- It may not happen often, but sometimes, sometimes entire civilizations die in a single day. Historian Victor Davis Hanson on "Uncommon Knowledge" now. (gentle music) Welcome to "Uncommon Knowledge," I'm Peter Robinson, a fellow at the Hoover Institution here at Stanford. Victor Davis Hanson is a classist and military historian. Dr. Hanson has published more than two dozen major works of history, including "A War Like No Other," his classic work on the Peloponnesian Wars.
Victor Davis Hanson's newest book, "The End of Everything, How Wars Descend into Annihilation." Victor, thanks for joining me. - Thank you for having me Peter. - First question, the destruction of Thebes by Alexander the Great, the Obliteration of Carthage by the Romans, the defeat of Constantinople by the Turks and the destruction of the Aztecs by Cortes. Those are your four case studies in this book. All those happened a while ago. Why write this book now? - I wanted, I was curious.
I've been, most of my career, I've been curious why Thebes, or I can go into the details, but why these- - We'll come to it. - Yes, we'll come to it. Why these civilizations were not just defeated, but were annihilated and there were others. There's a wide array in the ancient world that the island of Melos, towns in the Peloponnesian world like Schioni, et cetera. And this is very different than natural disasters like the Mycenaeans, et cetera.
But I was wondering if there was a typology, a repeating pattern, and if it would be applicable to any of a value. And I found that there was, both on the part of the attacker, certain mindset and on the part of the defender, and that those situations that we think could not happen today because we're supposedly a postmodern morals world. - We're more advanced than they were Victor. - Yes. That's what we think.
So in the epilogue, I just did a brief survey, well, not a brief survey, but I had a survey of countries that are very vulnerable as described either in the nature of their enemies and the intent of their enemies, or the neighborhood in which they reside, or their size, or their limits. So for example, there's only 12 million Greeks in the world.
- Right. - They're Cypriots, but Greeks and they have a lot, they have a bad neighborhood and they have been existentially threatened by the Turks, especially the present government. Israel's another example. The Kurds are an example. The Armenians are still an example. And all of them have had a history where at times people thought they would be existentially gone, 'cause that was the intent.
And yet we feel that today when somebody threatens to wipe somebody out, either with nuclear weapons, or with convention, we discount that that can't happen. - It's mere hyperbole. - And the epilogue, I think I mentioned maybe a half a dozen or maybe even a dozen direct threats by various Turkish figures, Russian, Chinese, where they actually threatened to destroy and wipe out, whether it's Ukraine or Taiwan, or the Armenians, or Greeks, or Israel.
- And the argument is take that possibility seriously. Because every so often it really does happen. - Every so often, the exception that nobody thinks, the unimaginable, or what people think it can't happen here does happen here. - The end of everything presents almost 300 pages of your usual approach, which is meticulous, thorough and engrossing historical writing. This is television. We can't go into it that deeply.
But I would like to touch on these case studies at least briefly, because even put in summary form, my feeling was as I went through the book, even in summary form, every one of them is just fascinating. - Yeah. - And surprising in some way. Alright, Thebes, the end of everything. I'm quoting you in 335 BC Thebans not only revolted against the Macedonian occupation of Greece, but defiantly dared Alexander the Great to take the legendary city, that is to take Thebes itself. He did just that.
Alright, briefly, the significance of Thebes. It was a major city who were the Macedonians, set it up. Set it up. - Yes. - Who are the Macedonians and who is this brilliant figure who arises as a very young man, Alexander the Great? - Well, for 20 years prior to 335, Philip II of Macedon, - Alexander's father. - Alexander's father had taken a backwater area that was deprecated as uncivilized by Greeks. - The northern mountainous region.
- The mountainous region of today is parts of northern Greece and the autonomous state of so-called Macedon, Macedonia. And he had forged a imperial power he'd borrowed, he was a hostage at Thebes when he was a young man himself. And he learned from the great master of Epaminondas about Greek military tactics. He lengthened the sarissa, he did all of his military. - Sarissa is? - Pike. - Right. - So he innovated and improved on Greek Phalanx warfare, fighting in column, and it was a juggernaut.
And he came from the north and he conquered at the Battle of Chaeronea three years prior to this, he destroyed Greek freedom by this, basically it was an army of Thebans and Athenians and a few other city states. And they were conquered and they were occupied. And there was no longer a truly consensual government in the city, 1500 city states. And he had a plan or an agenda that said, I will unite you. And even though you think I'm semi-barbarous. Macedonian, it was sort of hard to understand.
You could understand that the language and the tradition, but it had no culture, the Greeks thought. But we're gonna unite and take Persia and pay them back for a century of slights and get rich in the process. And the Greeks revolted in 335. He died, he was assassinated and he had his 21-year-old son who had been at the Battle of Chaeronea at 18 and had been spectacular in defeating the Thebes. And they didn't take him seriously. - Thebans or the Greeks? The Greek city states in general.
- Yes. They thought, you know what? - He's a kid. - No, who's gonna take over from Philip II? He was a genius. And he is got bastard children here and concubines there. And he's got this one guy named Alexander and it's don't take, we're gonna revolt. And everybody said, well, we hear about him and he's kind of fanatic, be careful, but we're willing to revolt if you revolt first. And Thebes was at this time legendary because it's the legendary home of Oedipus and Antigone.
It's the fountain of Greek mythology. It has kind of a dark history because bad things happen at Thebes, like Oedipus kills his father or Antigone is executed or- - Not a lot of cheerful stories. - Yes, in Euripides Bacchae, it's under the shadows of Mount Cithaeron. But the point is that it had been under a Epaminondas, a Pythagorean enlightened society, the first really expansive democracy. It was trying to democratize the Peloponnese.
So it was the moral leader at this point, not Athens- - Roughly, how big a population is? - It was small. It was somewhere between 15 and 25,000 citizens, and maybe at most five or 10,000 residents. But it was the capital of what we would call today in English, a province called Boeotia. - Right. - And that probably had somewhere around 150 to 250. And it was the capital that subjugated that. - Okay. - But it had a separate dial. Deepened dialect was different than the Boeotian dialect.
And it was the stellar city. So Alexander then says, if you revolt, we're gonna come down. So he eliminates his enemies, he starts to march. The Athenians are egging the Thebans on and said, don't worry, we'll come and the Spartans are gonna come, both of them in decline. And the long and the short of it is he arrives there, Thebans mock him. They think we can replay the Battle of Chaeronea, we'll win. And all of a sudden when he shows up, they have no idea who he is.
They don't know what he's intending. Had they studied his career, they would see he's a killer. And he is a genius. And he is about ready to conquer the Persian empire. And he needs to have a solid home front. And he means business. And he doesn't play by the rules and the rules of Greek warfare, except for the Peloponnese. You don't destroy your enemy. You don't even Athens after, as it lost the Peloponnesian War, they did not destroy Athens, the Spartans and the Thebans.
So Spartans say they're gonna come, the Athenians are gonna help 'em. They egg them on, they revolt, they kill the Macedonian garrison or they imprison them. And Alexander pulls up with this huge army. You can't get 200 miles from the north in 10 days. You can, if you're Alexander, you march at 20 plus miles a day. He pulls up, they build siege crop, and. - So he, is it fair to say he's a little bit like Napoleon? - Yes. - He's shocking.
- He's quick or Caesar quickness of Caesar, Napoleon audacity, it's like Danton and the Spartans dissipate and the Athenians dissipate. - You're on your own. - You're on your own. And they think, well, this is the seven gates of Thebes, of magnificent walls of Thebes. We've only been broached once after the Persian war. We can endure. We're on the defensive. We've got this wonderful army. We'll go out in front of the, and they are defeated and they think- - Not just defeated, - Not defeated.
They think they can negotiate, I think. And he says, I'm gonna kill every single person that's over the age of 16. I'm gonna enslave every woman and child, but you know what, I will save the descendants of Pindar, the poet, his house, and maybe some religious fines. And he levels the city down to the foundations. And there are no more Thebans. Later the Macedonians will take the site and bring in other people, other Greeks.
And so there is no longer a Theban who have been there for two millennia, they're gone. - They have their own culture, their own history. It is recognized as such by the entire Greek speaking world. And they even have their own, not quite their own language, but their own dialect. - Yes. - And it just ends. - Yes. And some of the surrounding the ocean villages, of course don't like them. So they join Alexander and they haul off the marble columns. They haul off the roof tiles, they level it.
After Alexander's death, some two decades later, they think it's be good propaganda to refound Thebes. And they call it Thebes, which is the modern city today. - Right. - But it's not the same culture. - Not the same. Okay. That's example number one. By the way, do we have from contemporary sources, who would've written that? What effect did that event have? It shocked all the other Greek city states into total submission. - Yes. They could not believe it.
They completely folded. And it was- - So he got the stable home base he wanted that permitted him to advance into. - Yes. And it became, even among the Macedonians, it became a shameful that Alexander had destroyed this legacy city, the fountain, as I said, of Greek mythology and of Epaminondas, the great liberator, his legacy Pythagoras, the Pythagorean group there. And he'd wiped them out and they regretted it later. But at the time, nobody came to their aid. They were very confident.
They didn't think anybody would ever do that. And they were shocked. It was something that had not happened before. - Carthage. - Yes. - Rome and Carthage, the end of everything, your book, the three centuries long growth of the Roman Republic, this is BC with, we're not at Caesar, we're not certainly not close to Augustus. We're seeing Rome grow from a city to the dominant force in the Mediterranean.
The three centuries long growth of the Roman Republic was often stalled or checked by its formidable Mediterranean rival Carthage on the other side of the Mediterranean at the northern tip of northern edge of Africa. The competition between Rome and Carthage involved antithetical civilizations. - Yes. - Explain that. - Carthage was founded about the same time as Rome was, but it was that we used the word, they used, it's an ancient word, Punic.
And all that is a Phoenician transliteration for Phoenician culture. That would be today where Gaza is along that area. This was a colony, colonists founded under the mythical Dido at what is modern Tunisia, right? Just, you know, 90 miles opposite. So narrows point of the Mediterranean - 90 miles opposite Sicily. - Sicily. - Yes. - And they were a Punic Semitic culture. So their language was not linguistically related to Greek or Latin.
They did things that classical culture abhors such as child sacrifice. However, they did, we were heavily influenced by Greek constitutional history. So they actually had a constitutional system. They learned about western warfare from Spartan task masters. And so they fought these series, what we call a Punic war, first and second. Unfortunately for Rome, they were confronted with an authentic Alexander, Napoleon like figure on Hannibal, who took the war home.
- Second Punic war, he goes across into what is now Spain. - Yes. - And it goes be home behind the Roman line. So speak famously, taking elephants up over the Alps and then wreaking havoc- - From two 19 to 202, this war went on. - In Italy itself. - And a series of battles at the River Caecanius, Trebia, Lake Trasimene and Cannae. He killed or wounded a quarter million Italians. And he ran wild for over a decade in Italy until Scipio Africanus
invaded Tunisia and forced him to come home. But what- - I'm giving to defend his home. - Yes. And he lost the Battle of Zama. He was exiled, but that was such a trauma or wound in the Italian mind. It was always Hannibal ad Portas. They scared little kids with Hannibal's at the gates. - Right. - And they were traumatized. So they had given a very punitive piece to the Carthaginians. And they said, you are gonna pay this huge fine, and you can never make war without our permission.
You're gonna surrender all of your European and Sicily colonies. We're gonna have it. And you're gonna be largely confined to the city of Carthage and some satellite villages. - So the Romans, I'm thinking now of a phrase that was used by Madeleine Albright to describe what we had done to Saddam Hussein. The Romans had Carthage in a box. - Yes. - Alright. - That was the idea. - So may I set up the third Punic war here, which brings us to the event to which this chapter is dedicated.
I'm quoting the end of everything. After the first two Punic wars, there was no call at Rome to level a defeated Carthage. And yet Rome attacks Carthage again. - Yes. - Why? - Well, it's very ironic and tragic because they paid the indemnity off early and- - The Carthaginians did. - Yes. - They were the Carthaginians.
- And they discovered that without these overseas colonies and given their prime location in North Africa, you gotta remember that this time, north Africa was the most fertile part of the Mediterranean, much more fertile than the shores of Europe, southern shores. And so they sent a delegation three years earlier to Carthage to inspect what was going on, and how did they pay the fine off. And they were astounded. The city had somewhat five to 600,000 people in it.
It was booming, it was lush. The countryside was lush. They were confident. And unfortunately for them, there was- - And they had one of the great ports of the ancient world? - Yes. It was the Port of Carthage, it's about 20 miles of modern Tunis today was starting to rival Rome again. And yet they professed no bellicosity at all. He said, you know, we have no problem with you. - We've learned our lesson. - We learned our lesson. We're just a mercantile.
They were sort of refashioning themselves from an imperial power to something like Singapore or Hong Kong. - Right. - And Rome unfortunately was in this expansionary mood. They had now consolidated Spain, they had consolidated Italy, they consolidated much of Greece, and soon would conquer all the Greece and Macedon. And they had Cato The Elder. And he got up, you know, legendarily and said, Carthage must be destroyed as the epithet of every speech.
So there was, after the inspectors came back, they said, these people are insidious. They may not have Hannibal, but they're gonna rival us again. - They're doing too well. - They're doing too well. And we've gotta eliminate. There were people in the Romans Senate that said, no, no, don't do that. They don't pose a threat. And actually they're good for us because the more that they're there, they put us on guard and we don't get lack.
The Romans had this idea that affluence and leisure make you decadent. So just the fact that there are right across the Mediterranean means it will always be vigilant. - Competition is good for us, Cato. - Yes. Kind of what Americans used to think what 19th century. So unfortunately, they decided that they would present Carthage with a series of demands that could not possibly be met and still be autonomous. So they sent a group from the Senate down to consuls.
Consuls were, you know, consular army was rare, but they brought two consuls in an army and they landed them there. And they said to them, you're gonna move your city at least 15 miles from the ocean. You're not gonna be a sea power. And if you get mad about it, we are the same way. We're Rome, we have Ostia, we're from inland. No problem. But you're gonna destroy this ancient city, and then you're gonna have to move, lock, stock, and barrel. And by the way, we want all of your arms.
We want your elephants, your famous elephant. They had personal names even. We want your elephants, we want your siege craft, we want your armor, we want everything. And if you're willing to do that, we'll- - You'll live. - We'll consider that the city can live. And they're willing to do that, not to move. They sent a delegation. They said, okay, here's our catapults, here's our body armor and we'll negotiate about the rest. And they came back and they think, I think we're okay.
And then they went back the next time. And the Romans who were camped away with this huge army, he said, you know? - you said that the army, the Romans took an army across the Mediterranean at- - To Utica right near them about 20 miles away. - That was bigger than the landing force in the invasion of Normandy. - Yes. - It was a vast force. - Our sources are somewhat in disagreement, but it could have been anywhere from 70 to 90 to a hundred thousand people. It took us all day to land 135,000.
Us being the British and the Americans. But the Americans themselves did not have as many people as the Romans landed at Utica. - Right. - And so the Romans then told all of the Carthaginian allies on the North coast, are you with us or against us? Because if you're with us, we're gonna destroy them. And you're gonna be a favorite colony. You're gonna get to share in the spoils. We won't tax you. You'll be the guys that run North Africa for it.
If you're with them, we're gonna do to them what- And so most of 'em, not all defect. And then the legates come back and they tell the Carthaginians, we blew it. They're gonna kill us. And now we have no weapons because they were gonna make us move. We thought if we turned in our weapons, they might not make us move. So they bring out a retirement Hasrbal, who's this fanatic, not the famous Hasrbal father of Hannibal, but another named Hasrbal. And he is a complete maniac.
And they had not trusted him. And he says, kill all the legates, anybody who was an appeaser we're in full more. We're going to re-arm. And they do. They get all the women's hair, they make catapults and they go crazy. And then they put a siege around the city. The problem the Romans have is, these walls are until Constantinople, they're the greatest walls in the ancient world. 27 miles of fortifications. Carthage is on a peninsula, and it's kind of like a round circle with a corridor.
And they've got that all area walled and they have a fleet still. And it's very hard to take that city. And the Romans are not known for their siege craft. And they can't take it. And they lose, lose, lose. And they get the new Midian allies to join them. And suddenly after two years, they've lost probably 20 or 30,000 Romans. Sometimes they break into the suburbs, but not the main walls. And it looks like it is an ungodly disaster. And they are very confident.
And then just in the case of Alexander, they don't know who they're dealing with. They bring out of this obscurity, Scipio Aemilianus. And he is the adopted nephew, grand nephew of Scipio Africanus, the famous one. And he is a philosopher, like Alexander the Great, he's a man of letters. He wouldn't do such a thing. He has a Scipionic circle, playwrights, terrains, he's a friend of Polybius the Great historian, just like Alexander has this student of Aristotle.
So he comes and they, he's a legate and he's been there and he keeps saying the consoles are incompetent and they don't know what they're doing. And I should be, but he's a lowly young guy. And they said, you take over. So he comes, he gives a big lecture and says, you guys are pathetic. His soldiers, you're lazy. This is what's going to happen. He has discipline. They build a counter wall. And over the next year he turns out to be an authentic military genius.
He cuts off the city, he cuts off the corridor or he cuts off all of the allies supplying them. And he desieges them. And they will not surrender, but they still have a hope that he's a man of principle. And he will negotiate with 'em and he will give them terms. And he is a killer. And he does not give them terms. And he systematically breaks for the first time and only time in history, the great walls of Carthage. He gets into the city.
And then over a two week period, he is systematically kills every single person that the Romans. In fact, the the descriptions are horrific. - Now, are we still dealing with half a million people or have many of them fled by? - Yes. - No. It's still densely possible. - They have nowhere to go. They're stuck and they're starving now. - So this is an act of butchery? - Yes. - This is like slaughtering cattle or sheep?
- Well, our sources, we have accounts in Diodorus and somewhat in Libya, Polybius fragments here and there. We're told that the Roman army has to scrape off the bodies because they've killed so many people. 'Cause they're in, it's like Gaza or Fallujah or Mosul. It's fighting in block by block. And they're destroying to get rid of the Carthaginian defenders. They're destroying the buildings and they topple and then the bodies are there and then the army can't move.
So they go, go, go until they get to the pinnacle, the capital. And there is Hasrbal and his wife. And of course he flips and cuts a deal with- - I'm on your side now boys. - Skips and he leaves his wife and they burn themselves up. And then he goes, he ends up in retirement in Italy, one of the few people who is endures a Roman triumph and humiliated in the parade. And they let him live. - And they let him live. - And then they wipe it out.
I don't think it's accurate to say they sowed the ground with salt as myth goes. But they did completely declare it a inhospitable place. And it was sacrosanct to even get near it. They took it down to the foundation. There is no more formal Punic center of knowledge. They had a very rich agriculture agronomy literature. It's gone. What happens?
There's remnants of people who in Augustine's time, in the fourth century, fifth century and there's still people who they claim speak Punic, very few of them. And Romans under Caesar, then they make something called Carthago Nova, a new city. But it's a Roman city built on the, somewhat near the old city. - So it's gone. - It's gone. - It's just disappeared. - Gone. Caput. - Alright. I want to get two more stories.
- Yeah. - We probably don't have time to go into as much detail, which is heartbreaking. - Yeah. I won't go. - But well these become a little bit more, so maybe we know a little bit more about them. I mean, maybe listeners will know more. Constantinople, the end of everything. Quote, the most infamous of wartime extinction was the destruction of Byzantine Constantinople on May 29th, 1453. Let me just set this up to go to, so I can do the setup, kind of condense the material a little bit.
We have the emperor Constantine in the very early fourth century, moves the capital of the empire from Rome to this city in what is now Turkey. It's been called Byzantium. He refound the capital as Constantinople, walls get erected, it remains, it becomes a Christian, Greek speaking empire that lasts a thousand years. - Beyond the west. When the west falls a thousand years- - A thousand years after Rome itself falls eighth century AD, we have the rise of Islam.
And now pressure begins to be brought on the Christian Byzantine empire century after century, after century, after century. And in 1453, on May 29th, what happens? - Black Tuesday, I lived in Greece, and on black Tuesday I was awakened by my landlord to make sure that I went to mass or Greek Orthodox services to lament that the emperor Constantine had been marbleized and saved by the archangels. And he was gonna come one day and free Constantinople.
So at around noon, the Ottomans under Met, had brought this - Sultan. - Yes Sultan. And he had his father and everybody had said they're declining. The empire of 20 million is now shrunk down to about a million. And there's only the city of a million people because of the fourth crusade where Christians, western Christians sacked it. It's in decline. And we all we have to do is wait. And it's very lucrative because it's still a beacon of western culture in our area.
So Venetians come in, Genovese come in, they bring in crossbows, they bring in gunpowder. It's very- - You can trade with these people. - Exactly. So most Sultans had let it live and there was actually Turkish people within the city. This movement, the great says, no, no, no, no, no, no. I am 19. I'm gonna destroy this. And he systematically fortifies the Hell's Point, the entrance in the Black Sea. And he takes the Dardanelles, you can't go in or out. And he squeezes it.
And when he surrounds the city, there's only about seven to 8,000 actual combatants of a city, that's no more than 50,000. And he thinks it's gonna be easy. But the walls of Constantinople, the so-called, built by the emperor Theodosus are, they remain the most impressive walls in the world. They were tri-part system. - When you say remain, you mean today? - Yes. - You can go to- - Yes. You see them. There was a mo- - Istanbul and go ahead.
- There's a mound. There was a moat, another mound, and then this so-called outer wall. And then with turrets, 30 feet, 20 to 30 feet high. And then in between a killing space of a plaza where there's nowhere to hide. And then the massive inner walls of 40 feet and gates where they could retreat in. And no one had ever taken, no one had ever taken that. The fourth crusade came in through a fluke on the seaside, but no army had ever, it was like a triangle.
So there was sea on the golden horn, sea on the, on the sea of Marmara. And then the exposed land had the Theodosian walls five to six miles. And they camp out there. And they cannot take it. Even with this reduce, they have these brilliant Genovese that are fighting for them, some mercenaries. They call to Christendom, help us we're the your Christian brotherhood. And they said, nah, you're orthodox and we're not gonna help you. They said they were. - How many forces has Mehmet got?
- It's debatable, but he's probably got 250,000 and probably at least a hundred thousand. - On land? - Yes. A hundred. The whole force is 250,000 and probably a hundred thousand on land. And he's got at least 10,000 cracked Janissaries, the mercenary elite. And they can't take the city. - So that says something about those walls that 7,000 defenders can hold off a hundred thousand. - Yes. And they have the massive, the so-called a Hungarian cannon that was built by a Hungarian huge.
And they have these huge cannon and they knock down holes on the walls at night. The civilians are all mobilized. And then Giustiniani, the famous Genovese merchant gets wounded and he is these- - The leader of the defenders. - Yes. And even though he's Italian, he's a spiritual anchor and he, for some reason, they withdraw the contingent and people say, oh my God, he's withdrawing.
And they panic. And when they leave the outer wall, they don't do it in order to get into the inner wall, they leave the gates open. And then it's every man for themselves. And it's one of the most heart wrenching descriptions in Byzantine literature, we have about 11 different sources in Italian, Turkish, Byzantine Greek. And it's a free for all. And they slaughter everybody.
And 7,000 go into the great church, that you can go to today at Hagia Sophia, they think the archangel is gonna come down and save them. He doesn't. The Janice series break in and it's three days of absolute slaughter wreckage, sort of like the fourth crusade. But the net- - It's more deadly. These are being people, civilians are being slaughtered.
- Yes. Right. And so at the end, after three days, Mehmet and the Sultan, his entourage, realize that we need somebody to run this city because we're not gonna destroy it like Carthage or Thebes. We're going to take a new DNA and use it, 'cause it's a beautiful city and we'll put menoroth. - We could use those walls. We can use that church. - We could use those walls. It's got the best location in the world. We need menorets on Hagia Sophia, we'll turn it into a mosque. So they get a few there.
And that within 50 years, they have wiped out what had one time been 20 million Byzantine Christian Greek speakers in the ancient home. The Celtic Turks who became Ottomans were not indigenous to that area. Something Mr. Erlian today does not understand. This was from time memorial, a Greek speaking area way back. And now it never would be again. - Cardinal St. John Henry Newman referred in this history. He referred to the Turks as the people who had destroyed half the civilized world.
He was very conscious that Byzantine culture represented half of Christendom up until it was gone. Okay, but what is the legend that you referred to at the very beginning? - Constantine didn't die. - That the last emperor. - Yes, Constantine. - Is turned into marble. - Yes, he's marbleized. And he went into a secret chamber in Hagia Sophia, and he was lifted up into heaven and he's in suspended animation.
And in 1920, 21, there was the Megala Iida, the idea that after world war I, Greeks had bet on the winning side and Turks had been on the losing side and they were gonna reform and they got almost to Ankara. And then the Greeks did. - Yes. - And maybe he was gonna come out of Marbleization and they would have Constantinople as the spiritual, political, religious home of Hellenism again. And then of course they were betrayed by the Europeans. They cut off and they were slaughtered.
- So we have, and that is an extinction, well I suppose the most dramatic way of describing how completely it ended. We still have Orthodox, we still have the Orthodox church, we still have devout Greeks who remember that day and shake young Victor awake and saying, you must remember this day with us. You must go to Orthodox Mass. But Hagia Sophia, which was for centuries, the largest church in Christendom is now a mosque.
- Yes. And today, if you or I were to walk along Ionia and see the ancient, the richest part of Hellenism, the ancient or the free Socratic philosophers, the lyric poets were, if we went to Didama, or Pergamum or Ephesus or Miletus, it's Ottoman Muslim culture, Turkish. If we went to Constantinople, especially under Mr. Erdogan, it's there's not current- - Yes. Leader of Turkey. - There're Christian churches are being shut down.
And this was a UN historical site, Hagia Sophia, the Great Cathedral. And now it is a mosque again under his leadership. - Oh, it was a museum. And now it's back to being a- - He took it away from it's UN status and made it into a mosque. And there are no Greeks to speak of, who speak Greek and openly are Christian in all of what was a 20 million person. There is no such thing as Hellenism, or Greek speakers outside of Cyprus and in Greece, except the diaspora say in Europe, the United States.
- Okay. - He extinguished it. - This brings us to the last of these four, which I'm going to try to compress. This is like turning an ox into a bullion cube here. We're engaging in an active compression Victor. (Victor laughs) Hernan Cortes lands in Mexico in 1519. He has 500 soldiers, about a hundred sailors. The sailors climb out of their ships and march with him. So he has 600 men, some horses, some guns. And two years later he destroys the Aztec capital 1521. And, well, let me quote you.
Although they had become familiar with Aztec civilization over the prior two years, the Spanish almost immediately sought to obliterate its religion, race, and culture. In their view, they had more than enough reasons to destroy the Aztec empire. Close quote. Now the book describes the way Cortes does. He's a politician as well as a general. And he discovers that many of the subject tribes in the area hate the Aztecs. So he assembles a force that he can use against the Aztecs.
The history here is rich and fascinating. And it is an astonishing story of how this small Spanish force conquers Mexico. But what I want to get to, this Spaniards had more than enough reasons to destroy the Aztec Empire. Could you explain that a little bit? This was not just raw hunger for land. - No. - It wasn't just gold lust. What else was going on? - Unfortunately, for the (indistinct) Tenochtitlan, the historic capital, it had an empire of 4 million people.
And this was 1492 to 1519 was only 30 years. Not even that. So they didn't really know what, the westerners didn't know what was in Mexico. They'd heard of this legendary civil. - 1492 being Columbus. - Yes. - First encounters the new one. - And Cortes was a minor official. He wasn't a general, he wasn't, he was just, he was an entrepreneur. And he got it in his head that he got temporary permission from the governor of Cuba to form this tiny force and go explore.
But he knew that he wanted to do more than that. So he goes in, he marches and he's entertained. They cannot, they think he's, it's debatable whether they really think he's a God. But they've never seen people with white skin. They've never seen people with armor. They think the horses and the man are one person. They're centaurs. They think the dogs are, they've never seen these mass-steeped dogs before. They've never heard gunpowder before. They have no idea what steel is. Steel.
They use obsidian blades. They don't know what Toledo steel is. They have no idea what the wheel is. They've never seen except in toys. So these guys come and they think they're gods. And then the more they see, they like to eat, they like to drink, they like to have sex, they bleed and they start to get wary. So there's a faction and on the Noche Triste, the sad night of sorrows, they almost get completely slaughtered. And they're chased out. They come back with more soldier.
Never at one time did he ever have in one place more than 1500 soldiers. Unfortunately for the Aztecs, they were not dealing with Plymouth rock and pilgrims. They were dealing with the most warlike deadly Europeans in the world. They were dealing with the Spanish who had just finished the Reconquista and fought for 300 years against Islam. They had been fighting during the Reformation field. They had been in Italy. They had been- - By the way, both of those are religious wars.
- Yes. And the people who came with Cortes were some of the most brilliant, Pedro Alvarado, people like that. Some of the most skilled soldiers. And they had horses and they loved to fight. And they were accompanied by a zeal that was in reaction. It was just the very beginning of the counter reformation. And they felt that their religion was going to be questioned unless they got souls.
They come here and they say, oh my God, 25,000 people are being sacrificed, human sacrifices on the great pyramid. - Now this, by the way, this has become a matter that intrudes into political correctness. - Yes. - And I'm, lord knows, I'm not an expert on this, but in my little lifetime we were taught that the Aztecs engaged in widespread human sacrifice. Then we have a revisionist school that says, well no, wait a minute.
The only authority we on that is the Spanish documents and they clearly overstated what was taking. And now it's my understanding that the archeologists are discovering more and more and more evidence that it was indeed not just occasional human sacrifice, but a regular feature. A daily feature. - Yes. - Of, I mean, it's almost as if in the island of Manhattan, every single day there were some human sacrifices at the top of the Empire State Building. - Yes. Well, the whole we know.
- Is that right or? - No, It's not. - And you insist on that in this book. - Yes. Well, you look at contemporary archeological reports that confirm what Bernal Diaz said or Prescott said in the 19th century, great historian. But more importantly there are pictorial skull racks that can be, that they have numerical records.
And we know that lake, the lake that surrounds it's an island civilization Tenochtitlan was polluted because of a festival where they may have sacrificed 20 or 30 or 40,000 within a four day period. It was something like Auschwitz. And they threw the bodies into the, so I don't think anybody object challenge. What they challenge is, there are anthropologists that say, well, there was no large herbivore.
So there was no source of protein for this sophisticated, systematic, centrally planned economy. And they were very architecturally advanced astronomically. And they needed in this very urban society of a quarter million people. And the Spanish said it was more impressive than Venice. - Right. - Venice at its height, it had a very sophisticated system of law. - No, but the Spanish are not saying these people are barbarians? - No, they're not.
They're saying that they are very sophisticated people, which means that we have, they're even more dangerous because they have spread three, or four things that we think are terrible. They're cannibals. And we know that they did eat portions of the sacrificial, they engage in ritual sodomy, which we don't think is permissible. And they sacrifice humans. And so it's our duty as emissaries of Christianity defined as Catholicism of the Spanish Reconquista period. To kill people, to save them.
We've gotta kill the people who are doing this. And then we are gonna surround all of the people around the lake of the empire who resent being harvested. When they lose, war is not fought to take land. War is fought to get captives. So-called flower wars. So you don't try to kill somebody, you knock them down and tie them up and you drag them. And then the guy that has the most captives is very famous. And then they're brought up to Tempo Major and they're sacrificed. - Right.
- And the Spanish find this horrific, but they also discover that it's in their interest because they're not, when you get Spanish Toledo steel male helmet, especially if you're mounted Toledo blade, arquebus, gunpowder. - They can't capture you. - They can't capture. And they're trying to capture. They're not trying to, if they would just swarm them and cut their throat, they might've won. - Right. - But they're trying to knock them down and talk.
And then they, final thing about it is they don't know who Cortes is. He's more gifted than Alexander in some ways. He's more gifted than men. He's probably more gifted than even Scipio. And he, nobody knows that. He's never had any experience in this. And it turns out he is a natural military genius. And every time they should have been extinguished, they lose. They've got, they're sick, he comes - He finds a way out. - and he finds a way out.
He's an authentic military genius. And he's ruthless. And- - So Victor on the Spaniards wipe out the Aztecs. To what extent, I'm just trying to think, to what extent is that an annihilation of the kind that takes place? In the other examples we have, you know, I have a Mexican friend who said, well, just look around Mexico City. You see very few people of Spanish descent. - Yes. - And millions of people of Indian - Yes. or Aztec descent. They didn't destroy- - Aztec is a key word.
- Oh, is that so? And and the other thing is there is, I checked on this, I went online, there is still a duke de Montezuma. - Yes. - In Spain today. They took the grandchildren of the last emperor of the Aztecs back to Spain. - They did. - And honored them by making, giving and ennobling them. Okay, so. - So. - What gets destroyed? What is ended? - Nahuatl, the language exists in Mexico today.
I have been in my hometown where people who've come from Mexico and Spanish speakers cannot understand them. So, but Aztecs as a city, as a unique culture among indigenous people is destroyed. So when you talk to somebody and you say, well, if somebody says to you, the San Diego Aztecs, they never say the San Diego, you know, the sports team, college team. They never say the San Diego Tlaxcalans or Toltecs because why do they not do that? - Couldn't spell it apart from anything else.
- Because first of all, we have a chronicle of this majestic civilization and how advanced they were, as I said, an architecture town planning, sanitation, very sophisticated. But they don't wanna talk about the downside of cannibalism, human sacrifice. But the point is, if we were transported to 1521, Cortes would've never been able to defeat them without the help of the Tlaxcalans, he had and their allies.
He must have had at least at, he drew on an army of at over that two and a half year period of over 200,000. And they probably lost. - 'Cause the surrounding tribes were tired of being raided for captives who would be sacrificed. - As soon as the word got out that Cortes was back again, that he was not annihilated. He came back. And this time he had brigandines or boats and he would navigate. And that combined amphibious and land attack on the causeways and by land.
And he'd figured out how to beat 'em. And he gave them an ultimatum that I wanna save your city and make it the capital of New Spain. But if you don't, I'm gonna destroy it. That word went out and all of a sudden these fickle allies, it sometimes it helped. They masked. I said, my God, you're going to destroy. - We have a moment here. - And I can pay them back for all the things they did. And they ran wild.
In fact, he says in his letters, and so does contemporary sources that he regretted that once he unleashed these people, they butchered and butchered and butchered and they destroyed Aztecs central civilization. So yes, there are people who survive the Holocaust and that's what it was. But centrally planned civilization with a precinct class and urban center and (indistinct) no, it's now Spain and the Spanish build on top of it, right on top of Tenochtitlan.
And they use the very foundations of the destroy. They destroy it down to the foundations. It's gone. And there is no formal Aztec culture. There are indigenous people of course, 'cause they form about 1% of the population in what is Mexico, Spanish. - And you can go to the Zocalo in Mexico City today. And on the very side of the Templo Mayor, the great Aztec pyramid is a gigantic Spanish cathedral. - Yes. - Which says among other things, what it says is, we won and you lost.
- Yes. And they were actually given special cons. There were concessions given from the Spanish to the Flaxcawans. And they honored them. In other words, that you are not gonna be subject to the same degree of subservience, of the scattered remnants of anybody who fought for the Aztec. - I see. Last questions. You've got a number of themes of relevance to us today. One theme here is the capacity of the doomed for self delusions.
Thebans fail to grasp, the military revolution that's taken place under Philip. They failed to grasp, even though they have some intelligence, they have reasons to question their own judgment of Alexander's ability. They say no, the Carthaginians fail to grasp the change in Roman power and determination over two centuries. The Byzantines cannot bring themselves to imagine that a city that has lasted a thousand years could fall, let alone fall on a day. The end of everything.
I'm quoting you, the gullibility and indeed ignorance of contemporary leaders about the intent, hatred, ruthlessness, and capability of their enemies are not surprising given unchanging human nature. - Yes. - At the beginning of the program, you talked about the plight of the Greeks, you talked about threats against Israel. What are Americans to make of this? - Well, I think we should take these lessons very seriously, both from the point of the attacker and the attack.
Because you mentioned some of the commonalities at the end of the book, I give you a kind of a common denominator blueprint. And people who have not been defeated, or accustomed to a period to a position of superiority, culturally, militarily, they think that they're invulnerable forever. And they're not aware of insidious decline Thebes that Alexander took is not the Thebes of a Epaminondas. And yet the walls look as stout as they ever were.
And the people are the same, they think, same thing with Carthage, the same thing with Constantinople. They said nobody's ever gonna get through the walls. They tried just early, you know, 50 years early, they couldn't do it. We're invulnerable. And people said, well, we're not the same people. They don't think that anybody would ever dream of extinguishing them. We've been here a thousand years. We're the children of Oedipus. To note Shitlan, we've been here.
This is the pinnacle of our civilization, et cetera. Constantinople, this is the city of of Constantine and Justinian. We can't fall. So there's a on reality. And then they have no idea who they're facing. They have no idea what's in the mind of Cortes. They have no idea. - Do we have any idea what's in the mind of Xi Jinping, of Vladimir Putin? - We have no idea. We think that he, we think that Xi thinks as,
I think George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, all bipartisan, they all thought that he is so impressed with Western civilization. He's globalizing, he's changed his economy. Yes, he's rough around their edges, but our leisure, our affluence, globalization will acculturate them and hit China will take their place among the family of nations. - 'Cause of course they want to be like us.
- They want us. And they don't understand that that is exactly what the Byzantine said about the Ottomans. That's exactly what people said about Alexander. That's exactly what they said about the Carthage. And these people don't understand.
So in our, whether it's Putin, so when Putin says I'm gonna use nuclear weapons if I lose and there's been about 17 threats from high members of the Russian military, high members of the Russian parliament, such as it is, and Putin himself tactical nuclear even. We say this is crazy. They would never do that.
We never say, well, if I was going to lose and be humiliated, if I wanted Ukraine, the bread basket of the old Soviet Union and ports on the Black Sea and a window right under Europe, I'd be willing to do a lot of stuff for it. - Right. - And I've done so. - There's an unreal reality. And then on the part of the attacker, they need to understand what the attacker is capable of. I just add one quick thing. - Yep. - I also mentioned the serial threats that China has given Taiwan.
And they even made a brief film about nuking Japan if it interfered calling the war criminal. - The Chinese have. - Chinese commerce. - And they've distributed that in China. - Yes, yes. Just like Erdogan has said that he was gonna send missiles and destroy Athens. He was gonna destroy Israel. He was going, he said, I'm gonna do the same thing to the Armenians. And he just ethnically cleansed a hundred thousand of them. I'm gonna do the same thing as my grandfathers. They had the solution.
So these people are serious when they say this, but I had one line in the epilogue to that effect of what China, and that's a very big market, the Chinese market. And I've had some, a lot of success with other books. - Victor one other of the- - But anyway, just to to- - Yeah go ahead. I'm sorry. - I was given notice by the Chinese publisher. I had to take out that line or there would be no book sales and everything would be canceled. No Chinese translation in the epilogue.
- So they are serious. - And so I didn't do it. And there's not gonna be a book in China. That book will never be in China. - Oh well, alright. Yes. You don't think somebody will, okay, well that's a separate conversation. Another of the themes that strikes me here, war changes things. I'm quoting you again, the end of everything.
Once Alexander grasped the full extent of Theban hatred, he concluded that only destroying the city, rather than merely capturing it would end Greek opposition to Macedonia. Cortes decided there was no way to root out the imperial system without knocking the Aztecs infrastructure down upon them. Such revised decisions are common throughout military history.
Near the end of World War II, US Army Air Corps general Curtis LeMay decided the only way to destroy Japan's dispersed manufacturing, which was deeply embedded within the neighborhoods of Tokyo, was to ignite the city. And we get the firebombing of Tokyo. Again, war changes things. So we are supplying the Ukrainians with weapons of material. We have two carrier groups in the Eastern Mediterranean to support the Israelis. And we have our forces disposed, our naval forces disposed in the Pacific.
We don't know where our attack submarines are because there's no reporting on that. And there shouldn't be. But we're concerned about Taiwan. We're very concerned about Taiwan. What are the lessons of the end of everything for Americans as we face trouble? Military challenges on three fronts. - If we would look at ourselves dispassionately and not say we're Americans, we're always number (indistinct).
We would say the following, we've never had in terms of the percentage of GDP debt or in actual numbers, except for a brief period in World War $35 trillion we owe. And we are borrowing 1 trillion every hundred days. It's completely unsustainable. We've never had the military admit to us that it is short 40,000 troops and they don't know where to get them at a time when the American population has never been larger. - The army missed its recruiting goals last year by 10%.
- Yes. - And that was not the first year. - No. And we have had a porous border. We have never had no border at all. It ceased to exist. We've had 10 million people walk across without audit. We've never seen anything like it. We have the largest number of foreign born residents, both in numbers 50 million and in percentages of the resident population, we've ever had. At a time when we haven't lost confidence in the melting pot. Okay. We've had high crime areas before, high crime periods.
We've never had a period in American history where our elites say that the crime is not crime. It's a social construct. And you have to let somebody, a violent criminal out the same day that he's arrested. That's a new theory, critical legal theory, okay? We're a multiracial society and we're the only successful multiracial democracy. We know that it depends on relegating your tribal affiliations to the general idea of being an American. We are regressing into tribalism.
So when you look at all of these challenges and you look at the symptoms, we have never done anything like Afghanistan, just completely flee and leave $50 billion in weaponry to a terrorist organization that's selling all over the globe. Never had that before. We have never had since World War II, a Verdun, we have passed the numbers of dead and wounded in Verdun. We're above 700,000 wounded, missing or killed Russians and Ukrainians.
And we're headed to Psalm territory and nobody has any idea how to stop this. Russia is not gonna be able to take all of Ukraine and we are not gonna be able to get back the Donbass in Crimea. So it's gonna continue. Nobody has an answer. Nobody takes serious that the Chinese would be crazy enough to go across the Taiwanese Strait and try to take that city. They say they can do it.
So my point is, never have we been faced with such existential challenges in the post-war here at a period when we are so weak, or at least we we're not naturally weak. Our Constitution as there are natural resources, we lead the world. But when you look at crime, when you look at debt, when you look at the border, when you look at our universities, which were the envy of the world, they were the engine that drove American culture and power and technology.
And they're in crisis, sciences in crisis, so. - So we're like Thebans, we're not the same people. - We're not the same people, we're not the same people that maybe we have it in us, we're not the same people who stormed Omaha Beach when the first 2000 people were mowed down, they just kept coming. - Victor, I wanna play a brief video excerpt.
You both work here, you're among the intellectuals who are, you're off stage, the members of Congress are on stage, but they're always turning around saying, Blumenthal, did I get that right? Bridge, what about this? Is this town serious? Do you feel a sense of seriousness descending that is adequate to the moment? - Absolutely not. - Absolutely not. - Absolutely not. - We're in a world of warfare and we're not on a war footing.
- Victor, Washington is, there's no sense of seriousness in Washington. - No. We think that the most important thing is canceling student debt, or an inaugurating new woke programs. But it's gonna take us seven years to replace the Javelin Anti-Tank weapons. We're short, 155 millimeter. That was our signature. We were the biggest producer of shells in the world. - Victor, can I ask one?
The book is called "The End of Everything," and you describe four episodes, all of which take place, the most recent of which takes place about four centuries before the invention of nukes. - Yeah. - So let me quote if I may, here's a quotation from Clausevitz, who saw the Napoleonic Wars as a young Prussian officer and meditated on military theory and the rest of his life. Here's Clausevitz. This has always bothered me.
If one side uses force without compunction, that side will force the other to follow suit. Even the most civilized of peoples can be fired with passionate hatred of each other. The thesis must be repeated. War is an act of force and there is no logical limit to the application of that force. Thebes wiped out. Carthage leveled, Constantinople, civilization blotted out, Aztecs, gone. And now we have nuclear weapons.
- Among other things. We have AI, we have bio weapons, apparently that an accidental release from the Wuhan lab. - So should we, what I'm desperate to do here is to end on an upbeat, if I can find one anywhere. Should we take encouragement from the long period of the Cold War when we had nuclear weapons, but managed to defeat Soviet communism without any use, without warfare, without a major war, without a major confrontation? Should we be cheered by that? - We should learn- - Or are we doomed?
- No, we're not doomed. - Alright. - We need to learn from wise men like Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, even to an extent, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and the rest of 'em, they all had one thing. - You're not gonna mention Ronald Reagan? - Yeah, I'm getting to him. - Oh, all right.
- And in a period of doubt where people had questioned their so-called Neanderthal approach to human nature that they believed the deterrence and not dialogue or the UN kept the peace. Along came Ronald Reagan and he said the, he basically said, the degree which we are safe is the degree to which we help our friends and tell our enemies to be careful because we will defend us and we are gonna have the capability to do it.
Deterrence, deterrence, deterrence, which is just a Latin word to scare somebody off from doing something stupid. And if you don't believe in deterrence, then as Vegeta said, if you want peace, prepare for war. If you want war, prepare for peace. - Victor, will you close our conversation by reading a passage from Victor Davis Hanson, the author of "The End of Everything," reading a passage from "The End of Everything?" - Well thank you to the degree that I can read well.
The fate of Thebans, Carthaginians, Byzantines and Aztecs remind us that what cannot possibly happen can indeed on occasion occur when war on leashes, timeless human passions and escalation rather than reduction in violence becomes a role of conflict. In this regard, we should remind ourselves that we really do not know the boundaries of what may follow from the dispute in the Ukraine or a standoff over Taiwan or strikes on nuclear facilities in Iran.
Like their predecessors, modern attackers will on occasions insist on impossible term. They will sometimes become further enraged by prolonged and toxic resistance. The targeted will believe that doomed resistance may not be so impossible, that their defenses are underestimated while there are enemies, powers are exaggerated and that reason rules war. And so they will hope that even their own defeat cannot possibly entail the end of everything. - Victor Davis Hanson,
author of "The End of Everything." Thank you. - Thank you very much for having me. - For "Uncommon Knowledge," the Hoover Institution and Fox Nation, I'm Peter Robinson. (gentle music)