Victor Davis Hanson Describes How Civilizations Perish
The Radio Free Hillsdale Hour
Hillsdale College
4.8 • 650 Ratings
🗓️ 10 May 2024
⏱️ 48 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Guests: Victor Davis Hanson & Mark F. McClay
Host Scot Bertram talks with Victor Davis Hanson, the Wayne and Marcia Buske Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, about civilizations that were completely destroyed by war and his new book The End of Everything: How Wars Descend into Annihilation. And Mark McClay, assistant professor of Classics at Hillsdale College, discusses the religious rites of the ancient cult of Bacchus and his book The Bacchic Gold Tablets and Poetic Tradition.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | From the historic campus of Hillsdale College in Hillsdale, Michigan, where the good, the true, and the beautiful are taught, nurtured, and honored, this is the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour, bringing the activity and education of the college to listeners across the country. |
| 0:25.1 | I think their militaries, they get acculturated to a particular system or tradition. |
| 0:32.4 | So I think it's an idea that we've always been preeminent. |
| 0:36.9 | We have a particular, in our sphere of influence, |
| 0:40.6 | our militaries have been predominant. It's kind of like the United States. |
| 0:43.6 | This is your host, Scott Bertram, and that's Dr. Victor Davis Hanson, the Wayne and Marsha Busky |
| 0:49.7 | distinguished fellow in history at Hillsdale College, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, |
| 0:55.1 | an author of many books, including the brand new one, The End of Everything, How Wars Descend |
| 1:02.2 | Into Annihilation. You can find that book at hillsdale.edu slash podcast. Dr. Hansen, |
| 1:13.7 | thanks so much for joining us. Thank you for having me, Scott. |
| 1:20.7 | This new book, The End of Everything, four case studies of civilizations that collapsed, and collapsed might not be going far enough. These are civilizations that quite literally |
| 1:26.5 | were wiped off the face of the earth. |
| 1:30.1 | When exactly, and this is a question the book answers, when exactly is a people defined as |
| 1:36.1 | vanquished or ended? Or in other words, how did you come to pick these four civilizations as |
| 1:40.9 | case studies? Well, there were more, but I thought these would be the most iconic. |
| 1:44.9 | It's the destruction of most of the people, and in the modern period, we don't enslave people, |
| 1:50.8 | although we do worse things to them sometimes. But it's the destruction of the population. |
| 1:55.8 | That means the killing of them or the enslavement of them, and the disperses so that they're no longer a collective |
| 2:02.4 | identity. And then the destruction of the language which is scattered or no longer has a whole, |
| 2:09.0 | there's no longer a literature or accounting system, there's no longer a central urban center |
| 2:14.1 | and there's no longer a culture. So in all of these, you could say that within 30 |
| 2:20.6 | years after the destruction of their cities, there was no more Theban dialect of the ocean. |
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