Victor Davis Hansen (4:10)
Well, you know, I wrote this week I wrote an article about is there going to be an end to the endless war? And I just, I didn't, you know, I didn't take a particular position in that particular article, although I have one. I just said if you, I surveyed the political spectrum, I could do that very quickly. The ultra maga says these people are corrupt. The Ukrainians, they have a long history with Russia. The Donbass and the Crimea had been part of Russia for in the case of Crimea, centuries. In the case of the Donbass, Khrushchev gave it to the Ukrainians, but it was basically indistinguishable from Russia. Western Ukraine, as we've mentioned before, until 1939 was Roman Catholic and Polish speaking. So it was all a mess. And the Europeans have, I'm now not voicing my own, but I'm trying to encapsulate fairly what the ultra mega or the mobile megabases. And then they say, and we don't really know much about that part of the world. We promised Russia, not Putin, but earlier Russian leaders, Yeltsin after the revolution that we wouldn't bring NATO to the doorstep. We get into the whole narrative of Robert Kagan, Victoria Nuland, maybe or maybe not staging this revolution to get rid of a pro Russian but elected leader and to give wink and nod assurances that ultimately Ukraine would be in NATO, which may or may not have prompted the 2014 invasion. I think it was prompted mostly by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton's loud reset, saying George Bush was too mean after Georgia Nosatia. And you put sanctions and we're going to live with the Russians and what do they do? What they call living with the Russians and resetting them. And the new detente was something like the following. You people are murderers. You're horrible, you're anti democratic, you're assassins. And you've got to listen to us because we're humanitarian. We know what's best for you autocratic Russians. So the point I'm making is that was for special effects, by the way, when I was yelling coffee, I had to use the. Rush Limbaugh wrinkled the paper, but I used a coffee cup. Anyway, the point I'm making is they think that we should not get involved, cut them off. Zelensky suspended habeas corpus, he outlawed political parties, he's canceled election. In direct contrast with what we forced Netanyahu to do, who has a wartime cabinet. There's regular scheduled elections coming up, et cetera, et cetera. And then there's the ultimate, on the other end of the spectrum, there is the ultimate left wing, right wing, uniparty, neo, whatever term you use. And I would call that the on to Russia. They say, look, Ukraine is an independent country and it's right on the doorstep of Europe and they have a perfectly right to defend themselves. They were attacked and we're giving the wherewithal. The problem with Biden is he put restrictions on landmines and missiles and everything. And so we've got to start doing what Biden just did, and that is let them go. And they will hit targets in the Kremlin. And after they do that, or bases or oil depots, after they do that, Russia will back off. And as far as people like you, Victor, that say, oh, well, you only have 30 million people left in Ukraine, they have 140. They have 30 times the area. They have 10 times the GD. It doesn't matter. We have the combined will, economic clout, munitions of the EU and the United States and a billion people. That's the argument. And you can beat Russia. And then there's the people in between. And I think that's where I am. And most of our listeners are, yes, Putin is a scoundrel and yes, we gave them javelins. Trump did. But this is highly ironic because all the people who are yelling at Trump that he's going to sell out or Russia, these were the same people who would not sell the Ukrainians javelins and impeach Donald Trump for suspending a sale that Obama was opposed to. And which he approved and which came in very handy when they tried to take Kiev in 2022. But more importantly, it's a humanitarian question. There is a million point five dead, wounded, missing Ukrainians and Russians combined, and it's getting out of hand now. It is worse than the Somme. It is worse than Verdun, and it's now more casualties than Stalingrad. This is the most deadly battle in the European history. Not a campaign, if you call it one battle, the battle for Ukraine. Nobody cares. They want to die. They want to be right to the last Ukrainian. Half the Ukrainian people want some kind of settlement. And I think they should have a coalition government. Zelensky should do what Churchill did in World War II, what FDR did by bringing in a Republican. Two people from the Republican Party into his cabinet. And. And Netanyahu was forced to by us. And we're not doing that with Haney. Should open, allow political parties, restore habeas corpus and let the press be honest and then get people behind him by the force of his argument. But this administration, Biden's, their attitude was we're going to give them just enough not to win and just enough not to lose. And we don't really care. We're just going to. This is a great proxy because we are weakening Russia. We've killed about a million Russians. Ha ha. And they rejoice in that. Which I understand that they're supposedly our enemy, but there's a lot of sophisticated diplomatic, strategic, geostrategic issues. They're completely missing. And do we really want a. Do you think that the Russian people, given the history, are going to get rid of Putin? And then they're going to say the United States is really helpful. We're going to have a. I don't know, a democracy. We're going to have transgendered issues, and we're going to get a pride flag like you had in Kabul. They're not going to do that. And that's what they're thinking. They're going to be like us. They're not. What we should be doing is. Listen, you SOBs. You don't like us. We don't like you. We don't trust you. You don't trust us. But China is much bigger than both of us and they hate both of us. So we want to triangulate with you and stop supplying Iran and stop importing from Iran. And if you do that, we will have a grand deal. And the grand deal is you can go back and tell everybody you got Donbass institutionalized and you got Crimea institutionalized. And that's what Zelenskyy and the Ukrainian people in the past have been willing to do. But you're not going to take any more. You're going to have a DMZ and we're going to keep arming them. They're not going to be in NATO, but they'll probably be in the eu. And I wrote that because that's what everybody. It's not my idea. It's what everybody's talking about both here and in Europe. And I got the worst reaction. It was so funny from people, oh, how dare you do that. That's stupid. You're just an appeaser. No, I'm not an appeaser. But I'm not sure that Ukrainians strategic and political goals are identical to ourselves. I'm not sure that what is. The government in Ukraine is democratic. I'm getting tired of us telling Netanyahu he has to be proportionate, he has to have a ceasefire, he has to have a bipartisan wartime cabinet. And he doesn't. We do not do that to Mr. Zelensky. I'm getting tired of Mr. Zelensky paying politics. Flying into Pennsylvania the day the mail voting began, a swing state that he thought, and he was correct, would determine the fate of the 2024 election. And what did he do? He was met by left wing politicians, he went to a munitions factory. He basically was telling America, this is good business. You guys are buying arms and it keeps you employed and you give it to us and you're all liberal Democrats and this is great. And he was interfering in our electoral process. So I just think that it's. I wish that Ukraine would win. I wish they would expel the Russians and the Russians would say, we really screwed up, we shouldn't have tried to do this. We lost a million people and we're not going to do it again. And we want to call up Victoria Nuland and Bob Kagan and, and say, you guys were right, Ukraine could beat us. That's not going to happen. And so if you think that, and if you think that you're going to hit targets all over Russia with missiles and drones. Mother Russia. Somebody wrote me, who I had a great deal of admiration and said, well, you should look at the Winter War, the Finland war, where the Finns beat them. No, they didn't. I wrote an article about that. They didn't. The Finns were absolutely heroic in November and December of January 1939. And the Russians sent a million people and the Mannerheim line held them and then guess what? They wore them down. Russia had. The Soviet Union had over 200 million people, and Finland had about 5 million, 4 million. And they wore them down. And then in April, you know what they March and April, they made a deal. And what was the deal? They lost 10% of their territory. And it was a lot worse than the original deal the SOB Stalin forced upon them. And they said, no, we'd rather fight. They fought heroically. They lost about 300,000 casualties. They inflicted a million casualties. They kicked Russia out of the League of Nations for that. We found ourselves in a weird situation where we were helping the Finns who were getting help from Hitler, who had started World War II, and Finland ended up losing. And that's pretty good example, but in the opposite way that these people intend. So we're going to have to have a settlement, whether you like it or not. And that's not treason. That's not Russian collusion. And, you know, I'm getting so tired of this Russian collusion stuff. On the night that msnbc, Rachel Maddow were completely humiliated, what was her first statement? Russian collusion.