The Mausoleum of Halicarnassus and Europe Undone by the Left

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Hello and welcome to the Victor Davis Hanson Show. This is our Saturday edition where we do something different, usually in the middle segment. And this week Victor's going to be looking at one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, the mausoleum at Holocaust. And so we'll do that in the middle segment, but we've got more news from the week. So we're going to be looking at

The speaker Mike Johnson's potentially, he'll be reelected to his position. And then Liz Cheney gets a president's citizens medal. So stay with us and we'll be right back. Hey, there, Rachel here to give a big shout out to you for making it through the Hector holiday season. The magic of those family moments, that was you. And now there's new milestones to prep for 2025.

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All right. Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hanson Show. Victor is the Martin and Ili Anderson senior fellow in military history and classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Buskey, distinguished fellow in history at Hillsdale College. We welcome everybody to the Victor Davis Hanson Show. Come join us at his website. It's VictorHanson.com and it is called the blade of Perseus. We'd love to have you all there.

Well, Victor, we've got new information about New Orleans first. And then we'll look at Mike Johnson and Liz Cheney. I thought you wanted to say something on that. I think everybody was really confused when the New Year's Eve terrorist operation that I guess is now killed 15 or 16 people. Mr. Jabbar, who was a military veteran but had been self-radicalized according to his family.

in radical Islam. But we've discussed earlier that the assistant special agent, apparently, that was in charge of the initial responses. I think her name was Alithia Duncan. The first thing out of the gate was that she assured us that it was not a terrorist organization. That reflected, I think, in the indoctrination, that's something that Cash Patel will have to address at the FBI. Because if you want to withhold

You want to withhold information. You want to withhold conclusions that you are not supported by data. And there was no data for that. But it tells you that her first impulse was to say, we don't want to accuse anybody of terrorism. That was more important than really getting. She should have just said, we don't know whether it's terrorism. We're working on it. We'll have an announcement. And then she said, it's an IED problem, not just a methodology. That's stupid.

The methodology of killing is not the pathway to find out necessarily who did it or what type of causation there was.

And then you had the mayor, LaToya Cantrell, and she came out, and the FBI said they were thinking there were more than one person. She said, he said, she said they were completely at odds. She was famous, remember, for being accused of credit card fraud and taking bribes, I remember. And then we had this Anne Kirkpatrick, the chief of police, and she was confused about the barriers. She would have been up to block the

the cars coming in and she gave a convoluted explanation why they went there. She was fired. Remember from the Oakland Police Department a few years ago, she's bounced around. She's kind of a DEI consultant for the FBI. So you get the impression from those three people.

And and carpatry can only the Duncan and not toy account trell that there's nobody in charge really Until they flew in the FBI. I think somebody from their washington office that kind of cleaned up the mess But there's a larger theme here and that is If you look at the

May, June, late May, June, July, August, September, May of 2020, when, as I said earlier, $2 billion in property was destroyed. There were 35 to 40 people killed, depending on how you count the particular violently caused deaths. There was, I think, 14,000 people arrested, unlike the January

six people they were mostly let go by Sorrel's district attorneys in major cities. Then we go to the Mangione case where this cold blood and assassin in Mafioso style lurks outside a building, executes a United Health Executive, and then gets 40% of the youth on major campuses applauding that cold blooded murder.

And I could go back to the Stevens-Galese attacks. And then the European Islamic attacks. And we saw right after the New Orleans attacks massive demonstrations in New York by pro-Palestinian radical Palestinian.

Add it all up and there's this problem with the left that they keep saying, as Joe Biden did to Howard University and other occasions, it is white supremacy. It isn't. If you just look up, people have looked up the number of dead the last 20 years and the number of dead are not due to white supremacists. It's Middle Eastern terrorism.

But my point is this is that there's something in the left that believes that these violent acts, if they're not justified, they're at least directed at the right people. And we saw this contextualization about Donald Trump's Too Failed Sasson, somebody who

I've talked to on the phone at least once or twice, John McWhorter. He said in the New York, the columnist in his column, but in a podcast with Glenn Lurie that he thought it might have been preferable for Donald Trump to be killed. And then when you look at the social media, there were people, oh, he missed, you know, that type of attitude. So the left has a problem with violence.

they believe that in all of these cases, they have the violent act, whether it's Trump or a healthcare person, or even there is some justification for it, whether the oppression of Muslims or the oppression of the poor by healthcare or the oppression that Donald Trump supposedly

is responsible for, and they can't come to terms with it, that it's overwhelmingly a left-wing problem, and they just don't want, they contextualize it. Violence is okay, because there, once you start with the premise that you're for the people, diversity, equity, inclusion, or the Marxist idea of a proletariat that's noble, a noble peasantry that's always in the Marxist binary, oppressors will press, victimize, or victimized, then you can justify anything.

Yeah. Anything. And that gets back to going to a store in California until recently steal up to $950 and you're not going, you're not going to be arrested. If you're arrested, you're not going to be booked. If you were booked, you were not going to be indicted. And if you weren't, you were not going to, and convicted, you were not going to jail for less than $950. And the, the exegesis or the basis behind that reasoning is,

something that they call critical legal theory that laws are just simply constructs of wealthy white people who have powered money. And so we get back to that reductionist point. I think I made an earlier podcast that the only reason they believe it's against the law to steal sneakers is because wealthy white people who made the law don't have to have sneakers. Anything that they don't need, they make a law against critical legal theory. And so they believe that

people, it's a cry of the heart. They go into a store and they think, wow, I need aspirin. I need diapers. I got to steal it because the capitalist system has made these unaffordable to me and the government won't give me enough. And then when you actually look at it, they're going in and looting in gang style processes, swarming sneakers stores, computer stores, high-end fashion stores, jewelry stores.

But that's the problem, that they can't just come out and say, we condemned unequivocally the use of violence for political means. And we could say, I wish that a university president would have gotten up in 2024 and say, if you come to this campus and you deface the library, if you chase students into the library, if you deface the sidewalks, you are destroying property and that's against law and you will be held accountable. They always say that.

The worst thing about the left recently is these braggadotchial threats, and it goes right to the top. Joe Biden, he did this incoherent reaction to New Orleans, where this isn't what I'm trying to stand for. Remember, he said about what would you do if Putin came in? At first, he said it depends on this major, minor invasion into Ukraine.

And then he always says, don't. What would you think about Iran hitting? Don't. What would you think about Israel? Don't. And it gets back to the whole corn pop saga. Creations and fictions are a slamming the head of somebody who insulted his sister at a luncheon desk.

It's the word of a man. You know, it's all this tough talk, but he never did anything. He never did anything. So it was very a twig and talk loudly. Yeah. And it's hard for the party of peace to reconcile that with them. So I think that's where they lost all of those Democrats that were one time. I did.

I was curious about this because today's Woke DEI party used to be Obama's progressive party and used to be Bill Clinton's liberal party, liberal Democrats. And these were far to the left of the Carter Clinton Democrats were far to the left of the old JFK Harry Truman party.

So it's gone left. But I went back and looked at the 1996 re-election effort of Bill Clinton and the official statement in the Democratic Party convention platform that summer. You would not believe it. It's surreal. It says, Bill Clinton was a crime fighter. He made people punish. And just youthful offenders shall be treated harshly just because you're youth.

As far as the border goes, he closed it. There is no such thing as an exemption for illegal immigration. It drives down wages.

And then he got into physical sobriety, physical sobriety. We balanced the budget and we're going to continue, he hadn't quite yet, we're going to continue to exercise physical, physical restraint, not physical, physical, physical restraint. I couldn't believe it. And then when he talked about environmentalism, it wasn't banning fossil fuels or EV, it was, we have to protect God's earth.

He used the word God with a capital G. That party and Nancy Pelosi gave a speech about why it's unfair to suggest that Democrats were for open borders, that they said it hurts wages of our union brothers. That party today would be called nativist protectionist racist homophobic transfer by the new democratic party. So if you want to know why they lost, go back and watch that dissent.

into Jacobinism. This is a Jacobin French Revolutionary Party, changing names, toppling statues, creating new genders, new foundational dates of America. This is something that the Clintons and JFK or Harry Truman would have never imagined.

Yeah. And then there's a hoe host of people that used to be Democrats that wanted law and order and America first diplomacy. And that's what Donald Trump was calling for. I think that's a big thing that turned people don't talk about that. But if you look at 2016, when he won, I think it was 67 or 60. I'm doing this by memory. I hadn't prepared for this 67 or 68 million voters.

And then he got 11 million more when he lost in 2020 and it went up to like 72 or 73 million. And then it went up 77 million. So win or lose, it was like this.

And of course, Luz is this aberration that historians are going to ponder how in the world 2020 had so many million more votes when four years later, a greater population, the actual people who participated went down. No one could quite, with the same, at least for part of the campaign, the same two candidates.

So anyway, my point is that the Democratic Party alienated people and the people who were alienated ended up voting for Donald Trump. I got chastised in a letter, somebody wrote me. I get a lot of emails. I can't keep track of them.

I say that because I'd like to reply to all of them. But this person said, you said on your podcast that the middle class and I live in a zip code were the majority per capita income business. And we went 62% Trump. I didn't mean that as an exclusionary term. I meant that is if you were lower or middle class, you, and that's the largest demographic in the United States, that they went overwhelmingly for Donald Trump.

The very wealthy zip codes did not, but in that continuum, small business owners could be considered part of the middle class. And they did as well. And some wealthy people did as well. There's a lot of corporate CEOs that voted for them for reasons of taxes and deregulation. But he won the election because he captured the old, not just the old Buchanan voters and the old Ross Perot voters,

And the old working class lunch bucket, people who had sat out and did not want to show up for John McCain and Mitt Romney, but he got Hispanics, I think 16, 17% of African Americans, I think that'll, that's kind of low. Those are estimates. And then he got somewhere around 40, 43 to 48% of Hispanics, depending on who was exit polling. And that was the difference.

Yeah, amazing. Well, you got away from my agenda, Victor, but that's okay. That was an interesting riff. What about your views on Mike Johnson as speaker and the chances for that? It seems like there's one Republican, Thomas Macy, who says he won't vote for him. So what are your ideas or what do you think? What would Thomas Massey do if he was speaker when he has a two vote

majority. And there are people in the Republican Party. It's more Trumpian than it ever has been in its congressional representation Senate and House. But what would he do as speaker when he has people from states like Maryland or California or and these are these are purple districts are Colorado.

where they can't be completely 99% behind Trump. They're 90%. But when you pick on particular issues that they will not vote for, you lose your majority and there is no Trump agenda. At least not until these, I think it's three people he appointed that were congressional representatives. I don't know why Matt Gates is including Matt Gates. They have to have special elections and they have to get Republicans elected. Then it will go back to four or five. They lost three seats.

I don't know how they lost the steel, Duarte, and Garcia seats in California. They were all great representatives. They were ahead, the mail and ballot, even 10 days later, something. No comment needed. So I don't know what you're supposed to be, you know, very famous Petronian statement. Sumo's woman is non day. We're just men. We're not gods. What do you expect him to do? Given the chaos of

liquidating your speakers. Does he think, Mr. Massey, think that Hicom Jeffries, even with this Jacobin party, doesn't have a few Democrats who are in purple districts and don't really want to go along with this radical, radical left 99.9%.

Yes, he does. But, I mean, our representative that for years was Jim Costa. He bragged that he was part of the old blue dog coalition. I don't think it existed then, really, and it doesn't exist now. But on questions of water and agriculture, he was middling in the middle. So my point is, he voted every single time with Heikim Jeffries. So Heikim Jeffries is able to tell all of those people

Not one of you, as Nancy Pelosi taught me, not one of you is going to deviate. We are going to vote in mass against every single speaker until they come to us and in disjointed mob fashion don't have the same degree of discipline. And they have defections and they're going to need our votes. And the moment we give our votes to them,

That speaker is compromised because then his own party will say he couldn't even get Republicans he had to go over and sell out to Democrats. Is that what Mr. Massey wants? Because that's what you're going to get if you reject.

Mike Johnson, you're going to have a vote after vote after vote until some person goes over to the Democrats and says, I can't corral these cats. I need five votes and I will approve your trans bill or I will approve your DI initiative or your green initiative.

Yeah, so they need to have discipline and they don't have to be perfect to be good They just have to be better than the alternative. So I hope he makes it makes it but they need absolute discipline and Solidarity and they can win if they don't and the Democrats do they'll lose Yeah, and I mean they lost Obamacare didn't they they would have repealed Obamacare if John McCain had enough

defected in the Senate. They always have these defections. The Senate, it's not so much. They have a three vote majority now, you know, 53 47. So we'll see for really with the vice president.

So the that's why Donald Trump shouldn't have any trouble getting his appointments through not too much trouble in the Senate. It would be it'll be much easier to do anything. Yeah, I think he has a very powerful argument in the the appointments. All he has to do is go to any defecting Republican. The Susan Collins, McCalski and Alaska, you name it and just said,

If you vote against Cash Patel or Tulsi Gabbard or Pete Hegsef, we are going to run commercials in your district. And we're going to say, cash was not okay, but you voted for Mallorca's and you voted it and then just put the whole bunch of Pete Buttigieg is her favorite, not prime fighter cash. Lloyd Austin is her ideal Pentagon, but not, and that's going to be devastating because they have votes

There are six or seven of them that have talked about not voting for the Republican nominees of Trump's, but there are a lot of them are in record that they okayed all of

almost all of the appointments that Joe Biden nominated. And so I think he can stop that. And Donald Trump, you know, I mean, there's always ways to corral people. I'm sure he's calling apostight representatives right now and saying, you know, I understand that you have to be reelected and you're in a purple district or you're in a crazy, you know, district that it's unpredictable or you're in a hard right district. But

I have ways to influence you. Well, Victor, we are at a break, and we're going to hear a few messages, and then we'll come back and talk a little bit about the mausoleum at how it connects us. Stay with us.

Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hanson show. You can find Victor at his X account. His handle is at VD Hanson. And you can find him at Facebook on Hanson's Warning Cup. So please come join us there. So Victor, I haven't heard a whole lot. I know that it doesn't exist anymore once again. So, but we do know what it looked like. And so I'm interested in this mausoleum at Halicon access.

We've been talking in our history section the last two times about not the modern Seven Wonders of the World or the natural Seven Wonders of the World, but the ancient as compiled in the Hellenistic period.

And it's very easy to remember, as I said before, the seven. There's two in Greece. We've discussed the Colossus of Rhodes on the island of Rhodes and the statue of Olympian Zeus in the Olympian Zeus temple in Olympia, Greece. Foundations are there.

There's two in Egypt, and we're going to discuss the pyramids of Giza and the site, the site, because the lighthouse at Alexandria is, you can go out and look down and see the foundations. And there's two in Egypt, and then there's two in Turkey. And today we're going to talk about the mausoleum in honor of mausulus of carrier, and the temple of Ephesus,

a temple to Artemis at Ephesus up the coast. We'll talk about that next time. And then there's one final, the seventh, that's not in modern Greece, Egypt, or Turkey, and it's in Iraq. And I saw that, and that was Saddam Hussein attempted to rebuild the hanging gardens of Babylon.

You can go there and see these little bricks that he put his own initial on to rebuild it falsely. I mean, it was poorly done, but I went out to the site and I flew over it, I think twice when I was embedded those two years. I'd been to every one of them. That was my goal as a high school kid on a farm. I said to myself when I was 17, by the time I'm 30, I want to go to all the seven wonders of the world.

And I think I fulfilled that pledge by 21, except for, I did not get to the hanging gardens of Babylon. I thought I'd never get there. And then the Iraq war came and I went twice with the combat units, once with the observation on Blackhawk and once with H.R. McMaster and tour. But it was the first time I flew over and we stopped.

I was with a group that went there and then I flew out to Kuwait and we drove out there and some people flew me out, drove me out there.

The third wonder of the world is that down the coast of Ionia, that is modern Turkey. And there's a beautiful city today. If anybody is vacationing in Turkey, it's called Bodrum, B-O-D-R-U-M. It's kind of famous for its harbor. They have an industry there that makes wood power boats and sailboats, beautiful Finnish mahogany oak. These boats are just beautiful in the harbor.

And it's a vacation city, and it looks at the dodecanese islands across. I was there once talking to a Turkish journalist. He said, see those islands? Those are those are Turkish because there's two or three miles away. And I said, no, they're not. They've been Greek since antiquity. And he said, well, they may be Greek now, but someday they won't.

which kind of was chilling, but you can go to the site of the mausoleum, which was created around 350 BC by a pre-helenistic, a late classical

tyrant dictator ruler of karaoke areas this the area of the southern part of iron a southern coast of the mediterranean turkey not that face a cypress where antalya is but uh... that some of the southern most of western seaside turkey and mousellas built why he was still alive this new city of heliconarsis and colonnades statuary

a harbor, and he decided to make his own tomb before he died, and he was married to Artemisia, not the famous one of the Persian war, but later. It was this, you know, in this Asiatic, excuse me if you're using that word, Asiatic was permissible at once. It was all right to marry your sister.

in the way that the Ptolemies had done that in some cases, but especially the Pharaohs. So anyway, he decided to make this monumental tomb for himself. And it existed from 350. It existed almost 1,800 years. All we know is that when the crusader knights came there in 1,400, they saw the ruins.

But there had been a geographer, I think, in 1300. So there was a 100-year period when it disappeared under the Ottomans. The British Imperialists, thank God for some of the British Imperialists, when they came into the Middle East, they were able to buy some land. They kind of dug under a land they didn't buy and find out where the foundations were. And they appropriated some of the statues, and of course, being Brits, they brought them back to the empire.

the London British Museum in London, where you can see some of the surviving statuary. I say that because according to the ancients and plenty of the elder talks about it, who was a parapetetic observer, and

It was one of the most extravagant statues you can ever see. Scopus was one of the most famous of the late classical Greek. That's when Greek sculpture reached its pinnacle, Praxility, Praxillities, Scopus, and apparently Mausles scoured all of the Greek-speaking world. Got the best sculptors and architects, and he built this great mass. The Statue of Liberty,

If you look at this from ground, the ground floor all the way to the top, I think it's

350 or something, but the actual statue itself is only about half. It's about 150 feet. Well, the base of the Mausoleum looks almost like the base, I mean, some of the reconstructions, not all of them, the base of the Statue of Liberty statue. In other words, it's kind of a rectangle and it was a temple, but it was solid and with a monumental

wall around it, and then there was a colonnade around that, and then there was the structure looked like it was pyramidal with a roof, four-sided pyramid roof, and it had colonnades at each section, but it was massive, and it was considered

famous in antiquity because it was the place where all of the all-stars of the Lake Greek and remember sculpture reached its pinnacle between 350 and 250, not during the classical period. That was, it was more realistic. This is the great period of the Hellenistic Laoccolin statues. I think that's in the Louvre, isn't it? Or is it in the Vatican Museum? I can't remember.

But in any case, this was a period of where Greeks not just were idealistic, but realistic. And Sculphus was one of the best masters. And so these statues that were in the upper levels of the temple, it is a temple.

But it had layers on it, and it was apparently about 150 feet high. So it was almost the size of the Colossus of Rhodes, which was not too far away. And it was one of the most famous tourist sites in antiquity, because it was a place you could go and see it perfectly.

proportion, classical Greek temple, you could see ionic columns, and then they had famous Parthenon-like Metapies and Freezcourses, the Battle of the Giants, the Amazons, all of those typical Greek mythological scenes that allowed the sculptors a chance to show muscularity, women, monsters, etc.

And it had that, and then it had the brother-sister rulers. And then he died, and his wife, I think, died two years later. But according to plenty, the people engaged in the project, I guess they still had their contracts. They continue to finish it, which is quite rare, even though the two creators of the mausoleum were no longer around. So our mausoleum does not come from any word in Greek.

that means tomb, sanctuary for the dead, or monument. It comes from the word mausulus, the king. And this was so huge and so famous that people called it the mausoleum, mausoleon in Greek. And so that's become the noun ever since. And in English and all of the European languages for people who are buried above ground.

and not cremated, which is very rare now, but there's still many cemeteries in New York and Los Angeles where that's true. I had an uncle just as a Dan Rhodes, and my grandfather was his great nephew, so I'm his great, great, great nephew. And I have a picture of him in my stairwell, and he was, along with his brother, I think it was Tom Rhodes,

They were at Sutter's Fort during the Donner Party, Snow Trapped Party that was up in the Sierra's near what's now Donner Lake and North of Lake Tahoe a little bit. Donner Pass. And they needed people to hike in there.

He and his brother were over six feet. They hiked in there and they rescued the Donner party. And they found the trail, got some of them back and then organized relief. And he became, at the turn of the century, because he lived a half century, he became one of the wealthiest people in Central California. And he was kind of

I don't know, a loan shark, but he had a lot of capital around Tulare Lake. Tulare Lake was the largest inland lake in the United States west of the Great Lakes. And it was basically from where today's 99 freeway is all the way over to 41 and all the way from what is now Tulare to the grapevine, so to speak.

It was a huge lake, very shallow, but it was the receptacle for the end of the Kings River, the Kern River, the Koea River, and it was just huge until these dams on the Koea River or the Pine Flat on the Kings stopped it. My point of all this is

When I was growing up, every once in a while, local historians wanted to write about him, and they would trace down where his portrait was. Apparently, this picture he made and he gave to his grandsons, one of which was my grandfather's grandmother.

and grand sons and grandchildren, granddaughters, and we had it. I think there's three or four other copies. There's one in Hanford by a family. It's related to him. But in any case, he built a mausoleum. That's my point. And it's a California historical monument right off 41.

And so when i was a little boy we would drive tomorrow bay and we'd say there's uncle dance mausoleum can we stop it was on private now it's a you can you have access in theory still on private property. But here's my point. We're always scared because we had an uncle who when he was a little boy.

Somewhere around 1910 went in there and saw the Mausoleum, but apparently something had a piece of architecture had broken into the crystal.

The remains of my great, great, great, great, great, great uncle were not intact. And then the question is, how could you couldn't get it in? We were little boys, we would always argue. They threw the key into Larry Lake and they dried up. No, they threw it in the Kings River. No, tell Larry Kings River. No, he was on their class. No, he was on their crystal. And so every time we'd drive, I'm going to go to the mausoleum and please let us in and let us in. No, no, we are not going to uncle down the mausoleum.

So I have this picture here. And I think a few years ago, somebody did a documentary on them. They found out about it and came here. And they took pictures of it. And I have another picture of it somewhere. But that was something that we don't do anymore with mausolean. That was famous in Sergio Leone, once at time in America, where Robert Nuneiro

And James Woods, they ended up in a mausoleum for them. James Woods is one of my favorite doctors. He's just really an actor who is politically incorrect, so they have found him in persecuting him to no avail, because he's very tell. Can I take you back to Halocarnassus and that mausoleum?

What was it? Was it used for something? It was huge. So was it used for something? Did they have religious ceremonies in it as well? Well, it was not. It was not used as a treasury as most temples are. It was sealed. So it was it was a burial from the royal family. But there was such expense put into it. And he wanted to make Halicon Arse's a tourist area or a place of

exquisite beauty. And remember, this is now during the Ackman admitted Persian empires closing days because Alexander is going to invade in 334, 333. So just 16 years after this is built, Alexander comes in because that's part of his route down the coast. And he's going to, of course, preserve it and absorb the carrion

like this little mini empire, small little, that the Akmanids had incorporated along with the Lydian. So he's going to come in and this is all going to be part of Hellenistic, the Salucid, and then to the North of Pergammon, Adalids, empires. And this is when people are exposed to the world again, outside of, you know,

early archaic Greece or early classical Greece when people went to Egypt or they went east and talked about now under Alexander the Mediterranean is going to be a Greek lake and people are going to much more frequently go see the Greek-speaking Ptolemies in Egypt and see the pyramids or they're going to see Greek speakers in Asia minor at Ephesus the old city of Ephesus is now

not going to be Persian anymore. It's going to return to its Greek roots. And this is when they start cataloging all the best places in the world to be a tourist and go see these seven places.

And seven is the kind of a magic word. If you're a sage, there's the seven sages of Greece, the seven wonders of the world, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah, I also think it's pretty cool that the British bought land next to it and then told under today, that's crazy. They didn't have the money to, the explorers didn't have the money. I've been in Malta twice and there's a place

out in the harbor where they brought the blocks to put them on display when the British weren't around Malta. But then I think the fort sunk and it's now out there. But I remember reading that there was one block that came from the Malzilian. It was

I'm trying to think of it. It was in the 1970s when I first went there in 73 and 74, and there was a Danish archaeologist that was that our archaeology program was an undergraduate. And then I went there as a graduate student, although not with the American school that year. I was at the American school, but I did this privately. But I was told before I went,

that this person was just finishing, I forgot his name, but he was Danish, and he went through the entire site, catalogued every stone, every piece of statuary, he traced them down in every museum, and he did some beautiful reconstructions. And it's kind of funny if you look at all the reconstructions from the 19th century, none of them look alike, because they're based on plenty of description or haphazard, early British

Discussions of what the Stylobate you go there today. I'm gonna go the mausoleum and you get to go drum It's just up a hill. It's in the city, but you go you walk up there and

I took my daughter and her husband when they were first married there. We were on a classical tour and I took them up there and then they went to Ephesus and they got in a traffic jam with some people, didn't come back. So I spent the whole day there at a cafe. So I walked around the whole thing and they're trying to make it a little bit more interesting.

But it's been completely obliterated. Most of the blocks were melted down. That was a problem in the ancient world. You can marble when it's melted down, creates lime and lime is what they use to whitewash and cover blocks. Is it a good vacation spot? Or does it belong to Greek still? People got to remember that

The coast of Turkey and antiquity was the richest part. If you want to go on a tour of a classical, you can go to Shanakalevi, modern city, but you started at Troy, and then you can go down

to the city of Pergamum, which was one of the most impressive classic Hellenistic cities in the world of that famous theater that's on a ledge almost. And then you can go to Meledus and Ephesus. If you want to go in on a little bit, you can see the Monumental Temple of Apollo at Derema. That's where you can stand between the flutes of the column. They're so huge. And then you can continue south

to Halakonarsus at Baudrom. You even turn the corner a little bit and go to Anatoliod, some beautiful city. But it's very wealthy. And this was, everybody should remember, this was Greek from the first two millennia before Christ, all the way until the onset of the Persian Empire in the sixth century.

And then the Greeks revolted during the Ionian revolt in the 5th century, and that proved, they put that down, but they did get their freedom with the destruction of Persia, the second onslaught, in degrees after the Battle of Salamis. The Greeks went through with the Delian League and freed those cities, and they were Greek then until

the end of the Athenian Empire, and then there was some reconquest by the Akmenes, and then Alexander put it into that from 3.30, 3.29, 3.28. I'm doing this by memory. And then it became Greek speaking under the successor kings. The Adalids donated their kingdom to Rome, and the Saludian Empire was annexed.

by Rome, and then it was Western until the 5th century AD, and then it became Byzantine. The Eastern Empire took that area until they finally started to lose that coast of Anatolia in the 14th and 15th centuries of the modern area. And that was largely because of the misdirected force crusade where they sacked the city.

in 1204, I think it was, 1203. And that split Christendom and weakened the empire. And then 250 years later, they lost everything. But that had been Greek. There was an, I'm getting off topic, but there was an effort called the Megalaya, the Great Idea after World War I. The Greeks bet correctly that the Allies would win and they used

Thessaloniki, Salonika as an ally port through fight Turkey. We know them about the Gallipoli disaster, but the Turks lost. The Greeks won. They were able to get Crete. And during the earlier Bulgarian war, what is now Northern Greece, and they got the islands after, you know, they were Italian after World War II. They were formally returned to Greece. But this is the point I'm making. And the great idea

There was the idea that we won World War I, Turkey is gone. We can go back and recreate the ancient Byzantine Empire. So what we need to do is get the allies to support us.

to go back from the coast and reclaim Ionia and then reclaim the traditional capital of the Byzantine Empire at Constantinople. During the weakness of Turkey from 1914 to 1918, the Greek population had actually

Crested, the Ottoman Empire had been weak for the last 50 years, and during that period of anemic, central control, Greeks had come back. So there was a million people living in Smyrna, in the area around Smyrna, which is modern Izmir. So then they got this idea that they were going to galvanize the Greek-speaking community and go all the way and free Constantinople, and they got near Ankara.

And they were so overexposed and so outnumbered and then the British and the French, especially the British said, this is a bad idea. We're not going to support this. How would you ever control all of this with 10 or 15 million people when they have 30 or 40 million? And we don't want this trouble. And we're dealing with Turkey to steal.

in the post-war area we want. The French said, we're going to take Lebanon and Syria and the British said, oh, we're going to take Iraq and we're going to take Egypt. So they were carving up the Ottoman Empire. And the last thing they wanted to do was to get in another war with the young Turks, this new, out of Turk government, Camilla's, and so they sold the Greeks out and they pushed them all the way back.

And that was one of the most horrific things in the world. They butchered all of the Greeks. And they jumped in the water. They jumped in boats. It was worse than Dunkirk. And they fled. The Americans were off the coast trying to help. I lived on Ecrasasia. I lived on Asia Minor Street in Athens, where almost everybody in the 1970s that I talked to

who was over the age of 70 or 80, they had all lived an Asian minor for six, seven generations, and they were refugees. That was the Asian minor, but they were all, very, had been very wealthy. And when they ethnically cleansed and perched the Greek speaking population, it was economically devastating to Turkey. Today, if you go into Constantinople, you see very few under

Early on, you see very few Greeks speaking Orthodox churches as I remember in 1970s. They see me they're closed down or there are very few people left. He's trying to kind of squeeze them out. He remember, he said he was the new Ottoman emperor.

Yeah. Well, Victor, we need to take a break and then come back and we're going to talk a little bit about England and Germany. And I like that you've told us these little tidbits of England, too smart to back Greece in that and their clever scientists. And England has that legacy, but the current PM doesn't seem to be quite living up to its tradition. So we'll come back though. Hold on.

you

We're back, and you're at the Victor Davis Hanson Show. Welcome. So Victor, the current PM, and I don't know how to pronounce his first name, but it looks like Kyre Starmer, he was the chief prosecutor some years ago. And right now the labor party's trying to cover up that he wasn't prosecuting grooming gangs for child sex labor.

And so, what are the British up to? I mean, that's... Well, the British have adopted this American, they've been infected by the American virus of Wolk, DEI. And remember, one of the tenants of Wolk is

It took the old affirmative action, identity politics, new tribalism, and it amplified it. And one of the tenets was, if you were part of the victimized oppressed binary, they divided the world in half.

then you yourself could not be an oppressor. So it was almost a blank check for anybody, anybody, human nature being what it is. If your parents say for a week, you're not going to be, you're a victimized child, so you can do what you want. Of course, you're going to do stuff without the fear of the law or deterrence. So what's happened in England is that with this nearly, I don't think, I think it's nearly 16, 17% of the population is

from the Middle East or from Eastern Europe, but maybe 10% is Muslim, but that figure increases enormously in Manchester, Liverpool, London. And given that reality that it is a parliamentary democracy, so people count on the Muslim boat and under the auspices of now DI,

they are not going to apply the law unequivocally across tribal identity politics line. And that's true of DI everywhere. So they have people who are from Pakistan or from the Middle East in general, who have very different ideas about

the role of women in society. So in these cases of child trafficking, or I think in Britain they call it child grooming, or younger women that are

younger than the age of consent. They're either watched carefully by particular gangs or groups, and they are trafficked out to people. Or they're quote unquote married to people, or multiply married, but under British law, some of the marriages are informal. In other words, they're trying to retain attitudes toward women that they grew up within the Middle East or their traditions. And under old British system,

Good luck. I mean, the British had that famous custom of Guinea rid of Salty. Salty, I'm pronouncing it right, but the Indian custom that the widow of the prince or the baron or the local grandi, when he died, she had to go onto the pyre. And they said, no. And when somebody tried to do that, they strapped them to a cannon and blew them up.

not very frequently, at least in one frame. You've been trying to force somebody to do that. No, the British did to stop it. Yeah. And when they were told, we have a custom in India that the widow has to, regardless of her age, follow her husband. Many of the widows follow their husband onto the funeral pyre, or the British reply, the Raj. We have a custom in England.

too, that we kill murderers. So they stamped it out. And they did a lot of things like that that now would be considered culturally oppressive. But now the British have the opposite idea that we went abroad in the 19th century to spread the rule of law and Western civilization and the English language and

economic and political and social, what we consider norms. It made us the most powerful country in the world, even though we had, you wouldn't know it from our small population and scant natural resources. That was the implicit British message.

We went to America. We went to Australia. We went to New Zealand. We went to Africa. We went to the Middle East. We went to India. And wherever we went, we built rare roads and we treated, we taught people about the English methodologies of education and government. And the result leaves your better off, even though you want you resent us and you hate us and what they called the Kipling called the white man's burden. And everybody thinks that's terrible today.

the people who think that was terrible.

don't look at any upside at all. In other words, that all of the multiplicity of languages in India and tribal customs do have a unified language, English. And one of the reasons that India is so competitive is that people like to invest there because so many people know English. And they have a parliamentary democracy that still works sort of. And that's not unusual anywhere else in the world.

But the point I'm making is that today's British ruling classes have the opposite idea.

that we're going to bring people in from the former empire. And they're going to enrich our culture by bringing their indigenous practices, one of which is very different attitudes toward women. And who are we to say, given our exploitive record, to question that our system is better than theirs. And so when it butts up against British law, which protects youth and children from sexual exploitation,

Some people are going to be lax about it and they're not going to think much about it because it's just it's just who to say that that custom is any worse than any other cost. Remember what fanny will is that she took everybody should understand how insidious the eye is.

When she was caught with Nathan Wade, remember when I'm talking now about the Fulton County prosecutor who kind of cooked up this idea that Donald Trump was guilty of making an inappropriate phone call by suggesting that he had 10 or 12,000, 10, I think. There were votes there. He knew and he just asked him to find them.

if you invited every process if you invited every losing candidate register and said i know that i have both you just don't want to come to find them you would put half of the political world in jail but she did make found out that her paramour Nathan Wade

was completely infinite and he was getting this money and part of the the prosecutorial suggestion was that she was going on junkets with him. Remember that? Yes. And she was paying him this lavish salary and then he was taking her all over the world on cruises and trips. But this is what I'm getting that.

They asked, well, we want to see the records of it. We just, if you're what you're said, everything was appropriate above board. Just show, we want to know why you don't have a record of your expenses. Cause she said, I paid for it at all myself. We had his credit card. Where is yours? Well, I paid him back. Well, where's the check? I paid him back in cash. And they said, well, can you show me that we say, no, you don't understand.

This is an African-American tradition to have a lot of cash. And they said, like, isn't your house? And she said, absolutely. And she got her father, a former Black Panther himself. And he came in and swore that people didn't understand Black culture, that they had loads of cash, and they paid for things in cash.

But the point I'm making is that this was another attempt to suggest that because of our past victimized status or cultural antithesis to your mainstream, you have no right to apply your standards to us. So it's perfectly okay to pay things in cash and have no record and how dare you ask us in a culturally inappropriate way to show receipts.

And I'm not saying that that's unique to the African American, I mean, so-called, the Bidens were at past masters. I went when Joe Biden gets a check for 250,000. And it says, lonely payment. We think, OK, he was asked, can you show me where you gave Frank Biden or whoever he was? Where is the loan, the loan documents? And where were the interest payments? And no, I mean, so

Obviously, he got some money. Cash was there. But that's one of the pathologies of the idea that you retreat to your superficial appearance. And then from there, all good things come. You can nullify the law. You can say, we're going to have sanctuary cities. Believe me, if we had

1 million illegal aliens coming from the Netherlands and Belgium and France, California wouldn't be a sanctuary city. We would say, how dare you people come to our country illegally. I would say that. But because the people who are coming are from a DEI protected category, then all the law is forgotten. That's what's very, I think people sometimes fail to appreciate

One of the great dangers of BI, it's a attack on norms and laws. And it says that people can be exempt from expected behavior because of passive victimization, even though you can't really prove that victimization in a particular case or a particular group of people. Yep. And it makes it so you can groom children for sex trafficking and the prosecutor. I can tell you that I have a professor of 50 years, 50.

I taught my first class when I was 21 and a 22 at graduate school. But I've had students who come up to me and said, I either need special consideration,

where I take my test, and I will say to them, well, do you have the certificate to show me or the authorization to show me your disability? Well, no, I don't, but you don't understand my culture or my this, of that. And then you're in the position, if you don't allow that student to take it under special non-exam conditions, i.e. in a room by himself or something,

then you're considered exploitive or racist or whatever. So that's the real problem everybody with DEI. It creates an erosion or it erodes the equal application of the law. It's the modern equivalent to the old boy white sort of southern idea that if you were white in the south and you committed a crime against a person that was not white

the legal system looked the other way, because of your particular tribal identity. And so we went from one extreme to the other and called it recompense, I suppose, or useless or nemesis. I don't know, but it destroys the law.

That's one wing of the left that is the undone modern civilization, but also climate and environmentalism. And you recently wrote an article about Germany and the plan after World War II to dismantle it. And your article was arguing that the left in Germany has done that today, I think. I did. I wrote an article on the Morgenthau plan, Henry Morgenthau, I should say Morgenthau.

He was secretary of the treasure for a long time. He came in in 1934, and he lasted till the end of the Roosevelt administration, 45. I mean, he didn't, I don't think he ever really went to college. He had no degree, but he had made a lot of money and hair a lot, but he made more, and he knew a lot about finance. They made him secretary of the treasury. So as the allies were getting near the Rhine River,

He came up with a plan, it came up in Quebec, and it would come up in Yalta, and then after the war at Potsdam, what are we going to do with Germany? And his position was, well, they got in, they invaded France in 1877-71, siege of Paris. Then they took the Alsace Lorraine, and then they invaded Belgium,

in 1914. And then they invaded Poland in 1939. So they always start war. But this time, 60, 70 million people got killed and we're going to punish them. So what to do with the post-war Germany? Well, there was already a problem because, as I said earlier, Stalin stole half the ball and he was not going to give it back. He was on the winnings. He had flipped sides and he said, I'm going to keep

Eastern Poland, it's now Ukraine. In fact, today, independent Ukraine, as I said earlier, about the third of it is Polius. And it was Roman Catholic and Polish speaking since the Middle Ages, not after 1939. He ethnically cleansed the Poles and he made it for the Soviet Union. So they said, take it to the Poles who needed a country. They said, take it from Pomerania and East Prussia. And they did.

So, you know, Donzig became the dance and everything. So, my point is that this was a change of borders. So, Morgenthau said, we're going to change the borders. Number one, number two, we're going to de-industrialize. So, all of the plants and industries and energy apparatus along the rural valley will be decommissioned.

Well, it wasn't hard to do because the bombing campaigns by September 1944 had been pretty extensive. And then he said, we're going to make it a pastoral society and break up the central control from Berlin and have different sort of like East, West Germany, but even more so broken up into principalities before the unification of Germany, a loose confederation organized and supervised by Britain and the United States.

Well, in addition to that, they were going to have no army or military ever. So you can imagine what the powerhouse of Europe for a hundred years was not going to have anything. But then they leaked it.

Joseph Goebbels, this was September 1944 that by October, the Germans had it. As you know, the Battle of the Bulge is going to start just in two months in December. Pretty soon, George Marshall, Chief of Staff of the Army, came to Roosevelt.

Morgan doesn't idiot. What he's done is he's told the German people that they're going to revert back to the pre-civilized country forever. Kind of like Tacitus Germania. That's the first century AD treatise about the wilds of Germany and people swimming in ice cold rivers and drinking milk in this tribal society. And they're fighting like fanatics. We lost 80,000 casualties at the Battle of the Bald. And then Herbert Hoover came in the great

hunger baron who you know who tried to save you did save millions of people after world war one you said you're gonna have it's gonna be worse than world war one you're gonna have mass starvation if you if they can't make steel or light bulbs or medicines what are you gonna do how are you gonna and gerbils meant to town so between those two arguments they dropped it so i wrote this article and i said if you look at what germany is doing today

Given the power of the Green Party and those loose coalitions that have allied themselves with it, they have shut down nuclear plants. They tried to shut down coal plants or oil-fired plants and generation and go solar and wind. But Germany is not very sunny, is it? And in very many cases, it's not that windy.

They had a problem with power, so they were buying nuclear power from France. Then they got so desperate that the price of electricity has gone up four times.

what it is in the United States on average, not here in California, that's becoming Germany, but nationwide. So then the biggest three companies are BMW, Volkswagen, Mercedes BMW, Audi and not the other, and they said we cannot compete.

And then they have the EV mandates that you have to have a certain percent worse than ours. And they said, look, people do not buy a Porsche or Mercedes to drive 250 miles. They just don't do it. They want a high performance, reliable German product, stamp of excellence, engines. And so

It started to hurt the competitiveness. And then they also decided basically to disarm. So I think Germany has, I don't know, 125 jets. They announced, I think they announced, we're going to buy F-35, the state of the art, the multi-task force.

fighter, and I thought they were going to buy 100 or two. They couldn't decide whether they're going to buy six or eight and add to their 25 or 30. And they're giving leopard tanks, too. But the tanks they're giving to Ukraine, I don't know how many they are, 20 or 30. That's almost, they don't have much more than 200 or 300 tanks.

They used to have 200. I don't want to get back. You can see what in fairness to Morgenthau, you can see what he was reacting to. He's reacting to the invasion of Western Europe, the Holocaust, and this monstrous Nazi regime. But my point in the article was, if you fast-forward it, and you looked at Germany today after this wondrous economic miracle after World War II, after a very

solid contribution to NATO in the 1950s and 60s, late 50s and 60s, you would say, my gosh, they are disarming. They don't really have a military. Oh, my gosh, they have no borders anymore. It's not, it says it's Germany, but a million people from the Middle East just walked in with Merkel. We can do this. We can do this. Remember that?

And 20% of the German population was not born in Germany. Many of them from the Middle East, and they're not assimilated. And then you'd say, OK, no military, no real borders, and electricity for times of price, anywhere else in the world, business is shutting down, corporations outsourcing. It's the Morgenthil plan. You weren't after all. They literally did on their own what

they once objected to. So we the victors said, we can do anything we want to Germany, but we're not going to do them more development. Even that is too radical given their even their sins. Not all Germans are responsible for that. They would ruin Germany. We wanted to be rehabilitated and powerful, but not militarily powerful.

but they did it on their own. I wrote that and somebody wrote me, I'm just talking about all the stuff I get in the mail. I don't have time to reply to him, but he said, how dare you say that? They didn't do it. Their leaders did it. Uh, and elected their leaders. And if you want to say to me, well, Victor, you didn't let in 20, uh, I don't know, Joe Biden's 12 million illegal lanes. Joe Biden, we elected Joe Biden. We elected him.

And so we're all responsible in a democracy or a constitutional republic. And so I know that you didn't, you, the letter writer didn't vote for candidates, but the majority of candidates who won had a majority of the population and they thought it would work. And it's a complete suicide, it's a pact with suicide on a collective national scale.

So as somebody who reads the comments on your site, there were many Germans who wrote it and said, you've got it all right, Victor Davis-Hanson. I lived it. So there's one thing there, but also, but also the Elon Musk recently wrote an article advocating for a new party called The Alternative for Germany. So there is hope on the horizon. It's been around about a decade. And it's been called, of course, by the Greens and the Christian Democrats as socialist parties.

races, white only, it's not really, it's returning it back to where the country was in the 1950s or 60s. It's for energy development. It is for rearming, not in a massive way, but in a European fashion. And it's to stop this crazy DI stuff and to apply the same rules of

of order and behavior and law to immigrants as they do the Germans. And it's now after this latest, the latest poll after the horrific terrorist attack three weeks ago, they have the largest public support of any of the many parties in Germany. But anyway, I should say that just to finish today,

I get a lot of letters and I get it in so many different, I get to the website and I have somebody that does it and I go through those. Then I get them to me. I don't know. I don't give out my personal, but I get a lot every day. And then I get a lot to my Stanford address. We have a full-time person doing that. So if you put them all together, there's maybe 100 or 200, not as much as I'm just a normal person, but for me, I can't go through two or 300.

snail mail and but my point is that sometimes people will say why don't you reply to this or why don't you do this i can't even address all one of them today said or it was a comment and said i'm getting so tired of your ten-year-old videos i'm glad you're doing a video for ultra and i thought i haven't done a ten-year-old then i think what he must be referring to is that people on their own

post-Youtubes of lectures that were to stale. For 30 years, I toured the country. I was flat broke, so I would go to universities or corporations, get $1,000, $500, and give a lecture, and they taped it. And maybe they thought, because we have this podcast, or I became a little bit better known, they started to put it on out. But I didn't have no control over that. We do, just to finish, we do three independent

up to date each week. And that is two ultra 750 word articles. I used to do three, but we're starting with a video, five minute video on a contemporary topic. In fact, I think the one I did yesterday, it's going to be posted today as I speak is about 12 or 15 minutes. So that take that's three a day. And then I have a long column every Monday.

American greatness, about 15 to 2000 words, and then I have a column syndicated. I've done for 20 years. I've never missed one, not one, even though I've had a death in my family, even though I had a ruptured appendix in Libya, even though I had three or two kidney operations.

That's five days a week as original content. So when I'm doing that, each day I have a new thing. I have a full-time job at Hoover, and I have now a three-book project with basic books. First book is due

just in a few months and I just started it. So I've been really busy, so it's not like I haven't been doing anything and I'm trying to suggest that I have been by posting 10-year-old videos. I have no control over it. It's very funny about that you have to be kind of ambiguous when you see people who takes all of your videos and they'll do things like

Great journals of World War II, and then they'll put videos with your lecture on patent or Curtis Lemay, or they'll say, my website is trends in small farming, and then you'll have a lecture. You'll be listed there as, you know, they'll have a little link to a lecture. So rather than go back and say, don't do that, that's, you didn't get permission. I don't know who asked permission.

So then I kind of say, well, if they want you to get word out, go ahead and do it. But it's not me doing it. So I don't know how old it is. Some of them are 20 or 30 years old. You can tell usually if I had hair. Not when you have hats on. Well, thanks everybody for listening, Victor. You've been wonderful today. It's been a nice everybody's enjoying their weekend. Thank you everybody for listening once more.

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

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