A Conservative Schism? And the Battle of Crete, 1941

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C

Hello and welcome to the Victor Davis Hansen Show. This is our Saturday edition in which we do something a little bit different in the middle segment, and that is Victor usually looks at a historical topic and today he's going to look at the battle for Crete in World War II. So stay with us for that. We'll start off with some new stories. We have a Charlie Kirk resolution that was passed in the by both houses to so we would like to go ahead and have a look at those first. Stay with us and we'll be right back after these messages.

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Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hansen Show. Victor is the Martin and Nealey Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marcia Buskey Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College. You can find him at his website, victorhanson.com name of the website is the Blade of Perseus and we'd love to have everybody join us there. Victor Charlie Kirk, his birthday, October 14, will be a national day of remembrance. And the House just passed that resolution today and I was wondering your thoughts on that.

B

Yeah, they had a number of resolutions commemorating various people recently that wasn't as controversial as the one asking to memorialize his legacy and life. That's the one that AOC said, I'm not going to put my imprimatur on his life he was a racist. And then Ilhan Omar said every day of his life he was a racist. Jasmine Crockett said only two Caucasians voted for this. I was really, I mean voted against it. I was really upset. She's not mentioning that the minority vote in the United states is about 20% Hispanic and black. And about 85 or 90% voted to reject that. So if she's talking about racial disproportionality, she should look in the mirror. She used the word Caucasians. It's kind of like Negro, you know, it's an ossified word. But that resolution was strange because she said only two so called Caucasians voted for it. But she's just looking at the people actually voted against it. But if you look at the 118 people who didn't vote for was because some of them are in purple districts. So they voted present, I.e. i abstain or they didn't show up to vote. And that was a larger margin than the 55 or something that said no. So the key point is a majority of the Democratic Party in the House majority voted not to recognize Charlie Kirk. They did not. And it wasn't just the 55 that voted no. The others, which were in greater numbers, voted no by saying present or not showing up. And Jasmine, they were more than two so called Caucasians. So don't play the race card ad nauseam. I guess the idea was that as I said earlier, they're into narrative seven. Narrative seven is their final one. We don't really care what you say. We say he's a racist. We don't want to see any evidence, we don't quote any evidence. We don't have any long text that says that shows he was a racist. We just don't like him. And we're not going to pretend otherwise. And we're going to oppose everything about him. That's the Democratic Party's attitude.

C

Yeah. Well, the second topic I wanted to talk about and 10, it's peripherally to do with Charlie Kirk. But it was at his memorial service. Tucker gave a speech. I listened to the whole 6 minute and 5 seconds. And it was mostly about repentance for being a sinner and redemption. And so it was more or less innocuous. But there's all sorts of static out there on the right that doesn't like what Tucker's current position is doing. So there were suggestions that somehow it was anti Semitic, et cetera. And I'm not so worried about his speech because I thought it was very appropriate to what was going on at the memorial. So I thought he did a good job. But I think in general Tucker is getting a lot of static from the right. And I was wondering if you could talk about that.

B

Well, I know Tucker. I always try to introduce any comment when I'm asked about him that for a number of years he was gracious enough to have me on a block right after his commentary. So I owe him a great deal of gratitude and I like him. But the Pat Buchanan position of the MAGA spectrum is. Now, Pat Buchanan has got a lot who ran against George H.W. bush for president I think in 92. And you know, he had a. He wrote the book A Republic, not an Empire. And he wrote a very controversial book about World War II, if you're interested. I did a long critique of it with Christopher Hitchens on, on Peter Robinson's Uncommon Knowledge years ago. But basically I watched that speech too. And he was comparing spiritual leaders who go against the establishment and the establishment doesn't know what to do about them until somebody peeps up and says kill him. Now, he didn't mean that there was a room of Democrats and pro trans people. But you. But he was trying to say he incurred the same hatred for his non violent message that Jesus Christ did. So far, as you say, so good. But then he said it was as if in a candlelit room there were a group of elders or a group of people and they were eating hummus. And people then interpreted that as a logical allusion to the Pharisees, the elder hierarchy of the Jewish faith at the time Jesus was killed. So they said he is a false. The implication was these were people that didn't want Jesus saying what Charlie Kirk was saying. They were the establishment and so they ordered him to be killed. The only, I think problem why some people objected was yes, technically they didn't intervene and they were happy that Pontius Pilate had him executed, but he was actually executed by the Romans. So that analogy they felt was strained. And they felt that it was strained because Tucker was trying to bring in people of the orthodox Jewish faith in antiquity to be the ancient libel. They were Christ killers. That was the kind of illusion which I don't, you know, it was so innocuous, as you said, and vague. The larger question is when. If you look at a number of things that Tucker has done, he went to Russia and he went to a supermarket in Moscow. And he. Basically the theme of that was we deprecate the Russians. But if you look at what they're doing, they're doing okay, this supermarket is clean, it's got a lot of stuff. And they are not nihilists. They're not ashamed of their, I guess, Christianity or their whiteness. They're not a diverse people. So that was something that raised red flags. And then he went over to Bethlehem. This was a very controversial move because once the west bank was turned over to the Palestinian Authority, they went into Bethlehem, which was a tourist bonanza. And it had been really packed under Israeli control. Free people wanted to come in, they were safe. And they began harassing Christians and Christian Palestinians have left en masse Bethlehem and it sort of died economically because of their absence. But Tucker went over and talked about to a Palestinian Christian who to stay there, had exemptions from the Palestinian Authority. That is the suggestion. He was sort of like a Vichy Frenchman or something. And he said on record that Israel drove out all the Christians in their antique. And that's not true. Then he had Darrell Cooper on, who he said was the most well known World War II historian. He's never written a book on his. He's just written a book on the Internet. I think it's on Twitter. And he said some outrageous things that were demonstrably untrue. Winston Churchill was a terrorist. They bombed the Black Forest and killed a bunch of civilians deliberately. That was a very complicated operation. It wasn't aimed at civilians. It was aimed at storage depots for the invasion of France by the Nazis. Anyway, that person that he had on was not a recognized authority on World War II. And what he said about the German army going into Ukraine and being ill equipped to handle 2 million prisoners and therefore they died out of ineptness rather than premeditated agendas, that was false. They had something called the hunger plan written down as a doctrine. The German army did. And they. The idea of killing commissars, killing Jews and shipping food and starving Ukraine was preplanned. Then he had David Cullim, etc. So the question is, what is he doing? And I think he's reviving the Buchanan, America first isolationism and the MAGA people. I think what Tucker wants to do is he wants people to go on record to either say, I agree with the Buchanan neo isolationist and America first, or I'm more like Trump. This is a war for Trump and maga and he's saying that Trump, he's trying to bring Trump over to this. And what would that mean? It would mean, ah, Ukraine, let it go. You know, I'm not going to get involved in Israel with taking out that nuclear facility for Israel. It's a. It's not even a Jacksonian foreign policy. It's a Buchanan, Pat Buchanan. And so there's a lot of tension in the MAGA ranks because he's very close. Tucker's very close to J.D. vance. I think his son works for him. He's very close to Don Jr. He's got the ear of Trump and Trump is. The thing about Trump is Trump doesn't say, I'm going with him or him or them or them. He just lets them fight it out in the arena and see which side wins, you know, which has a more applicable strategy. Not that he doesn't have his own views, but the fact that he said that he's going to support NATO and the fact that he took out the Ukrainian nuclear program and the fact that he hit the Houthis shows you that he's not a neo isolationist.

C

Well, since you brought us all the way over to the Middle east, in Gaza, there is a short story, and I'm not sure if there's too much to say about this, but I feel like we should point out that the Washington Free Beacon had a story on food aid to Gazans. And there is a Gaza humanitarian foundation that's run by Israelis and the United States, and they are having more success of getting food to Gazans who are in obviously war zone areas than even the UN Is, who more often than not gets hijacked by Hamas. And then of course, Hamas does not use the food to aid innocent people as well as the Israelis in the U.S. so another story about humanitarian aid coming from the U.S. and Israel, I thought that was a good story.

B

So the Free Palestine movement's not interested in that. They don't care about the people of Gaza. They don't care what their caloric intake is every day. They're pro Hamas. So we know that Al Jazeera reporters that cover the news are Hamas people. And we know people who work for the UN were not only in Hamas, but they were involved in some cases on October 7, killing people while they were UN employees. So the UN sends a food in, Hamas wants to control it. So they send their thugs out and they beat up people and they swarm the trucks and steal all the food. Then they take it to their subterranean distribution points and either sell it or they give it under the auspices that support Hamas. Israel wants to get rid of Hamas. So what they're doing is they come in with more food and better food supplied by the United States for the most part, but also Israel. And then they provide security and they allow mostly women to represent families, not just a bunch of men to fight each other. And they make it very orderly. And they are much more successful in getting the Food to the people. The UN doesn't care. Their attitude is, well, you just throw a bunch of food out there and there's so much food the price will go down anyway. And so what if Hamas sells it? That's their attitude.

C

Well, Victor, I'd like to welcome back a sponsor Home Title Lock. When's the last time you checked on your Home title? If your answer is never, you need to do something about it right now. That's why we've partnered with Home Title Lock so that you can find out today if you're already a victim. Go to hometitlelock.com Victor to get a free title history report and a free trial of their million dollar triple lock protection. That's 24,7 monitoring of your title, urgent alerts to any changes. And if fraud does happen, they'll spend up to $1 million to fix it. And we'd like to thank Home Title Lock for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hanson show. So Victor, let's then turn to the California and the $2.2 billion solar plant in California's Mojave Desert. It was called the Ivanpah Solar power facility that was just turned off. $2.2 billion is what I did say to everybody. So.

B

Well, it was the golden age of Obama wind and solar subsidies. So all these cronies, as we saw in the case of usa, wanted to jump in with new solar wind technologies that had no proven profitable ability. So they all were in need of subsidies. So this one was weird. I think it's the one where they had a series of reflective mirrors and they took the sun and they reflected it on a particular target of water to create enormous temperatures and then steam. And of course they had wildlife that got in between the mirror reflection and the object. So it was not good to the environment, but it never worked. And then it blew up $2 billion. And so when you collate that with a billion or two not too far away, well, right at Moss Landing, the battery plant. So this was superseded by photovoltaic cells. So you have everybody in the first stage that's producing electricity on their homes. And then PGE kind of reneged on the next deal and said we're not going to give you as much compensation. Then the third, we're not going to give you much at all because people were basically either making a profit or not having to pay their power bill. And PGE says you're not contributing to the overhead maintenance of the power lines. So for all practical purposes, the idea that you put new owners because they can't renege on the contracts that are in existence. But new owners put solar panels. They do it for one reason. They put batteries and then they generate their own electricity. They use batteries for the evening and during the day when the batteries are charged, any excess goes to PG&E and it mitigates what they use from PG&E that they're low on the batteries. So that's what the future was. And so then the idea that the state was going to build big battery storages in Moss Landing, the old power was kind of bogus. And they blew up. They had two fires. I think it's a billion dollar white elephant. And then we had another one. Remember Joe Biden and Obama came for Solyndra in Silicon Valley. We were going to make state of the art solar panels. Didn't work. They weren't very good. They weren't cost competitive. So when you look at Solyndra and the desert project and Moss Landing, you're talking about burning up $5 billion for nothing. And if you ask yourself what would $5 billion have done? Well, it would have fixed a lot of the freeways In California, maybe 101 or i5, or it would have. You could have encouraged natural gas production and more leases. You could have done a lot of things. If you want to subsidize somebody, tell them if you take a risk and try to drill a natural gas well. But they got everything. My point is they got everything they wanted. Jerry Brown and Gavin Newsom, over the last 14 years, they went full green. So did Arnold Schwarzenegger. They got their subsidies, they got their new technologies. And gas is the highest it's ever been in real dollars. Natural gas is the highest it's ever been. Your power bill is the highest it's ever been. They haven't built a new nuclear plant, they haven't built a new hydroelectric plant. If they're going to build a dam, instead of they get money from the taxpayers to build dams, they use them to blow them up. So this has been the worst, Jerry Brown's eight years, followed by Gavin Newsom six years. It's the worst 14 years in our history of the state. It's suicidal nihilism. It's trying to dismantle modernity to destroy a modern idea of California and bring it back to some 19th century romantic idea of, you know, the San Joaquin rushing to the ocean as if there's nobody living here that needs water or agriculture or power or flood control. They may get their wish because we're losing 300,000 people net population per year. People are leaving. And so maybe that was what they wanted, to make it so unlivable and expensive. We'll get down to, we'll go from 41 million down to, I don't know, 30 million. Then they'll get their wish. They'll just make it a bunch of wealthy people who get tech money and then they live in a la la, land of green.

C

Well, let's turn to another favorite issue for the left and that is the pro Palestinian contingency, not just in the US but in Europe. And I think that you and Jack talked about this, that England, Canada, Australia, France, those are the ones I can think of. We're going to recognize a Palestinian state. Well, Giorgia Meloni in Italy did not recognize a Palestinian state and she had riots. So riots have broken out in Italy because she refused to sign on. And so I guess England and France are saying that's what we don't want to have. What do you want?

B

Well, I have a question. Prior to October 7th, there wasn't any Israeli inside Gaza. It was all Palestinian. Now they spent in foreign money and American money and UN money, several billion dollars to make an underground city of tunnels for war purposes. They had one election in 2006 one time and they elected a thuggish Hamas and then they canceled all elections. They killed the opposition or drove them out. So maybe a Palestinian, they're talking about the west bank and Gaza. Are they asking the Palestinian Authority to take it over? If they are, they're going to have a civil war. So my point is, when the Israelis left, they gave them a 50 million dollar lucrative hothouse industry to export winter vegetables. Some American financiers very magnanimously funded that. The first thing they did when the Israelis left, they tore it out, they looted it, they stole all the infrastructure, they destroyed it. And then they voted in Hamas, who then killed a lot of the Palestinian people and created an Islamic dictatorship. Then they started in with the intifadas and da da da, and then they started building their labyrinth and it was all culminating in October. So my point is this. You have your autonomous state, you're getting billions of dollars in foreign aid. Somebody set up international elections for you. You have all of the ingredients of making a successful Dubai or Saudi or Kuwait. Just go to it. There was nobody stopping you. But that's not what they wanted. They wanted from the river to the sea. So they turned that into a militaristic frontline battle state. Just like the west bank under Arafat trying to kill Jews and they can't do it. And so, you know, I got so frustrated, I mentioned that to our audience walking from my apartment to my office on the Stanford campus 2023 and early 24 and being confronted by these occupants of Free Palestine, pro Hamas. And they would come up to you and they want to engage you, but not like Charlie Kirk, they wanted to yell at you. So you, every once in a while you would waste two or three minutes, you just say, well, why don't you have your state? And they say, what do you mean? I said, well, you have the west bank and you have Gaza. Why don't you go to the Israelis and say, now that you're out of Gaza, give us 10 years, keep giving us water and power. Which they do and they do it to the west bank too. And we will go through a three step plan to be like Jordan in Egypt. And they would say river to the sea and you'd say river to the sea. So you really, really think you're going to go to the Jordan river and you and this ragtag bunch of killers on October 7th are going to kill 11 million Jews and repeat the holocaust twice over and destroy this civilization that has given us everything from drip hoses to sophisticated anti ballistic missile systems. You're going to destroy all those people? There's no way in blank blank you're going to do that. There's not going to be a second holocaust. And you can't do that because you don't have the wherewithal to fight them. Even though there's 500 million of you, you cannot do that. And they would. That's their agenda. That's why they don't create a Dubai or Kuwait in the land that they control, because to do so will mean they can't destroy Israel. And then these totalitarian governments all around, strongmen say, oh, we're for the Palestinians, we're for getting their land back. We just don't want them to live in our country because they always cause trouble. But all you poor people, Jordanians, Egyptians, Syrians, Iraqis, we're all for the Palestinians. So don't complain that you don't have affordable housing or good health care because we're for the Palestinian. That's what these dictators do, they use them as a club. And it's been my whole life. I remember 1967, I was 14 and I had the Fresno Bee and it was June 4th and I had my aunt's husband, my uncle, he was farming. So Vernon, I called him Uncle Vernon. So I had the Fresno Bee. And they had a picture right at the eve of the Six Day War. And they had a tank for how many tanks Israel has, and a plane for how many Israel, and a man for how many soldiers. And they were each representing, I think, 100,000 soldiers or 1,000. And they would put the little symbols in this little tiny Israel. And then they said. Then they had the symbols in Egypt, then they had the symbols in Jordan, then they had the symbols in Syria, then they had the symbols in Iraq. And I said, I was 14 years old. So I said, well, Uncle Vernon, they're going to wipe them out. Look at all these tanks, look at all these men. Look at all these planes. They're going to have a war. Going to have a war. And I said, so they're going to destroy them? He said, no. I said, well, how can they fight? They have the whole. All the map has, all their stuff. It's like chess pieces. And these guys don't have anything. He said, they're smart. They know what they're doing. They will win. And I said, well, they don't have a chance. So I went home to my parents. I said, the Israelis are going to lose. And my dad goes, they're going to win. And then my mom goes, they should win. And they did.

C

How do you think your parents and your uncle knew that?

B

Well, my dad was a World War II guy, and my uncle was in World War II.

C

So they'd been reading about it in.

B

Israel because they had a great knowledge of Judaism. Because of. All my life, I did not meet anybody Jewish my age. I went to UC Santa Cruz and there were these three guys, and somebody told me there were a bunch of Jews. Watch out. They said that he's another person of minority status, and he was the dorm. What was it? Resident assistant. RA and he said, don't buy drugs from them because they'll rip you off because they're Jews. So I really said this. What's Jews? I knew what Jews were, but I'd never seen a Jewish young person. My mother had one family in Fresno that she was very close to that were Jewish. And then the guy who sold my aunt and my grandmother hearing aids would come out once every six months. And Lila, who was crippled and living in. She lived her whole life in the house I'm living in. She'd call me up and go, 20. She called me 20. Could you ride the wheel down? There was a very nice man. Who's going to show us the latest mom and I. Mom, she was 45, and my grandmother was 75. She's going to show us the latest model hearing aid. Those were like transistor radios with a dial on them and the headphones with wires. And she said, he has a tattoo and he'll tell us a story about being Auschwitz. So I would go down and ride my bike and this guy, I think his name was Rosenblum or something, and he was an itinerant hearing aid. He was really smart. So he would sell Island, Georgia, the latest upgrade. And then he said, and then my aunt would go, well, did you see the ovens? Well, I saw the ovens, of course I did. And then he would talk for three or four hours and my grandmother would make little cakes and coffee. That was the only Jewish interaction you had? My mother had a Jewish lawyer friend. So when I got to Santa Cruz, there must have been 10 or 20% of the. I didn't know what Jews were, but they were all pro Israel. That's what was strange. And I've always been pro Israel and I've had so many people come up to me, you're a Zionist. You're just, you know, you can't talk. You're just pro. You're a brain. No, I'm not. It was all empirical. I didn't have any Jewish friends. There was not. Let me be very careful. Out of 250 People who graduated from my class, I don't think there was one Jewish student. We had a lot of Armenian students, a lot of Japanese students, a lot of Chinese students, a lot of Indian students, a lot. The majority were Mexican American students. We had a lot of black students, not one Jewish student.

C

I guess I was just surprised that your parents and your uncle would know the capability of Israel, the state, in their military capability. I mean, today we've had all those wars. So anybody who has even the slightest knowledge of the wars that were fought in the Middle east knows Israel is super duper well.

B

They had known the 47 war where they had nothing and they won. They were surrounded. They were using P51 Mustangs and Sherman tanks and they were surrounded by people with the latest state of the art Russian. And then the 56 Suez. I mean, it was a disaster strategically, but they were very adept tactically. And then this was the 67 day war.

C

All right, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and then come back and hear a little bit about Crete in World War II. Stay with us and we'll be right back. Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hansen Show. If you're on social media, you can find Victor at X. His handle is Ed Hansen. And on Facebook he has a page called Hanson's Morning Cup. So come join us there. And Victor. So I'm excited to hear about Crete in World War II. I know we talk about it peripherally in the discussion of World War II, but the Nazis invaded it and they fought back pretty hard against that. So I'm anxious to hear about this.

B

Germany invaded its partner, the Soviet Union, on June 22, 1941, with the largest invasion in history. Three and a half million people on a 17, 1800 mile front. So the question is, what were they doing on May 20th to June 1st in Crete? Look at the Mediterranean. If you want to supply Rommel, it would be better to supply them via Malta. Greece is way to the east. It's very hard to get rail service into Greece from Europe as compared to Italy, for example, through Sicily. So why were they there? They were there because Hitler had a directive that he did not want any peripheral theaters opening up that would detract from the main thrust into Russia. Lo and behold, the Yugoslavian underground overthrew the government in the spring. So he had to go into Yugoslavia and restore a fascist. Once he was in Yugoslavia. Mussolini, who had declared war belatedly on the Axis, was angry that he wasn't getting his share. He didn't know anything about going into Russia, but he had invaded in October, Greece and he had taken Albania. And he was in a mess October of 1940. So Hitler then said, okay, I've got a mess on my hands. I've got Rommel with only two or three divisions. I got a supply in North Africa. I've got troops now in Yugoslavia. Mussolini has screwed things up. I've got to go bail him out in Greece. And I am diverting men and materiel from the planned buildup to go into Russia. So he took Greece, and it was pretty much declared secure in May. But a lot of the British got out of Greece and about 30,000 got to Crete. And they still had Egypt. And Cairo and Alexandria were there under British control. So what happened was Hitler came up with the idea, we just have to close down the theater. So we've got Greece. We'll go halfway across the Mediterranean and take Crete and make air bases there. And therefore Rommel will be in Egypt. Basically, he'll be at the end of the Libyan border, and we can just stop anything from happening that would interfere with Army Group South. Okay? The problem was that they had never really done a parachute drop, so they didn't have maritime superiority. The British Navy in the Mediterranean was the largest navy, and they had done very well against the Italians and scared the Italians. They had blown up a lot of cruisers and injured battleships and carriers. So they dropped soldiers into Crete, mostly in the Chania area. The two capital cities are Chania and Heraklion. And they tried to surprise them, and it didn't work. The Greeks fought just absolutely courageously, and they had just primitive weapons. And the British who had evacuated there were only about 20,000, but they were not well supplied enough to help the Greeks. But between the two, they held out for about four days. And each time the Luftwaffe brought in a new group of soldiers, they were rendered inert. So they were getting worried, and they started to build up from Greece. So then they started. They brought in some Italian ships at night, they started landing some troops, and then they made a whole effort. Had the New Zealand commander of Allied forces Freyberg, been more aggressive, he could have taken the airfield and held it, and they wouldn't have been able to land at Marmalade. So anyway, the point is, after 10 days, they landed enough German troops. Eventually they would get up to about 20,000. They took this long island halfway between Libya, Egypt and Greece. And they said, at this point, we're going to close down this theater and we're not going to supply Rommel. He'll just have to hold still, because now we're going into Russia. The problem with the campaign was that the British fought so ferociously and the Greeks did that. They damaged about or destroyed 500 Luftwaffe Bf109s, Stuka dive bombers, logistical planes. And this was on top of the other four or five hundred they had lost in Greece. And this was on top of the blitz that had just ended. That was July 1940 to January, February 1941, where they lost 2,000 planes. And they had lost 23,000 soldiers going into Poland dead. Another 25,000 in the Victory in France. And then in the quagmire, they've lost another three or four thousand. So they had lost about five divisions of some of their top people, and they had lost, probably in aggregate, 3,000 planes. So when they went into Russia, even though they had this huge force, they didn't realize that logistically they did not have the air power to support the armies because they had lost so many transport planes. Hitler was so shocked about the 2,000 dead Germans. They killed more British and Greeks, and he said, no more. Never again are we going to have major paratroop drops. The Americans looked at it, and so did the British, and they Said, wow, this worked. So they got the opposite message and they created more sophisticated airborne. They looked at the German system and they saw, well, either parachutes are lousy, you can't steer them. We can improve, we can improve. And they did. But Hitler only used them on special operations to free Mussolini or somebody. But they never wanted to do it again. There were a couple of sidelights to the battle. Patrick Lee Feymore, the famous classicist and novelist was there. There was a lot of British expatriates that loved to live in Crete. And he staged. He dressed up with, I think his name was Stanley Moss. They dressed up as German officers and they went in to Heraklion and they captured a three star in German and they said, we're here to pick you up for a mission. And they got him to the. They drove and kidnapped him and drove him across the island, hiked over the mountains to the south and then the PT boat took him to, to Britain. It's in one of his novels, if you read, I mean one of his books. I met him when I was living in Greece. In 73, a group of us went in Areopagus. He lived in the Mani. He built with his wife a home, couldn't believe it. He drank heavily and he was smoking non stop. And I think he lived to be in his late 90s. Paul Ray, the classicist, knew him very well. But this tragedy of what happened is that they, when they kidnapped that general, I think his name was Muller or something, not Mueller, Muller was the other one. But they did all of these reprisals. That was the first time that the German army had. The Luftwaffe always had a reputation of not being tyrannical, bloodthirsty Nazis. They were in charge of the POW camps and they were pretty wild. They killed hundreds of Greek patriots in reprisals for the kidnap. So Patrick Lee Fehmar and Stanley Moss, they meant well, but they got off and then they took it out on the Greeks and that really the generals that were left that maybe his name was Mueller. The Greeks tried him after the war and they executed him for what he did to Greeks there. There was another really tragic story. There was a famous aristocrat from a very wealthy family, John Pendleberry. And he had been blinded in one eye, I remember when he was young. But he had written the Palaces of Crete and he was a brilliant Cambridge classicist and he'd excavated in Greece. And anyway, in his late 30s or middle 30s he and his wife went to Crete and he was in charge of the excavations and he knew Very well that there's a lot of German archaeologists. He got along with him and the war broke out and he had enlisted in British Intelligence on Crete, and he knew that island backwards and forwards, as did Patrick Lee, former. So during this resistance, he was trying to help. He wasn't a spy, he wasn't a guerrilla. He was uniformed and he was sort of an advisor, showing British troops where the best routes were, bridges and stuff. And he got shot in the chest. He would have lived. A German doctor who had been captured. I think he had been captured. He treated him, removed the bullet. He was fine. The next day, the Germans came in to the village and they saw him and he protested that he was a British officer. And they said, you don't have your dog tags on. And they had just removed his shirt because of the thing. And so they took him out and put him against the wall and shot the greatest Minoan, Mycenaean classicist of his generation. If you go today to the British, Americans have very beautiful war cemeteries. I was on the War Monuments Board Commission, and the British have the War Graves Commission. You go to Hunia and they have beautiful graves. They're a little bit different than the way that we do it. They don't have lawns as much, but they have rose bushes and stuff by each grave. And you can find John J.S. pendleberry. So every time I've gone to Crete, eight or nine times, I always go up there. It's very tragic to see he was executed by the German. The other thing about Crete was once they got the island, it played almost no role. They didn't have the wherewithal to bring in a lot of German bombers, aircraft to bomb Cairo or Alexandria and get the Suez Canal. It was a depot, but they had no navy. The British still had maritime supremacy. So they tried to bring U boats into the Mediterranean. I think of the 40U boats that went into the Mediterranean, 39 were sunk because the British brought in oil from Iraq and the Gulf, through the Suez Canal, through the Mediterranean, out Gibraltar. And once they did away with the Italian navy, and they had blown up the captured French navy. The Germans had no Mediterranean fleet, so the British ran the whole Mediterranean. So to supply Rommel or to supply Crete was almost impossible because you had to do it by night, by air, or you had to get a convoy from Greece all the way over there or from Italy. And it was very difficult to do so, for I think there was about 5,000 people killed, roughly 2,000 Germans, maybe 2,500 Greeks and British but then it was never retaken. It just stayed there as a backwater. It was kind of like the Greek islands themselves that the Germans occupied. There was a lot of good literature written about the battle for Crete and documentaries.

C

It would seem, though, that today the United States finds it a convenient base for its, I guess, air force.

B

It's funny, there's a big NATO base at Ceuta Bay in Chania, and that is on the western side of the northwest side of the island. It's a beautiful city. Chania is one of the most beautiful cities in Greek. They have a nice university there and they have a big NATO base. I took a military group, maybe my military history, when we used to have this company with Al Philip. I did. We took about 80 people that year and we went to Hania. We got permission and we met the Greek officer. But it was a NATO base. The United States had a base. But during. When the Papadopoulos government fell in 73, it was replaced by a dictatorship by Ioannidis. In 74, he fell. And then you had the return of the socialist democrats. So they got. That was the period. That was when I left Greece. It was during the Cyprus war. There was so much anti Americanism blaming us on the dictatorship. And so it was a time when all Americans left Greece. So we had a. We were going to homeport a carrier in Piraeus. We had missile bases at Mount Kathyron, but all U.S. troops were more or less removed. And then every time I think I visited Greece between 1982 and 2010, maybe 30 times, and it was all anti American, anti American. And then recently, with the Metsakis government and the rise of a more belligerent Turkey and the realization that the United States supports Greece, the Greeks and the Americans have been very friendly. Greece is a very good ally of the United States. It's very fair to Israel. Israel, Cyprus and Greece have the East Med project that Biden canceled, but Trump has greenlined again. And I think we even have maybe 12. Is it F15 or F16s up in Thessaly based for the first time, but that's a NATO base. 1973, during the YOM Kippur War, a guy came to, called me, a fellow student, and he was in Crete. We were off for break and he said, you got to come down here to Chania. He said, the Americans are supplying Israel, but they can't land on the NATO base. Greece won't let them. So there's a big carrier and they're landing on the carrier and then they're refueling. So I took that night passage. You know, you go down 7 at night and you get there at 7 in the morning. And I went to Hunyaa. And so about four guys, we sat out in a hill above Hunia and off the shore you could see this American carrier and all these planes were landing and then taking off. Israel suffered terribly from swift surface to air missiles. So they were trying to supply Phantom jets. And I think American pilots were flying them in. I was really angry at Greece at that time because they were letting the Soviet Union fly over Greek airspace. I saw a Soviet transport, everybody said, look at this huge plane. It's flying right over Crete. And they were letting the Russians fly over Crete and in Greek airspace to supply the Arabs. But they were not allowing their own NATO partner, the United States, to fly over Greece to supply Israel, because they were so. And then I can see why, because they cut all oil off anyway to Greece. So when we were living there for the whole winter, we had no oil, fuel oil, furnace oil for our radiators. And it was against the rules to use an electric plug in because all they had was lignite powered up in Megalopolis. And so I think I told that story where there was this age professor. He's very famous. HD kiddo. He's kind of rude. I loved him though. He taught me Greek. He wrote a great book called the Greeks. And somebody in our class, we were walking by and he had the curtains and they had a little electric heater. And he and his wife were so cold in a basement. And that guy goes, look at him. We were freezing. I said, yeah, but he's 85 years old. So he went back and called the electric police on him to cut off his heater. That's so cruel.

C

Yeah. Oh, my gosh. Well, just one last thing though. On Crete, the United States maintains one section of that NATO base, right? They have a section of it, and.

B

That'S by request of NATO. I mean, NATO is the United States in that part of the world. The Sixth Fleet. Sixth Fleet is not what it used to be, but it's still the biggest fleet in the Mediterranean.

C

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B

60. 40.

C

Oh, the article I read was 40.

B

So it's kind of scary because they had bought an old. Remember they had bought an old Soviet carrier that they got that was broke and was rusting, and they claimed they were going to use it for a casino. So they towed it to China and then they made it into an actual carrier. And you remember they had the slope where you land. Their idea is that you take off and then the deck goes up so the plane doesn't fall straight down, it goes up. But the first two carriers were kind of Russian design. They bought the designs that are not very good. Maybe they're, I don't know, 40 or 50,000 ton displacement. They hold maybe 30 planes. And they're kind of decrepit Russian design. This one, if you look at a picture of this, did you see this one with the new Gerald Ford? It looks like they just copied the whole Gerald Ford. Gerald Ford is the biggest ship ever. It's the biggest warship ever made 102,000 tons. It replaces the Nimitz. We have 10 carriers that are Nimitz class. The Gerald Ford is bigger. They're about 95,000. I think it's about 102 or 3,000. It carries 65 planes. And the key is when you get these big jets now that are not just fighters, but they're fighter bombers, everything like F35s or new super Hornets and all that. The old technology of steam catapults, they don't have enough thrust to take them off. They're so heavy, and the deck has to be heavier. But the new Gerald Floyd has kind of an electromagnetic catapult that can shoot almost anything. And what I'm mentioning all this for is that Chinese new carrier has one just like its catapult system is not like the steam propulsion. It's like our latest one. It came from us. Everything that they have comes from us. And they have three fleet carriers now we have 11. So we're still way ahead of them. And we're under construction. We're making three, three to replace three. I think every five years one goes out and a new one comes in. Also this has, this, Gerald Ford has the largest, as I understand it, nuclear propelled engines ever made. So it can go much faster, even though it's bigger than any aircraft carrier in the world. And we're going to make, I think, four of them. They cost about $15 billion each. So, you know, a frigate, I would rather have a nuclear frigate than the Tehachapi Solar project for $2 billion, to tell you the truth. So I just think, Mr. Trump, if you're listening to this farmer out in the middle of nowhere, please don't let in 600,000 Chinese students because I guarantee you that 6 to 7,000 are People's Liberation army officers under the guise of students. And they're going to come here and they're going to try to befriend American students and people in Silicon Valley and they're going to try to steal things. And we are fueling all of their technological development and we don't want to make it so easy for them.

C

We have a soap opera going on with the Ryan Ruth trial. Jury came back, he was convicted of all five trials charges and he tried to stab himself in the neck. And I was wondering if you had any thoughts on that.

B

I don't like to follow any of that.

C

Excuse me, I'm sorry. He tried to stab himself in the neck with a pin from the.

B

Okay, I find all those people are satanic. You know, his daughter stormed out and said he wasn't giving a free trial. What do you mean he didn't get a free trial? The man had a sniper's nest and had he not been spotted at the last moment, he would have killed Donald Trump. He was a complete evil person. And I was afraid that under some quirk they might try him in Washington or New York. And I don't know what would have happened if that had happened rather than in Florida. But he, at least I hope they give him the death penalty, I really do. Even though it's conspiracy to kill the President United States, they need to have some deterrent because as I said earlier, when you see this, the communications of Tyler Robinson to his trans girlfriend boyfriend, when he says Oh, I didn't want to tell you right away because I explained I thought I'd be living to an old age and nobody would ever knew. He never thought he was going to get caught. And if he did get caught, he thought he would be like De Carlos Brown, slit a little immigrant girl's throat. And then it'll be just like the other 14 felonies that he committed. And he just went in and out. And then Ms. Stokes, the magistrate who had never passed the bar, just let him out to her own alternative treatment where she was profiting. So it's I, I don't think these people are necessarily crazy. I do think they make a cost to benefit analysis in two different ways. They're on the left and they think if we kill the Republican hierarchy or we kill a United health care executive or we kill, as just happened, they killed one person, wounded two at an ICE center. Gavin, remember that you said Kristi Noem was going to have a bad day. Well, they had a bad day today. They killed an immigrant. The guy just got on a roof and shot randomly into a detention center. And you and Karen Bass are lowering the bar along with Jasmine Crockett and the rest of you who are demonizing Immigration and Customs Enforcement. But I do believe they think they're going to be iconic and praised like Luigi Mangione is. And two, they'd think they're not going to be punished. They think, well, you know, I might go to an alternative sensing and I'll get out in 10 years or something. And they need to tell these people, if you shoot a public official, we are going to look for the death penalty and we are going to be swift about it. And you are not going to be famous. And I think they could deter a lot of people.

C

Yeah, they sure could. Well, Victor, let's take our last break and then we'll come back and talk a little bit about YouTube's new commitment to free speech. Stay with us and we'll be right back. Foreign welcome back to the Victor Davis Hansen show. You can find Victor or these podcasts on YouTube, Rumble and on Spotify. So come join us if you prefer the video version of the podcast. Victor. So YouTube has sent a letter to the House Judiciary Committee. Jim Jordan's chairs that committee and they have committed to free speech in all sorts of ways. It's quite a long letter, but I wanted to read you one. One part of it that they put in there, they said it is unacceptable and wrong when any government, including the Biden administration, attempts to dictate how the company moderates content. And so now once the Biden administration is gone, YouTube, Google, Alphabet, they're all kind of the same company has said that they are not going to allow the government to moderate.

B

All the left is so angry that Brendan Carr, the Trump appointed federal Communications Commissioner, said he was looking at Jimmy Kimmel for deliberately implanting a lie on national TV and saying this was a MAGA shooter and he would look at that. Then people conflated that with the temporary decision on the part of Disney to take him off the air. Then Disney folded to this mob of celebrities and he's back on the fcc. Repeat, did not take him off. Was that a good thing to do? Probably it was good in the moral sense, but legally it was a mistake, I think because the FCC really regulates speech and not content so much. If you went after every single person on national TV who lies, you would have to kick off the whole view. They lied. All of cnn, all of mnbc. Brian, what would you do with Brian Williams? The guy made up everything he said. You know, he said he was a hero in copter crashes and everything. He was a complete inveterate liar. What would you have to do with all these people? So I just think it's not in the Trump interest to go in and start regulating people's speech. And I think that's good. It's a corporate free market decision that you use your power as a consumer to affect. And because Jimmy Kimmel was on record so much gleefully cheering on conservatives that were deplatforming like Tucker or others, he deserved what he got, even though it was just a little suspension. And I think he won't be back very long. Too many of the subsidiaries don't want him on. Nobody wants to hear him. And he's not, he's not, he doesn't have a winning personality, he's got a mean streak, nasty person, he's cruel to people and he's not funny.

C

I think these companies are a little too conveniently also coming in on the side of, well, we don't agree with censorship of our platform, etc. Because now they have the Trump administration and not the Biden administration that wanted to censor theirs.

B

Yeah, they got, they implanted FBI agents into Twitter and the old Twitter and Facebook to stop any information about Hunter's authentic laptop. They got, went out to the New York Post. They Obama, remember he went after cell phone encryption. I mean, data on AP reporters. Obama did that. They went to the Google people and they went to the Facebook people. Google Guys said it the other day, they said we're going to, they forced them to monitor content of people on the right. Not even going to get into Lois Lerner and the IRS trying to disrupt conservatives applying for status.

C

I think my point is now, do you think, well, if a left leaning administration gets back in, will they just be right back in to censorship again? And yeah, that's the companies, that's how they work, that's how they roll.

B

This is the problem that the Republicans have. The Democrats do whatever they have because they think their superior moral and intellectual ends justify any means necessary. So they have five criminal lawfare attempts to destroy Donald Trump, they raid his house, they try to get him off the ballot, they fine him $500 million. They go, they think of anything. If you even go after a John Bolton for good cause, then they go crazy. This is weaponizing that government. And the same thing about right at the last, right before the last debate, the government armed Joe Biden with a lie. So he got up on stage and said, donald Trump, you're lying about my son. He didn't. That's not his computer. The Russians did this because 51 intelligence authorities have all. And that was all cooked up by Anthony Blinken, his campaign flack and future Secretary of State. But my point is, if you even talk about like Brendan Carr, oh my gosh, we've lost, it's, we've lost our freedom. And they project so successfully. So then that begs the question, when you're in power, how do you stop them? Do you use their, you just say to themselves, well, you know what? We're going to do what you do to teach you a lesson. And we don't want to listen to you call us fascists, we don't care. But you're going to have to feel what we felt and then maybe you won't do it again. Or do you say, I play by the Marcus of Queensberry rules? I'm not going to destroy the Constitution to go down to their level. And then when they come back, they'll say, well, because they would never get down to our level, we're going to get even lower. And that's hard to know how to deal with them. They're like adolescents, you know what I mean? They're like little teenagers. The whole party is. Now, every time I listen to Jasmine Crockett, I say to myself, this is a very wealthy, upper middle class, privileged, spoiled girl woman. And she went to $35,000 a year tuition prep schools, and she speaks normal English. If I can use that bad term normal. And she plays this game that when she gets on television she uses the inner city ghetto patois and then she starts in her racial Gerry, math, just race, race, race, white, white, white, white, white. And she's a creature of this whole left wing. We're gonna, we're gonna do whatever you do. And if you ever talk like we do, if you substituted the word white, black for white, and you just had somebody that said every time she says white, you said black. They would, they would, she'd go nuts. It is so racist. Same thing with Joy Reid, same thing with Don Lamone. All of these guys, they don't think they understand what they're doing. They're just so racially fixated. As I said, tribalism is like nuclear proliferation. You're a bunch of states in the Middle east and all of a sudden one state has a bomb and then everybody wants to get a bomb. Well, if you're sitting there and every time Jasmine Crockett or Al Sharpton just keeps saying black, black, black, black, black, white, white, white, white, white, or people just use this term white synonymously with a pejorative. So every time you hear the word white on television, it is a negative context. And every time you go on DirecTV and you look at a title with white white men can't ju, it's like the treatment of blacks in the 1930s and 40s. It's going to just tell people, you want to go tribal. This group will go tribal. So it's good to stop that. But how do you stop it, Jasmine Crockett? Because that language catapulted her national attention for being such a racist.

C

Yeah, it's very sad. I don't know how to stop it. Victor, I wish I had an answer for, for you. Well, Victor, we're at the end of the show and we have comments from our viewers and our listeners. And this one was from YouTube and I've been waiting for this one. I've been waiting for a Karen to write who is a politically dysfunctional, socially misfit, religiously compromised Karen. And so here it is, she says, and her name, it's JF Kaja 4043. She says, K A J E H I don't, I don't know what it means. Anyway, she says, thank you, Victor. I look forward to listening to you every day. I am a white 68 year old coastal dwelling California native, college educated, teaching credential possessor, retired school administrator and Cal Poly San Luis Obispo lecturer. What is the difference between me and Those women, many of. Many of whom I know and have worked with. And she asked that question and she answers it for you. She says, I am a Christian and a lover of truth. I left the destructive Democratic Party over a decade ago. So there you go.

B

Thank you, I appreciate that. But.

C

Straight from a Karen's mouth, huh?

B

Yes, I. Last week I was walking in Palo Alto and I won't tell you where. And there was a Karen in front of me, and I walked very fast behind her in my evening walk. And she looked at me and I said, I'm not trying to pass you. I just thought it might be uncomfortable for you to hear people walking, you know, a man walking right behind you at seven o' clock at night. And she didn't. She just looked at me and growled. Didn't even say hello. Usually when I see them, I'm 72, but usually when I see them, they just walk in this little narrow sidewalk. They just walk toward me and I'm supposed to jump in the gutter, and I always do. So they can walk by with their dogs or something. But they never say hello. You say hello. They never say hi. And they're kind of get off the grass type people only wear your mask, do this. And every time I see a demonstration against Trump or Charlie Kirk's saying, I just look at the crowd. It's like central casting. Then my mind goes back. If I could say this. Well, Victor, you're 72. You made the mistake of going to UC Santa Cruz when you were 17, and you saw coming from the farm, a whole different world, a very affluent Southern California, children of movie producers, financiers, very wealthy kids. And this was the tail end of the 60s. The Vietnam War was almost. There was no fighting really left in 72. And you saw the most promiscuous people I'd ever seen in my life. I mean, in Selma High School, people said, did you know John Doe? We think he might have had sex with his girlfriend. Oh, my God, really? They're going to have to get married. And then you go to this thing where people were having sexual congress in the bathroom, openly or at parties. And then you saw people with drugs, you know, hashish, $5 this on their door. And then you saw all the protests where people. I was sitting in Gary Miles history class and people came in with chairs, I mean, carrying a chair in and throwing it at us. This is the Vietnam Moratorium and you're getting out right now.

C

Yeah, but do you think public universities have changed at all? I know you can find Private ones that are not like that.

B

But no, I think they're more now into race and tribalism. But my point was, and in those days, if you went to UC Santa Cruz today, it's probably 30 or 40% white. It's a multicultural, and you'll see Palestinian. The issues will be Palestine, La Raza, blm. Right? But it won't be an inclusive we hate America. Kind of like this was when I went to UC Santa Cruz. I bet you five bucks it was 95% white. But what I'm getting at is the girls that were my age, that was the era when no one shaved their arms, no one shaved their legs. They used something called patchouli oil. They were, I'm not saying all, but very promiscuous. Like the guys were drug users. So what I'm getting at is I watch that generation age 30, 40, 50, 60, 70. So when I see them at airports and they come up to you and try to be all I just go back to is I say to myself, figuratively, I know you. I talked to you in the amphitheater in 1971. Whether I did or not, I know you. You were in my Western Civ seminar and sat on the floor and started mouthing off all the time and interrupting everybody. Oh, I know you. You were the one that had 17 boyfriends in the dorm. So I know them all. And I'm just being facetious. Somebody's going to say, well, I wasn't like that. Of course you weren't. But what I'm telling you is that there's something about that baby boomer, affluent, entitled generation on the left. And they always acted as if they were poor or they wore raunchy clothes or they didn't take bath, but they were so absorbed with their money and their credentials. And my dad, did I ever tell anybody my dad wrote the screenplay. He wrote the screenplay for the Maltese Falcon. You know, they would say things like that all the time. So they were snob. And that's who they are now. They're anal retentive, compulsive, obsessive people. That bi coastal, affluent elite. And I can see them because I've met them my entire life and they are completely no holds barred. They're just like they're out there in the quad at Cal College, UC Santa Cruz, and they're protesting and they're saying, f. Nixon. F. Nixon. F. Nixon. You know, out of Cambodia. You know what I mean? Viet Cong are going to win. And I see them out there F. Trump. You know what I mean, 65 year old, 75 year old women saying F, the F word. And I just think, man, I seen you. You're the Karen with a thousand faces. I see you on planes, I see you at the airport. I see you on sidewalks. You always get in everybody's business. You always lecture people. You always are so paranoid and so obsessive with everything. And I can see why people stereotype you. That's a good ramp.

C

Yeah. Okay, Victor, just remember that there are some socially dysfunctional and religiously compromised Karens out there.

B

Yes.

C

All right, well, thank you for all of your wisdom today. This has been a pleasure, and thanks to our audience for joining us. We appreciate everybody spending some time with us on Saturday. And Victor just said something that reminded me of our topic for next Saturday. It will be the Tet Offensive. So that's something to look forward to. We hope everybody comes back and joins us.

B

These are all questions you wrote in. Somebody wrote in about Creed Tet. Yeah, Sherman. So.

C

So we'll be there. All right, thank you. This is Sammy Wink and Victor Davis Hansen, and we're signing off.

B

Thank you, everyone.