0:05

A couple of years ago, I did a military

0:07

history series with co-host James Early called Key Battles

0:09

of the Civil War. And

0:11

we ended the series by looking retrospectively at the

0:13

effects of the Civil War in the United States.

0:16

And we said that the modern United States

0:18

are basically an outgrowth of the Civil War.

0:21

We're industrial, not agrarian. We're tightly

0:23

knit federal republic rather than a

0:25

constellation of states. Now, one

0:27

of the questions we got to but didn't

0:29

really dive into was how do we remember

0:31

Confederate soldiers? How do we remember

0:34

Confederate generals? This was during a time period

0:36

when there was strong debate about whether or

0:38

not statues of Confederate generals should come down

0:40

in city squares. And James and

0:42

I didn't really get into that issue. We mostly

0:44

said that it's best if local communities

0:46

decide that and if they have a referendum and

0:48

decide to move them, then it's a collective decision

0:51

that really needs to be localized as much as

0:53

possible. What we didn't get into

0:55

was the much larger question of how do

0:57

we understand past historical figures? How

0:59

do we judge anyone who, if you get back

1:02

more than one or two generations, will have an

1:04

alien valuable system to us? How

1:06

do we celebrate someone who did good for humanity when

1:08

they may have lived two or three hundred years ago,

1:11

may have owned slaves in the case of many

1:13

of the founding fathers, and may have

1:15

done and said things that would have been reprehensible

1:17

today? How do you separate

1:19

someone who was a product of his

1:21

time yet contributed to the universal good

1:24

of humanity and someone who is understood

1:26

as being universally corrupt or evil like

1:28

Emperor Nero or Hitler? I

1:30

can't imagine a case where he'll be rehabilitated five

1:32

hundred years ago. And I don't

1:34

want to imagine that. Well, today's guest

1:37

is going to help us dive into that question.

1:39

And he is Victor Davis Hanson. I'm

1:41

very excited because Dr. Hanson is perhaps one of

1:43

the most qualified people to tackle this question. He

1:46

was one of the earliest guests on Dan Carlin's

1:48

Hardcore History. He's also a

1:50

retired classics professor. Professor

1:52

Meredith at Cal State University, Fresno. He's

1:54

written books on everything from the Peloponnesian

1:57

War to comparing Julius Caesar in a

1:59

bowl of Agent Alexander the Great

2:01

to determine who is the greatest military leader.

2:03

He's a fellow at the Who Are Institute

2:05

and was awarded the National Humanities Metal in

2:08

Two Thousand and Seven. He was also in

2:10

two Thousand Seventy Thousand A On the American

2:12

Battle Monuments Commission says a questionnaire year to

2:14

sort of all sorts of things of this

2:16

episode such as one is a good when

2:18

set is removed. For example, people celebrated the

2:21

top one of Saddam Hussein such as in

2:23

Iraq in Two Thousand Three and One is

2:25

it that how do you just people from

2:27

the passer determine when they do and say

2:29

things. Are inexcusable today are actually excusable in

2:32

the long arc of history and other Sure

2:34

it was a danger of writing off people

2:36

if they don't me or Twenty first Century

2:38

Centered on the flipside, what is the danger

2:41

of Slavic worship for someone who actually I

2:43

a sucker Hansen Is there any people who

2:45

deserve to have more statues of of housewares?

2:47

Who without the that is is very well

2:50

as the discussions that also a timeless question

2:52

of how do we understand of them have

2:54

enjoyed this discussion and sector things as thousand.

2:59

And one more thing before we get started with this

3:01

episode, a quick break for work from our sponsors. Something

3:05

which is known as a better way to do. Things

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like bundling a home and auto insurance

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happy to the maximum available savings of the home policy

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Also, vehicle. In Property insurance company and Affiliates not like

3:33

Illinois. Doctor

3:38

Hansen walking to the show. And we

3:40

were having me. I'm really glad

3:43

you're here because we're going to discuss

3:45

something that listeners have been discussing and

3:47

asked me about for the last few

3:49

years regarding. How. We remember our

3:51

past. How do we honor? predecessors?

3:54

Or evaluate them in light of.

3:56

The question of removing statues and thus

3:59

began an exploit. The seventy what Confederate statues

4:01

and as I picked up steam with. Protests

4:03

and riots and everything else. And

4:06

you are classics professor your neither of books

4:08

on topics such as. The. Fall Season

4:10

War Were assessing whether Caesar, Hannibal, or

4:12

Alexander was that ancient world's best military

4:15

leader. Of the. Are also a social

4:17

and political commentator on modern events. So.

4:20

What sort of of the question? A statue

4:22

removal? Since this is one of the central

4:24

features of the debate in the last three

4:26

to four years about. How we in

4:28

the twenty for certainly rightly or wrongly under center

4:30

on past. So. Sometimes and

4:33

of we as Americans have celebrated

4:35

statue removal. Such. As the

4:37

removals Saddam Hussein statues after the fall

4:39

of his regime in Iraq. in two

4:41

thousand and three. Or. The

4:43

removal as Marx and Lenin statues in

4:45

Eastern Europe and Ninety Ninety One. And.

4:48

I would in Budapest for a couple of years and

4:50

there are many places where are those old statues of

4:52

and replaced. But. Today many

4:54

are worried about the removal of

4:57

statues of Jefferson or Roosevelt's. Some

4:59

celebrate, that's are concerned. Or.

5:01

Their concern about her toppling and rights. So.

5:03

How do you described the difference

5:05

between our celebration of statue removals

5:07

and our concern about statue removals.

5:10

Think. We make a mistake when we say

5:12

it's kind of a role of a

5:14

relativist enterprise. In other words, that one

5:16

man's terrace is a mountain, other men's

5:18

your or one man's hero. And nineteen

5:20

ten, it's not twenty to him. By.

5:23

That I mean within latitude of

5:25

people have independent judgment and there

5:27

is truth in the world and

5:29

you can distinguish like that. Where

5:31

I'm at Thomas Jefferson. Even. Do

5:33

that and variety of ways you can

5:36

count the body so you can count

5:38

the nature of their advocacy Be soupy,

5:40

government or race except for and you

5:43

can also judge the what degree they

5:45

were captives of their own age or

5:47

they look forward. In. Time

5:49

and to universal standard. So.

5:52

There are differences and different differences

5:54

among new and weekend adjudicate those.

5:56

The number two is the manner

5:59

in which the room removed. And

6:01

that is is a statue toppled in

6:03

the dead of night. Is it

6:05

a work of a mob? or

6:07

is it done by petitions and

6:10

redress? Fill a city council or

6:12

plebiscite? a referendum? And. Out

6:14

of that, and mm, who? Within.

6:17

Supposedly. Uniform Groups of

6:19

people that say example Confederate

6:21

general are they all Confederate

6:23

generals without individuality is James

6:26

Longstreet. Who. Was

6:28

a wreck and celia door after

6:30

the Civil War and join the

6:32

Union government and the help free

6:34

blacks protect themselves as you to.

6:37

Same as Nathan Bedford Forrest, the

6:39

supposed villain of for hello There

6:41

there's a difference. So I think

6:43

the the measure that we use

6:45

is to look at every particular

6:47

individual and not as a part

6:49

of a larger cause. Recruit necessarily.

6:52

And then the be Some people

6:54

feel offended by that the continuing

6:56

presence of an icon. To.

6:58

What degree is They seek

7:01

to remove that statue legally

7:03

or through a process. Rather,

7:05

Than just do mob rule and alphabet

7:08

conundrum. I. Think you can have

7:10

a systematic approach to it? If.

7:12

You don't like Robert, a Lady

7:14

in Van mobilize people to vote

7:16

in a referendum or mobilize the

7:19

city council to both. And.

7:21

Then people who are upset about it. They.

7:23

Will cease being upset with that can make

7:25

at least and see them in a republic.

7:28

The majority. Of

7:32

to make a better case and the next decade

7:34

Li is tragic cure or rather than a villain

7:36

and and see if and get a statue back

7:38

up. And. That happens a lot. and

7:40

in Rome, remember the dumb naughty Or memorialize.

7:43

They. Just removed face was such an

7:45

expense to karma marble statue of an

7:47

Emp. In. Emperor or prefect

7:49

or liga had our provincial official

7:51

that you can. Take. Away

7:53

his face and leave the body and then put on

7:56

a new face. And. That happened a

7:58

lot. In so. Iconoclasm.

8:00

As a sort of a it's a

8:02

frequent. Phenomenon. In world history

8:04

were today's heroes become villains and

8:07

vice versa. The Forum: It touches

8:09

upon a larger problem as the

8:11

criteria by which she was I

8:13

said damn, somebody is on where

8:15

they have been. I. Kind

8:17

of surprised and that depends

8:19

on a mixture of modern

8:22

and contemporary sensibilities, but I

8:24

think the primary activity there

8:26

should be degree was of

8:29

person. A captive of

8:31

his age. Or. Had

8:33

some notion that there were

8:36

universal principles that transcend. And

8:39

in some cases. I. Think

8:41

that would separate a Jefferson.

8:43

Or Washington. Or any

8:46

of the founding fathers who may

8:48

have had slaves it's own by

8:50

themselves or their families. From

8:52

some other people have that same period.

8:55

That really gets to the heart of the matter

8:57

and. It's important to know, as

8:59

I'm sure you're well aware that were

9:01

not the first to grapple with this

9:03

question of how do we assessed those

9:05

in the past and how do we

9:07

separate morals that are as place and

9:09

time versus universal morals. And I

9:12

wonder how did ancients and pre modern understand

9:14

her own past? I was looking a different

9:16

room and chroniclers of emperors and I think

9:18

it was you tony us as trying to

9:21

find exact passage and I couldn't locate it

9:23

by. I believe that he said something along

9:25

the lines that it's not a worthwhile endeavor

9:27

to judge earlier emperors or states when by

9:30

morals and said a report on what they

9:32

did because it's almost impossible not to impute

9:34

our own morals into that, and that's as

9:36

best as I can remember. But how do

9:39

you from what you've read and research, did

9:41

Ancients. Imprimatur. It's judge others who came

9:43

from an earlier time period. The

9:46

first. Thing we hit as they didn't have

9:48

of oh a sense of progress that

9:50

we differ in the post industrial age

9:52

so they didn't feel that they are

9:54

particular generation. Was. Inherently

9:56

better. They

10:00

either believed in there was a cycle

10:02

of golden age, from

10:04

iron to bronze, to silver to gold, and

10:06

then back again, or

10:08

paradise lost, or something

10:11

that had vanished. Part

10:13

of that was their history that they were

10:15

aware of it, say, in the case of

10:18

the Greeks of a Mycenaean age. They didn't

10:20

call them Mycenaeans, but they saw the monumental

10:22

remains and occasional linear V-table in the Dark

10:24

Ages, and they understood they couldn't do that.

10:26

They didn't know how to write, and they

10:28

couldn't ever put up a lion's gait or

10:31

a phtholus to them, so they romanticized the

10:33

past, the Age of Heroes of Achilles and

10:35

Ajax, which were probably names that came down

10:37

in the oral tradition from

10:39

Mycenaean provincial officials. But the point

10:41

I'm making is that when you

10:43

have a society that believes that

10:45

you're not the end of every...you're

10:47

not the end, and you're not

10:49

improved necessarily, but you're vulnerable, then

10:51

they're less likely to judge the

10:53

past negatively based on the improvements

10:55

of the present. They

10:58

also had a lot deeper

11:00

appreciation of past generations, the

11:02

mores of their forefathers, and

11:04

so they were very careful to

11:07

acknowledge that their present

11:09

affluence, luxury, stability

11:11

to such as did exist, it was

11:13

not due entirely to themselves. That

11:16

gave them a greater sense of gratitude, not

11:18

that they didn't pull down statues in Rome, but

11:21

they were more tolerant of the

11:23

imperfections of the past. You

11:26

can see that in the first book

11:28

of these cities when he talks about

11:30

in the past, there were tribes and

11:32

then slowly civilization emerged, or Aristotle and

11:34

his politics about the rise of a

11:37

middle class and hoplites and

11:39

small landowners and stuff. So they

11:41

understood that their present system in large

11:44

part was due to somebody else. The

11:46

difference in the modern age, I think,

11:48

is that we've been bewitched by technology,

11:51

especially 21st century technology,

11:54

i.e. if somebody has an

11:56

iPhone, it can access most

11:59

of modern knowledge. within a few seconds

12:01

in the palm of his hand, therefore

12:03

he thinks the culture that created that

12:05

must be superior to other

12:07

cultures that couldn't create it without

12:09

any acknowledgment that the road

12:12

of science and technology is incremental and all

12:14

of those elements that he enjoys

12:16

in the palm of his hand in some

12:18

part were due to prior discoveries,

12:21

experiments, hit and

12:23

miss lives that were invested in technology

12:25

and science. But we

12:27

tend to say that because we

12:30

have a materially superior lifestyle

12:32

to all of those

12:34

who came that we follow, then

12:36

we're better. And the second thing

12:39

is we're self-centered as

12:41

a result of that generation. So we

12:43

never quite believe that the standards of

12:45

the present that we impose on other

12:47

people will boomerang back to

12:49

us in the sense that future generations

12:51

will use their standards, which made me

12:53

very different than our own to judge

12:55

us and judge us negatively. We're

12:58

not aware of that. And we think that

13:00

the trajectory or the road of civilization

13:02

is always to be wealthier and always

13:04

to be more liberal and more tolerant

13:06

and more ecumenical. Maybe

13:09

not. But say

13:12

in, I don't know, 2090

13:14

or some generation is going to look back at us and

13:16

say, wow, these will

13:18

be way you aborted 60 million

13:21

fetuses, but each year you did it, there

13:23

was a mark in advance and

13:25

viability of a fetus, i.e. a baby outside

13:27

the womb, and yet you paid no attention

13:29

to it. Or you

13:32

have a million homeless people that

13:34

are defecating and urinating and injecting

13:36

and fornicating right on the

13:38

streets of your major cities. Or you have

13:41

800 African American people that slaughtered each other

13:43

in Chicago and you didn't do anything about

13:45

it, things like that. And

13:47

we could be very severely judged by

13:50

our future generation and call slaves

13:52

to our appetites an amoral, but we don't think

13:54

of that. And So

13:56

that type of attitude makes us very

13:58

prone to be self-righteous. The sanctimonious

14:00

and judgmental past generation. And.

14:03

Then finally. It's always salutary

14:05

to say what would I do in

14:07

the past. How many Americans

14:09

could get on a covered wagon and

14:11

go across the Organ Trail without eyeglasses?

14:14

Maybe. If. They had vision deficiencies

14:16

or without vaccinations are without clean

14:18

water or without refrigerated food or

14:20

but have seen your children die

14:22

of yellow fever, typhoid and then

14:24

going some ways and now I'm

14:26

studying and working seventeen hours a

14:28

day. Eat one more day. And

14:31

so you have this other disconnect as

14:33

the people who were doing that as

14:35

a the iconoclasm with the present and

14:37

the name, counseling and. Council.

14:39

Culture often. Or

14:41

elites and they often com and are

14:44

driven are inspired by universities in get

14:46

those are the most antithetical places to

14:48

the subjects of their disdain. And

14:51

I don't. Ah is someone who spent forty

14:53

years and academic. I can tell you that

14:55

the vast majority of people that I matt.

14:58

It would not know how to

15:00

fix our broken pipe under their

15:02

house or defective circuit breaker. Or.

15:04

To ride a horse or to chainsaw

15:07

farm lemon aerobics? Don't know you're an

15:09

out. And yet they're judging

15:11

people to whom that was second nature.

15:14

And so I don't think they're up to

15:16

the physical or deal and we forget the

15:18

circumstances of the power. It's usually until about.

15:20

Oh night twenty it's usually of.

15:23

Homs in solitary, singular,

15:25

nasty, brutish and short

15:28

life. Excellent point.

15:30

Added something that. I. Have to

15:32

constantly work on and I try to help

15:34

my audience with putting themselves in a place

15:36

of the passed since it's essentially everything. More

15:38

than three generations ago was a couple a

15:40

foreign country. Where. As as you describe.

15:43

Somebody. From nineteen Hundred would easily recognize

15:45

something from are not easily by be

15:47

somewhat acquainted with somebody from one thousand

15:49

or two thousand years ago. Whereas.

15:51

Today, we can scarcely mechanized things from

15:53

one or two generations ago. So.

15:56

Get into one of the crux of the matters

15:58

is how do we. Judge. those

16:00

of the past and determine character flaws that

16:02

are due to the accident of their

16:05

birth while there are other

16:07

character flaws that are universally condemning.

16:09

So, what would make, say,

16:11

a slave owning Jefferson a product of

16:14

his time while, say, a

16:16

Nero would be someone that is universally

16:18

understood as cruel? Well,

16:20

I think the word you

16:22

said was universally. And by that

16:24

I mean, what did people think of

16:26

Nero at the time he lived versus what did

16:29

people think of Jefferson? I mean, there were

16:32

pretty tough invective between Adams

16:34

and Jefferson, etc., and Hamilton.

16:37

But more or less when Jefferson died, people

16:39

had reference for him and they had

16:41

understood his contribution. When

16:44

Nero died, from what we know

16:46

from Sputonia's life and what we

16:48

know from Tacitus' annals

16:51

and what we know from

16:53

later historians and contemporary epigraphy.

16:56

And I think you can make the argument that the

16:59

patronius who wrote the satirical

17:01

is patronius arbiter, the arbiter

17:04

elegante of Nero. And

17:06

that novel is really an allegory to

17:08

maybe Trimalchio as Nero. But from all

17:10

that evidence, we can understand that he

17:12

was roundly despised. I know there's

17:14

revisionist moment in history, historians that look at

17:17

hard data and say, well, economically

17:19

they are in terms of infrastructure

17:21

or road building. He was a

17:23

good emperor perhaps, but he

17:25

was roundly despised when he died. And he

17:27

touched off the year of the four emperors

17:30

in a period of... And that's

17:32

in contrast to Augustus for all

17:34

his flaws. He was pretty

17:36

much revered when he died. And you can

17:38

make the argument to a lesser extent of

17:41

Claudius and maybe not

17:43

so much of Tiberius, but a

17:45

great deal of somebody like Titus

17:47

and Vespasian, but not Domitian.

17:50

And I think that

17:52

reputation transcends a

17:55

particular individual historian. It's the

17:57

aggregate of historical opinion. And

18:00

you can look at news mathematics,

18:02

coins, statuary, art, archaeology, and

18:04

out of all of those sources, you can

18:06

get a sense that people of the time

18:08

had a particular opinion that we

18:11

in the present have to respect. And

18:13

that makes Jefferson different, I think, than

18:15

a Nero. And then there's an absolute

18:18

standard, and that transcends time and

18:20

space, and that's dependent on sources.

18:23

But did Jefferson Strangler kill

18:25

his wife? And equituitously

18:28

kill slaves? Did

18:30

he do the things that Nero

18:32

did in a variety, or Caligula,

18:35

or Commodius, in a variety of sources?

18:38

I think the answer from what we know of our sources is no. And

18:41

so what I'm getting at, there

18:43

are various dimensions and approaches that

18:46

we can form a complex historical

18:48

picture that differentiates one person from

18:50

one time from another and another

18:52

time. But that's all loss. It's

18:54

lost because of two

18:57

reasons. One is ideological zeal

18:59

that trumps empiricism, that

19:01

if you say this person's a sexist, or

19:03

he was a racist, or he was a

19:05

bigot, then bang, we just very

19:09

cheaply and easily don't have to do any research.

19:11

And the second is that we're increasingly

19:14

historically ignorant, not just

19:16

in facts and data about the past,

19:18

but in the methodology which we discover

19:20

those facts about. And so, for

19:22

the students, I can tell you of somebody, as

19:24

I said, four decades. If I look back four decades

19:26

ago and I look at freshmen at

19:29

a public university who came in and how well

19:31

they were when they came in and how well

19:33

they were trained when they left, there's

19:36

absolutely no comparison today with

19:38

that generation 40 years ago. It's not

19:40

even close. And

19:43

so this generation that is fortified

19:45

and fueled and speeded up, if

19:47

I could use that vernacular by

19:49

technology, Facebook, Twitter, Google, Internet, etc.,

19:52

they accelerate or they emphasize their

19:54

ignorance because they have an opinion

19:56

almost instantaneously about everything. It's

19:59

usually... geared to group consensus,

20:01

mob-like approval. If a person's on their

20:03

own, they feel inferior, they

20:06

feel vulnerable because they don't have the independent

20:08

judgment or the training to make an argument

20:10

against the majority. Hey,

20:14

everyone, Scott here. We're gonna take a short break for

20:16

a word from our sponsors. Some

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people just know there's a better way to do things,

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20:53

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20:56

yet, they were just as human, just as

20:58

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21:00

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21:02

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21:04

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21:07

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21:09

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21:11

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21:13

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21:17

This American President

21:19

on your favorite

21:21

podcast platform. You mentioned a

21:23

good point in light of some people speaking positively

21:26

of Nero that he built

21:28

up infrastructure. And that's an

21:31

interesting thing I'm seeing in revisionist accounts

21:33

of historical figures where they'll

21:35

look at the positive aspects that are

21:37

often incidental to the bulk of their

21:39

reign. A book I've picked on a

21:41

lot in the show is Jack Weatherford's Genghis Khan and

21:44

the Making of the Modern World, where he

21:46

credits Genghis with international trade

21:48

networks, religious tolerance, diplomatic immunity,

21:50

paper currency, all these things

21:53

would say, yes, they happened, but I don't

21:56

think they were out of some grand program

21:58

of acceptance. I think it was more... It

22:00

was the most effective way to

22:03

run a Eurasian Empire and also

22:05

doesn't gloss over the 50 to

22:07

100 million people that he and

22:09

his sons and their grandsons killed

22:11

in their wholesale conquest. So,

22:15

I want to talk about the dangers of

22:17

writing off historical figures that don't meet our

22:19

21st century standards. But on

22:21

the flip side too, the dangers of

22:24

slavish worship of certain figures. I lived

22:26

in Turkey for years and auto-Turk

22:28

there is still widely beloved, maybe a little

22:31

bit less so recently. But one

22:33

of my professors from Russia said it reminded

22:35

him of growing up and going to Soviet

22:37

era marches with pictures of Stalin and Lenin.

22:39

That's what it evoked in his memory. So,

22:42

on both sides of that, what do you see

22:44

as the dangers of total rejection and also hagiography

22:47

of different historical figures? That's

22:50

largely a phenomenon of non-democratic

22:52

or non-free or non-transparent dieting

22:54

because in a constitutionally public

22:57

or democracy or whatever term

22:59

we use for consensual government,

23:02

there's always going to be dissidents and they're

23:04

always going to have access to the media

23:06

and to forms of communication. So all

23:08

of our heroes in the West will have feet

23:11

at play, every one of them, in the virtual

23:13

goal at times and depending on

23:15

popular moods and tastes that

23:17

are often transitory. But

23:20

when you talk of Attaturk, and I

23:22

was a frequent visitor to Turkey in the 1970s and 80s,

23:26

even then before the Islamization and

23:28

the automization of Turkey, it was

23:31

a military dictatorship.

23:34

And so Attaturk then in

23:36

that particular phase of

23:38

Turkish life was considered the

23:40

modernizer, the person who was secular,

23:42

the person who gave us the modern

23:45

script, the person who eliminated

23:47

the clothing, the fashion, the

23:49

customs of the decadent and

23:52

ossified Ottoman. But

23:54

there was no free discussion of

23:56

ideas. So that's a problem

23:58

for a Soviet regime. Russia or

24:01

Nazi Germany or a

24:03

non-democratic Turkey, but it's not so

24:05

much a problem in the West. And yet in the

24:07

West, there's much more of this cancel

24:09

culture because there's a free

24:11

society and it's on discipline. And that's

24:13

good in many ways, but

24:16

that doesn't exist in those countries.

24:18

And then I wouldn't note

24:20

though, in free societies on the Left, especially,

24:23

when they cancel people, they

24:26

have this theory now that you have to

24:28

be perfect to be good, that one flaw

24:30

in a person's character then wipes out.

24:33

And you mentioned this connection with Rome

24:36

wipes out their entire good

24:38

traits, but it's unequally

24:41

applied. So according to

24:43

the Left, if you were

24:46

abusive to women or

24:48

you plagiarized or

24:51

you were unfaithful to your wife,

24:54

then you're relegated to the junk heap of

24:56

history under the tenets of feminism. But I

24:58

just quoted something that we know from a

25:01

variety of biographies Martin Luther King

25:03

suffered from. He was

25:05

abusive to women. He was

25:07

the chronic adult herb. He plagiarized

25:10

his thesis and yet he was a

25:12

great American. He did a wonderful thing.

25:14

And so do we

25:16

say that...do we allow those concessions to

25:19

other people or is it only to

25:21

people that we feel were

25:23

champions of our versions of social

25:25

justice that we overlook flaws

25:27

and we say, you don't know, these are just

25:29

personal indiscretions. They don't undermine his

25:31

contribution to society as a whole, but

25:33

we don't extend that. So what

25:35

I'm calling for is that

25:38

whatever your particular standards are,

25:40

the first and most important

25:42

tenet of them has to

25:44

be uniformity across ideological boundaries

25:46

and politics. I

25:48

wonder if there are any historical figures that

25:50

you used to hold in high regard but

25:52

now think less of or vice

25:54

versa. To give you an example, what I

25:56

thought of is Christopher Columbus. Now,

25:59

I used to be... much more bullish on him.

26:01

I have a soft spot in my heart for travelers

26:03

and explorers. And I don't think

26:05

less of him for the stock reasons I

26:07

think most people do, where they're unfairly linking

26:09

him to the inauguration of the Atlantic slave

26:12

trade. I think that's a process that existed

26:14

independent of him and was far more complicated

26:16

than we have time to get into. But

26:19

I see it more as, yes, he was

26:21

a symbol of the United States or America

26:23

more broadly. Columbia in the

26:25

19th century, she's visualized as a

26:28

goddess like female national personification of

26:30

the United States and of liberty

26:32

itself named after Columbus. And this

26:34

is comparable to British Britannia or

26:36

the French Marianne. And you see this image

26:38

live on in Columbia pictures of the woman

26:40

holding up the torch. But

26:42

it seems now that his true

26:45

popularity was linked to the immigration

26:47

of Italians to America and the

26:49

development of an Italian American identity.

26:51

And when presidents would celebrate Columbus

26:54

Day, they would typically couple that

26:56

with discussions and mentions of the

26:58

contributions that Italian Americans have made

27:00

to the United States. So for

27:02

what Columbus did, the discovery I respect him, but I

27:04

see that his holiday and the

27:07

celebration that developed in the last 100

27:09

years isn't something that's a 500-year process,

27:11

but a little bit more recent. So

27:13

anyway, I just wanted to set that up by way

27:15

of example. So are there any figures like that that

27:18

you think more of or less of over the years?

27:21

There are, but let me ask you a question. You feel

27:23

the same thing about Harriet Tubman that your your

27:25

views have changed about her because

27:27

she's now a national icon among

27:30

African American communities and she's taught

27:32

in all the schools. Her name

27:34

is much more familiar to K-12

27:36

students and so Ulysses S.

27:38

Grant. Has that affected your opinion? I'm just

27:40

curious. I'm not trying to be adversarial. To

27:43

be honest, I haven't read enough about Harriet Tubman,

27:45

but that's an excellent point. Yeah,

27:47

but I think the point is that people

27:50

exist in history for what they did

27:52

and the ability of historians to

27:54

adjudicate what they did given the

27:56

sources. And with that

27:59

reality, There's the concession

28:01

that during the long story of

28:03

history, there's going to be eddies

28:05

and backwaters and peaks and

28:07

valleys of their particular popularity depending

28:09

on a lot of things, current

28:11

tastes, but also ethnic groups who

28:13

identify or are opposed to them.

28:16

But all of that said, it

28:18

doesn't really involve the actual nature

28:21

of the contribution. So

28:23

when you look at Christopher Columbus

28:25

from a disintegrating Italy that was

28:27

disunited and, you

28:30

know, 15th century Italy was

28:32

characterized by constant rivalries between

28:35

the Republic of Venice, the Papal States,

28:37

Florence, etc. Genoa. And

28:40

then you look at what Europe

28:42

itself was faced with and that

28:45

was that the countries of

28:47

Southern Europe, especially occupied

28:49

Greece by the Ottomans,

28:51

Italy, Southern France, Southern Spain,

28:54

they were kind of in a

28:56

lake of the Mediterranean, Galilee,

28:58

seamanship. They didn't really know

29:00

anything about maritime exploration given what

29:03

the British and the northern Spanish

29:05

and French and Dutch had with

29:08

Atlantic ports. And so they were

29:10

the bulwark that's kept Ottomanism out,

29:12

they felt, from Western Europe. And

29:14

then second, they felt that the

29:16

only way they were ever

29:18

going to be prosperous was to

29:21

trade what they called the Orient. And there

29:23

was no way they could do it because

29:25

the Ottomans blocked most of the cell crowds

29:27

on land. So there was this desire to

29:30

get out of this straitjacket of the Mediterranean,

29:32

get out in the ocean and then reviving

29:35

classical theories, there was the idea that you

29:37

could sail westward and you could either go

29:39

straight and nobody had thought that was possible

29:41

or you could go south around the coast

29:43

and hug the coast of Africa. But you

29:45

would eventually find a way to get to

29:48

this east without dealing with the

29:50

Ottoman and then you would have

29:52

to venture out and discover the

29:54

mastery of the sail rather than

29:57

the ore. And so when you

29:59

put it in that contacts and see that

30:01

this guy has to go all the

30:03

way as a foreigner to Spain and

30:05

then beg for subsidies and then take

30:07

off where nobody really felt maybe the

30:09

leaf erics and etc. had in

30:12

the mythological past, but go

30:14

out in the middle of nowhere and keep

30:16

going when he was faced with rebellion. And his

30:18

ships were minuscule. I mean, within 50 years, nobody

30:21

would want to get in one of those ships.

30:23

And then brave uncertainty and

30:26

starvation, lack of water or

30:28

navigation and somehow hit upon

30:30

a new land and

30:32

a new place and then survive

30:35

and then sail back and do that three

30:37

times. It's pretty extraordinary to be the first

30:39

to do that. So I

30:41

think his achievement was extraordinary,

30:44

at least comparable to the Americans

30:47

in 1969 that went to the

30:49

moon or people of

30:51

that level of exploration. So

30:53

I have a great deal of admiration for

30:55

him. And as far

30:57

as the writ against him,

30:59

it is that he introduced a

31:02

toxic Western civilization to a paradise.

31:04

I think that was a book

31:06

by sales, The Conquest of Paradise. But

31:09

that's just a morale... that's a melodrama.

31:11

It's not a tragic tale of what

31:13

happens when two civilizations collide.

31:15

It doesn't tell you what the Lakota

31:17

did to a different tribe in North

31:20

America. That doesn't tell you any

31:22

different... it's no different than the Aztec

31:24

Empire of 4 million people liquidating all

31:26

of its neighbors. That's the

31:29

story of... the brutal story of history

31:31

until much... until recently. And we may

31:33

be have a hiatus that's very brief.

31:36

And so, you know, we

31:38

really want to look at history as melodrama where we are...

31:40

we have a little ledger and we say, well, Columbus

31:43

gave the Indians or the

31:45

indigenous people a more virulent

31:48

form of malaria. He

31:50

gave them yellow fever. He gave them

31:52

whooping cough and they died. Versus they

31:54

gave him sugar cane

31:57

and cocaine and tobacco.

32:00

braco and stronger strains

32:02

of coffee, and that

32:04

would take its toll for...and maybe

32:06

vernurial disease would destroy a lot

32:08

of lives in Europe. Do we

32:10

blame indigenous people for that? I don't think

32:12

so. And then we have to

32:14

ask ourselves, had the indigenous people

32:17

later saved the Aztecs or the Mayans,

32:19

had they had a different approach to

32:21

science and they had

32:23

discovered, I don't know, transoceanic navigation

32:26

and given their war-like status

32:29

and cult, would they have

32:31

hesitated from sailing into Barcelona?

32:33

Had they had gunpowder or horses? I don't

32:36

think so. So this

32:38

idea that one side is evil and

32:40

the other side is good, it's just

32:42

ahistorical. History is tragedy, especially

32:45

when two antithetical civilizations meet.

32:47

I think it was the military

32:49

historian John Keegan once said when he looked at

32:51

North America, he said, and it was right at

32:54

the height of the damnation of

32:56

so-called European settlers in the frontier,

32:58

he said, when you're starving in

33:00

Eastern Europe or Ireland and there's

33:03

300 people per square mile and

33:05

they have the ability to navigate and get

33:07

to a place where there's one person per

33:09

300 square miles, then what's

33:13

the morality, especially

33:15

in groups now that have socialistic ideas

33:17

of sharing the wealth and things? So

33:20

this one person just say, all

33:22

300 miles, is that any different than a

33:24

king in Europe saying all these 300 miles

33:26

are for each one of my tribe and

33:29

that's just the way it's going to be

33:31

forever. I don't know. That's not realistic either.

33:37

Scott here. One more break for a word from our

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34:00

a warm spot in my heart for travelers and explorers based on

34:02

the level of

34:19

uncertainty they face is something that I don't think

34:21

is possible outside of space exploration in the 21st

34:23

century. And it boggles

34:25

my mind to think about in a great

34:27

book, I recommend to listeners that's an older

34:29

book but still very data-driven is Admiral of

34:31

the Ocean Seas on Christopher Columbus. Well,

34:34

Dr. Hanson, thank you for all this

34:36

perspective you provided. One last question. If

34:39

there was somebody whose statue you

34:41

would want to see more of

34:43

in public squares, who would that be? Well,

34:47

Americans, about four or

34:49

five people, if I was in America,

34:52

there is a wonderful statue of

34:54

him in Central Park

34:56

and there's one in Washington, D.C. and

34:59

there's, of course, the great

35:01

General Sherman Tree in Sequoia

35:03

National Park. But if you look

35:05

at dispassionately the Civil War and you ask

35:08

yourself, who did more to

35:10

end the war as quickly as

35:12

possible or humanly possible? Who

35:15

directly freed the most slaves? Who

35:17

did the most damage to the

35:19

plantationist class? Three percent

35:22

of the Confederate population that was responsible for

35:24

the war and who

35:26

killed the fewest number of southerners while

35:28

achieving those objectives while losing the fewest

35:30

number of people, it would have to

35:33

be William to come to Sherman. And

35:36

yet we hardly know him and to

35:38

the degree we know him, we bought

35:40

into the Confederate propaganda that he was

35:42

a barn burner or he killed people

35:44

or, you know, that he was cruel

35:46

because he said kind of things like war is

35:49

hell and all this stuff. And I think that's

35:51

a very interesting way to refine it. I

35:54

think it was that it was... This

35:56

is why I mention a lot about the fragility of sources. Plutarch's

36:01

life of Apaminondas

36:04

and had not been lost, I

36:06

think his reputation would be

36:08

what it was in antiquity when Cicero

36:10

called him some, you know, nearly for

36:12

370 years later. Sixty

36:16

years later said that he was print-kept,

36:18

squick, yeah, he was the best man, the

36:21

first man of Greece. In

36:23

a brief lifetime, he

36:25

created democracy or constitutional,

36:27

broad-based oligarchy in

36:29

Boeotia and Thebes in particular. He

36:31

destroyed the system of Messinian

36:34

hellatage. He defeated the Spartan army. He

36:36

changed the entire geopolitics of Greece from,

36:38

say, 371 for a whole decade. And

36:43

then he did so with

36:45

sort of a...we don't really...can't

36:47

quite comprehend what Pythagoreanism was,

36:50

but whatever it was, it was

36:52

quite different than Olympian religion. It

36:54

argued for everything from vegetarianism to

36:56

the quality of women to

36:59

the treatment of slaves as an individual.

37:01

So he was a very extraordinary man

37:03

of the mind and of muscle. And

37:06

yet nobody really knows who

37:08

he is. And so that was...and

37:10

that was because of many of the sources. He

37:13

just didn't live at a time where there

37:15

were people who wrote about him and the

37:17

people who did write in that period like

37:19

Xenophon, the Athenian, and who was pro-Spartan, could

37:21

not stand Thebans and generals and hated him

37:24

in particular and kept him almost out

37:26

of his history. And then Kuttrók,

37:28

who had sources at his disposal that

37:30

are now are lost, wrote

37:32

a very...apparently a very impressive

37:34

biography that was very popular even

37:38

up to early Europe and then somehow

37:40

it was lost. And

37:42

so those are two people that, you know, that are...I

37:44

think were extraordinary individual

37:47

and they went through a lot of...the other person

37:49

I think is pretty much

37:51

underrated is someone

37:53

like George Patton that sounded

37:56

groggy, was boisterous, he was rude,

37:59

but like Sherman, he had a very... this idea that he

38:01

wanted to get war over as quickly

38:03

as possible with the fewest people being

38:05

killed on his side and

38:07

by extension because the war would be over

38:10

quickly, the fewest of the

38:12

enemy are people in general. And he

38:14

had the skills and intellect how to do it. And

38:16

so, and yet, partly because

38:18

of the movie, partly because of, you

38:20

know, the cult around Patton, he becomes

38:22

a one-dimensional sort of buffoonish warrior when

38:25

he was a very erudite person who

38:27

spoke French. He read some

38:30

German, read French, he read some

38:32

Latin, and he was not at

38:34

all like the stereotype character we

38:36

see in popular culture. So

38:39

people like that I think are important

38:41

to look at. I think people

38:43

are starting to again see that Dwight Eisenhower was

38:45

a good man and then he was a stable

38:48

president and more important, he was very

38:50

prescient about power, what he

38:52

called the military-industrial complex, his final

38:54

speech that we often quote. But

38:57

what's interesting is that

38:59

that can be transcended

39:01

now and apply to

39:03

the military-industrial intelligence investigatory

39:05

complex. In other words,

39:07

the people in the FBI or the

39:10

CIA or the NSA who have enormous

39:12

judge jury and executioner power under

39:15

one auspices. And so

39:17

people like that I think that

39:19

we're looking to the future and have

39:21

a view of what things would be

39:23

like in Sherman Patton and Eisenhower did

39:25

in our own sort of the

39:27

Permanente. Excellent choices. And

39:29

I think it really speaks to

39:32

character like that or somebody else I think

39:34

cut from a similar cloth as Curtis LeMay

39:36

willing to fight a hard war. Yeah, he's

39:38

a good example. Right. I mean,

39:40

he realizes this is ugly, but if

39:42

it isn't ended now, it will be uglier and

39:45

to hell with my personal reputation or

39:47

being on corporate boards or getting autobiography deals

39:49

after this is done. Let's just get it done.

39:52

Well, thank you so much for your time

39:54

and discussing these things. And you are a

39:57

extremely prolific writer. You

40:00

have many books and new one that's coming out is called

40:02

the dying citizen. Dr. Hanson. Thank you for joining us

40:04

Thank you for having me All

40:09

right, that is all for today's episode If

40:11

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