Welcome back to the Ten Blocks podcast. This is Brian Anderson, the editor of City

Journal. Joining me on the show today

is the military historian, columnist, and classic scholar Victor Davis Hanson. Victor is an old friend

of the Manhattan Institute and City Journal. He's been a contributing editor for us. He's the Martin

and Ily Anderson Senior Fellow in Residence in Classics and Military History at the

Hoover Institution.

He's a distinguished fellow at the Center for American Greatness and a visiting professor

at Hillsdale, among other distinctions and roles.

His writing has appeared in dozens of outlets, including the Wall Street Journal, the Chicago Tribune,

and other leading publications. He's the author of more than 20 books, and today we're going to

discuss his latest, which is called The End of Everything, How Wars Descend into Annihilation. It's

really a compelling book. It came out in May,

and it looks at the causes and consequences of wars of obliteration. So Victor, thanks very much for

coming on, Tim Black. Thank you for having me, Brian. So in this new book, The End of Everything,

you chronicled the demise of four civilizations,

classical Thebes, Punic Carthage, the Byzantine, Constantinople, and then the Aztecs.

And there can be, you write, degrees of obliteration, and you describe them in each of these

examples.

But there are also striking similarities in the wartime destruction of whole societies.

So I wonder, just to start out, how do you define the total destruction of a culture?

What do you mean by that?

Well, it's different than just the obliteration of their infrastructure or the mass killing, as we saw

...