics of these kind of things, when your hat's hit off your head or your neighbors are giving you the hairy eyeballs and the middle finger, it's kind of unnerving.

But

yeah, after a while, maybe it's a source of pride.

Here's how you end your piece.

I think this is terrific.

Ostracism is pleasurable.

Their dislike is praise.

You don't have to do, listen to anything.

In a way, you've turned 1984 on its head and upside down.

And then you torture

Orwell's final writing, and

you substitute this.

But it was all right.

Everything was all right.

The struggle was finished.

He had won the victory over himself.

He loved being canceled, deplatformed, and ostracized by Big Brother.

So, this is: Has Any of This Happened to You?

Optimism Inc.

by Victor Davis Hansen on his terrific website, victorhanson.com.

We'll pick up again the Eeyore

part of it next

time on the Classicist.

We also do a traditionalist um podcast so now twice a week we're doing podcasts we're you're we're on just the news and but you can find us maybe some of you are listening to this right now because you have found us on itunes or stitcher or google play etc victor uh thanks uh very much it was really uh your education was really fascinating.

It sounds brutal, but

kind of unique.

I can't imagine many people having gone through what you went through.

I don't think my parents knew what they did.

I had a very brilliant older brother, but very sarcastic toward me sometimes.

He said it was sort of like, I think it came from Dr.

Johnson.

It was like a dog dancing on two legs.

It's impressive, but what was the point?

Well, it was always getting back to the farm and tended to those grapes also.

So that's fascinating.

Well, Victor, thanks so much.

We thank our listeners for listening to the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

The classicists, join us again next week for this and for the traditionalist, also.

And Victor, hope you have a great weekend.

And you too.

And thanks again, leaders, for listening in.

I really appreciate it.