we are joined on The Daily signal today by Victor Davis Hansen a best-selling author columnist and scholar and historian at the Hoover institution at Stanford University Dr Hansen we're honored to have you back on the daily signal podcast today to talk about your new book The End Of Everything how Wars descend into Annihilation thanks so much for joining us thank you for having me now let's uh start by sharing with our listeners your motivation for doing this book uh very interesting topic kind of in the you know Realm of the events that are playing out in the world today but uh from a historian uh what motivated you to write it well I was wondering I had been I've written a lot of books on military history and I've come across cases where the defeated didn't just become occupied or Surrender unconditionally or have change of governments or suffer Grievous losses but they were completely wiped out and by that I mean it wasn't just their physical space their pop ations of course in the ancient world they enslaved anybody they didn't kill but their language their culture their civilization their religion disappeared within a generation and so for today we don't know much about Punic culture in North Africa or the Aztecs in Mexico and why would and did that happen frequently it didn't happen frequently but what were the conditions under which it occurred and then I have a long epilog trying to speculate if that could still happen given that the Agents of of annihilation uh nuclear biochemical AI are much easier to uh to use than muscular labor of the past well that's certainly true and let's come back to that final point in just a moment but but before we get there uh can you talk about the four different case studies that you examine of of wartime Extinction in the book well in 335 Alexander the Great who had just become king on the assassination of his father Philip II marched 300 miles Southward into occupied Greece the macedonians were occupied because thieves which at that time was the most iconic city of the 1500 city states rebelled and they thought the king wouldn't either the new king would either be killed or he he had claimants to the throne or he was inexperience and what could a 21y old do anyway and he besieged uh the city and then after three days of warning he they thought that the gate seven gated thieves was legendary for its bastions he broke into the city he killed everybody in battle that he could 6,000 he enslaved probably 20,000 and he demolished the city down to the foundation saving only the house of pendor the poet and that was the end of Thieves as a distinct subset of uh helenic culture about 200 years later the the Romans had had enough after a century of fighting the carthaginians they had won the first and second Punic War but they'd always come to terms with it and so after the second one uh they gave them a fine Indemnity payments occupation they had certain protocols all of which the carthaginians met but they sent a delegation to see what was going on and they were shocked that there were 500,000 people in the city it was wealthier than ever and it was on the rebound a third time so the Elder KO famous for saying Carthage must be destroyed carago Dinda asked after every speech they sent a huge Consular Army of about 70,000 people right across the Mediterranean at its narrowest point to modern day Tunisia Tunis and after two years they couldn't do much because the walls were the largest in the ancient world at that time 21 miles they' never been approached but they had a literal genius among the ranks a lowly officer aot named skipio amanus the adopted grandson of the famous africanas who beat Hannibal and uh within about three months he had occupied the city bro broke through the walls uh had killed probably about 450,000 people enslaved the 50,000 destroyed the walls all the way down to the foundation plowed the ground G wiped out all of the satellite Villages or forced the ones that were still uh to survive a great tax and that was the end of Punic culture Punic religion pun Punic script uh Punic government and within about 50 years there was no one in North Africa that knew much about this 8800e civilization and of course Rome founded a new new Carthage about 15 miles away which is the the foundation you can see if you go to Tunisia and then I I tried to look at a different example much later 1453 Tuesday May 29th 1453 Constantinople fell to the Ottomans under the sultan memt II he had a huge Army of 200,000 people below the walls but like Carthage the land walls of of Constantinople had never been breached and they they were almost in penetrol if you look at them the problem was the city was in Decline it had been there for 1100 years it was the center of Greek Christian helenic culture in Asia at one time the Byzantine Empire was 20 million people and they had repulsed all the attacks for two months they didn't think they could break through kind of a chance accident with some of their Italian heal allies one was wounded gustiani and people panicked they broke through the walls and the rest is history and that was the end of Byzantine culture in Asia Minor that had been there as I said before Byzantium actually had been there for Greek culture had been there for 3,000 years and within 30 years all of the Byzantine satellite towns were ethnically cleansed the Ottomans took over the greatest cathedral in Christendom U Santa Sophia made it into a mosque it's now a mosque again and there was uh really no Christian helenic civilization left and there isn't really today either and then finally I looked at Hernan Cortez's storming of uh what is now Mexico City the Aztec city of tanon it was also impenetrable it was like a Venice on a lake uh Empire of four million people and he destroyed it uh within two years never with more than 1500 uh conquistadors he raised the city to the ground or burned it the part that were flammable enslaved who uh the survivors turned loose the allies of Cortez that were very angry that they had been subjects of human sacrifice 20 or 30,000 a year the Aztec sacrific from their subjects and they wiped out most of uh those who were not enslaved and there was no more uh Central Aztec civilization it there were fragments that in some Mountain Villages today in Mexico there's some people who speak naho to it's a descendant of that language but for all practical purposes the Spanish wiped it out in two years that's an outstanding history lesson thank you so much for for walking us through those four examples so it raises the question then which you talked about earlier in what ways are we today in contemporary Society vulnerable to the threat of Extinction well I try to look at a pattern if there was a pattern and I also mentioned a few other examples the island of mos for example as well in past but in all these cases these societies did not realize they were in Decline they did not realize that in the past when they had Wars there were usually negotiations over the Victor between the Victor and the defeated they didn't they had no idea who who Cortez was who skipio was who meem II was who or Alexander that these were killers and they were different sorts than they had encountered before they also had this kind of naive egocentric idea that allies would come to their rescue the Spartans will come and save us um the venetians will come to Constantinople the macedonians will attack the Romans from the rear and they didn't really understand that all allies are self-interested and then finally they didn't understand that these killers destroyers were not like genas Khan or tamarlane they were much they were men of uh education Alexander was tutored by Aristotle skipio milanus had pus at his side the great Roman historian when he destroyed the city me had the largest library in the Islamic World Cortez was a man of letters and so they didn't realize that they had thought deeply about how to destroy that they didn't just come in Kill rape women and leave they they really had an existential plan to erase these cities when you look at today uh there's the same idea that no one would ever do that it couldn't happen here this is this is in the past so I I went through in the epilog and looked at all the threats of Extinction um that we have seen in the say the last 15 years I was shocked it wasn't just Kim Jong-un saying that he wanted to wipe out South Korea and he would but it was plac people like erdoan the reup Eran he is threatened he said not too long ago six about eight months ago that the Athenians the modern Athenians would wake up one morning and there would be a barrage of rockets to wipe them out that was anger over his attempt to take back islands that are Greek off the coast of turkey he said to the Armenians and and we've just at nagar at carabat uh a year ago they ethnically cleansed every Armenian out of ab Aban and there they had been there for a thousand years and he said we we're going to deal with Armenia itself in the way that our grandfathers did and that was of course the destruction of Armenian culture in Turkey uh we know what the Iranians have said there was a very controversial statement by RAF and Johnny about 20 years ago but more that's been reiterated lately that uh in a variety of context that the idea of Israel is the home of devout Jews is actually a gift to Iran because it concentrates devout Jews in one place half the world's jewry is now in Israel but more importantly these are the observant Jews and they are at what RAF and Johnny called a one bomb state that one nuclear weapon could erase uh Jewish civilization itself Putin of course says that Ukraine is an aberration that doesn't really exist as was a province of the Soviet Union uh and the language should be uh obliterated should be reincorporated into Russia and I I I've counted about 16 statements in the press that Russian generals Russian Media or Russian government officials have said if they if the if the war were to continue they would use nuclear weapons in the case of china they have threatened to wipe out Taiwan and destroy the bastard idea of a Taiwan a Taiwanese civilization they say it doesn't exist and uh they've threatened to Nuke as well Japan if it aids Taiwan I only mention that because I've had pretty good luck with Chinese uh Publishers buying books on military history I wrote a book on World War II they purchased but they sent a letter to our my publisher at basic and basically said if I didn't take that sentence out of the book then they were going to cancel the publication agreement and of course I couldn't take it out instead I sent back not just one thread of Taiwan I found about 15 others and I said this is ridiculous you you've done this more than and so they've cancelled the Chinese translation but it's pretty prevalent and the and also the denial you know people on the walls of Constantinople said we can work with a sultan he won't kill everybody and people said Alexander the Great is a philosopher he won't obliterate us like Philip did alenas or something like that and when you see the same denial people get very angry when you you mentioned Putin's threats they said oh he's just Bluster he he would never do that and uh Kim Jong Lon would never do that and I'm not sure that's true history says that the odds are they won't but it's happened and there's no Second Chances when that happens we're talking to Victor Davis Hansen author of the new book The End Of Everything how Wars descend into Annihilation and on that last point I I certainly agree with you it it seems in many respects um so unrealistic but yet you have documented just for us here now uh the many leaders across the globe who are making these types of threats you mentioned earlier in the interview the role of AI artificial intelligence what role do you think technology is playing in either facilitating or even exasperating uh the potential for these um actors to to destroy you know other societies I think we we learned with Co gain of function research that the technology was way was accelerating much more rapidly than the social political economic cultural analysis of how to handle it and there were people who were freelancing like uh Echo Health for example that was giving expertise to the Wuhan lab I think the same thing is true of AI unfortunately I live I work at Stanford right next to Silicon Valley so when I go out and eat dinner at night I often listen to conversations of techies and I know people who give to Stanford Etc I have very little confidence on their moral sense I have a great deal of confidence that they're very Adept in high-tech research like AI so my point is that when we see things like the FBI hiring Twitter contractors to suppress uh news about a laptop in the last election these are the same people the same mentalities that will be in charge of AI and there was I mentioned in the book a pentagon simulation in which they used a computer launch completely directed by an AI program and so they sent a missile on a computer and they programmed every defense mechanism in it possible so as it went into the computer they launched computer simulations of air attacks from aircraft from anti-ballistic missile systems weather problems Etc and then when it was almost over they had the computer kill the launch because it was over well the launch didn't kill it turned around and went back at the launch person because it had been programmed to think spontaneously about a threat so the person who launched the the missile had never thought that the missile would attack him and so they shut down the entire experiment because they realized that they didn't have the capability in the real in the real world of ensuring that an AI couldn't reason or analyze a threat including the person who launched the missile which would be the greatest threat of all if he canceled the missile and aborted it so things like that are pretty scary just like the covid and biochemical Etc and um I I think if you look at what these people said in the past that I was just shocked about the denial monuma said you know we're going to be here forever he was kind of he had visions that the Cortez were some type of deities maybe but he thought he could appease them and the same thing was true of the carthaginians that they they said you know what we we will give up our elephant we'll do everything the Romans won't do this and they and they had no intention of doing anything else other than destroying them so I do think there's people like the Chinese communist government like the government in South Korea like the government in Turkey like the government in Iran who are in a whole different moral Universe than what we think they're in so do you do you think that some of that denial ex exists here in the United States today absolutely I I don't think the average American understands that the Chinese are producing four ships per year to R1 ship or that if you took any of our $15 billion carriers and you put them in the Straits between Taiwan and China they wouldn't last more than an hour given the Chinese have developed missile batteries where they could launch five or 6,000 small missiles that would go about six inches above the water and hit the water line at night and you couldn't stop that uh they are building nuclear weapons at a phenomenal rate they're working on anti-missile defense they have somewhere between they're back up to probably 250,000 students in the United States if 1% are engaged in Espionage and the FBI say it's more than that you've got thousands of people who are appropriating technology uh I don't think anybody understands it it's going to take us six years to replenish Javelin stocks and maybe we can't North Korea is producing more 155 mm shells than we are at least they sent 2 million of them for the Russians so we are not armed and yet our strategic responsibilities our strategic confidence or arrogance has not lessened commiserate with our reduced defense capacity we're 40,000 recruit short now in the military never happened before and when you analyze who is not joining the military it's not blacks it's not Latinos it's not gays it's not women it's not trans people all of those numbers are the same it's the largest group are white males from the lower and middle classes whose families fought in Vietnam First Gulf War Afghanistan but this third and fourth generation are not joining up and uh unfortunately for the military if you look at the casualty or the fatality rates in Afghanistan and Iraq that demographic dies uh at twice their demographics 72 to 74% of all all the dead in Afghanistan in Iraq are white males from the middle and lower classes and yet this is the very demographic that General Millie and Lloyd Austin and testimonies have suggested suffer from White Rage or white privilege and the Pentagon was investigating just those uh kind of Slanders about that demographic and and they found of course in December they quietly issued a report there was no cabal of white supremacist but the point is you can't really have a successful military when you're 40,000 recruits short in just a year you're absolutely right on that point and and thank you for for raising it um one of the things that I appreciate most about your work and we're honored to publish your weekly column at the daily signal and encourage our our listeners and every everyone else who's uh who's viewing this to to check it out uh it's uh it's a phenomenal column and you are one of our most popular columnist because of the topics that you tackle and the historical perspective that you bring so in light of the book um what do you suggest that societies today including the United States learn from those historical examples you gave us earlier in the interview to maybe mitigate some of the risks that uh that we might find ourselves in in the future well I wouldn't I would not put much confidence in uh International bodies or even in so-called close allies the Spartans came all the way up to the theevans and they heard the macedonians they turned right back that on the last day of the existence of Constantinople they were looking out at the walls at the helis Pont thinking that Phoenician galleys and mass would come up and save them so don't I I support NATO uh I don't really think the UN is of much value the only thing that will save the United States is a deterrent military and we don't have that now an overwhelmingly uh large successful smart military and we don't have that we're going to see more of what we saw in Afghanistan what we saw with the Chinese balloon what we see in Gaza and uh I think Americans don't realize that we're on a back of a tiger and we can't get off uh because we set up the post-war world and we had the pretentions of saying to the world you can go in the Red Sea you can go in the Black Sea you can go in the straight of Hormuz you can do all that and you won't be injured that was a wonderful thing to do but if you're going to have those pretentions that you're going to have a post-war order you have to have a military that from time to time takes care of the hooes or gets rid of Soloman and uh doesn't mean you're going to be a neocon interventionist but I think under Trump and Pompeo they had a uh I guess you would call it a Jacksonian idea that there would be no better friend in the United States and No Worse Enemy and we did not want to get involved in optional military um Adventure but we would be very very tough on our enemies and then the tougher we were the less we would have to do it once we reestablish deterrence so we've lost deterrence and uh that can be achieved militarily economically politically but we've lost it in every category and it's going to be very very dangerous to to reestablish it uh thank you for that answer sir you recently had the opportunity to speak with Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts in California about a variety of topics and I I just like to to close on on this point uh how much is at stake and what is at stake this year in 2024 as it pertains to the future of this great country of ours well everybody says each election is you know the most important but I can tell you that this election is more important than 2016 and 2020 because we have never in my lifetime we've never seen a Democrat the Dem ratic part they always say the Republican party was taking over Maga but you look at 90% of the magga agenda and it's traditionally low taxes small government strong defense closed borders but the Democratic party as we're seeing with Colombia and all these student protests they are a revolutionary party they do it's not that they believe in a porest border they believe in no border it's not that they believe in light sentencing they don't want to sentence anybody they don't want to bail have bail they don't believe that there is a such a thing as deterrence the way we got out of Afghanistan they believe in radical climate change if you you can show them data you can show them all sort they don't care they want to ban combustion engine they don't want fossil so this is a a group of people as we're seeing in this split screen with Donald Trump charged with this ridiculous misdemeanor bootstrapped onto felonies uh at the same time people are entering with violence into a Colombia building and they and as one of them said the other night they will be out in 24 hours I don't think they're even in jail as we speak they're already out so I guess what I'm saying is we're in a revolutionary Jack ofan period kind of a reign of terror and I don't see it stopping unless I don't think the election of Donald Trump will be enough you'll have to elect the Senate Donald Trump and enlarge the House Majority and then they're going to have to act very quickly to stop it to restore the border to restore deterrence to restore deterrence against criminals to get back our preeminent position economically to stop this $1 trillion dollar borrowing every hundred days um it's we're in bad shape and uh so in every category and I think whether we like I know there's a lot of never trumpers out there but whether whatever problem they have with Trump's temperament it just pales in comparison with the ideological revolutionaries that are in there now and want to if Biden is reelected what we saw the first term will be nothing it'll be enhanced to a magnitude it'll be so much greater so I'm really worried about this election especially the Integrity of the balloting and turnout and all of those other issues well we appreciate that perspective and there are several reasons to be concerned which is one of the reasons why we appreciate people like you uh for bringing it to our attention and making sure that we're focused on the right challenges um and thank you for spending time with the daily signal today again we've been talking to Victor Davis Hansen he's the author of the brand new book called The End Of Everything how Wars descend into Annihilation you can find it wherever books are sold or online and uh make sure you check out his weekly column with the daily signal thank you so much sir for visiting with us today thank you for having me
