← The Victor Davis Hanson Show
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- [00:02]
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- [00:31]
Sammy Wink
Hello and welcome to the Victor Davis Hanson Show. This is our Saturday edition and we're looking at continuing with the international affairs. There's a little bit more in Israel we want to talk about and then also Russian ships in the Baltic. So stay with us and we'll be right back.
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- [01:49]
Sammy Wink
Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hansen Show. Victor is the Martin and Eli Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College. You can find him at his website, victorhanson.com and his website is called the Blade of Perseus. So please come join us there. It's still $5 a month or $50 a year and we like to see it. Come along, Victor. So we've got lots of international news still and I know that we already talked about Israel on Friday, but have come out. Netanyahu has said that he's turning now on the Iran back Houthis after finishing with Hezbollah in Lebanon and with Hamas in Gaza. And his words are even if it takes time, the result will be the same. And I was wondering your thought, I really personally appreciate Netanyahu's position there. I wish we had a leader like that, but. And maybe we will in Trump. But what are your thoughts on this?
- [02:57]
Victor Davis Hanson
Well, the Houthis, they've had this premise that because Hamas had sent five or six thousand projectiles into Israel, and then they had the October 7th massacres, and then there was the war in Gaza, and simultaneously, Hezbollah had sent 8,000 rockets in, they had to deal with Hezbollah. Then Iran had sent 500 projectiles in. And to deal with Iran, they were going to be exempt and they were going to garner the terrorist headlines because they were very distant. They were hundreds of miles way, way, way down near the Red Sea. And they thought, well, the Israelis would have to refuel once or twice to get us. They don't want to send a ballistic missile. They have their hands full with Hamas, Hezbollah, Syria, Iran. So we're just going to, every couple of days, send a projectile in there, a drone, a missile, e. And it's going to hit something. They did, you know, they killed, I think, a couple of Israelis, and they just keep doing it. And then they get on their national propaganda megaphones and they brag that they're the only terrorist organization that Israel can't reach, even though they took out their ports. So it was just a matter of time. And now with the Assad overthrow and Syria is in turmoil, it's no longer able to mount a defense. It's no longer able to transit Iranian goods. There is nobody to give them to. Hamas and Hezbollah are inert, and Iran is in the target, Netanyahu saying, you know what? Now we have time to deal with you. And what was ironic about it was at the very moment Mr. Al Houthi, or whatever his name is, the erstwhile leader of the Houthis, I don't know what you'd call them, cabal. They don't have the entire country. But while he was bragging that they were hitting Israel, Israel just very quietly took out their power plants. They took out some of their airport facilities. They took out infrastructure. They went after the headquarters of Houthi people. Many of the Houthi leaders have quietly left the capital because they're afraid that their numbers up because Netanyahu's people have said, you know, we're going to go after you. So it's just a matter of time. And it was kind of ironic because Israel doesn't really make threats unless they carry them out. Unlike Joe Biden. Don't. What are you going to say to the Iranians if They're thinking, don't. What if you think, should Israel reply, no, I told them, don't. How about if Russia goes, no, don't. No, Joe, nobody listens to you. Sorry. When you say don't, that means yes, and they don't do that. And they're quiet and they're taking care of business with the Houthis. And then think about it in a minute. We had this conversation two years ago. People would have said, wow, Israel is surrounded by Hamas, who are deadly. And then they've got Hezbollah. Well, no one can deal with Hezbollah. They're just indomitable. And then they've got Iran ascended under Biden, they've got Assad, that's fueling the whole thing on his end. And then they've Houthis and they're little tiny Israel and they've got a hostile administration. Two years later, they're all been taken care of one way or the other, or they're in the process of being taken care. It's quite an achievement that people don't realize. And there has been a. There was a lot of photographs of the arsenal, I don't know if you saw it, the arsenal that Israel inherited from Syria. And there were rumors that Assad, on his way out, gave to Israeli intelligence areas where he had arms depots in fear that his enemies would find them and use them against the vestigial Russian bases there on the coast. And there are pictures then of the explosions where Israel systematically blew up the whole weapons arsenal, both in Lebanon and in Syria. But more importantly, they kept a lot of stuff. And it's absolutely shocking to see it. I mean, there's RPGs, there's machines. You know what it is? It's the antithetical version of the $50 billion that we left behind to the Taliban and Afghanistan, only they took it. So here's a nice way to end this little vignette, Joe. Biden goes into Afghanistan, pulls out, goes in when he takes over and leaves 50 to 80 billion dollars of trucks, jeeps, machine guns to terrorists. Israel goes in under enormous criticism from Biden, and they end up with a huge cash that they take from terrorists, not only taking it out of circulation, but perhaps they can find a use for it themselves. It's just the opposite. And yet they get criticized. They've done more for the United States security in the last 30 years in the Middle east than anybody else.
- [08:13]
Sammy Wink
Yeah, Victor, I would like to take a moment for our sponsor, Wired to Fish Coffee. Wired to Fish Coffee cares so much about our Earth and its people that they give back 25% of their profits to faith based programs and clean water initiatives. And the coffee is delicious. It's sourced in Guatemala and Mexico, known for some of the best and finest coffee beans in the world. This coffee is also consistently getting five star ratings from the thousands of coffee lovers who comment on its smooth finish and amazing taste. Give Wired to Fish coffee a try today and join a community of people that are making a positive impact. I mean, everyone drinks coffee. So drink coffee for something that you're passionate about. Head over to wired2fish.com that's wired2fish.com Coffee sorry, that's wired number two fish coffee.com today and use code give back for 10% off your order. And we would like to thank Wired to Fish for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hansen Show. Victor? So since you mentioned Russia in that Russia has also got its tentacles in other places, especially the Baltic and between the Baltic states and Finland, apparently one of their ships has dragged an anchor across the Baltic Sea floor and has disrupted a lot of energy and communication cables going between Finland and the Baltic states. Now they, they don't know for sure if it was done on purpose or not, but it certainly looks like a weird quote unquote accident for a ship to have. What are your thoughts on this?
- [09:59]
Victor Davis Hanson
Well, I mean, they rent Chinese ships and then the Scandinavians and NATO people just fly over them and take pictures. And when they don't see an anchor visible from the top of the ship, which they are, anybody who's been on a big ship sees that they're visible, they understand that they're somewhere else and that somewhere else is along the bottom of the sea and they're dragging it in areas where they think there's communication cables and then they sort of drift off. In this case, the Finns have stopped the ship and they're looking. But the question is, what are you going to do about it? And I don't know what you do about it. Russia's mad because one of the disastrous developments was that they had always considered since the Potsdam Treaty that Austria, Finland were going to be neutral. Neither one would have joined NATO and didn't or the Warsaw Pact. And they had had a bitter experience in their conquering of the Finns in the winter war of 1939 and 40. So Finland was a special case. They just let it go. And they said, you know, Helsinki can be sort of like Vienna, Switzerland, Vienna, Austria or somewhere like Geneva, Switzerland, neutral. And then this war and the bullying of Putin just convinced the Finns that they are going to be a NATO power. So they joined NATO and they brought with it one of the most effective artillery forces in the whole alliance, given their experience going all the way back to World War II as superb fighters. And then Sweden followed. So one of the things that Putin is really upset about on his right northern flank, he always had two neutral countries that were careful not to join NATO and were fact in the case of Sweden, especially left wing and anti American, and that's no longer true now. And Sweden has a very effective arms industry for pacifists. They make pretty good arms, as do the Finns. So I guess what I'm saying is we're not talking about putting in countries that will not fight. And these two countries, Finland and Sweden, are more valuable additions to NATO than a lot of the Western European. I'd rather have Sweden or Finland easily than Belgium, for example. And we'll see what they do. But they're going to try. They're going to have to react in some way to restore deterrence. We'll see. What Trump says when he meets Putin, is he going to say, you're going to stop cutting our cables of our allies or you're going to stop this and this and then you're going to get this. We'll see what his art of the deal will be. But right now, where is Biden? I guess he's.
- [13:02]
Sammy Wink
Where?
- [13:03]
Victor Davis Hanson
Where is he?
- [13:03]
Sammy Wink
No one knows.
- [13:04]
Victor Davis Hanson
No, he's at some beach. It's. It's Delaware. No. Is it this? Virgin Islands? I don't know. At some place. He's at a beach and he's always at a beach. And whoever is running the country, I guess it's Mr. Blinken who's running the country. And I think Jack, Jake Sullivan said something the other day. He said that we're handling handing off a quiet world to Donald Trump. Remember his. Right before they went in, the killers went in on October 7. He said, I'm looking at my portfolio and the Middle east is one of the quiet, quietest, most stable places. And now he's saying the same thing. You think, okay, what did you guys do in Ukraine? What happened in the Middle East? What do you think the world is like with Tew? You've screwed up everything and you're telling it's stable because we're not quite at war yet. God, this is going to be. Maybe Mr. Blinken can go back to his $5 million mansion in Washington or his Martha Vineyard estate that he used to rent out. I guess he used to let Obama use it.
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Sammy Wink
Yeah, leave the rest of the country alone.
- [14:13]
Victor Davis Hanson
Yeah, just leave us alone. You know, all of these people. Just as an anecdote, I was driving home yesterday on the decrepit, ossified, calcified, narrow 99, big wreck. Two lanes in each direction. Hasn't changed since I was a kid. Then you got to hear Gavin Newsom gallivanting around and bragging about we have a fund to sue Trump. And I'm just thinking, when you came into power, I'm going on a rant now, 19 cents, I think it was for kilowatts, which was the highest in the country. Now it's 31 or 32 kilowatts on average. You went, the gas tax went up, the income tax, the sales tax and the whole country went to, you know what? And here you're driving and you can't even drive. It was like a road warrior. I mean there were just semis lined up and then one lane for cars and it was a menagerie of cars. And then everybody trying to go on the shoulder, there was a wreck. It was just a mess. It didn't have to be that way because, you know, it was not too far from the Stonehenge. It just sits there. The 15 billion invested in the disastrous Stonehenge high speed rail. So Blinken made me think of that because there is something here about this Brahmin, aristocratic, wealthy left wing class. If you think about it, the legacy of Dianne Feinstein and her husband and the Pelosi's and the Newsoms, they all are Bay Area left wing people who never were subject to the consequences of their harebrained utopian schemes for us, their spouses. I think Gavin's wife had a company with business, with estate. Dianne Feinstein's husband became very wealthy. Richard Bloom with investments. We don't need to get into the Pelosi's real estate and stock deals. Given her office. Then we had Barbara Boxer, she was hiring her son and all of this stuff. And then we've got Camilla Harris and Jerry Brown. And they all had one thing in common. They were left wing. Two thief. They were left wing, they were very wealthy and they all never had to drive in the 99 like most of these poor people like myself last night. They don't have to drive in the 99. They don't have to fight, fight as a common person in lax. Getting to lax. They don't have to worry about the crime on the streets of Stockton or Fresno or San Francisco. I think Nancy's up in Napa Jerry's up in Grass Valley, Barbara Boxer's down at Rancho Mirage. Rest in peace. The Feinsteins, Camilla, I don't know where, where was she in Hawaii, probably. Yeah, I think she was in Hawaii. They all, they all. This is something that really destroyed the Democratic Party. They're all left wing, utopian millionaires that use their offices, us to become billionaires or want to be billionaires. And I think that was one of the subtext of the election. They have done so much damage in the state.
- [17:35]
Sammy Wink
Well, the left has found something else to cling onto. Recently there was an article in the Hill by Evan Davis and David Schultz, and they were arguing that Trump should be disqualified by the Electoral College because he participated in insurrection, disqualifying him under the 14th Amendment. And I know we've heard this before, but they are renewing this before the January 6th count of the Electoral College.
- [18:05]
Victor Davis Hanson
That is so strange because they never, I mean, Jack Smith had to drop all those indictments, but he never had an indictment for an insurrection. It was trying to, this is important. He tried to block the process of balloting. And that's what these guys are trying to do. They're trying to say that under the 14th Amendment, Donald Trump is a rebel Confederate general, basically, and he tried to stage an armed insurrection. That's what the statute implies. No one was ever found in the Capitol, inside the Capitol with a weapon. If you're an insurrectionist, you don't say, I expect my people to assemble peacefully and patriotically at the Capitol. You'd think there's going to be a lot of people dead. Like the 120 days that killed almost 40 people. And there was none. There was nobody killed except five people died. Four of them were Trump people. I'm getting to Ashley Babbitt, everybody. Four people were Trump people, including Ashley. Ashley Babbitt, the one person who died violently, who was lethally shot by Officer Byrd for the misdemeanor of entering a broken window. And then Officer Sitnik died naturally, the next day, tragically. But the point I'm making is all of the violence, the violence was in May, June, July, August, September, October of 2020. And yet these two law professors say Donald Trump tried to stage an insurrection. Forget about the FBI informants. We know that we're there. Forget about the deliberate efforts, according to the Capitol Police hierarchy, to not beef up security by the left. Nancy Pelosi didn't follow up on recommendations. And they want to say that Donald Trump, all of a sudden, who's never been charged with insurrection, he's had a whole federal prosecutor go at him for two and a half years, but they're going to say that he's an insurrectionist. And then what was weird is Raskin, the representative, I think he's from Maryland, he said that the Supreme Court that threw out this question came up because 16 states said that Donald Trump was an insurrectionist and alluded to the 14th Amendment that was passed, remember, after the Civil War, so that people like Robert E. Lee could not run for office or serve in the US Government who had taken up arms against the United States and broken their oath in the military, etc. Etc. Either as a politicians or as military officers. So Raskin is saying, well, they don't need to be charged with insurrection. The people and Donald Trump doesn't need to be charged. I say that he's insurrection. And he was taken off the ballot in 16 states for a while because those people and local, state courts said he was an insurrectionist. The real reason, of course, was they were hard left and they were afraid of him. And this is the key what I'm getting out and the Supreme Court's not doing their job because they rejected all of those arguments and forced him to be on the ballot as everybody else has a right. So therefore we're going to need, he said, we're going to need bodyguards, we're going to need security against these MAGA people and the Supreme Court. Think about what he's saying. He's saying we, we law professors, me, a congressperson who's taken an oath to uphold the Constitution, we do not accept the vote on November 5th. We don't accept the popular vote and we don't do the legally applicable vote, the Electoral College. And therefore we want the electors in December to vote against him. They will not vote against him. Hillary tried this in 2016, which was an insurrection. So when the electors vote for Donald Trump, we're not going to accept it. And we want, that's the question. Who does he want? Where is power? Where is the power? He wants to stop Donald Trump from taking office. So he thinks a left wing judge at the federal level, the Colorado Supreme Court, who, who is he talking about, is going to have an injunction and then people like him are going to have personal security details and then they're going to ignore the Supreme Court. This guy is an insurrectionist. And you know, it's funny, they were, there was a big fight among the left that over the anger that Jack Smith couldn't charge Donald Trump with insurrection. He charged him with disrupting a Baptist ballot process and all that stuff. But this guy is an insurrectionist. It's so funny for me because I remember during this time I had never questioned the election. I had questioned the laws changing the way people balloted in 22. But I had to sit down and go over transcripts of everything I'd said on Fox News because I had been accused by the Stanford Faculty Senate, I guess, fomenting insurrection or not accepting the ballot. I wonder if right now the Stanford faculty will issue a censure because they do issue proclamations that they're in theory censuring Representative Raskin and these two law professors for daring to, in an insurrectionary fashion, try to nullify the results of our recent election. I hope so, because they do it to a lot of other people.
- [24:07]
Sammy Wink
Yeah, they sure do. Okay, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and come back to talk a little bit about the Olympian Temple of Zeus. Stay with us and we'll be back.
- [24:23]
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- [24:52]
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- [25:25]
Sammy Wink
You're back. This is the Victor Davis Hansen show. You can find Victor on X and his handle is Dhanson and also on Hanson's Morning cup on Facebook. So please come join him there. He's also got a Truth Social account and his handle is also Dhanson. So we'd love to have you come. So Victor, we were on a discussion of the seven wonders of the world and so you wanted to turn this week to the Olympic seven ancient wonders.
- [25:58]
Victor Davis Hanson
Because there are seven natural wonders of the world. There's seven, you know, the left comes in seven technological seven green wonders. We're talking about the Hellenist from the Hellenistic times. What were Considered the most impressive sites in the ancient world, the ancient western world. And it's easy to remember them. Everybody. There's two from Greece and we did the Colossus of Rhodes and we're going to do the statue of Zeus in the temple of Olympia, of Olympian Zeus at Olympia. So there's two in Egypt. We're going to next do the lighthouse in the harbor of Alexandria, Alexandria at Pharos, and then the monumental pyramids at Giza. And then there's two in Turkey and that is the temple of Artemis at Ephesus, the Halicarnassus Mausus mausoleum, that is the tomb of Mausolus. And then there's just one. The seventh is in Iraq, outside Baghdad, at the ancient site of Babylon, in the supposed and controversial hanging gardens of Babylon. The temple of Olympian Zeus is interesting. If you go to Olympia today and the Altis that is that beautiful. It's a beautiful site. It's near the Alphaeus river and it's well watered, there's meadows, there's all sorts of greenery. And the Temple of Zeus was for the time was one of the biggest temples on the mainland. And it wasn't as huge as some of the ones in Asia Minor would be, but it was roughly about the same size as the Parthenon. Not quite about, in other words about, oh, I think it was 35 meters or 30 meters by 60 anyway, but it was about the same size as the Parthenon. And the problem with it was it was the most spectacular temple in Greece. This is the problem everybody wanted to go see. It was the largest temple in Greece and it was built around, oh, in the 570s, excuse me, 470s. It was an early Doric temple. Most of the temples in the Peloponnese tended to be Doric. This was purely Doric. But what had happened under Pericles, the great building program. He had built The Parthenon, the 20 year project, which as you remember was finished pretty much by four 30s, 440s. And everybody wanted to go to the Parthenon. It was the tourist attraction. I don't know why it wasn't one of the seven wonders of the world. And they wanted to go not just for the friezes and the monumental metopes and pediments, but also because of the Chrys elephantine statue of Athena pro polis, the big protector of the city, the patron saint. There was a pro makos, a statue outside with a spear. But this was huge. It was about 38 or 39ft tall and she's standing inside the now of the temple itself. Remember what Chris L. Folks, Fontaine means. It means that the skin is ivory, and that supposedly radiates the actual look of skin. So they make a wood statue. Phidias was the famous sculptor. And then they plate ivory sections on the wood arms and face, and then the clothing and the accoutrements. The dress is. Is made of gold. And in the case of Athens, they actually weighed the gold, and that was also served as a treasury. They knew how much gold was plated on this huge sculpture. So the Olympians got angry. The people, the aliens that were in charge of the Panhellenic sanctuary said, we're losing business, so why don't we remodel our temple? But they said, well, you can't really change it. It was the biggest that we knew of. And they said, yeah, but over there in Athens, the Parthenon, I don't know, is 10 or 15ft longer and 10 or 15ft wider, and it's getting all the traffic. And they said, well, why don't we hire Phidias to come down here and make a statue of Zeus that's bigger and it'll be really great. What he'll do, we'll put it right in the aisle of the temple and we'll make him sit down. But sitting down, he will be taller than Athena. Inside, the Parthenon is standing. So I think, as Strabo says, you get the impression when you walk in the temple and he was riding 500 years after it was dedicated, the statue, that if the statue got up, his head would go through the roof. It was so big. In other words, think about it. You wanted to make a bigger statue than the Athenians did with Athena, but if you did, it would get too hot for the ceiling, so too high for the ceiling. So you put Zeus sitting down, and then you can make him even much bigger. And then just sitting. He's taller sitting down than Athena is standing up. And that projects the idea that if he were to stand up as the head of the Olympian gods, his head would break through the roof. So it had a traumatic effect on people who visited it because it was so huge and yet it fitted in a temple. And I think later in Roman times, Dio Chrysostom, the great orator, his name I think translated it Dio of the Golden Mouth, he was so eloquent. He gave a great oration there, right in front of the statue, about how you portray God. And he comes to the conclusion that you can't have an inanimate God because there is nothing to portray. There's nobody can relate anything. And if you're going to make it anthropomorphic, you've got to make it divine like. And this statue captured that because the way it was formed and it showed you that he had the power to break through the temple, but for mere humans, he was willing to sit here and take worshipers to give offerings. How does it look? You know it from. We don't have any. It was dedicated around 450 B.C. and it survived all the way to the fifth century A.D. for a thousand years. And then there were various rumors that Justinian in the 6th century or constant people carted it off to Constantinople or during the barbarian invasion. Subsequently, parts were broken up because it was gold, the plating was. And the ivory we have on coins, renditions of it. And then we have very clear literary descriptions. I mentioned Strabo and Dio, but we also have one by Pausanias. And apparently it was Zeus was sitting in a throne like this and in his right hand he was holding a scepter, some type of bird of prey on top of it. And then he was holding here a statuette or a statue of Nike, the goddess of victory. In other words, this was the idea that the Greeks, following the Persian war, had worshiped Zeus. And as a result, these warlike Greeks now were predominant in the known eastern Mediterranean. And so Zeus is pretty much unleashing the goddess Nikkei to reify that fact. The other thing to remember is we know it. I said, you know it because you've all seen George Washington in that famous Horatio Greenhal Greenow sculpture of him where George Washington is sitting with his breast naked and he's got drapery and he's sitting like this with the same pose as Zeus that was sculpted in the. I think it was in the 1830s or 40s and it was brought to the Capitol and people got very upset about it. They thought it was too bold or risque, that the father of the country would be shown bare breasted or that he was imperial and we were a democracy. And yet we were trying to make our founding father into an imperial British or German type of tyrant. And anyway, it didn't go well in the rotunda and they moved it. I think today, as I remember, it's in the second floor of the Smithsonian. You can see it, it's still there, but that is patterned after the temple of Zeus in general. And the statue of Zeus that doesn't exist anymore in there. If you go to Olympia, you can See, some of the columns are still there and you can. Can see the stylobate and you can see how large that temple was. The other thing to remember was that. That just a sidelight. That sculptor Greenough was. I think he was very active in the 1830s, 1840s, and he made two more famous sculptures and they were on the entrance to the Capitol. They were on pediments. Not pediments, but bases. As you walked in, there were the stairs. On one side it was called Discovery and it's Christopher Columbus and he's pointing the way to America. And the other was very controversial. It was called Rescue. And it shows a American, I guess he has a flintlock and he's got sort of a cap on and he's putting. He's kind of warding off a Native American who's half. His body is half naked, looks like he has a Mohican haircut or something to that effect, as I remember. And he's got one hand pushing him away and then protecting his wife and child. And then his dog is barking. And when that was made, people had just. They were kind of ambiguous about it. They thought it was great. And Green Owl himself said, well, I was trying to show how noble Native Americans were in this colossal fight that we won, thank God. But even at the time they thought that it was deprecatory of Native Americans. I think it was finished and put in the capitol finally for 1870s. It was there until 1930 something. And they had passed legislations shortly after it was commemorated and established that Native Americans were U.S. citizens. So they got angry and said, you make us. This guy is half dressed, he's on the ground and the noble settler has defeated him and saved his family from him. And that is either condescending or it's racist. So even in the 1930s and then the Roosevelt administration moved it and they put it. I think they put it in a yard. And then sometime in the 50s or 70s, I can't remember, but I remember reading that they dropped it. I think they probably dropped it intentionally and it shattered. But the little dog I've seen, I think it's in the Smithsonian or the Museum of American History. Yeah, and it's. The dog part survived, but the other statue of Discovery is still there in the yard. And I wonder if there's been ever any effort for a private collector to buy the remnants and put them back together. But that was the American version of the statue of Zeus at Olympia.
- [38:41]
Sammy Wink
Yeah. Can I ask you where. For the ancient sculpture of Zeus. Where did they get all this gold. Where was the gold coming from in Greece, in other words?
- [38:52]
Victor Davis Hanson
Yeah, they had a lot of mines up near Amphipolis. That's up in Macedonia, on the borders of Macedonia. There were gold mines up there. And they also traded for gold. There was a lot of gold in Ionia, and of course, they had a lot of silver ivory they had to trade for from Africa. They didn't have access to India at this time, so they were dealing with African elephants in Egypt. And from what we know, the ivory was more valuable or more. It was scarcer the white and more highly prized. So one of the striking things about Pheidias second statue and what made it a seven wonder in the world in a way that his Athena statue did not. If you go in and look at replicas in museums, and sometimes there was a lot of replicas of the Athena statue, but it's drapery and that was gold for the dress. But in this case, he's naked from the Zeus has his torso showing and stomach. That all had to be in ivory. And then some of the cape was made of glass with minerals embedded into glitter. So there were elements of glass embroidery. Then he had the gold accoutrements, the scepter, the Nika statue, and some of the robes were gold. But what was striking about it was this white ivory. And because the interior of the statue is made of wood and it would wear, especially if you go to Olympia, it's really moist, you know, it's kind of malarial because the river floods through the sanctuary on occasion. That was part of the duties of the stewards of the temple. They had to have olive oil. And every day we're told, I think that's in Palestinians. Wash, smooth out all of the dust, clean it off, lubricate it, lubricate the statue.
- [41:01]
Sammy Wink
I know that we have descriptions of the Olympian temple of Zeus, but how do, in general, archaeologists recreate what, for example, the city of Athens might have looked like? Or even if you need something more specific, there's a stoa that they've rebuilt. How do they know exactly what.
- [41:24]
Victor Davis Hanson
Well, take the. I had a class when I was 20 with William Dinsmore Jr. And his father was the great William Dinsmore, the author of a textbook on Greek architecture. So it turns out that there is a very specific ratio of all of the architectural members of a classical temple. Now, what do I mean by that? Once you find a piece like that of a column and you can date the pottery around it, you have a general idea of how many you'll know whether. If it's Doric very quickly, whether they're pointed flutes or fillets flat, or for the Ionic order, pointed or Doric, you know how many there were around the circumference. So you can reconstruct that. Then you can take the width of, say, a surviving little piece of co, and you can estimate the ratio of width to height. And then once you get the height, you know, if it's a classical Doric, how many given the date, if you have the pottery, you can have a pretty good idea of how many columns. What was it? Was it 6 by 8, 9 by 7, as far as the columns. And then you can date by the same type of measurement that are standardized. You can go into the frieze course, the metopes, the pediment. So actually, in one of the exams, he gave us a picture of, as I recall, a column, and he gave us the measurements. And he says, give me the measurements of the entire temple.
- [43:12]
Sammy Wink
Wow.
- [43:13]
Victor Davis Hanson
And you could. You hit. His father did that reconstructing temple. Some people question it since then. But the other thing is you have all of these stylobates. So the foundation, say, of the temp of the. You've got all of the foundations. It's kind of like if you were going into American downtown and they leveled the whole downtown.
- [43:33]
Sammy Wink
Yeah.
- [43:34]
Victor Davis Hanson
But you saw the dimensions of each building, and then you would want to come reconstruct them. And how would you do that? You would go ask. Pictures, descriptions. We don't have photographs. So what happens when you're reconstructing a city? You go into literature. So you go to Plato's Republic, just to take one example, and at one point, Socrates, they're walking by the Ilissus river and they're talking about a shrine. Or you look at the peripatetic geographer Pausanias, who wrote and today four large volumes on what he saw in Roman times about 30 AD and he describes in very clear detail what I see at Olympia, what I saw at Delphi, what I saw at Athens. And then we have Greek vases. And you'll see everyone's. In a while. Most of the themes are Achilles or the Amazons or the Centaurs. They're figures and stories from Greek mythology, but the background in them are things like triremes and hoplite armor and temples. And so every once in a while you'll get. And there's tens of thousands of these pots, vases, etc. Cups. You can see particular Greek temples. And then people argue over that. And then the other Thing is, these temples are made of. In the case of the Zeus temple, as I remember, it was shelly limestone. It was limestone where you can see the shells. But on most of them, in the case of the Parthenon, that was made of pentelic marble up from Mount Patella and the freeze course was the. The most prized of all white marbles was from the island of Perils, Parian marble. But my point is that it doesn't just disintegrate. I know that modern smoggy air will disintegrate it. And tragically, lime could be. I mean the marble could be heated at great in later times, medieval times and turned into lime and stucco, but not always. So when, when you go and see these temples, the early archaeologists of the 19th century would go out throughout the village or through the general area. They would look at people's private homes and look at a threshold. They go to a church mostly and see if maybe one of the lentils or some of the columns and then they would describe them. So the temple stays there in one way or the other. And that is when the temple collapses. People carry parts away, but they put them in structures. Sometimes they use it and they destroy it. But there are people who describe it, there's people who painted it, there's people who talked about it. And you can. We have the most complete temples in the Greek world are on the island of Sicily at Paestum for example. But in Greece we have two temples that are almost intact. And one of the most famous is the temple, we call it the Theseum, but it's really the temple to Hephaisis and the Agora. It's one of four iconic smaller temples in the Parthenon and they were in Attica. We know there was one at Ramnus and one at Sunean and there was a temple of Ophea that was at Nemesis, was at Ramnus and there was another one at Ephea. So there were four of them. But we know one right in the Agora. You can go in today and see what a classical Greek temple looks like. If you're really ambitious, you can go up to Arcadia and you can go to take a nice beautiful scenic road outside of Olympia and go right into the heart part of the Peloponnese and you go to a little town called Andritsyna and there's a 15 miles road. I went there when it was a dirt road. Now I think it's paved, but it'll go all the way in the back country to the temple of Apollo at Vasae. And that temple, except for the roof. They have a tent over. It's the last time I saw it. But that is completely intact except for the roof. Remember, the roof is wood on the inside and the joist and the structure of the roof is made of wood and that collapses and the roof tiles fall off.
- [48:18]
Sammy Wink
Well, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and come back to talk a little bit about news. Stay with us. We'll be back.
- [48:28]
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- [49:07]
Sammy Wink
Welcome back. So Trump is busy in appointing heads of government, but also his advisors. And recently he has chosen and I hope I get his name correct here, Srirampura Krishnan, who is a, he's East Indian, but he came to the United States and is a naturalized citizen of the United States. And he's been here since 2005. And where Trump has appointed him is as an AI advisor because he's been involved in Microsoft and Facebook and X. And so he's worked in all, all of the big platforms and yet he stirred up a lot of controversy against him to some extent from the right. But the left is loving this. He is being criticized or this choice is being criticized because they are anxious or angry, I think on the left about allowing high skilled immigrants into the United States and all the controversy with the open border. And then also Krishnan, the right has noted he supported the Harris campaign and so he has left leaning inclinations.
- [50:33]
Victor Davis Hanson
There are so many fault lines and they're not mutually exclusive. So the big fault line is legal versus illegal. And so the left has four illegal immigration. We wouldn't have 50 million people that were not born in the United States, probably 30 million of them illegal. So the left wants immigration and they do not want the prior immigration systems that were meritocratic. Remember Teddy Kennedy, I think it was in 65, changed the immigration laws and put quotas on people from Australia, Europe and said that no longer did capital or money or education, except you can still buy your way citizenship. But for the most part it was family reunification or refugee status. But the whole point of the Kennedy, if you're disinterested in it, was to bring poor people into the United States who were not white and get it diverse and they would be constituents. If you're really cynical, you would say that Ted Kennedy as a Catholic and this was sort of the 19th century Rome rebellion, you know, and rum, that kind of nativist racist campaign against open borders from the Irish. But the idea was that you were going to get a lot of very poor people from Latin America who were Catholic and that would dilute the power of the old WASP white Anglo Saxon Protestant hierarchy. So whatever you believe is we've had this great influx, the right then says we've got to have immigration only. I think everybody on the right, everybody in the middle now believes legal immigration only. And now there's two fights over that. The left is saying, well, wait a minute, you are deporting people who are poor back to Central America, Vietnam, Africa, but mostly Mexico. And yet you're welcoming in people from India and from China and from parts of Asia because and they're skilled and they're privileged and they're wealthy. This is, I can't quite say it's racist, but they're saying this is unfair. And the conservatives then fire back, no, no, no, they're coming in with somebody who's going to make us money. They play by the rules, they're educated and they're doing it legally. So that's that one battlefield among the right there is a secondary theater of battle and that is the Maga Bay. The Stephen Miller base is saying, now wait a minute, Mark Kakorian, who's a wonderful guy at the center for Immigration Studies and others have said we have 16% of the population is foreign born and we're getting up to about 55 million. Whatever status they are, we are not able to intermarry, integrate and assimilate the these immigrants. There's just too many of them. And we don't believe anymore in any way until we get civic education back, until we start to go to the melting pot model again and reject the salad bowl of the last 50 years. Even legal immigration is too much. So we're bringing in all of these high tech people from India and we're doing it because we said their skills and it's merocratic, but we're forgetting things. This is what the right is saying. The maga, I'm trying to be fair to both sides, they're saying there's more to immigration just than money and skills. You're bringing in people who will take jobs from Americans. And why don't we have a Marshall Plan in the schools to train people to code and do the same things that people from India are doing. Because these are Americans. And you are not looking at, not everybody's like Vec or Elon. You're going to bring a lot of people like this AI Czar who work for Harris. They're going to be left wing or they're not going to know American codes. And you know, as somebody just mentioned driving, I can tell you if you have 28% of the California population that was not born in the United States and you don't have a pro in the schools that tries to say you're very lucky to be to this country, here's what we're going to teach you. And this is what we learned in school. Here is how to write a check. This is driver training. This is what you say to a policeman when he pulls you over. This is what you always carry. You carry your checkbook, you carry your license, you carry your proof of insurance. You say, yes, sir, no, sir. Yes, ma'am, ma'am. All of those protocols of a citizen, when you deal with authority, if you're not going to do that and you're going to have almost a third of the population, you're going to have problems and they're not going to be on the same page. So why would we bring people, more people in from India when you think that just because they know how to code or they have a skill, that they're going to be completely Americanized and they're going to follow the same protocols that everybody else does. Right away you have to pay your taxes. You do not cheat on your taxes. You do not go. You know, I just drove into town two days ago and I can tell you that almost every corner, rural corner that I pass, there is somebody opening a pedaling store. There are the people with clothes hanging out. There are people with plants, there are people with milkshakes, there are people with fruit. And they are not paying. They're not taking credit cards and they are not paying sales tax and I doubt they're paying income. It's an all cash. Or I can tell you that when I go to get food, I won't mention the location. One of the most frustrating things is someone who does not speak English English, but starts to produce numerous electric bank transfer cards, what we used to call food stamps. And WIC card, Women, infant children cards. I'm talking about three or four of them. So what I'm saying is, yes, they are here, but somebody did not teach them that they should be very happy to be here and they, of all people, should be beyond reproach and they should never, ever try to cheat the IRS or the state franchise board. In other words, they should make sure that all of their transactions are reported as income and are charged sales taxes and they don't go out and work for cash for someone. And that's. We have a huge cash economy in the San Joaquin Valley. And because of the protocols of diversity, equity, inclusion, we just don't talk about it. You know, what if you have a bunch of people who are here illegally and they're immigrants and they want to go peddle stuff, or they have mobile kitchens and they do most of their stuff, or if you have somebody that wants to work for you and only wants cash, just go ahead and pay it. I mean, this is the underclass. They're working hard. At least they're not in welfare. You say, yeah, but you're paying 13% income tax and these people aren't. Or you're paying 10, 12% sales tax. These people aren't. And that's the argument that you've got to first ensure that everybody that comes in here, here understands they're on the same American page. And I don't know how this is going to end up, but the VIVAC Mellon Elon wing of the New MAGA coalition is going to be in dire conflict with the Stephen Miller. We have enough immigrants. Let's just let in a couple hundred thousand at most and make sure they're diverse. They're from all over the world. We're not just going to bring in people from, from India that are coders who are going to live in Silicon Valley and make a ton of money when we don't really understand what their feelings of America are about. Are they going to follow the laws? Are they going to bring their. That's the question of assimilation and integration and American jobs. It's kind of sad. And I think Vivek's. Is it Vivek or Vivek?
- [59:03]
Sammy Wink
I think he says it's Vivek.
- [59:05]
Victor Davis Hanson
Vivek. Excuse me, Vivek. So Vivek and Elon's argument is. And I think this is what we really got them in trouble. They mentioned Vivek says something to the effect that Americans are lazy and complacent and their education system is substandard. So when you're bringing in eager beaver Indians who've had to pull themselves up by the bootstraps in a very competitive and tough, impoverished society, they come over here and they have a work ethic and they do very well. In fact, Indian American income is much higher than white. And I think Stephen Miller and people would say, hey, Victor, why is India India and America's America? So when you bring people over here, if you don't want to replicate India or Mexico or Vietnam or for that matter Russia or Belgium or France, then you teach them first to completely assimilate into America. Otherwise you reproduce the system that they're fleeing from. India is a mess. I mean, I don't mean that in a deprecatory way. It's a democracy. Congratulations. It's making enormous strides. Congratulations. An ally of the United States. All more power to it. It has some of the most successful and admirable immigrants in the world. But the country itself is impoverished and it doesn't have to be. It's impoverished not because of any foreign influence right now. I mean, if you can argue that British colonialism at least gave them a stable system of government and that's one of the reasons why it's democratic. That's one of the reasons it has a English language. It gives us enormous advantages. But there are caste, belief in India and certain ideas that are not compatible with the American way. So this is what the restrictionists. I don't want to say nativist, but Jeremy Carl, who we had on our podcast about the discrimination toward white people, for example, he's commented on this and said, why is it. I'm trying to. I don't want to be on ferdom. Why is it that when you defend the ethos that grew up in America of the founders, the white Anglo Protestant, Anglo Saxon Protestant culture that created the model for the country, and then not just creating the model, but creating the ethos that allowed people who didn't look like George Washington or Alexander Hamilton or Madison and Monroe to become more Madison than Madison. That is, it's not the idea that you could be a WASP and not even look like a WASP or think like a wasp. Why would you just bring everybody in and not acculturate that them to the model? And you would either do it on the poor side by saying, well, they're poor, so we're just going to bring them in from the third World, or you do it from the wealthy side and say, well, we don't really care about the assimilation. We just want their ability to make a lot of money or help our tech industry. And what he's saying is we've got to have people who 360 degrees, 24, 7 and their lives are fully American and we don't just and that's a lengthy process. So I think it's going to be a big fight. And I can see that some of the reasons that Vivek and Elon were Democrats and open borders people and libertarian Wall Street Journal Chamber of Commerce people are going to come back and that's going to crystallize. And it's one of the things I've talked about in a new Criterion article that comes out next month that you can't offer all these tax cuts as we're doing and then balance the budget unless you're going to do massive, massive government cuts in spending. And I don't know how you can do it without looking at entitlements. And you can't say we're not going to get in any option awards. We don't want to waste blood and treasure. I agree with that. But then the world is a dangerous place. And Trump showed us the first time he had to knock heads with Soleimani Baghdadi, the Wagner group to restore deterrence. So he's going to have to use some force or people are not going to take his credibility seriously and we're going to get either put at a disadvantage or get into an endless war. So there's a lot of paradoxes in MAGA that people have to think and work. One of them is also immigration. You say legal immigration. Legal immigration, no, illegal. Everybody's in agreement. But then you say, well, we need 2, 3 million legal immigrants a year. Then you get the disagreement.
- [64:13]
Sammy Wink
Well, Victor, we are at the end of the show. We're on a hard break today. I know you have other things to do. So I would like to thank our listeners for listening to the Victor Davis Hansen Show.
- [64:24]
Victor Davis Hanson
Thank you very much for listening. We're going to try to have just announce announcement. We're going to try to have Devin Nunes on again. He's been on four or five times, but he was just appointed to the Defense Intelligence Advisory Board. And since we've had him on last time, I think the shares of Truth Social have gone up to 37, $38. It's almost $10 billion in market capitalization. I only mention that because people said it was going to improve, implode. It didn't make a profit. I don't know if it is profitable. We'll ask him. So there's been a lot of developments there. But more importantly, his appointment to this intelligence board has reopened the whole questions of the Steele dossier, the Nunes memo. And I'm reading stuff that just is so incoherent. It's like, didn't they get the message that Christopher Steele was a total fraud, fusing gps? They didn't. So we're going to go back and see what's going on, what's fueling this anger at his appointment.
- [65:29]
Sammy Wink
So thank you too, Victor, for being very enjoyable today. It's a nice weekend, so I hope everybody else enjoys it. This is Sammy Wink and Victor Davis Hanson and we're signing off.
- [65:39]
Victor Davis Hanson
Thank you very much.