Transcription
It may not happen often, but sometimes, sometimes, entire civilizations die in a single day. Historian Victor Davis Hanson, on Uncommon Knowledge, now.
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Welcome to Uncommon Knowledge, I'm Peter Robinson, a fellow at the Hoover Institution here at Stanford. Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and, and military historian. Dr. Hansen has published more than two dozen major works of history, including, *A War Like No Other*. His classic work on the Peloponnesian Wars. Victor Davis Hansen's newest book, *The End of Everything, How Wars Descend Into Annihilation*. Victor, thanks for joining us.
>> Victor Davis Hanson: Thank you for having me, Peter.
>> Peter Robinson: First question, the destruction of Thebes by Alexander the Great, the obliteration of Carthage by the Romans, the defeat of Constantinople by the Turks, and the destruction of the Aztecs by Cortes. Those are your four case studies in this book. All those happened a while ago, why write this book now?
>> Victor Davis Hanson: Most of my career, I've been curious why Thebes, or I can go into the details, but why these-
>> Peter Robinson: We'll come to it. Yes, we'll come to it.
>> Victor Davis Hanson: Why these civilizations were not just defeated, but were annihilated? And there were others, there's a wide array in the ancient world, the end of Milos, towns in the Peloponnesian War like Scionie, etc. And this is very different than natural disasters like the Mycenaeans, etc. But I was wondering if there was a typology, a repeating pattern, and if it would be applicable to anything of value. And I found that there was, both on the part of the attacker, certain of mindset, and on the part of the defender, and that those situations that we think could not happen today because we're supposedly a postmodern, morals world.
>> Peter Robinson: We're more advanced than they were, Victor.
>> Victor Davis Hanson: Yes, that's what we think. So in the epilogue, I just did a brief survey, well, not a brief survey, but I did a survey of countries that are very vulnerable as described either in the nature of their enemies and the intent of their enemies or the neighborhood in which they reside, or their size, or their limits. For example, there's only 12 million Greeks in the world, right? They're Cypriots, but Greeks. And they have a bad neighborhood, and they have been existentially threatened by the Turks, especially the present government. Israel is another example, the Kurds are an example, the Armenians are still an example. And all of them have had a history where at times, people thought they would be existentially gone, because that was the intent. And yet, we feel that today, when somebody threatens to wipe somebody out, either with nuclear weapons or with convention, we discount that, that can't happen.
>> Peter Robinson: It's mere hyperbole.
>> Victor Davis Hanson: And in the epilogue, I think, I mention maybe a half a dozen or maybe even a dozen direct threats by various Turkish figures, Russian, Chinese. Where they actually threatened to destroy and wipe out, whether it's Ukraine, or Taiwan, or the Armenians, or Greeks, or Israel.
>> Peter Robinson: And the argument is, take that possibility seriously, because every so often it really does happen.
>> Victor Davis Hanson: Every so often, the exception that nobody thinks, the unimaginable, what people think it can't happen here, does happen here.
>> Peter Robinson: *The End of Everything* presents almost 300 pages of your usual approach, which is meticulous, thorough, and engrossing historical writing. This is television, we can't go into it that deeply, but I would like to touch on these case studies, at least briefly. Because even put in summary form, my feeling was, as I went through the book, even in summary form, every one of them is just fascinating and surprising in some way. All right, Thebes, *The End of Everything*, I'm quoting you. In 335 BC, the Thebans not only revolted against the Macedonian occupation of Greece, but defiantly dared Alexander the Great to take the legendary city, that is to take Thebes itself. He did just that. All right, briefly, the significance of Thebes, it was a major city. Who were the Macedonians? Set it up, set it up, who were the Macedonians, and who is this brilliant figure who arises as a very young man, Alexander the Great?
>> Victor Davis Hanson: Well, for 20 years prior to 335, Philip II of Macedon-
>> Peter Robinson: Alexander's father.
>> Victor Davis Hanson: Alexander's father had taken a backwater area that was deprecated as uncivilized by Greeks.
>> Peter Robinson: The northern mountainous region.
>> Victor Davis Hanson: The mountainous region of today is parts of northern Greece and the autonomous state of so-called Macedon, Macedonia. And he had forged imperial power he borrowed, he was a hostage at Thebes when he was a young man himself, and he learned from the great master of Pamanondas about Greek military tactics. He lengthened the Sarissa, he did all of his military work.
>> Peter Robinson: Sarissa is?
>> Victor Davis Hanson: Pike.
>> Peter Robinson: Right.
>> Victor Davis Hanson: So he innovated and improved on Greek phalanx warfare, fighting in column. And it was a juggernaut, and he came from the north, and he conquered at the Battle of Chaeronea. Three years prior to this, he destroyed Greek freedom by this. Basically, it was an army of Thebans and Athenians and a few other city states, and they were conquered and they were occupied, and there was no longer a truly consensual government in these 1,500 city states. And he had a plan or an agenda, said, I will unite you, and even though you think I'm semi Barbarous. Macedonia, it was sort of hard to understand, you could understand it, the language and the tradition, but it had no culture, the Greeks thought. But we're gonna unite and take Persia, and pay them back for a century of slights and get rich in the process. And the Greeks revolted in 335. He was assassinated, and he had his 21-year-old son, who had been at the battle of Chaeronea at 18, and had been spectacular in defeating the Thebans. And they didn't take him seriously.
>> Peter Robinson: The Thebans or the Greek city states in general?
>> Victor Davis Hanson: Yes, they thought, you know what?
>> Peter Robinson: He's a kid.
>> Victor Davis Hanson: Who's gonna take over from Philip II? He was a genius, and he's got bastard children here and concubines there, and he's got this one guy named Alexander, and it's, don't take it, we're gonna revolt. And everybody said, well, we hear about him, and he's kind of fanatic, be careful, but we're willing to revolt if you revolt first. And Thebes was at this time legendary, because it's the legendary home of Oedipus and Antigone, it's the fountain of Greek mythology. It has kind of a dark history, because bad things happen at Thebes, like Oedipus kills his father, or Antigone is executed.
>> Peter Robinson: Not a lot of cheerful stories.
>> Victor Davis Hanson: Yes, in Euripides, *Bacchae*, it's under the shadows of Mount Cathaeron. But the point is that, it had been under a Pamanondus or a Pythagorean, enlightened society. The first really expansive democracy was trying to democratize the Peloponnese. So it was the moral leader at this point, not after the-
>> Peter Robinson: What had happened to population.
>> Victor Davis Hanson: It was small. It was somewhere between 15 and 25,000 citizens, and maybe at most, 5 or 10,000 residents. But it was the capital of what we would call today, in English, a province called Boeotia.
>> Peter Robinson: Right.
>> Victor Davis Hanson: And that probably had somewhere around 150 to 250, and it was the capital that subjugated that. Okay, but it had a separate dialect, Theban dialect was different than the Boeotian dialect, and it was the stellar city. So Alexander then says, if you revolt, we're gonna come down, so he eliminates his enemies, he starts to march. The Athenians are egging the Thebans on and said, don't worry, we'll come, and the Spartans are gonna come, both of them in decline. And the long and the short of it is, he arrives there, the Thebans mock him. They think, we can replay the battle of Chaeronea, we'll win. And all of a sudden, when he shows up, they have no idea who he is, they don't know what he's intending. Had they studied his career, they would see he's a killer and he's a genius, and he's about ready to conquer the Persian empire, and he needs to have a solid home front. And he means business, and he doesn't play by the rules. And the rules of Greek warfare, except for the Peloponnesian, you don't destroy your enemy. Even Athens, as it lost the Peloponnesian war, they did not destroy Athens, the Spartans and the Thebans. So Spartans say they're gonna come, the Athenians are gonna help them. They egg them on, they revolt, they kill the Macedonian garrison or they imprison them, and Alexander pulls up with this huge army. You can't get 200 miles from the north in ten days, you can if you're Alexander. You march at 20 plus miles a day, he pulls up, they build siegecraft.
>> Peter Robinson: So is it fair to say he's a little bit like Napoleon?
>> Victor Davis Hanson: Yes.
>> Peter Robinson: He's shocking.
>> Victor Davis Hanson: Or Caesar, quickness of Caesar or Napoleon, audacity like Danton and the Spartans dissipate and the Athenians dissipate.
>> Peter Robinson: You're on your own.
>> Victor Davis Hanson: You're on your own, and they think this is the seven gates of Thebes, the magnificent walls of Thebes. We've only been broached once after the Persian war. We can endure, we're on the defensive, we've got this wonderful army will go out in front of the, and they are defeated. And they think-
>> Peter Robinson: They're not just defeated.
>> Victor Davis Hanson: Not defeated, they think they can negotiate, I think. And he says, I'm gonna kill every single person that's over the age of 16. I'm gonna enslave every woman and child, but you know what? I will save the descendants of Pindar, the poet, his house and maybe some religious shrines. And he levels the city down to the foundations and there are no more Thebans. Later, the Macedonians will take the site and bring in other people, other Greeks. And so there is no longer a Theban who have been there for two millennia, they're gone.
>> Peter Robinson: They have their own culture, their own history, it is recognized as such by the entire Greek-speaking world. And they even have their own, not quite their own language, but their own dialect, and it just ends.
>> Victor Davis Hanson: Yes, and some of the surrounding Boeotian villages, of course, don't like them. So they join Alexander and they haul off the marble columns, they haul off the roof tiles, they level it. After Alexander's death, some two decades later, they think it'd be good propaganda to refound Thebes, and they call it Thebes, which is the modern city today, but it's not the same culture.
>> Peter Robinson: Okay, that's example number one. By the way, do we have from contemporary sources, who would have written about that? What effect did that event have? It shocked all the other Greek city states into total submission.
>> Victor Davis Hanson: Yes, they could not believe it, they completely folded. He was-
>> Peter Robinson: So he got the stable home base he wanted that permitted him to advance into.
>> Victor Davis Hanson: And even among the Macedonians, it became shameful that Alexander had destroyed this legacy city, the fountain, as I said, of Greek mythology. And Epaminondas, the great liberator, his legacy, Pythagoras, the Pythagorean group there. And he'd wipe them out, and they regretted it later. But at the time, nobody came to their aid. They were very confident, they didn't think anybody would ever do that. And they were shocked, it was something that had not happened before.
>> Peter Robinson: Carthage.
>> Victor Davis Hanson: Yes.
>> Peter Robinson: Rome and Carthage, *The End of Everything*, your book. The three centuries long growth of the Roman Republic, where this is BC we're not at Caesar, certainly not close to Augustus. We're seeing Rome grow from a city to the dominant force in the Mediterranean. The three centuries long growth of the Roman Republic was often stalled or checked by its formidable Mediterranean rival, Carthage. On the other side of the Mediterranean or the northern edge of Africa, the competition between Rome and Carthage involved antithetical civilizations, explain that.
>> Victor Davis Hanson: Carthage was founded about the same time as Rome was, but it was, we use the word they used, it's an ancient word punic. And all that is, is a Phoenician transliteration for Phoenicians culture, that would be today where Gaza is along that area. This was a colony colonists founded under the mythical Dido at what is modern Tunisia, right? Just 90 miles opposite, it's the narrowest point of the Mediterranean. 90 miles opposite Sicily. Yes, and they were a Punic Semitic culture, so their language was nothing linguistically related to Greek or Latin. They did things that classical culture abhorred, such as child sacrifice. However, they did were heavily influenced by Greek constitutional history, so they actually had a constitutional system, they learned about western warfare from Spartan taskmasters. And so they fought these series, what we call the Punic War first and second. Unfortunately, for Rome, they were confronted with an authentic Alexander Napoleon like figure in Hannibal, who took the war home from the-
>> Peter Robinson: Second Punic War, he goes across into what is now Spain.
>> Victor Davis Hanson: Yes.
>> Peter Robinson: And it goes behind the Roman line, so to speak, famously taking elephants up over the Alps and then wreaking havoc.
>> Victor Davis Hanson: From 219 to 202, this war went on.
>> Peter Robinson: In Italy itself.
>> Victor Davis Hanson: In a series of battles at the river Tiquanis, Trebia, Lake Trasimity, and Cannon. He killed or wounded a quarter million Italians, and he ran wild for over a decade in Italy until Scipio Africanus invaded Tunisia and forced him to come home,-
>> Peter Robinson: To defend his own.
>> Victor Davis Hanson: Yes, and he lost the battle of Zama, he was exiled. But that was such a trauma or wound in the Italian mind, it was always Hannibal ad Portas. They scared little kids with, Hannibal's at the gates, and they were traumatized. So they had given a very punitive peace to the Carthaginians and they said, you're gonna pay this huge fine and you can never make war without our permission. You're gonna surrender all of your European and Sicily and colonies, we're gonna have it. And you're gonna be largely confined to the City of Carthage and some satellite villages.
>> Peter Robinson: So the Romans, I'm thinking now of a phrase that was used by Madeleine Albright to describe what we had done to Saddam Hussein. The Romans had Carthage in a box.
>> Victor Davis Hanson: Yes, that was the idea.
>> Peter Robinson: So may I set up the third Punic War here which brings us to the event to which this chapter is dedicated. I'm quoting *The End of Everything*. After the first two Punic Wars, there was no call at Rome to level a defeated Carthage. And yet Rome attacks Carthage again, why?
>> Victor Davis Hanson: Well, it's very ironic and tragic because they paid the indemnity off early.
>> Peter Robinson: The Carthaginians did.
>> Victor Davis Hanson: Yes.
>> Peter Robinson: They were called the Carthaginians.
>> Victor Davis Hanson: And they discovered that without these overseas colonies and given their prime location in North Africa, you got to remember that this time North Africa was the most fertile part of the Mediterranean, much more fertile than the shores of Europe, southern shores. And so they sent a delegation three years earlier to Carthage to inspect what was going on, and how did they pay the fine off. And they were astounded. The city had somewhat five to 600,000 people in it. It was booming, it was lush, the countryside was lush, they were confident. And unfortunately for them-
>> Peter Robinson: One of the great ports of the ancient world.
>> Victor Davis Hanson: Yes, it was the port of Carthage. It's about 20 miles of modern Tunis today, was starting to rival Rome again. And yet they professed no bellicosity at all. They said we have no problem with you.
>> Peter Robinson: We've learned our lesson.
>> Victor Davis Hanson: We learned our lesson, we're just a mercantile. They were sort of refashioning themselves from an imperial power to something like Singapore or Hong Kong. And Rome, unfortunately, was in this expansionary mood. They had now consolidated Spain, they had consolidated Italy, they consolidated much of Greece and soon would conquer all of Greece at Macedon. And they had Cato the Elder, and he got up legendarily and said, Carthage must be destroyed, is the epithet of every speech. After the inspectors came back, they said, these people are insidious. They may not have Hannibal, but they're gonna rival us again.
>> Peter Robinson: They're doing too well.
>> Victor Davis Hanson: They're doing too well, and we've got to eliminate. There were people in the Roman Senate that said, no, no, don't do that, they don't pose a threat. And actually they're good for us, because the more that they're there, they put us on guard and we don't get lack. The Romans had this idea that affluence and leisure make you decadent. So just the fact that they're right across the Mediterranean means it will always be.
>> Peter Robinson: Competition is good for us, Cato.
>> Victor Davis Hanson: Kind of what Americans used to think, 19th century. So unfortunately, they decided that they would present Carthage with a series of demands that could not possibly be met and still be autonomous. So they sent a group from the Senate down, two consuls. Consular army was rare, but they brought two consuls and an army and they landed them there. And they said to them, you're gonna move your city at least 15 miles from the ocean, you're not gonna be a sea power. And if you get mad about it, we were the same way. We're Rome, we have Austria, we're from inland, no problem. But you're gonna destroy this ancient city, and then you're gonna have to move, lock, stock and barrel. And by the way, we want all of your arms, we want your elephants, your famous elephants. They have personal names even. [LAUGH] We want your elephants, we want your siege craft. We want your armor, we want everything. And if you're willing to do that, we'll-
>> Peter Robinson: You'll live.
>> Victor Davis Hanson: We'll consider that the city can live. And they were willing to do that. Not to move, they sent a delegation. They said, okay, here's our catapults, here's our body armor, and we'll negotiate about the rest. And they came back and they think, I think we're okay. And then they went back the next time, and the Romans who were camped away with this huge army, said-
>> Peter Robinson: You said that the Romans took an army across the Mediterranean.
>> Victor Davis Hanson: Right near them, about 20 miles.
>> Peter Robinson: That was bigger than the landing force in the invasion of Normandy, it was a vast force.
>> Victor Davis Hanson: Our sources are somewhat in disagreement, but it could have been anywhere from 70 to 90 to 100,000 people. It took us all day to land 135,000, us being the British and the Americans. But the Americans themselves did not have as many people as the Romans landed at Utica.
>> Peter Robinson: All right.
>> Victor Davis Hanson: And so the Romans then told all of the Carthaginian allies on the north coast, are you with us or against us? Because if you're with us, we're gonna destroy them, and you're gonna be a favored colony. You're gonna get to share in the spoils. We won't tax you, you'll be the guys that run North Africa for it. If you're with them, we're gonna do to them. And so most of them, not all, defect. And then, the legates come back and they tell the Carthaginians, we blew it. They're gonna kill us and now we have no weapons because they were gonna make us move. We thought if we turned in our weapons, they might not make us move. So they bring out of retirement Hasdrubal, who's this fanatic, not the famous Hasdrubal, father of Hannibal, but another named Hasdrubal. And he's a complete maniac and they had not trusted him. And he says, kill all the legates, anybody who was an appeaser. We're in full moor, we're going to rearm. And they do, they get all the women's hair, they make catapults and they go crazy. And then, they put a siege around the city. The problem the Romans have is these walls are, until Constantinople, they are the greatest walls in the ancient world, 27 miles of fortifications. Carthage is on a peninsula and it's kind of a round circle with a corridor, and they've got that all area walled and they have a fleet still. And it's very hard to take that city. And the Romans are not known for their siege crowd, and they can't take it, and they lose, lose, lose, and they get the Numidian allies to join them. And suddenly, after two years, they've lost probably 20 or 30,000 Romans. Sometimes they break into the suburbs, but not the main walls, and it looks like it is an ungodly disaster. And they are very confident. And then, just in the case of Alexander, they don't know who they're dealing with, they bring out of this obscurity, Scipio Aemilianus. And he is the adopted grand nephew of Scipio Africanus, the famous one, and he is a philosopher like Alexander the Great. He's a man of letters, he wouldn't do such a thing. He has a Scipionic circle, playwrights, Terence, he's a friend of Polybius, the great historian, just like Alexander has the student of Aristotle. So he comes, and he's a legate, and he's been there, and he keeps saying the consuls are incompetent and they don't know what they're doing, and I should be, but he's a lowly young guy. And they said, you take over. So he comes, he gives a big lecture and says, you guys are pathetic, his soldiers, you're lazy. This is what's going to happen. He has discipline, they build a counterwall, and over the next year, he turns out to be an authentic military genius. He cuts off the city, he cuts off the corridor, he cuts off all of the allies supplying them, and he besieges them, and they will not surrender. But they still have a hope that he's a man of principle, and he will negotiate with them, and he will give them terms, and he is a killer, and he does not give them terms. And he systematically breaks, for the first time and only time in history, the great walls of Carthage. He gets into the city and then over a two week period he systematically kills every single person that the Romans, in fact, the descriptions are horrific.
>> Peter Robinson: Now, are we still dealing with half a million people or have many been fled by. No, no, it's still densely popular.
>> Victor Davis Hanson: They have nowhere to go, they're stuck and they're starving now.
>> Peter Robinson: This is an act of butchery, this is like slaughtering cattle of sheep.
>> Victor Davis Hanson: Our sources, we have accounts in Diodorus and somewhat in Livy Polybius, fragments here and there. We're told that the Roman army has to scrape off the bodies because they've killed so many people. It's like Gaza, or Fallujah, or Mosul, it's fighting in block by block and they're destroying to get rid of the Carthaginian defenders. They're destroying the buildings and they topple, and then the bodies are there, and then the army can't move. So they go, go, go until they get to the pinnacle, the capital. And there is Hasdrubal and his wife, and of course he flips and cuts a deal with.
>> Peter Robinson: I'm on your side now, boy.
>> Victor Davis Hanson: And he leaves his wife and they burn themselves up. And then he goes, he ends up in retirement in Italy, one of the few people who endures a Roman triumph and humiliated in the parade. And they let him live.
>> Peter Robinson: And they let him live.
>> Victor Davis Hanson: And then they wipe it out. I don't think it's accurate to say they sowed the ground with salt, as myth goes. But they did completely declare it an inhospitable place and it was sacrosanct to even get near it. They took it down to the foundation. There is no more formal Punic center of knowledge. They had a very rich agriculture, agronomy, literature, it's gone. What happen is there's remnants of people who in Augustine's time, in the fifth century AD, there's still people who they claim speak Punic, very few of them. And Romans under Caesar, then they make something called Carthago Nova, a new city, but it's a Roman city built on the somewhat near the old city.
>> Peter Robinson: So it's gone.
>> Victor Davis Hanson: It's gone. It disappeared, gone, you can put.
>> Peter Robinson: All right, I want to get two more stories, we probably don't have time to go into as much detail, which is heartbreaking, I won't go. Well, these become a little bit more modern, so maybe we know a little bit more about them. I mean, maybe listeners will know more Constantinople. *The End of Everything*, quote, the most infamous of wartime extinction was the destruction of Byzantine Constantinople on May 29, 1453. Let me just set this up so I can do this setup, kind of condense the material a little bit. We have the emperor Constantine, in the very early fourth century, moves the capital of the empire from Rome to this city in what is now Turkey. It's been called Byzantium, he refounds the capital as Constantinople, walls get erected, it becomes a Christian Greek-speaking empire that lasts 1000 years.
>> Victor Davis Hanson: Beyond the west when the west falls thousand years.
>> Peter Robinson: A thousand years after Rome itself falls. 8th century AD, we have the rise of Islam. And now pressure begins to be brought on the Christian Byzantine Empire century after century after century after century. And in 1453, on May 29, what happens?
>> Victor Davis Hanson: Black Tuesday. I lived in Greece, and on Black Tuesday, I was awakened by my landlord to make sure that I went to mass or Greek orthodox services to lament that the emperor Constantine had been marbleized and saved by the archangels and he was gonna come one day and free Constantinople. So at around noon, the Ottomans under Metnad had brought this-
>> Peter Robinson: Sultan.
>> Victor Davis Hanson: Yes, Sultan and his father and everybody had said they're declining. The empire of 20 million has now shrunk down to about a million. And there's only the city of a million people because of the fourth crusade where Christians, western Christians sacked it. It's in decline, and all we have to do is wait. And it's very lucrative because it's still a beacon of western culture in our area. So Venetians come in, Genovese come in, they bring in crossbows, they bring in gunpowder. It's very-
>> Peter Robinson: You can trade with these people.
>> Victor Davis Hanson: Exactly, so most Sultans had let it live and there was actually Turkish people within the city. This the great says, no, no, no, no, I am 19, I'm gonna destroy this. And he systematically fortifies the hell's point, the entrance in the Black Sea, and he takes the Dardanelles. You can't go in or out, and he squeezes it. And when he surrounds a city, there's only about seven to 8000 actual combatants of a city that's no more than 50,000. And he thinks it's going to be easy. But the walls of Constantinople, the so-called, built by the emperor Theodosis, they remain the most impressive walls in the world. They were a tripart system.
>> Peter Robinson: When you say remain, you mean today?
>> Victor Davis Hanson: Yes, you see them today. Yes, you can see mogul-
>> Peter Robinson: Go ahead.
>> Victor Davis Hanson: There's a mound, there was a moat, another mound, and then the so-called outer wall. And then with turrets 30ft, 20 to 30ft high. And then in between, a killing space of a plaza where there's nowhere to hide. And then the massive inner walls of 40ft and gates where they could retreat in. And no one had ever taken, no one had ever taken that. The fourth crusade came in through a fluke on the seaside, but no army had ever. It was like a triangle. So there was sea on the golden horn, sea on the Sea of Marmara. And then the exposed land had the Theodosian walls, five to six miles. And they camp out there and they cannot take it even with this reduced. They have these brilliant Genovese that are fighting for them, some mercenaries. They call Christendom help us, we're your Christian brotherhood. And they said, nah, you're orthodox and we're not going to help you. They said they were.
>> Peter Robinson: How many forces has Mehmet got?
>> Victor Davis Hanson: It's debatable, but he's probably got 250,000 and probably at least 100,000.
>> Peter Robinson: On land?
>> Victor Davis Hanson: Yes, the whole force is 250,000 and probably 100,000 on land. And he's got at least 10,000 crack Janissaries, the mercenary elite, and they can't take the city.
>> Peter Robinson: So that says something about those walls that 7,000 defenders can hold off 100,000.
>> Victor Davis Hanson: Yes, and they have the massive, the so-called Hungarian cannon that was built by a Hungarian huge. And they have these huge cannon and they knock down holes in the walls. At night, the civilians are all mobilized. And then Giustiani, the famous Genovese merchant, gets wounded. And he is-
>> Peter Robinson: The leader of the defenders.
>> Victor Davis Hanson: And he even though he's Italian, he's a spiritual anchor. And he, for some reason they withdraw the contingent and people say, my God, he's withdrawing and they panic. And when they leave the outer wall, they don't do it in order to get into the inner wall. They leave the gates open and then it's every man for themselves, it's one of the most heart wrenching descriptions in Byzantine literature. We have about eleven different sources in Italian, Turkish, Byzantine, Greek, and it's a free for all. And they slaughter everybody and 7000 go into the great church that you can go to today at Hagia Sophia. They think the archangel is gonna come down and save them. He doesn't, the Janissaries break in and then it's three days of absolute slaughter, wreckage, sort of like the fourth crusade, but the next-.
>> Peter Robinson: More deadly, civilians are being slaughtered.
>> Victor Davis Hanson: Yes, and so at the end, after three days, the Sultan as entourage realized that we need somebody to run this city because we're not gonna destroy it like Carthage or Thebes. We're gonna take a new DNA and use it cuz it's a beautiful city and we'll put minaret.
>> Peter Robinson: We could use those walls.
>> Victor Davis Hanson: Yeah, use those walls, it's got the best location in the world. We need minarets on Hagia Sophia, we'll turn it into a mosque, so they get a few there. And within 50 years, they have wiped out what had one time been 20 million Byzantine Christian Greek speakers in the ancient home. The Seljuk Turks, who became Ottomans, were not indigenous to that area, something Mister Erdogan today does not understand. This was, from time immemorial, a Greek-speaking area way back and now it never would be again.
>> Peter Robinson: Saint John Henry Newman referred in this history, he referred to the Turks as the people who had destroyed half the civilized world. He was very conscious that Byzantine culture represented half of Christendom up until it was gone. Okay, what is the legend that you referred to at the very beginning?
>> Victor Davis Hanson: Constantine didn't die.
>> Peter Robinson: That the last emperor is turned into marble.
>> Victor Davis Hanson: Yes, he's marbleized. And he went into a secret chamber in Hagia Sophia and he was lifted up into heaven and he's in suspended animation. And in 1920/21, there was the Megala Idea, the idea that after World War I, Greeks had bet on the winning side and Turks had been on the losing side and they were gonna reform and they got almost to Ankara, and then the Greeks did. Yes, and maybe he was gonna come out of marbleization and they would have Constantinople as the spiritual, political, religious home of Hellenism again. And then, of course, they were betrayed by the Europeans, they cut off and they were slaughtered.
>> Peter Robinson: And that is an extinction. Well, I suppose the most dramatic way of describing how completely it ended, we still have orthodox. We still have the orthodox church, we still have devout Greeks who remember that day and shake young Victor awake and saying, you must remember this day with us. You must go to orthodox mass. But Hagia Sophia, which was for centuries the largest church in Christendom, is now a mosque.
>> Victor Davis Hanson: Yes, and today, if you or I were to walk along Ionia and see the richest part of Hellenism, the ancient were the Pre-Socratic philosophers, the lyric poets were. If we went to Didyma or Pergamum or Ephesus or Meletus, it's Ottoman Muslim culture, Turkish. If we went to Constantinople, especially under Mister Erdogan, it's not the current-.
>> Peter Robinson: Leader of Turkey.
>> Victor Davis Hanson: There are Christian churches are being shut down and this was a UN historical site. Hagia Sophia, the greatest cathedral, and now it is a mosque again, under his leadership.
>> Peter Robinson: It was a museum and now it's back to being-.
>> Victor Davis Hanson: He took it away from its UN status and made it into a mosque. And there are no Greeks to speak of who speak Greek and openly are Christian. In all of what was a 20 million person, there is no such thing as Hellenism or Greek speakers outside of Cyprus in Greece, except the diaspora, say, in Europe, the United States.
>> Peter Robinson: Okay.
>> Victor Davis Hanson: He extinguished it.
>> Peter Robinson: This brings us to the last of these four, which I'm going to try to compress. This is like turning an ox into a bullion cube, here we're engaging in an active compression Victor.
>> Victor Davis Hanson: [LAUGH]
>> Peter Robinson: Hernan Cortes lands in Mexico in 1519, he has 500 soldiers, about 100 sailors. The sailors climb out of their ships and march with him. He has 600 men, some horses, some guns, and two years later, he destroys the Aztec capital 1521. Well, let me quote you. Although they had become familiar with Aztec civilization over the prior two years, the Spanish almost immediately sought to obliterate its religion, race and culture. In their view, they had more than enough reasons to destroy the Aztec empire, close quote. Now, the book describes the way Cortes, he's a politician as well as a general, and he discovers that many of the subject tribes in the area hate the Aztecs. So he assembles a force that he can use against the Aztecs. The history here is rich and fascinating, and it is an astonishing story of how this small Spanish force conquers Mexico. But what I wanna get to, the Spaniards had more than enough reasons to destroy the Aztec empire. Could you explain that a little bit? This was not just raw hunger for land, it wasn't just gold lust, what else was going on?
>> Victor Davis Hanson: Unfortunately, for the Tenochtitlan, the historic capital had an empire of 4 million people. This was 1492 to 1519 was only 30 years, not even that. So they didn't really know what, the westerners didn't know what was in Mexico. They'd heard of this legendary civil war.
>> Peter Robinson: 1492 being Columbus first encounters the new war.
>> Victor Davis Hanson: And Cortes was a minor official, he wasn't a general, he was an entrepreneur. And he got it in his head that he got temporary permission from the governor of Cuba to form this tiny force and go explore. But he knew that he wanted to do more than that. So he goes in, he marches and he's entertained. It's debatable whether they really think he's a god, but they've never seen people with white skin, they've never seen people with armor. They think the horses and the man are one person, they're centaurs, they think the dogs are. They've never seen these massif dogs before, they've never heard gunpowder before. They have no idea what steel is, steel, they use obsidian blades, they don't know what Toledo steel is. They have no idea what the wheel is, they've never seen, except in toys. So these guys come and they think they're gods, and then the more they see, they like to eat, they like to drink, they like to have sex, they bleed and they start to get wary, so there's a faction. And on the Noche Triste, the sad night of sorrows, they almost get completely slaughtered. And they're chased out, they come back with more Never at one time did he ever have in one place more than 1,500 soldiers. Unfortunately, for the Aztecs, they were not dealing with Plymouth Rock and Pilgrims. They were dealing with the most warlike, deadly Europeans in the world. They were dealing with the Spanish, who had just finished the Reconquista and fought for 300 years against Islam. They had been fighting during the reformation field, they had been in Italy.
>> Peter Robinson: By the way, both of those are religious wars.
>> Victor Davis Hanson: Yes, and the people who came with Cortez were some of the most brilliant Pedro Alvarado, people like that, some of the most skilled soldiers, and they had horses and they loved to fight. And they were accompanied by a zeal that was in reaction, was just the very beginning of the counter reformation, and they felt that their religion was going to be questioned unless they got souls. They come here and they say, my God, 25,000 people are being sacrificed, human sacrifices, on the great pyramid.
>> Peter Robinson: Now this, by the way, this has become a matter that intrudes into political correctness.
>> Victor Davis Hanson: Yes.
>> Peter Robinson: And lord knows I'm not an expert on this, but in my little lifetime, we were taught that the Aztecs engaged in widespread human sacrifice. Then we have a revisionist school that says, well, no, wait a minute, the only authority we have on that is the Spanish documents, and they clearly overstated what was taking. And now it's my understanding that the archaeologists are discovering more, and more, and more evidence that it was indeed not just occasional human sacrifice, but a regular feature, a daily feature. I mean, it's almost as if in the island of Manhattan, every single day, there were some human sacrifices at the top of the Empire State Building. Is that right?
>> Victor Davis Hanson: No, it's not.
>> Peter Robinson: And you insist on that in this book, why?
>> Victor Davis Hanson: If you look at contemporary archaeological reports that confirm what Bernal Diaz said, or Prescott said in the 19th century, great historian. But more importantly, there are pictorial skull racks that they have numerical records. And we know that the lake that surrounds it's an island civilization. Tenochtitlan was polluted because of a festival where they may have sacrificed 20, or 30, or 40,000 within a four day period, something like Auschwitz. And they threw the bodies into there, so I don't think anybody object, challenges it. What they challenge is, there are anthropologists that said, well, there was no large herbivore, so there was no source of protein for this sophisticated, systematic, centrally planned economy. And they were very architecturally advanced astronomically. And they needed, in this very urban society of a quarter million people, and the Spanish said it was more impressive than Venice. Venice at its height, it had a very sophisticated system of.
>> Peter Robinson: No, but the Spaniards are not saying these people are barbarians.
>> Victor Davis Hanson: No, they're not. They're saying that they are very sophisticated people, which means that we have, they're even more dangerous because they have spread three or four things that we think are terrible. They're cannibals, and we know that they did eat portions of the sacrificial. They engage in ritual sodomy, which we don't think is permissible, and they sacrifice humans. So it's our duty as emissaries of Christianity, defined as Catholicism of the Spanish Reconquista period, to kill people, to save them, we've got to kill the people who are doing this. And then we're gonna surround all of the people around the lake of the empire who resent being harvested when they lose it. War is not fought to take land, war is fought to get captives, so called flower wars. So you don't try to kill somebody, you knock them down and tie them up and you drag them. And then the guy that has the most captives is very famous. And then they're brought up to Templo Mayor, and they're sacrificed. And the Spanish find this horrific, but they also discover that it's in their interest because they're not. When you get Spanish Toledo steel mail helmet, especially if you're mounted Toledo blade, arquebus gunpowder.
>> Peter Robinson: They can't capture it.
>> Victor Davis Hanson: They can't, and they're trying to capture. If they would just swarm them and cut their throat, they might have won, but they're trying to knock them down and talk. And then the final thing about it is, they don't know who Cortes is. He's more gifted than Alexander in some ways, he's more gifted than Mehmet. He's probably more gifted than even Scipio. Nobody knows that he's never had any experience in this and it turns out he is a natural military genius. And every time they should have been extinguished, they lose, they're sick, He comes.
>> Peter Robinson: He finds the way out.
>> Victor Davis Hanson: And he finds a way out. He's an authentic military genius and he's ruthless. And he-
>> Peter Robinson: So, Victor, on the Spaniards wipe out the Aztecs, I'm just trying to think, to what extent is is that an annihilation of the kind that takes place in the other examples? I have a Mexican friend who said, well, just look around Mexico City. You see very few people of Spanish descent and millions of people of Indian or Aztec descent. They didn't destroy.
>> Victor Davis Hanson: Aztec is a key word.
>> Peter Robinson: Is that so? And the other thing is, I checked on this, I went online, there is still a Duke Duque de Montezuma in Spain today. They took the grandchildren of the last emperor of the Aztecs back to Spain.
>> Victor Davis Hanson: They did.
>> Peter Robinson: And honored them by ennobling them. Okay, so what gets destroyed? What is ended?
>> Victor Davis Hanson: Nahuatl, the language exists in Mexico today. I have been in my hometown, where people who have come from Mexico and Spanish speakers cannot understand them. But Aztecs, as a city, as a unique culture among indigenous people, is destroyed. So when you talk to somebody and you say, if somebody says to you, the San Diego Aztecs, they never say the San Diego. The sports team, college team, they never say the San Diego Tlaxcalans or Toltecs, why do they not do that?
>> Peter Robinson: I couldn't spell it apart from anything.
>> Victor Davis Hanson: Because first of all, we have a chronicle of this majestic civilization and how advanced they were. As I said in architecture, town planning, sanitation, very sophisticated. But they don't wanna talk about the downside of cannibalism, human sacrifice. But the point is, if we were transported to 1521, Cortes would have never been able to defeat them without the help of the Tlaxcalans he had, and their allies. He must have had at least, he drew on an army of over that two and a half year period of over 200,000. And they probably lost.
>> Peter Robinson: Because the surrounding tribes were tired of being raided for captives who would be sacrificed.
>> Victor Davis Hanson: As soon as the word got out that Cortes was back again, that he was not annihilated, he came back and this time he had brigantines or boats. And he would navigate in a combined amphibious and land attack on the causeways and by land, and he figured out how to beat them. And he gave them an ultimatum that I wanna save your city and make it the capital of New Spain, but if you don't, I'm gonna destroy it. That word went out and all of a sudden these fickle allies that sometimes had helped him, they masked, they said, my God, you're going to destroy.
>> Peter Robinson: We have a moment here.
>> Victor Davis Hanson: And I can pay them back for all the things they did, and they ran wild. In fact, he says in his letters, and so does contemporary sources, that he regretted that once he unleashed these people, they butchered, and butchered, and butchered, and they destroyed Aztec's central civilization. So yes, there are people who survived the holocaust, and that's what it was. But centrally planned civilization with a priesthood class, an urban center and no, it's now Spain. And the Spanish built on top of it, right on top of Tenochtitlan. They use the very foundations of the destroyer, they destroy it down to the foundations, it's gone. And there is no formal Aztec culture. There are indigenous people, of course, because they form about 1% of the population in what is Mexico.
>> Peter Robinson: And you can go to the Zocalo in Mexico City today, and on the very site of the Templo Mayor, the great Aztec pyramid is a gigantic Spanish cathedral which says, among other things, what it says is we won and you lost.
>> Victor Davis Hanson: Yes, and there were concessions given from the Spanish to the Tlaxcalans and they honored them. In other words, that you are not gonna be subject to the same degree of subservience of the scattered remnants of anybody who fought for the Aztecs.
>> Peter Robinson: I see. Last questions, you've got a number of themes of
relevance to us today. One theme here is the capacity of the doomed for self-delusions. The Thebans fail to grasp the military revolution that's taken place under Philip. They fail to grasp, even though they have some intelligence, they have reasons to question their own judgment of Alexander's ability; they say no. The Carthaginians fail to grasp the change in Roman power and determination over two centuries. The Byzantines cannot bring themselves to imagine that a city that has lasted a thousand years could fall, let alone fall in a day, the end of everything.
I'm quoting you: "The gullibility and indeed ignorance of contemporary leaders about the intent, hatred, ruthlessness, and capability of their enemies are not surprising given unchanging human nature."
Victor Davis Hanson: Yes.
Peter Robinson: At the beginning of the program, you talked about the plight of the Greeks, you talked about threats against Israel. What are Americans to make of this?
Victor Davis Hanson: Well, I think we should take these lessons very seriously, both from the point of the attacker and the attack. Because you mentioned some of the commonalities at the end of the book. I give you a kind of a common denominator, blueprint. And people who have not been defeated or are accustomed to a period, to a position of superiority culturally, militarily, they think that they're invulnerable forever and they're not aware of insidious decline. Thebes that Alexander took is not the Thebes of Epaminondas. And yet the walls look as stout as they ever were, and the people are the same; they think, same thing with Carthage, the same thing with Constantinople. They said, nobody's ever gonna get through the walls. They tried just early 50 years earlier, they couldn't do it, we're invulnerable. And people said, well, we're not the same people. They don't think that anybody would ever dream of extinguishing them. We've been here a thousand years, we're the children of Oedipus. To note Chitlan, we've been here, this is the pinnacle of our civilization, etc. Constantinople, this is the city of Constantine and Justinian, we can't fall. So there's an unreality, and then they have no idea who they're facing. They have no idea what's in the mind of Cortes, they have no idea. Do we have any idea what's in the mind of Xi Jinping or Vladimir Putin? We have no idea. We think that he, we think that Xi thinks as I think George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, all bipartisan. They all thought that he is so impressed with western civilization, he's globalizing, he's changed his economy. Yes, he's rough around their edges. But our leisure, our affluence, globalization will acculturate them and China will take their place among the family.
Peter Robinson: Because of course, they want to be like us.
Victor Davis Hanson: They want us, and they don't understand that that is exactly what the Byzantines said about the Ottomans. That's exactly what people said about Alexander, that's exactly what they said about Carthage. And these people don't understand. So whether it's Putin, so when Putin says, "I'm gonna use nuclear weapons if I lose." And there's been about 17 threats from high members of the Russian military, high members of the Russian parliament, such as it is, and Putin himself, tactical nuclear even. We say, "This is crazy, they would never do that." We never say, "Well, if I was going to lose and be humiliated, or if I wanted Ukraine, the breadbasket of the old Soviet Union and ports on the Black Sea and a window right under Europe, I'd be willing to do a lot of stuff for it and I've done." So there's an unreality. And then on the part of the attacker, they need to understand what the attacker is capable of. I just add one quick thing. I also mentioned the serial threats that China has given Taiwan. And they even made a brief film about nuking Japan if it interfered, calling the war criminal.
Peter Robinson: The Chinese Communist.
Victor Davis Hanson: The Chinese Communist.
Peter Robinson: And they've distributed that in China.
Victor Davis Hanson: Yes, just like Erdogan has said that he was going to send missiles and destroy Athens, he was gonna destroy Israel. He said, "I'm gonna do the same thing to the Armenians," and he just ethnically cleansed 100,000 of them. "I'm gonna do the same thing as my grandfathers, they had the solution." So these people are serious when they say this. But I had one line in the epilogue to that effect of what China, and that's a very big market, the Chinese market. And I've had a lot of success with other books.
Peter Robinson: Victor, one other of the, yeah, go ahead, I'm sorry.
Victor Davis Hanson: I was given notice by the Chinese publisher, I had to take out that line or there would be no book sales and everything would be canceled, no Chinese translation in the epilogue.
Peter Robinson: So they are serious.
Victor Davis Hanson: So I didn't do it, and there's not gonna be a book in China, that book will never be in China.
Peter Robinson: Well, all right. Yes, you don't think somebody will, okay, well, that's a separate conversation. Another of the themes that strikes me here. "War changes things." I'm quoting you again, "the end of everything." Once Alexander grasped the full extent of Theban hatred, he concluded that only destroying the city, rather than merely capturing it, would end Greek opposition to Macedonia. Cortes decided there was no way to root out the imperial system without knocking the Aztec's infrastructure down upon them. Such revised decisions are common throughout military history. Near the end of World War II, US Army Air Corps General Curtis LeMay decided the only way to destroy Japan's dispersed manufacturing, which was deeply embedded within the neighborhoods of Tokyo, was to ignite the city. And we get the firebombing of Tokyo. Again, war changes things. So we are supplying the Ukrainians with weapons of material, we have two carrier groups in the eastern Mediterranean to support the Israelis. And we have our forces disposed, our naval forces disposed in the Pacific. We don't know where our attack submarines are because there's no reporting on that and there shouldn't be. But we're concerned about Taiwan, we're very concerned about Taiwan. What are the lessons of the end of everything for Americans as we face trouble? Military challenges on three fronts?
Victor Davis Hanson: If we would look at ourselves dispassionately and not say, "We're Americans, we're always numbered," we would say the following. We've never had, in terms of the percentage of GDP, debt, or in actual numbers, except for a brief period in World War, $35 trillion we owe, and we are borrowing one trillion every 100 days. It's completely unsustainable. We've never had the military admit to us that it is short 40,000 troops and they don't know where to get them at a time when the American population has never been larger. We have—
Peter Robinson: The Army missed its recruiting goals last year by 10%.
Victor Davis Hanson: Yes.
Peter Robinson: And that was not the first year.
Victor Davis Hanson: And we have had a porous border. We have never had no border at all, it ceased to exist. We've had 10 million people walk across without audit, we've never seen anything like it. We have the largest number of foreign-born residents, both in numbers, 50 million, and in percentages of the resident population we've ever had, at a time when we have lost confidence in the melting pot. Okay, we've had high crime areas before, high crime periods. We've never had a period in American history where our elites say that crime is not crime, it's a social construct. And you have to let somebody, a violent criminal, out the same day that he's arrested. That's a new theory, critical legal theory. Okay, we're a multiracial society, and we're the only successful multiracial democracy. We know that it depends on relegating your tribal affiliations to the general idea of being an American. We are regressing into tribalism. So when you look at all of these challenges and you look at the symptoms. We have never done anything like Afghanistan, just completely flee and leave $50 billion in weaponry to a terrorist organization that's selling all over the globe. We've never had that before. We have never had, since World War II, a Verdun. We have passed the numbers of dead and wounded in Verdun. We're above 700,000 wounded, missing, or killed Russians and Ukrainians. And we're headed to Somme territory, and nobody has any idea how to stop this. Russia is not gonna be able to take all of Ukraine, and we are not gonna be able to get back the Donbas and Crimea. So it's gonna continue, nobody has an answer. Nobody takes serious that the Chinese would be crazy enough to go across the Taiwanese Strait and try to take that city. They say they can do it. So my point is, never have we been faced with such existential challenges in the post-war period, at a period when we are so weak, or at least we're not naturally weak. Our constitution is there, our natural resources, we lead the world. But when you look at crime, when you look at debt, when you look at the border, when you look at our universities, which were the envy of the world, they were the engine that drove American culture and power and technology, and they're in crisis. Science is in crisis.
Peter Robinson: So we're like the Thebans, we're not the same people.
Victor Davis Hanson: We're not the same people. We're not the same people that maybe we have it in us. We're not the same people who stormed Omaha Beach when the first 2,000 people were mowed down.
Peter Robinson: I wanna play a brief video excerpt. You both work here, you're among the intellectuals who you're offstage, the members of Congress are on stage, but they're always turning around saying, "Blumenthal, did I get that right? Bridge, what about this? Is this town serious?" Do you feel a sense of seriousness descending that is adequate to the moment?
Daniel Blumenthal: Absolutely not.
Victor Davis Hanson: Absolutely not.
Bridger Colby: Absolutely. We're in a world of warfare, and we're not on a war footing.
Peter Robinson: Victor, there's no sense of seriousness in Washington.
Victor Davis Hanson: No, we think that the most important thing is canceling student debt or inaugurating new woke programs. It's gonna take seven years to replace the Javelin. Anti-tank weapons were short 155 millimeter. That was our signature. We were the biggest producer of shells in the world.
Peter Robinson: Victor, can I ask one? The book is called "The End of Everything," and you describe four episodes, all of which take place, the most recent of which takes place about four centuries before the invention of nukes. So let me quote, if I may. Here's a quotation from Clausewitz, who saw the Napoleonic Wars as a young Prussian officer and meditated on military theory and the rest of his life. Here's Clausewitz: "This has always bothered me. If one side uses force without compunction, that side will force the other to follow suit. Even the most civilized of peoples can be fired with passionate hatred of each other. The thesis must be repeated: War is an act of force, and there is no logical limit to the application of that force." Thebes wiped out Carthage, leveled Constantinople, civilization blotted out Aztecs, gone. And now we have nuclear weapons.
Victor Davis Hanson: Among other things, we have AI, we have bioweapons, apparently that an accidental release from the Wuhan lab.
Peter Robinson: So should we, what I'm desperate to do here is to end on an upbeat, if I can find one anywhere. Should we take encouragement from the long period of the Cold War when we had nuclear weapons but managed to defeat Soviet communism without any use, without warfare, without a major war, without a major confrontation? Should we be cheered by that?
Victor Davis Hanson: We should learn.
Peter Robinson: Or are we doomed?
Victor Davis Hanson: No, we're not doomed. We need to learn from wise men like Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, even to an extent, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and the rest of them. They all had one thing—
Peter Robinson: Can you mention Ronald Reagan?
Victor Davis Hanson: I'm getting to him.
Peter Robinson: All right. [LAUGH]
Victor Davis Hanson: And in a period of doubt where people had questioned their so-called Neanderthal approach to human nature, that they believed that deterrence and not dialogue or the UN kept the peace, along came Ronald Reagan. And he said, he basically said, "The degree to which we are safe is the degree to which we help our friends and tell our enemies to be careful because we will defend us and we're gonna have the capability to do it." Deterrence, deterrence, deterrence, which is just a Latin word to scare somebody off from doing something stupid. And if you don't believe in deterrence, then as Vegeta said, "If you want peace, prepare for war. If you want war, prepare for peace."
Peter Robinson: Victor, will you close our conversation by reading a passage from Victor Davis Hanson, the author of "The End of Everything." Reading a passage from "The End of Everything."
Victor Davis Hanson: Well, thank you. To the degree that I can read well, the fate of the Thebans, Carthaginians, Byzantines, and Aztecs remind us that what cannot possibly happen can indeed on occasion occur when war unleashes timeless human passions and escalation, rather than reduction in violence, becomes a rule of conflict. In this regard, we should remind ourselves that we really do not know the boundaries of what may follow from the dispute in the Ukraine or a standoff over Taiwan or strikes on nuclear facilities in Iran. Like their predecessors, modern attackers will on occasion insist on an impossible term. They will sometimes become further enraged by prolonged and toxic resistance. The targeted will believe that doom resistance may not be so impossible, that their defenses are underestimated while their enemies' powers are exaggerated, and that reason rules war. And so they will hope that even their own defeat cannot possibly entail the end of everything.
Peter Robinson: Victor Davis Hanson, author of "The End of Everything," thank you.
Victor Davis Hanson: Thank you very much for having me.
Peter Robinson: For Uncommon Knowledge, the Hoover Institution, and Fox Nation. I'm Peter Robinson. [MUSIC]