The Michael Knowles Show - Ep. 72 - CNN is Literally Hitler (ft. Victor Davis Hanson)

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00:00:37.600 Facts are under attack, and the barbarous tyranny of feelings is ascendant.

00:00:42.540 We will analyze a wonderful covfefe weekend of some of the fakest news yet.

00:00:47.460 Total self-humiliation by the mainstream media, CNN, Washington Post, New York Times, oh my.

00:00:53.320 Then, the great Victor Davis Hanson, VDH, helps us kick off our new segment, This Day in History,

00:00:59.420 on the anniversary of Hitler's dumb decision to challenge the red, white, and blue. 0.94

00:01:03.700 Don't be like Hitler. Stick around. These colors don't run. 0.99

00:01:06.700 I'm Michael Knowles. This is The Michael Knowles Show.

00:01:08.500 You know, there's a meme going around. It's been going around for a while, which is literally Hitler.

00:01:20.300 So you'd say, you know, Donald Trump cut taxes. He is literally Hitler.

00:01:25.160 Donald Trump thinks that Supreme Court justices should respect the text of the Constitution. 0.89

00:01:30.280 He's literally Hitler. You know, any trivial thing that you don't like becomes literally Hitler. 0.80

00:01:34.960 Well, today is different. We are going to talk literally about Hitler. 0.64

00:01:38.960 Today is the anniversary of Germany declaring war on the United States, one of the worst decisions of the war.

00:01:46.380 Victor Davis Hanson, the Martin E. Lee Anderson fellow at the Hoover Institution,

00:01:50.260 has a great new book that just came out about this, The Second World Wars.

00:01:53.680 So we will talk to him.

00:01:54.980 But before we get to Hitler, literally Hitler, we have got to talk about something slightly less awful, just slightly, 0.51

00:02:01.060 which is the Democrat operatives who pretend to be journalists on television.

00:02:05.300 Let's begin with CNN.

00:02:07.260 A CNN exclusive in the Russia investigation, an electronic trail has emerged showing a possible attempt

00:02:13.300 to share hacked WikiLeaks documents with the Trump campaign.

00:02:18.740 Let's get right to CNN's Manu Raju with these breaking details. Manu, what have you learned?

00:02:22.460 Well, John, Donald Trump, his son Donald Trump Jr. and others in the Trump organization,

00:02:26.460 they received an email in September 2016 offering a decryption key and website address for hacked WikiLeaks documents.

00:02:34.620 Now, this is according to a September 4th, 2016 email provided to congressional investigators by the Trump organization.

00:02:41.500 Now, to put the time frame in context here, this email came months after the hacked emails of the DNC were made public

00:02:47.680 and one month before WikiLeaks began leaking the contents of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta's hacked emails.

00:02:54.140 And shortly before, Trump Jr. began an exchange of direct messages on Twitter with WikiLeaks.

00:02:59.460 Now, congressional investigators are trying to determine whether the individual who sent the September email is legitimate

00:03:05.220 and whether it shows additional efforts by WikiLeaks to connect with Trump's son and others on the Trump campaign.

00:03:12.220 You saw that. That looked like a news report. That sounded like a news report, right?

00:03:16.700 It's got the guy in the suit. It's got the chyrons and the backdrop and everything.

00:03:20.980 It looked like a news report. It reminds me of that stupid ad that CNN put out. 1.00

00:03:25.360 It said, this is an Apple. It looks like an Apple. It is an Apple. 1.00

00:03:27.960 That's like CNN. But that wasn't a news report.

00:03:31.900 Do you know how much of that was true? How much of what they were saying?

00:03:34.240 It's so soberly, straight-faced, very serious, breaking news, exclusive.

00:03:39.020 Do you know how much of that was true? None of it. That wasn't true. That's fake news.

00:03:42.900 CNN reported that Donald Trump and Donald Trump Jr. were emailed a link from WikiLeaks or from someone connected to WikiLeaks

00:03:51.320 days before WikiLeaks released the batch of emails to the public.

00:03:56.480 So there it is. That's the collusion. We've been waiting for all.

00:03:59.120 Here, we finally got the smoking gun.

00:04:01.360 Forget Van Jones said Russia is a nothing burger.

00:04:03.920 Forget James Comey under oath said that most of these stories are nonsense.

00:04:07.240 We've got the smoking gun.

00:04:09.520 So CNN's Manu Raju, Jeremy Herb, they report, we now have the first evidence that Trump's campaign was given

00:04:15.040 advanced info on WikiLeaks' stolen documents from Democrats.

00:04:19.420 And there's just one problem with that report, which is that there is no evidence that Trump received

00:04:24.100 advanced information on stolen documents from Democrats.

00:04:27.120 Other than that, other than the content of the report, that was totally right.

00:04:31.860 But except for the reporting. That was wrong.

00:04:33.760 But it looked right. It looked like the news.

00:04:36.020 Even if it was on television like the news is, the guys wore suits like the news do.

00:04:40.060 Even the Washington Post, left-wing as can be, democracy dies in darkness or whatever,

00:04:46.280 even they pointed this out.

00:04:48.320 They were the first to call out CNN for this fake report.

00:04:51.160 So CNN reported that the email, the awful email saying that WikiLeaks did all this,

00:04:55.460 was sent on September 4th.

00:04:57.060 That was nine days before WikiLeaks released it.

00:05:00.680 Turns out, though, the email was really sent on September 14th.

00:05:03.980 That one digit makes a big difference.

00:05:06.020 Ten days later, that was after WikiLeaks had tweeted out the info.

00:05:10.280 This was completely publicly available information.

00:05:13.160 WikiLeaks, the tweet said, 678 megabytes of DNC documents from Guccifer.

00:05:19.820 And here's the password. And here's how you unlock it.

00:05:21.840 They gave everything that's in his email that WikiLeaks had tweeted out already.

00:05:25.700 So the email came from this guy, Mike Erickson.

00:05:28.740 I've never heard of Mike Erickson before.

00:05:30.740 So CNN's report insinuated that Mike Erickson might be a Russian agent.

00:05:36.900 Now, I don't know.

00:05:38.540 I didn't look into the guy.

00:05:39.420 So let's do five seconds of research.

00:05:41.220 Turns out he's not.

00:05:42.840 Turns out after I'm just getting it in my ear, they're doing five seconds of research.

00:05:46.740 And yeah, turns out that guy is the president of an aviation management company.

00:05:51.000 But I guess CNN doesn't have access to Google, you know, or doesn't they don't have telephones where they can call people and check any of their facts.

00:05:57.520 So instead, they have to suggest that Mike Erickson is a Russian agent and completely screw up the dates.

00:06:04.860 So it goes from being, I guess, sort of a story to being nothing to being WikiLeaks sent out a tweet and a Trump supporter forwarded that tweet to them and said, hey, look at this.

00:06:16.640 You know, like just friends do.

00:06:18.180 It's like a chain email or something.

00:06:20.380 But do not worry.

00:06:21.520 It gets better.

00:06:22.680 Not only were the email dates completely off, undermining the entire story, but as Trump Jr.'s lawyer explains, quote, the email was never read or responded to, which the House Intelligence Committee knows.

00:06:34.460 So Donald Trump Jr.'s lawyer had a masterful response here, and this brings up some questions.

00:06:41.500 He said, quote, the email was never read or responded to.

00:06:43.700 The House Intel Committee knows this.

00:06:45.560 It is profoundly – I've lost his line here.

00:06:49.900 It is profoundly disappointing that members of the House Intelligence Committee would deliberately leak a document with the misleading suggestion that the information was not public when they know there was not a scintilla of evidence that Mr. Trump Jr. read or responded to the email.

00:07:04.880 So not only did they get it completely wrong, there isn't any evidence that they even saw this thing.

00:07:10.100 Now, this raises a question, especially for the political operative types who don't think that there are really any such thing as coincidences in politics.

00:07:20.720 Who leaked it?

00:07:21.960 Donald Trump Jr.'s lawyer says it was a Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee who would have access to this testimony and this information.

00:07:28.560 I suppose it could be that.

00:07:29.840 But as The Daily Caller reported, how CNN got its report so wrong is unclear.

00:07:35.600 So one has to wonder, was it a Democrat on the committee who saw the emails, who heard the testimony, and then that Democrat just got it completely wrong?

00:07:45.300 Or was it a Republican?

00:07:47.120 Was it someone around the Trump administration, the Trump apparatus, who leaked it knowing that CNN would never do its due diligence, would never check any of its facts, would breathlessly report this thing, and then look humiliated when it came out that this wasn't true?

00:08:02.040 Hard to tell.

00:08:02.980 We're posing two difficult interests against one another, Democrat incompetence and Republican strategy.

00:08:11.500 I don't know.

00:08:12.180 I don't know which one I believe.

00:08:13.560 I guess they're not mutually exclusive.

00:08:16.200 But if I had to gamble here, I would suggest this might have come from the Republicans because every effect of it was so beneficial.

00:08:24.240 It totally knocked CNN for a loop.

00:08:26.100 Donald Trump was ready to go to slam these people.

00:08:28.660 The Trump lawyer was ready to go to slam them.

00:08:31.280 So I don't know.

00:08:32.020 It looks like they may have gotten taken advantage of.

00:08:34.780 The tactic has been used before.

00:08:37.740 You'll remember on my doppelganger Rachel Maddow's show, she was boasting, we have the Trump tax returns.

00:08:42.120 We have them.

00:08:42.720 Someone gave us the envelope.

00:08:44.740 And then when she read it on air, it proved that Trump had paid taxes.

00:08:47.820 It completely destroyed their narrative.

00:08:49.580 And they got got.

00:08:50.400 They got had because they didn't do their due diligence and Republicans planted information there.

00:08:57.880 That might be the case here.

00:08:59.100 I'm not certain of that, 55, 45, 60, 40, but I wouldn't be surprised.

00:09:03.700 Now, the fake news does not end there over the weekend.

00:09:05.880 I don't know how we didn't work.

00:09:06.880 We should have come in and done a show.

00:09:08.420 Washington Post does not get off the hook.

00:09:11.200 It's true they called out CNN for pushing fake news, but they don't get off the hook.

00:09:16.340 The Washington Post's Dave Weigel posted a screenshot of an auditorium before a Trump speech.

00:09:22.980 This was a tweet.

00:09:24.120 And he wrote on it sarcastically, packed to the rafters.

00:09:28.560 Do you get it?

00:09:29.280 Because it was empty.

00:09:30.900 That was the picture showed that it was completely empty.

00:09:33.560 So do you get it?

00:09:34.440 It's really funny, isn't it?

00:09:36.200 Except it turns out it wasn't so.

00:09:38.280 Now, as Donald Trump responded, he said, Dave Weigel, Washington Post, put out a phony photo of an empty arena hours before I arrived at the venue with thousands of people outside on their way in.

00:09:48.520 Real photos now shown as I spoke.

00:09:50.380 Packed house, many people unable to get in.

00:09:52.380 Demand apology and retraction from fake news WAPO.

00:09:55.400 So in his defense, Weigel did apologize.

00:09:57.760 He responded, he said, sure thing, I apologize.

00:10:00.840 I deleted the photo after David Martosco, who's a conservative journalist, told me I'd gotten it wrong, was confused by the image of you walking in the bottom right corner.

00:10:10.180 Now, what that really should read is somebody called out my fake news and now I've got to move on to the next dirty trick.

00:10:15.920 So I'll admit that you got me on this one.

00:10:18.060 But, you know, he did apologize for posting it.

00:10:21.360 But his apology missed the whole point.

00:10:25.120 So how did the Washington Post, which reported all of this, how did they respond?

00:10:29.820 How did they cover this little dust up?

00:10:31.480 Here's the headline.

00:10:32.740 Quote, President Trump calls for Washington Post reporter who apologized for inaccurate tweet to be fired.

00:10:40.340 Completely misses the point.

00:10:41.920 It is not just that it's an inaccurate tweet.

00:10:45.280 Sure, it is inaccurate.

00:10:46.820 He posted fake news.

00:10:48.140 But it's the arrogance.

00:10:49.620 It's how smug.

00:10:50.960 It's how condescending.

00:10:52.360 And it's inaccurate.

00:10:53.560 That's on top of it.

00:10:54.280 It's the pact to the rafters.

00:10:56.680 Tee hee hee. 1.00

00:10:57.640 Isn't that guy? 1.00

00:10:58.340 What an idiot Donald Trump is. 1.00

00:11:00.000 Tee hee hee. 1.00

00:11:00.900 But behind my, I'm a journalist.

00:11:02.700 I'm from the coasts.

00:11:03.920 I'm really cool.

00:11:04.960 I'm on my computer.

00:11:05.720 I'm so much smarter.

00:11:06.960 That's the fake news.

00:11:08.600 The fake news isn't that the tweet is inaccurate.

00:11:11.020 The fake news is that Dave Weigel is a journalist rather than an activist.

00:11:14.580 The fake news is that the Washington Post is an objective news organization rather than an activist group for the left.

00:11:21.480 Now, by the way, this is a pattern with Weigel.

00:11:23.920 He, in recent years, he's tweeted out that any who oppose redefining marriage to include monogamous same-sex unions are bigots.

00:11:32.680 He's regularly disparaged members of the conservative movement on Twitter like Matt Drudge.

00:11:37.320 He violated Washington Post's guidelines asking journalists to refrain from posting anything that could show bias or favoritism.

00:11:45.400 That hasn't stopped any of the rest of them, so I don't know why we should hold him to a particular account.

00:11:49.560 And in Weigel's defense, his job is to mix opinion and journalism.

00:11:54.360 That's in his contract.

00:11:55.620 He has to provide analysis and some opinion.

00:11:58.080 But the reason that the Washington Post has moved in that direction is the reason all news outlets have moved in that direction.

00:12:03.660 It gets views.

00:12:04.740 It's very popular.

00:12:05.880 We like to see some opinion with our reporting.

00:12:07.960 Plain reporting is boring.

00:12:10.100 But that means it's no longer news.

00:12:12.080 It's fake news.

00:12:13.260 Some outlets, like the Daily Wire, not to navel gaze, but we're very straightforward with our point of view.

00:12:19.220 We have a point of view.

00:12:20.220 We have certain political goals.

00:12:22.120 Some are shared.

00:12:22.720 Some are different.

00:12:23.500 And we just tell you this is the lens through which we're looking at the world and we're looking at the news.

00:12:28.500 Washington Post doesn't do that.

00:12:29.620 They have pompous, preening, moralizing slogans like democracy dies in darkness.

00:12:34.960 Dave Weigel doesn't even tell you that.

00:12:36.760 CNN doesn't tell you that.

00:12:38.300 CNN employs – Andrew Klavan calls him Fredo Cuomo.

00:12:43.520 Chris Cuomo, these Democrat operative hacks.

00:12:47.220 George Stephanopoulos, and they pretend to be news.

00:12:49.960 That is it.

00:12:50.580 If any Democrat tells you that fake news is just an empty slogan or it's just an attack by Donald Trump, that isn't the case.

00:12:58.440 We're not talking even about the stories.

00:13:00.820 We're talking about the attitude of the outlets.

00:13:03.240 Now, for straight-up false reporting, we would have to turn to Brian Ross at ABC News.

00:13:07.860 Ross incorrectly reported on Friday, December 1st, that President Trump directed Michael Flynn to make contact with Russian officials before the election.

00:13:16.760 Now, in reality – not in the ABC reporting, but in reality – Trump had actually asked Flynn to make contact with Russia after the election, when he was president-elect.

00:13:27.880 This is a slight difference – before the election or once the country has voted him in as president.

00:13:32.580 And it's not just Ross.

00:13:34.000 It isn't just that he misspoke or something, which I think some people tried to say.

00:13:37.520 ABC also tweeted the nonsense.

00:13:40.200 Just in, they tweet.

00:13:41.680 Brian Ross on ABC News special report.

00:13:43.720 Michael Flynn promised, quote, full cooperation to the Mueller team is prepared to testify that, as a candidate, Donald Trump directed him to make contact with the Russians.

00:13:53.800 This was liked and shared tens of thousands of times before they had to delete it because it's utterly false.

00:14:00.500 And ABC, for their part, refused to cop to the error.

00:14:03.400 Initially, they said, well, we're going to offer a clarification.

00:14:07.240 Clarification.

00:14:07.800 The thing we said isn't true.

00:14:08.960 I just want to clarify.

00:14:10.220 I reported that Donald Trump, as a candidate, told Michael Flynn to talk to the Ruskies.

00:14:15.180 The one addition I'll make to that is that he didn't do that.

00:14:18.440 That's the one clarification I'll make.

00:14:19.880 But other than that, the story stands.

00:14:21.500 Now, they were widely panned for offering this clarification.

00:14:25.180 So the next day, they had to give out a full correction.

00:14:29.140 They admitted error, but only because we've been hammering the drums, only because Donald Trump himself has been going after these Democrat communications operatives who pretend to be journalists for so long.

00:14:42.080 There's another story in the New York Times just came out from Donald Trump.

00:14:45.220 He responds, quote, another false story, this time in the failing New York Times that I watch four to eight hours of television a day.

00:14:53.160 Wrong.

00:14:53.720 Also, I seldom, if ever, watch CNN or MSNBC, both of which I consider fake news. 0.98

00:14:59.980 I never watched Don Lemon, who I once called the dumbest man on television. 0.96

00:15:04.480 Bad reporting. 0.95

00:15:06.220 As a side note, thank you to Twitter for the extra 140 characters.

00:15:09.460 They're making these so much, they're doubling the covfefe of them.

00:15:12.680 So thank you for that.

00:15:14.300 The New York Times ran a report today saying that Trump watches a lot of television and he watches CNN and they're allegedly talking to all these people.

00:15:22.100 Yeah, the New York Times headline is this, quote, inside Trump's hour by hour battle for self-preservation.

00:15:30.360 Now, I'm trying to think back on the last 11 months, but 11 months he's been in office since he was inaugurated.

00:15:39.660 He destroyed ISIS within 11 months.

00:15:42.100 He just militarily destroyed them.

00:15:44.140 He got a major tax overhaul passed, repealed the Obamacare mandate, got an originalist on the court, packed the rest of the courts, the lower courts, with originalist judges, has the biggest deregulation program in modern history.

00:15:56.680 A net zero new regulations passed per year, despite an average 13,000 or so in previous administrations.

00:16:04.460 It looks pretty good to me.

00:16:05.940 He's handled Syria well, dropped the Moab. 1.00

00:16:08.540 He is handling North Korea pretty well.

00:16:10.440 That seems okay.

00:16:11.180 Pulled out of the Paris Climate Accord.

00:16:12.800 What else do you want, people?

00:16:14.540 If that's self-preservation, keep doing it, man.

00:16:17.000 Now, the New York Times reporting is not credible because the premise is not credible.

00:16:22.380 You know, by the way, the New York Times last February ran a piece titled, quote, Trump campaign aides had repeated contacts with Russian intelligence, which even James Comey, James Comey, no fan of Donald Trump, you know, Democrat hack through and through.

00:16:37.580 Under oath, James Comey admitted in the main that report was not true.

00:16:42.580 So, I don't know.

00:16:43.720 The report today is that Donald Trump watches four to eight hours of television.

00:16:47.440 I suppose there's no way to know this.

00:16:49.420 There is a little coincidence here because one time President Trump saw me on television, when we were doing the blank book thing, I complimented him on Fox and Friends, and he tweeted a quote that I had said, and then he next endorsed the book.

00:17:04.220 So, I do know he watches these shows sometimes, and I'm very grateful that he does, and thank you again.

00:17:08.440 That was a nice early Christmas present.

00:17:09.860 But I don't care how much TV he watches.

00:17:12.400 I don't care.

00:17:13.060 I'm not convinced it's eight hours a day, but I certainly don't care.

00:17:15.760 If we get all of these good things, if we get the best conservative legislation in our lifetimes while he's watching a lot of TV, keep it up.

00:17:25.380 Tune in, man.

00:17:26.020 Sounds good.

00:17:26.540 I'll make you the popcorn.

00:17:27.760 Here is former Republican, former Bush speechwriter David Frum, explaining what we should take away from all of this fake news.

00:17:35.580 You asked the question, Brian, why should, given these mistakes, why should people trust the media?

00:17:40.260 And I would say the mistakes are precisely the reason that people should trust the media.

00:17:44.020 The press, the worst mistakes that, again, when we talk about the press, we exclude Fox.

00:17:48.780 I mean, we talk about press organizations that have an interest in finding truth.

00:17:52.340 Excluding Fox, the worst mistakes that press organizations have made in the coverage of Trump has precisely occurred in their effort, their overzealous effort to be unfair to the president.

00:18:03.760 I'm almost speechless watching that clip.

00:18:07.180 You see, we have to trust the news media because they lie to us.

00:18:11.740 Don't you understand?

00:18:13.120 You're not woke like David Frum.

00:18:15.320 You're probably one of those troglodyte Republicans who's still a Republican and didn't become woke.

00:18:20.040 But David Frum now realizes we have to love the news media and they have to have credibility because they don't have any credibility.

00:18:25.880 And this is the irony of the fake news.

00:18:28.800 That term, fake news, we use it all the time.

00:18:31.180 I think it was actually invented by Norm MacDonald.

00:18:33.320 He used it when he was the SNL guy on Weekend Update.

00:18:35.800 But it became popularized in the days after the 2016 election to make excuses for Hillary's loss.

00:18:42.840 So there was an assistant professor of communications at Merrimack College in Massachusetts, Melissa Zimdars.

00:18:49.540 And she sent around a Google document with all of the fake news websites because it couldn't be that Hillary lost.

00:18:55.300 It couldn't be that America doesn't want her to take away our freedom and shriek for the next four to eight years. 0.98

00:19:00.280 It had to be that fake news stole all of it.

00:19:03.560 So she sent out this Google document and it had some websites that are pretty kooky.

00:19:08.920 And then it also had regular old websites, so just right-wing websites.

00:19:12.920 The Daily Wire was included on this.

00:19:14.660 We don't run fake stories.

00:19:15.920 We run real stories.

00:19:16.840 We have a point of view, but they're not artificial, you know.

00:19:20.980 They used this because they thought they could discredit the new media, the right-wing media that broke the monopoly of the mainstream media, which used to run the whole show until Fox News.

00:19:32.080 And then it all started to crack a little bit with the internet.

00:19:35.160 It backfired on them.

00:19:36.520 It backfired on them because we can check facts.

00:19:39.420 We have the internet.

00:19:40.340 We have freedom to information.

00:19:42.120 And we looked around and we saw, hmm, CNN ran a completely fake story.

00:19:46.640 Washington Post ran a completely fake story.

00:19:48.520 The New York Times ran a completely fake story.

00:19:50.320 And another one.

00:19:51.080 And another one.

00:19:51.920 And another one.

00:19:52.800 Who's the fake news here?

00:19:54.060 And it stuck to the left wing.

00:19:55.660 It stuck to the mainstream media because it's true.

00:19:58.220 It stuck like any other of Donald Trump's nicknames that he gives to people.

00:20:02.980 He had tried out a few on Hillary.

00:20:04.560 You know, he tried low stamina Hillary or this, that, or that. 0.54

00:20:07.140 The one that worked was Crooked Hillary. 1.00

00:20:09.680 It stuck not because he kept repeating it.

00:20:12.540 He kept repeating it because it stuck, because it was true. 1.00

00:20:15.460 It rang true. 1.00

00:20:16.400 This fake news rings true for CNN in a way that it just doesn't for alternative outlets that don't pretend to be something that we're not.

00:20:24.780 Okay.

00:20:25.500 Should we get into our new segment?

00:20:26.960 We have to get into our new segment.

00:20:28.580 We have to bring on the Nazis. 0.98

00:20:30.340 There is so much to talk about, but unfortunately, you cannot get that if you are not subscribed to The Daily Wire.

00:20:38.140 So if you are a subscriber, we appreciate it.

00:20:41.260 You help us keep the lights on over here.

00:20:43.060 If not, you've got to go over there right now.

00:20:45.980 What do you get?

00:20:46.660 Well, the conversation is going to happen tomorrow starring the one and only, the big boss himself, Fox News' Power Player of the Week, Ben Shapiro.

00:20:55.380 So that will be tomorrow at 5 p.m. Eastern, 2 p.m. Pacific.

00:20:58.440 If you want to ask questions of Ben, he's going to sit there for an hour and just answer the questions as they come in.

00:21:03.680 If you want to ask a question, you have to be a subscriber.

00:21:06.260 You go to the chat page at The Daily Wire, and you can ask him whatever you like.

00:21:10.300 Everybody can watch, but few can ask questions.

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00:21:26.460 Forget all of that.

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00:21:53.500 We'll be right back.

00:21:54.260 To fight the barbarous tyranny of feelings, let's get into our latest segment, This Day

00:22:10.120 in History.

00:22:11.480 This Day in History.

00:22:15.360 Let's begin with the Nazis. 0.90

00:22:16.780 On this day in 1941, Adolf Hitler declared war on the United States, bringing the formerly 0.81

00:22:22.580 neutral U.S. into the European conflict.

00:22:25.760 Incredibly, Hitler had no advance warning of his Axis partner Japan's plan to attack the 0.55

00:22:30.400 United States.

00:22:31.680 German Foreign Minister von Rippentrop believed a declaration of war on the U.S. would overwhelm

00:22:37.260 the German war effort.

00:22:38.760 Hitler thought war inevitable, so he declared it first. 0.95

00:22:41.140 Bizarrely, blaming FDR for the war, Hitler proclaimed, quote, first he incites war, then 0.89

00:22:47.520 falsifies the causes, then odiously wraps himself in a cloak of Christian hypocrisy and slowly 0.92

00:22:53.760 but surely laids mankind to war.

00:22:56.800 But obviously, his was louder and in German.

00:22:59.320 We are fortunate now to be joined by Victor Davis Hanson, the Martin and Illy Anderson Senior

00:23:04.600 Fellow in Classics and Military History at the Hoover Institution and the author of the

00:23:08.640 new book, The Second World Wars.

00:23:11.260 Victor, thank you for being here.

00:23:13.500 Thank you for having me.

00:23:14.740 Now, before we get into today's significance and some of the other excellent questions your

00:23:19.400 book brings up, why the S?

00:23:22.340 Why title the book The Second World Wars rather than The Second World War?

00:23:27.760 Well, for a lot of reasons, the war was fought from the Arctic Circle to the Sahara and from

00:23:33.640 the English Channel to the Boulder River and then the Pacific all the way from the

00:23:38.640 Indian Ocean to the Aleutians and Manchuria to Wake Island and Hawaii.

00:23:43.700 So the vast canvas in which the combatants and all but 18 countries finally joined didn't

00:23:50.900 really know at every moment who they were fighting or why.

00:23:54.780 I mean, nobody in Manchuria, a Japanese soldier in Manchuria didn't have much in common with

00:24:00.460 the Bulgarian on the Eastern Front fighting the Russians.

00:24:02.820 But more importantly, until 1941 and the invasion of the Soviet Union by the Third Reich, people

00:24:13.100 didn't call it World War II or in the Anglosphere Second World War.

00:24:17.380 In other words, there were 10 separate wars conducted by Hitler and they were all except for the Blitz 0.94

00:24:24.180 against Britain, successful between September 1st, 1939 and June 22nd, 1941.

00:24:31.040 So that nearly two-year period, they were known as the fall of France or the Yugoslavian War,

00:24:37.960 the Greek War, the Norwegian War, the Danish War.

00:24:40.240 But they were all surprise attacks, all successful, all against supposedly weaker neighbors, all

00:24:48.020 within close proximity to Germany and German logistical capability.

00:24:54.700 When he went into the Soviet Union, that was quite a horse of a different color. 0.70

00:24:59.820 It was a huge country.

00:25:01.140 He had no ability to get to Russian industry across the Urals.

00:25:04.940 And then six months later, when Japan attacked us and the British at Singapore, us at Pearl

00:25:10.760 Harbor, and then mysteriously four days later, Italy and Germany quite unexpectedly declared

00:25:16.860 war in the United States.

00:25:17.840 At that point, this huge canvas that I just mentioned really took shape.

00:25:25.140 And there was no longer a Yugoslavian War or a Polish War.

00:25:29.320 It all became lumped into the Second World War, singular.

00:25:35.160 And World War I, appropriately, was now renamed from the Great War to World War I.

00:25:42.020 You know, this is, as you point out, the 76th, I think, anniversary of that declaration of

00:25:48.820 Hitler declaring war on the United States, you know, just shortly, four days after Pearl Harbor.

00:25:54.020 Why on earth would Adolf Hitler, already in the midst of his wars that he's fighting,

00:26:00.740 why would he declare war on the largest economy in the world?

00:26:03.860 Well, it didn't make any sense, and it truly doesn't make any sense now.

00:26:07.240 Most of the people at his general staff, his key military advisors, not only didn't know

00:26:14.200 that he was going to do it, but objected vehemently when they found out about it.

00:26:18.500 So, we have to put ourselves in his mindset.

00:26:22.840 He was inordinately impressed by naval power because his fleet was a fraction of the size

00:26:28.060 of the British fleet.

00:26:30.080 And he felt the Japanese fleet, which was the third largest in the world and comparable

00:26:34.220 to the American Pacific fleet, would so tie down America that they would not really be

00:26:40.420 able to fight a two-front war.

00:26:42.420 And he felt that Britain was dormant.

00:26:45.800 He had controlled what is all, what we would call now the European Union.

00:26:50.160 And he really only had one front, and that would be against Russia.

00:26:54.700 And when he declared war on December 11th, he was at the first subway station outside of

00:27:00.400 Moscow.

00:27:01.440 So, in his way of thinking, very shortly, Moscow, Leningrad are going to fall.

00:27:07.200 So, I'm going to finish the war. 0.87

00:27:09.960 Britain will be isolated.

00:27:11.400 The United States is going to have its hands full after it lost its fleet at Pearl Harbor.

00:27:19.000 And my U-boats will be right off the coast of Miami.

00:27:23.280 And for the first time in two years, they could really go after these fat targets that will

00:27:28.680 cut the lifeline off to Britain. 0.86

00:27:30.740 And therefore, the war will be over six months.

00:27:33.660 British will starve. 1.00

00:27:34.660 Russia will fall.

00:27:35.480 United States will come to terms with the Japanese in terms of, did he have any idea 0.99

00:27:41.280 of the fleet that was being constructed in U.S. dockyards in 1941?

00:27:46.820 No.

00:27:47.140 Did he have any idea that in World War I, the United States had delivered two million men

00:27:52.420 in less than 18 months?

00:27:54.080 No.

00:27:55.520 Did he have any idea that the United States would create 130 aircraft carriers or a bomber

00:28:03.160 an hour?

00:28:03.660 And he had no concept of that.

00:28:06.420 And as people tried to explain to him, even people like Goering, the marshal, the Luftwaffe,

00:28:12.740 that if you're getting yourself into an existential war, it's quite different than border wars.

00:28:17.900 And he said, mind sure, we have no ability to bomb Russia beyond the Urals.

00:28:23.060 We were not able to shut down Manchester and Liverpool and London industry.

00:28:28.500 And we surely don't have an ability to go to New York or Detroit or Oakland.

00:28:32.420 And yet that fell on deaf ears.

00:28:33.940 And by an existential war, you mean a war that can't be solved with a little treaty and leaving

00:28:39.160 the government in place.

00:28:40.160 You need to totally force the country into submission.

00:28:44.660 Unconditional surrender war.

00:28:46.380 Unconditional surrender.

00:28:47.440 And that hubris that you describe in Hitler is, I suppose, unsurprising. 0.89

00:28:54.400 I was thinking to myself that the Axis powers not being able to collaborate or to coordinate

00:29:00.260 with one another shouldn't be so surprising.

00:29:02.580 Nazis and racialist totalitarians are not the easiest people to share and get along.

00:29:07.340 But it's unbelievable that Hitler did not know that his partner in Japan was going to attack 0.89

00:29:13.420 Pearl Harbor.

00:29:14.200 Then the betrayal of the Soviet Union.

00:29:16.320 There was no coordination with Mussolini.

00:29:18.720 To what degree...

00:29:19.700 Where it was.

00:29:20.900 Yeah.

00:29:21.560 To what degree does that inability to cooperate, did that affect the outcome of the war?

00:29:29.020 Well, it did a great deal because they all had shared fascist ideologies.

00:29:34.560 And you'd think they would have coordinated in a way that British imperialist, American

00:29:38.880 Democrats, and Soviet communists would not.

00:29:41.400 But all the major decisions on the Allied side, unconditional surrender, a second front

00:29:48.840 in Normandy, a strategic bombing campaign, Lend-Lease, were all mutually agreed upon.

00:29:55.280 And they were coordinated.

00:29:57.180 And more importantly, the Allies shared expertise.

00:30:00.260 So if we had a P-39 Air Cobra that we didn't feel was very good, but although it was excellent

00:30:06.700 for anti-tank warfare, then we gave it to the Soviets who found it quite useful.

00:30:12.280 If we had a Sherman tank that really couldn't knock out a Panther, the British came in and 1.00

00:30:16.740 said, let's put our 17-pounder on that turret. 0.98

00:30:20.320 Or if we had a P-51 that was not flying as fast as a Falk Wolf, the British came in and 0.98

00:30:25.880 said, great airframe, long engine, we'll put a Merlin engine in.

00:30:28.980 We made the best fire of the world.

00:30:30.680 There was no such sharing of information among the fascists.

00:30:35.220 And it really hurt them.

00:30:36.820 In the case of Pearl Harbor, the Japanese were very angry at the Russians because right when

00:30:44.180 they were fighting Stalin in 1939, in August, and part of the fascist war, global war, what

00:30:53.440 they felt against communism, Hitler cut a deal with Stalin, Molotov-Libbentov pact, and that

00:31:01.340 made, that freed up Russia's western flank worries about it.

00:31:05.920 And the Japanese used to sue for peace. 1.00

00:31:08.200 They paid the Germans back in April of 1941. 0.79

00:31:11.540 On the eve, not too long, six weeks before Germany was going to go into Russia, they cut their own 0.90

00:31:19.140 non-aggression pact with Stalin.

00:31:21.280 And that freed about 25 divisions on the east shores of Russia and boundaries to be used against

00:31:28.440 the Germans.

00:31:29.120 So there was nothing but suspicion among all three of the Axis powers.

00:31:33.680 I suppose it's not a surprise if your partners are fascists that you might be a little suspicious,

00:31:39.260 though it is impressive that liberal democracy is able to work with, was able to work with

00:31:44.760 Stalin so well. 0.90

00:31:45.560 One of my favorite lines in your book is, you say, quote, we often forget that the Third

00:31:52.160 Reich was postmodern in creative genius, but pre-modern in actual implementation and operations.

00:31:58.880 And it reminds me of that scene in George Bernard Shaw's Back to Methuselah, where the serpent

00:32:04.680 says to Eve, this is frequently quoted by Democrat politicians like the Kennedys, but he says,

00:32:09.800 you see things that are and ask why.

00:32:11.780 I dream of things that never were and ask why not.

00:32:14.660 To what extent was Germany and Adolf Hitler, were they the victim to their own fantasies and

00:32:20.040 delusions?

00:32:20.520 Well, their entire Nazi ideology was built on sort of a hodgepodge of Nietzschean, Superman, 0.69

00:32:30.960 crackpot philosophy, Wagner's operas, and the drama that they had never been corrupted,

00:32:40.480 assimilated, intermarried, integrated with the Roman Empire, that they turned upside down 0.61

00:32:46.640 Roman history, that being on the wrong side of Danube and Rhine was the right side, and 0.89

00:32:51.520 that they were therefore evoked a term that meant not just you were German or you lived

00:32:56.940 in Germany or spoke German, but you looked this particular way.

00:33:00.800 And out of that sort of crackpot idea, they came up with the idea that one German was worth 1.00

00:33:05.500 three or four Russians or Americans or British, and that meant that they never really looked

00:33:11.140 in a very pregnant, not until Albert Speer, the brilliant engineer of Russian industry

00:33:18.800 and central planner, a German industry, came into power in 1942-1943, did they ever look 0.64

00:33:24.480 at a cost-benefit analysis?

00:33:26.340 So where the Allies said, here's a B-17, here's a Lancaster bomber, here's a B-24, here's a B-29,

00:33:35.160 this is how much money it costs to deliver one pound of ordnance so many miles against the

00:33:39.860 enemy.

00:33:40.320 Now, what are the alternatives?

00:33:41.580 They said, we're going to have a cruise missile, a V-1, or an intercontinental business, a V-2,

00:33:46.740 they're the latest technology, or we're going to have a measurement 262 jet.

00:33:51.520 And they just looked at performance, ability in isolation, or high-tech in isolation, or

00:33:58.640 they looked at a Tiger II tank.

00:34:00.840 They never asked, they said, well, it has an 88-millimeter barrel, it has six inches of

00:34:04.680 armor, it weighs 65 tons.

00:34:06.720 They never asked themselves, how many hours can that tank operate per hours of maintenance?

00:34:13.060 Whereas, that's all we talked about.

00:34:15.240 Sherman went out one hour of maintenance, 10 hours on the road.

00:34:18.800 B-29, 20,000 pounds, you can deliver much cheaper than a B-17.

00:34:22.760 And so, when we did things like the Manhattan Project or the B-29 Project, they were grounded

00:34:29.700 in common sense, pragmatism, maintenance, durability, and they lived in a world of fantasies

00:34:37.120 where there was huge rail guns like Gustav that took 7,000 Germans to shoot one projectile

00:34:45.680 every three minutes, and after 180, they wore out the barrels, had absolutely no effect

00:34:50.520 on the war.

00:34:52.300 Or the Japanese building the Mushashi and the Yamato, the two largest battleships in the world, 0.80

00:34:58.360 but between them sank one light carrier when they could have used resources to build 50 of

00:35:05.000 the world's best destroyers.

00:35:06.780 They had a great destroyer, they just didn't have enough of them.

00:35:08.920 But they lived in an ideal fantasy that we're going to build things really big, and they're

00:35:13.960 going to be really high-tech, and our soldiers are so much better than everybody else.

00:35:20.240 Well, that old stereotype we have of the Germans is, you know, they're very efficient.

00:35:24.580 Those Germans are a very efficient people.

00:35:26.460 But the portrait that we get out of your book is of a passionate Hitler, a Hitler who is given 0.96

00:35:34.140 to his own ideological wackiness, given to the blunders that come out of his own ideology

00:35:41.600 about his people.

00:35:42.940 And this brings up the question of what precisely was the main decider of the war?

00:35:51.940 What was the biggest influence?

00:35:53.020 You write, ideology for good or evil was a force multiplier of German, Japanese, and Soviet 0.62

00:35:59.020 armies, but obviously they lost.

00:36:01.040 So what was the relative importance of ideology, air, land, and sea, military superiority, and

00:36:07.440 economic output, finally, on the outcome of the war?

00:36:10.800 Once Hitler and the Japanese redefined the war as really the big six, Italy, Germany, and 0.88

00:36:18.660 Japan against the Soviet Union, the United States, and Britain, they could not win that

00:36:23.500 war because they were outnumbered by almost 200 million people.

00:36:27.480 And the United States and the Soviet Union had a larger GDP, each of them, than the three

00:36:34.300 Axis put together. 0.67

00:36:35.940 And the United States would soon have a GDP bigger than all of the combatants on both

00:36:40.340 sides.

00:36:41.740 And the Soviet Union and the United States would each field a military over 12 million.

00:36:47.540 So the question was, once they found themselves and they stumbled into an existential war, could

00:36:53.820 their greater experience, could the ferocity of the Japanese or German soldier, could the

00:36:58.620 head start that they had, could their utilization of what is now the entire EU under Third Reich 0.76

00:37:07.280 occupation and most, much larger area in the Pacific, from the shell oil fields in Indonesia

00:37:14.620 to the Malaysia to the Malaysian rubber plantations to the rice belt in Southeast Asia, could they

00:37:20.440 use all of that and defeat the Allies before they geared up?

00:37:25.240 And for a while, it looked like they could.

00:37:27.360 If we were to ask this question in August of 1942, the Sixth Army was just about ready to

00:37:34.180 crush the Russians at Stalingrad. 0.99

00:37:36.080 Guadalcanal had been occupied and was cutting off Australia from the Americans.

00:37:40.940 And Rommel had taken Tobruk and was on his way to the Suez, thinking he could link up with

00:37:47.740 Army Group South in Russia.

00:37:49.200 And then suddenly that fantasy vanished with the 1st Marine Division just wiped out the

00:37:55.260 Japanese on Guadalcanal.

00:37:57.940 And when a series of five naval battles destroyed a great portion of the Japanese fleet, no need 0.86

00:38:04.680 to talk about Stalingrad.

00:38:05.800 They lost the entire Sixth Army of 300,000 veterans.

00:38:10.280 And then Rommel was stopped at El Alamein, had to flee all the way back into Libya and Algeria.

00:38:18.220 And then, of course, a quarter million people would surrender the next summer.

00:38:23.020 So at that point, it was just a question.

00:38:26.360 What do the Allies want to do?

00:38:27.920 They've defeated the Axis tactically. 0.92

00:38:30.160 But do they want to have an armistice like World War I, or do they want to have an unconditional

00:38:34.800 surrender?

00:38:35.520 They have to have an unconditional surrender.

00:38:37.200 They have to go to Rome, Berlin, and Tokyo and destroy these people's political systems.

00:38:43.840 There's 15 million enemy soldiers in the field.

00:38:46.880 That was going to be very costly.

00:38:48.660 And that's mostly the war of 1943, 1944, and 1945.

00:38:52.340 And before that, the Axis powers were doing very well, but they had the advantage of constantly 1.00

00:38:59.500 surprising people.

00:39:01.060 There was a series of surprise attacks, sucker punches in the field of war.

00:39:05.780 And yet, then the mongrel Americans and the decadent British and all of these countries that 1.00

00:39:11.840 the Germans would have called decadent were able to rally a lot of economic and military

00:39:17.940 output.

00:39:18.980 To what degree did the Axis powers rely entirely or majorly on surprise?

00:39:28.620 And how did decadent nations defeat the ideologically disciplined Axis? 0.87

00:39:35.980 Well, I think the answer is that they were ideologically, but they weren't disciplined.

00:39:40.060 So, if you look until 1944, per capita expenditures on military affairs, munitions, soldiers as a percentage

00:39:53.880 of GDP was much greater in places like Britain or the Soviet Union in the United States than it was not just in

00:40:00.760 Japan, but Germany as well.

00:40:02.760 So, you had Americans who were called decadent that were not having women wear nylons, where Germans were still 1.00

00:40:09.460 wearing nylons.

00:40:11.180 And we were having paper drives when people in Germany were not saving paper.

00:40:15.800 That changed by 1944 and 1945, but we really geared up.

00:40:19.880 People always look at Britain as sort of a weak link, but during the blitz of September of 1940,

00:40:25.360 the British, they'd lost 50,000 dead.

00:40:28.940 They were under attack.

00:40:30.080 They were producing more supermarine Spitfires per month than the Germans, with all of the 0.98

00:40:35.920 current, today, EU under the control, were producing VF-109 fighters.

00:40:41.480 So, we kind of forget that.

00:40:44.200 And the Allies just made a lot more sacrifices.

00:40:47.500 They were a lot more practical and pragmatic in their approach to war, and they were not

00:40:52.020 blinded by ideological zealotry.

00:40:55.240 And speaking of some of those sacrifices, now, particularly when we talk about the war in

00:41:00.060 the Pacific, when we talk about the war in the Pacific, there is a tone, it seems, of apology.

00:41:06.100 Barack Obama implicitly, if not explicitly, went to Hiroshima to apologize for the dropping

00:41:12.960 of the bomb, and yet, as you write, the Japanese were butchers during the war.

00:41:17.960 They killed many more than were killed themselves.

00:41:21.580 Why is it that when we discuss the war in the Pacific, there is such a feeling of sympathy

00:41:29.820 or apology toward the Japanese?

00:41:33.660 It's hard to know.

00:41:34.700 I think part of it was the Chinese theater was really unknown to the West, and some 15

00:41:41.240 to 17 million Chinese, the vast majority of them, civilians were butchered by the Japanese

00:41:47.240 who then killed another four to five million civilians in the South Pacific and other areas

00:41:53.360 of Asia.

00:41:54.380 And then they probably killed, either in camps, civilians, or in combat, another five to six

00:42:00.260 hundred thousand Australians, Americans, and British.

00:42:04.460 And I guess the idea was that because we dropped the bomb, and it was a nuclear bomb, on Hiroshima 0.54

00:42:10.060 and Nagasaki, that just ended discussion.

00:42:12.400 And we forget sometimes that of the 65 million people who were killed in World War II, about

00:42:17.580 80 million, excuse me, 80 percent of them, about 50 million, and that would be the six million

00:42:24.120 who'd lost their lives in the Holocaust, so three or four million civilians in Yugoslavia and

00:42:29.800 Poland, the 27 million dead, of which probably somewhere around 16 million in Russia were

00:42:36.480 civilians, and I mentioned the other civilians in Asia, were all killed by Germans and Japanese

00:42:42.320 soldiers.

00:42:43.660 And World War II, we should remember, was one of the few wars in history where the losers

00:42:47.900 lost far left and did the winners.

00:42:52.040 And basically, it was a story of German and Japanese soldiers killing people in Eastern Europe,

00:42:58.260 Russia and China, they didn't have any weapons, and were not in uniform.

00:43:02.160 And so when Obama said that, and this apology, you think, wow, what were the Japanese thinking

00:43:07.200 when they know in their own history that, in terms of how many they lost versus how many

00:43:12.040 they killed, they were the most murderous combatant in the entire war, and that all of these

00:43:18.680 dead people, 50 million dead people, were killed by these two countries. 0.85

00:43:22.680 And yet, we're showing deference to them because we ended the war and ended the misery in Hiroshima

00:43:28.920 and Nagasaki.

00:43:30.440 And by the way, that was true, because it wasn't that we tried to stave off an invasion as largely

00:43:36.340 caricatured, but we had the entire bomber fleet that had been idle for three months in Europe.

00:43:42.880 So, 10,000 B-24s, B-17s, British Lancaster bombers, all were going to be, at least a large part,

00:43:52.180 transferred to Okinawa, which was not like the Marianas, 1,600 miles from Japan, but 380 miles.

00:43:59.100 And Curtis LeMay could envision dropping more napalm, which had already burned out 65% of the

00:44:06.380 urban core of Japan, but dropping more explosives and napalm about every two weeks than with the

00:44:13.460 power of one atomic bomb.

00:44:16.020 And so that was all called off by the atomic bombs.

00:44:20.180 And LeMay sort of said, well, I don't know why we had to drop them.

00:44:22.780 I had a fleet in mind, an air fleet, that would have devastated Japan in ways that no atomic bomb 0.98

00:44:28.800 could do.

00:44:29.840 And he was right.

00:44:30.560 My grandfather was a navigator on a B-24 during the war over Belgium, I believe, in Germany.

00:44:37.080 And I've toured some of those planes.

00:44:39.820 Had those fleets gone over to the Pacific, had we not dropped the atomic bomb, I don't 0.62

00:44:44.640 know of anybody who suggests there wouldn't have been catastrophically more damage and bloodshed.

00:44:51.220 And this brings up a question with the Japanese and the kamikaze attacks specifically, because

00:44:58.040 you write that the kamikaze attacks were cheap and effective, it didn't cost very much to

00:45:03.440 do it from an economic level rather than a human cost level.

00:45:08.020 But paradoxically, they demonstrate desperation.

00:45:12.000 They demonstrate that the enemy is so desperate, they're willing to kill their own soldiers to

00:45:16.020 sink your ship. 0.53

00:45:17.300 Are suicide attacks ever sustainably advantageous in war?

00:45:23.560 Well, they're usually taken, there's a paradox in their use that can be very effective and

00:45:29.500 a cost-benefit if you have no morality about the value of a life.

00:45:33.440 But usually people use them in an asymmetrical fashion, in other words, when they're losing

00:45:38.320 and because they're in desperation.

00:45:40.460 So had the Japanese launched 400 kamikazes in the Battle of Midway, they would have won the 1.00

00:45:48.800 war.

00:45:49.120 They would have won that battle, and maybe they would have not won the war, but they

00:45:52.640 would have won, for two years they would have been unstoppable, because they sank 17 ships

00:45:58.400 at Okinawa and killed 5,000 American sailors, worst defeat in American history at the sea.

00:46:05.020 And they did so with obsolete zeros that increased their range by not having to have a round trip

00:46:11.200 back home, and by using substandard pilots that all they had to do was get in the plane

00:46:17.160 and dive down on American, you know, no dogfighting, no bombing, nothing.

00:46:21.880 Doesn't take a whole lot to learn how to take off, you know, doesn't, doesn't require as much

00:46:26.180 training if you're going to just run your plane into somebody's ship.

00:46:29.100 They used no fuel to train them, and the point was that this was a cruise missile whose human 0.52

00:46:34.760 brain was more accurate than anything known at the time in a V1.

00:46:39.040 So they were very effective.

00:46:40.580 But why Japan didn't use them earlier was they thought, we don't have to, we're winning.

00:46:46.520 And usually what happens in history, when you get that desperate tactic that is very successful

00:46:52.040 is probably just too little, too late.

00:46:54.740 The irony is that it would have been very successful, but human nature being what it is,

00:46:59.100 you never resort to that when you feel that there's no need to.

00:47:02.580 The final question is, you say that World War II, which killed 60 million people, could

00:47:08.260 have been prevented.

00:47:09.420 How is that?

00:47:10.260 Why is it that wars such as this begin?

00:47:14.500 The Axis were the weaker powers by any standard of calibration.

00:47:18.540 So as Hitler known in 1939 in September that the Soviet Union was just, you know, was neutral

00:47:26.720 but not a partner or was opposed to Germany, they would have never declared war because

00:47:31.680 they would have had this army of 7 million people on their eastern flank and the indomitable 1.00

00:47:36.720 French army.

00:47:38.200 But they made a non-aggression pact.

00:47:40.500 So collusion was one reason on the part of Russia.

00:47:43.500 The other was appeasement.

00:47:44.660 And that was that not just materially, the French and British, when they saw Hitler finally

00:47:51.020 in 1938 for what he was, they desperately rearmed and they were very successful.

00:47:54.800 They were getting close to parity or maybe even superiority, but they didn't, they were

00:47:59.740 so traumatized by World War II that they didn't want to repeat Verdun and the Somme, whereas

00:48:04.340 the Germans, who should have been traumatized as the losers, very much wanted to repeat it. 1.00

00:48:09.800 They wanted a second try.

00:48:11.420 So there was an appeasement going on that Hitler interpreted not as magnanimity to be reciprocated,

00:48:17.680 but with weakness to be treated with contempt.

00:48:20.340 And finally, the third unfortunate leg in that equation was the United States was isolationist.

00:48:27.080 If we had said in 1939, say in January, we have an alliance with France and we're going

00:48:36.940 to station 100,000 American troops and we had mobilized, Hitler would have never gone in. 0.54

00:48:41.820 But it was a combination of British and French appeasement, American isolationism and Soviet

00:48:48.420 collusion that tricked Hitler into thinking that these countries were morally weak and did 0.88

00:48:53.760 not want to go to war.

00:48:54.920 And that deluded him to the fact they were actually very strong countries that already had parity

00:49:00.480 with him when he attacked them and would soon overwhelm him.

00:49:03.060 And as a result, we lost 2% of the world population, all because of isolation and appeasement and

00:49:10.660 collusion, all very bad stuff.

00:49:13.040 Victor Davis Hanson, Professor Hanson, thank you for being here.

00:49:16.220 The book is excellent.

00:49:17.600 The book is The Second World Wars.

00:49:19.500 I highly recommend it.

00:49:21.160 We've been talking about how nobody in America learns history anymore.

00:49:25.160 Facts have now been banned from college campuses and they're deemed hateful and bigoted.

00:49:31.000 So I recommend if you'd like to refute all of that craziness, go out there and read Victor

00:49:36.280 Davis Hanson's The Second World Wars.

00:49:39.060 VDH, thank you very much and we'd love to have you back.

00:49:42.360 Thank you for having me.

00:49:44.320 All right.

00:49:44.880 That's our show.

00:49:45.740 Go out there and get this book.

00:49:46.940 It's really, really good.

00:49:48.440 Until tomorrow, I am Michael Knowles.

00:49:50.260 This is The Michael Knowles Show.

00:49:51.560 Tune in tomorrow.

00:49:52.400 We'll see you then.

00:49:53.000 The Michael Knowles Show is produced by Marshall Benson.

00:50:01.740 Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.

00:50:03.820 Senior producer, Jonathan Hay.

00:50:05.760 Supervising producer, Mathis Glover.

00:50:08.080 Our technical producer is Austin Stevens.

00:50:10.660 Edited by Alex Zingaro.

00:50:12.800 Audio is mixed by Mike Coromina.

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00:50:17.180 The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire Forward Publishing production.

00:50:20.960 Copyright Forward Publishing 2017.

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00:50:58.120 Long it away.

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00:51:08.020 Bye.

00:51:08.400 ku

The Michael Knowles Show - December 11, 2017

Ep. 72 - CNN is Literally Hitler (ft. Victor Davis Hanson)

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