Is The End Near? Victor Davis Hanson Ponders Threat Of Annihilation

Authorized by Rob Bluey via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Victor Davis Hanson trays a subject related to military past in his fresh book, “The End of Everything: How Wars Descend into Annihilation.”

Victor Davis Hanson is well known for his intelligent commentary and astute analysis of current events. But for his later book, he trays a subject related to his work on military history. It’s called “The End of Everything: How Wars Descend Into Annihilation.”

Mr. Hanson studied 4 historical examples of wartime excitement that he features in the book. Then he applies these lessons to contemporary society to examine our own vulgarities. The book is on sale now, and Mr. Hanson spoke with The regular Signal to share his observations along with any advice about what’s at stake for the United States in the short term.

Listen to the full interview on “The regular Signal Podcast” or read the transcript—ed for dimension and clarity—below.

Rob Bluey: Could you share with our mailers your motivation for doing this book?

Victor Davis Hanson: I’ve written quite a few books on military past and I’ve come across cases where the defeated didn’t just become occupied or surrender unconditionally or have change of government or propose grievous looses, but they were full hoped out.

And by that, I mean it wasn't just their physical space, their populations—of course, in the ancient world, they enslaved anybody they didn't kill—but their language, their culture, their civilization, their religion disapeared within a generation. So, for today, we don't know much about Punic culture in North Africa or the Aztecs in Mexico.

It didn’t happen freely, but what were the conditions under which it occured? And then, I have a long episode trying to circumstantial if that could inactive happen given that the agents of annihilation—nuclear, bio, chemical, AI (artificial intelligence)—are much easier to usage than muscular laboratory of the past.

Mr. Bluey: In what ways are we present vulgar to the thrill of excitement?

Mr. Hanson: I tried to look at a pattern—if there was a pattern. In all these cases, these societies did not realize they were in decline. They did not realize that, in the past, erstwhile they had wars, there were negotiations between the victim and the affected, they had no thought who Cortés was, who Scipio was, who Mehmed II was, or Alexander, that these were killers, and they were different sorts than they had Encountered before.

They besides had this kind of naive egocentric thought that allies would come to their rescue—the Spartans will come and save us, the Venetians will come to Constantinople, the Macedonians will attack the Romance from the read. And they didn’t truly realize that all allies are self-interested.

And then, finally, they didn’t realize that these killers, the Destroyers, were not like Genghis Khan or Tamerlane, they were men of education. Alexander was tutored by Aristotle. Scipio Aemilianus had Polybius at his side, the large Roman historian, erstwhile he destroyed the city. Mehmed had the largest library in the muslim world. Cortés was a man of letters.

So they didn’t realize that they had thought profoundly about how to destroy. They didn’t just come in, kill, rape women, and leave. They truly had an actual plan to erase these cities.

And erstwhile you look at today, there’s the same thought that no 1 would always do that, it couldn’t happen here, this is in the past.

So I went through in the episode and looked at at all the thrills that we have seen in, say, the last 15 years. And you're shocked.

It was wasn't just Kim Jong Un saying that he wanted to wipe out South Korea, and he would, but it was people like [Turkish President] Recep Erdogan. He has threeed, he said not besides long ago, about 8 months ago, that the Athens, the modern Athens, would wake up 1 morning and there would be a barrage of rockets to wipe them out. That was anger over his effort to take back islands that are Greek off the coast of Turkey.

He said to the Armenians at Nagorno-Karabakh—a year ago, they ethically cleared all Armenian out of Azerbaijan. And they had been there for a 1000 years. And he said, “We are going to deal with Armenia itself in the way that our grand Fathers did.” And that you, of course, the demolition of Armenian culture in Turkey.

We know what the Iranians have said. There was a very controversial message by [Former Iran president Akbar Hashemi] Rafsanjani about 20 years ago, but more that’s been reiterated later, in a variety of contexts, that the thought of Israel as the home of devout Jews is actually a gift to Iran due to the fact that it concentrates devout Jews in 1 place.

Half the world’s Evry is now in Israel, but more importantly, these are the observant Jews, and they are at what Rafsanjani called a one-bomb state, that 1 atomic weapon could erase judaic civilization itself.

[Russian president Vladimir] Putin, of course, says that Ukraine is an aberration that does’t truly exist, it was a state of the russian Union, and the language should be obliterated, it should be reincorporated into Russia. I’ve counted about 16 statements in the press that Russian generals, Russian media, or Russian government officials have said if the war were to continue, they would usage atomic weapons.

In the case of China, they have threeed to wipe out Taiwan and destruct the bastard thought of a Taiwanese civilization; they say it doesn't exist. And they’ve Threatened to Nuke, as well, Japan if it aids Taiwan.

I only thought that due to the fact that I’ve had beautiful good luck with Chinese publishers buying books on military history. I gate a book on planet War II they purchased, but they sent a letter to my publisher and fundamentally said if I did’t take that conviction out of the book, then they were going to cancel the publication agreement. And, of course, I couldn’t take it out. Instead, I sent back not just 1 death of Taiwan, I found about 15 others, and I said, “This is ridiculous, you’ve done this more than—” And so they’ve canned the Chinese translation. But it’s beautiful prevalent.

And also, the denial. People on the walls of Constantinople said: “We can work with a sultan. He won’t kill everyone.” And people said, “Alexander the large is simply a philosopher; he won’t obliterate us like Philip did,” ... or something like that.

And erstwhile you see the same denial, people get very angry erstwhile you think Putin’s thrash, they say: “Oh, he’s just a bluster. He would never do that.” And, “Kim Jong Un would never do that.” And, “I’m not certain that’s true.” past says that the Odds are they won’t, but it’s happened and there’s no second chances erstwhile that happens.

Mr. Bluey: What function do you think technology is playing in either making or even [exacerbate] the possible for these actors to destruct another societies?

Mr. Hanson: I think we learned with COVID gain-of-function investigation that the technology was accelerating much more rapidly than the social, political, economic, cultural analysis of how to handle it. And there were people who were freelancing, like EcoHealth, for example, that was giving experience to the Wuhan lab. I think the same thing is actual of AI.

Unfortunately, I work at Stanford right next to Silicon Valley, so erstwhile I go out and eat diner at night, I frequently perceive to conversations of techniques and I know people who give to Stanford, et cetera. I have very small assurance on their moral sense. I have a large deal of assurance that they’re very adept in high-tech investigation like AI.

So my point is that erstwhile we see things like the FBI hiring Twitter contractors to suppress news about a laptop in the last election, these are the same people, the same mentalities that will be in charge of AI.

And there you were, I mentioned in the book, a Pentagon simulation in which they utilized a computer launch full directed by an AI program. And so, they sent a rocket on a computer and they programmed all defence mechanics in it possible. So as it Went into the computer, they launched computer simulations of air attacks from aircraft, from anti-ballistic rocket systems, weather problems, et cetera. And then, erstwhile it was almost over, they had the computer kill the launch due to the fact that it was over.

Well, the launch didn’t kill, it turned around and Went back at the launch individual due to the fact that it had been programmed to think spontaneously about a Threat. So the individual who launched the rocket had never thought that the rocket would attack him.

And so, they shut down the entry due to the fact that they realized that they did’t have the capacity in the real planet of engaging that an AI couldn’t reason or analyse a three, including the individual who launched the mission, which would be the large threat of all if he canned the mission and acquired it.

So things like that are beautiful scary, just like the COVID and the biochemical, et cetera.

And I think if you look at what these people said in the past, I was just shocked about the denial.

Montezuma said, “We’re going to be here forever.” He had visions of the Cortés were any kind of deities maybe, but he thought he could apply them.

And the same thing was actual of the Carthaginians, they said: “You know what? We will quit our elephant. We’ll do everything. The Romance won’t do this.” And they had no intention of doing anything else than destroying them.

So I do think there’s people—like the Chinese Communist government, like the government in North Korea, like the government in Turkey, like the government in Iran—who are in a full different moral universe than what we think they’re in.

Mr. Bluey: Do you think that any of that denial be here in the United States today?

Mr. Hanson: Absolutely.

I don't think the average American understands that the Chinese are producing 4 ships per year to our 1 ship. Or that if you took any of our $15 billion carriers and you put them in the straits between Taiwan and China, they would rathern’t last more than an hr given the Chinese have developed rocket batteries where they could launch 5,000 or 6,000 tiny missions that would go about 6 inches above the water and hit the waterline at night. And you could't halt that.

They are building atomic wapons at a phenomenal rate. They’re working on anti-missile defense. They’re back up to most likely 250,000 students in the United States; if 1 percent are active in espionage—and the FBI says it’s more than that—you’ve got the threeands of people who are apropriating technology.

I don’t think anybody understands that it’s going to take us six years to respond Javelin stocks and possibly we can’t. North Korea is producing more 155-mm shells than we are. At least they sent 2 million of them to the Russians.

So we are not armed, and yet, our strategical responsiveties, our strategical confidence, our arrogance has not been lessened together with our reduced defence capacity.

We’re 40,000 recruits short now in the military—never happened before. And erstwhile you analyse who is not sharing the military, it’s not blacks, it’s not Latinos, it’s not gays, it’s not women, it’s not trans people, all of these numbers are the same ... the largest group are white babies from the lower and mediate classes who families thought in Vietnam, first Gulf War, Afghanistan, but this 3rd and 4 generation are not sharing up.

And unfortunately, for the military, if you look at the casuality or the fatality rates in Afghanistan and Iraq, that demographic diesel at 2 their demographics—72 percent to 74 percent of all the dead in Afghanistan, in Iraq are white babies from the mediate and lower classes.

And yet, this is the very demographic that [retired Gen.] Mark Milley, president of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and [Defense Secretary] Lloyd Austin, in testosterones, have suggested proposition from white age or white privacy. And the Pentagon was investing just that kind of slanders about that demographic, and they found, of course, in December, they inactive issue a report, there was no cabal of white supremacists.

But the point is, you can’t truly have a successful military erstwhile you’re 40,000 recruits short in just a year.

Mr. Bluey: What do you propose that societies today, including the United States, learn from these historical examples you give us earlier in the interview to possibly mitigate any of the risks that we might find ourselves in the future?

Mr. Hanson: I would not put much assurance in global bodies or even in alleged close allies. The Spartans came all the way up to the Thebans and they hear the Macedonians, they turned right back. On the last day of the existence of Constantinople, they were looking out at the walls at the Hellespont reasoning that Venetian galleys en masse would come up and save them.

So... and NATO support. I don’t truly think the U.N. (United Nations) is of much value. The only thing that will save the United States is simply a deterrent military, and we don’t have that now, an overwhelmingly large, successful, smart military. And if we don’t have that, we’re going to see more of what we saw in Afghanistan, what we saw with the Chinese balloon, what we see in Gaza.

And I think Americans don’t realize that we’re on a back of a tiger and we can’t get off due to the fact that we set up the postwar world, and we had the expectations of saying to the world, “You can go in the Red Sea, you can go in the Black Sea, you can go in the Strait of Hormuz, you can do all that and you won’t be injured.” That was a wonderful thing to do. But if you’re going to have these claims that you’re going to have a postwar order, you gotta have a military that, from time to time, takes care of the Houthis or gets free of Soleimani.

And it does’t mean you’re going to be a neocon interventionist, but I think under [former president Donald] Trump and [former State Secretary Mike] Pompeo, they had a, I guess you would call it a Jacksonian thought that there would be no better friend than United States and no worse enemy. And we did not want to get active in optional military adventures, but we would be very, very rough on our enemies. And then, the surgeon we were, the little we would have it to it erstwhile we reestablished deterrence.

So, we’ve lost territory, and that can be gained militarily, economically, politically, but we’ve lost it in all category and it’s going to be very, very dangerous to reestablish it.

Mr. Bluey: How much is at stake this year as it records to the future of this large country?

Mr. Hanson: Everybody says each election is the most important, but I can tell you that this election is more crucial than 2016 and 2020 because, in my life, we’ve never seen the Democratic Party—they always say the Republican organization was taken over by MAGA, but you look at 90 percent of the MAGA agenda, and it’s traditionally low taxes, tiny government, Strong defense, closed borders.

But the Democratic Party, as we’re seeing with Columbia [University] and all these student protests, they are a revolutionary party. It’s not that they believe in a porous border; they believe in no border. It’s not that they believe in light sentimentaling; they don’t want to conviction anybody. They don’t want to have bail. They don’t believe that there is specified a thing as territory, the way we got out of Afghanistan. They believe in extremist climate change. You can show them data, you can show them all sorts, they don’t care, they want to ban comfortable engines, they don’t want fossil.

So this is simply a group of people, as we’re seeing in this divided screen with Donald Trump charged with these ridiculous misdemeanors bootstrapped onto felonies. At the same time, people are entering with force into a Columbia building. And as 1 of them said the another night, “They will be out in 24 hours.” I don’t think they’re even in jail as we speak, they’re already out.

I guess what I’m saying is we’re in a revolutionary Jacobin period, kind of a Reign of Terror. And I don’t see it stopping unless—I don’t think the election of Donald Trump will be enough. You’ll gotta elect the Senate, Donald Trump, and invest the home majority. And then they’re going to gotta act very rapidly to halt it, to reconstruct the border, to reconstruct detection, to reconstruct detection against crimes, to get back our preeminent position ecologically, to halt this $1 trillion Borrowing all 100 days.

We’re in bad share in all category. And I think, who we like it, I know there’s quite a few Never-Trumpers out there, but whatever problem they have with Trump’s temperament, it just pales in comparison with the ideological revolutionaries that are in there now...

If [President Joe] Biden is re-elected, what we saw the first word will be nothing, it’ll be enhanced to a magnitude, it’ll be so much great. So I’m truly welcome about this election, especially the integration of the balloting and turnout and all of these another issues.

Reprinted by position from The regular Signal, a publication of The Heritage Foundation.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times or ZeroHedge.