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Sept. 27, 2022 - Dinesh D'Souza
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VIVA L'ITALIA Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep422
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Coming up, I'm going to outline the broad significance of Georgia Maloney's huge win in Italy.
I also want to show how the rightward turn of Europe signifies a second crisis in Marxism.
I'll talk about how the FBI raid on a leading pro-lifer shows how the feds are now targeting not just Trump, but ordinary citizens on the right.
Actor Stelio Cervantes joins me.
We're going to talk about his new film, Pursuit of Freedom.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Show.
Mmm. America needs this voice.
The times are crazy, and a time of confusion, division, and lies.
We need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
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Italy has had a free and fair election, and the result is a big win for the right-wing or conservative party.
And it's actually a coalition party.
But the leading member of that coalition is a group called Friends of the Fraternal Order of Italy, or Friends of Italy, and Fraternal Brothers of Italy.
And its leader is Giorgio Maloney, who will become the next Italian prime minister.
Now, there might have been some leftists in this country.
I mean, they were warning against this result, and they might have been hoping that just as here in 2020, you'd get, like, late-term results that would pivot away from Maloney and give the election to the left.
But unfortunately for these leftists here in America, Italy has voter ID. And also the only mules that you find in Italy are four-legged ones.
They eat grass.
So this was an honest election.
And now the left is dismayed at the outcome.
And there's also a lot of screaming about the outcome at the EU. Why?
Because at the European Union, they can see that this is a trend that is beginning to sweep across Europe.
In the beginning, the trend was only in Eastern Europe, and you may say at the periphery of Europe.
So Hungary, for example, pivoted in a right-wing direction, Viktor Orban.
Latvia, Poland, Lithuania, Czech Republic, Austria, Slovakia.
And so the EU said, well, the mainstream countries in Europe aren't going that way.
France is okay, even though we've got Le Pen.
Germany is okay.
England is okay. And Italy is okay and Spain is okay.
But now Italy, one of the countries, in fact, sometimes described as the beating heart of Europe, Italy has decided to also pivot sharply to the right.
And I found it interesting that Ursula von der Leyen of the EU was issuing threats before the Italian election.
If the Italian election goes the wrong way, in effect, she was saying, if the right-wingers come to power, we have some tools to apply pressure and sanctions.
I think the Italian people were extremely annoyed that this unelected bureaucrat would try to lecture the Italians and and you know here in America I've seen a lot of far-right She's extreme. This is Giorgio Maloney His extreme and I'm thinking to myself extreme wait a minute the Italians have voted for a new prime minister If she's extreme does that mean that the Italians are extreme?
I mean, most of us have.
I've been to Italy probably 20 times.
And the Italians are famously easygoing.
They live and let live.
Let's enjoy life together.
They're moderate. Happy-go-lucky, tolerant people.
So the idea that they're somehow extreme and they voted for some extremist is just, on the face of it, ludicrous.
The Italian phrase, I think I mentioned this yesterday or the day before, is centrodestra, center-right.
The Italians decided this time to go center-right.
And Giorgia Maloney, the reason she's controversial in the West and in America, listen to this, Yes to natural families, no to the LGBT lobby.
Yes to sexual identity, no to gender ideology.
Yes to the culture of life, no to the abyss of death.
No to the violence of Islam, yes to safer borders, no to mass immigration, yes to work for our people.
I was quoting this to Debbie and showing her a clip.
It's actually, you know, it's just interesting to listen to this in the Italian.
And Debbie goes, well, that's the Trump agenda.
And it sure is. Interestingly, Georgia Maloney is not a kind of libertarian free market capitalist.
In fact, she attacks Trump.
Not only big government, but to some degree even big business.
She goes that big government and big business have a kind of common interest in erasing the particularities of our given identities.
So the fact that we are not just, as she puts it, numbers.
We're not just interchangeable numbers or consumers, but rather we are members of a family.
We have a family last name.
And we are embedded in communities.
And we have religious faith.
And we have affiliations to not only our state, but also our country.
So these loyalties to family, to faith, to country, she goes, get in the way.
Of big business, which wants to see everybody merely as a consumer, and big government, which wants to see everybody pretty much as a pawn that it can manipulate to its benefit.
And at the end of her speech, Georgia Maloney goes, she quotes G.K. Chesterton.
And again, G.K. Chesterton, the famous Catholic intellectual, somebody who would hardly be described as a fascist.
In fact, he was vehemently anti-fascist.
And so her quotation from Chesterton, very telling, Fires will be kindled to testify that two and two make four.
Swords will be drawn to prove that leaves are green in summer.
What she's getting at is that today we are in the surreal position, I think we all feel this, of having to defend reality itself.
Reality itself has become contested.
You look like a woman, but no, I'm not a woman.
I don't see myself as a woman.
I see myself as a toad.
And so this is an argument we seriously have to have with people.
They identify with members of other genders or perhaps even other species.
And basically, Georgia Maloney says, my candidacy is here.
I'm here to tell you enough.
Enough of this nonsense.
So she's running as a cultural conservative.
And in doing so, she is transforming the landscape of Italy and perhaps, in a sense, all of Europe.
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Listening to the newly elected Italian Prime Minister, Giorgio Maloney, talk, what you have, first of all, is a certain type of rhetorical Subtlety.
They say yes, but we say no.
And so as this lilt builds, you begin to see that there's an agenda here.
She knows how to lay out her vision.
She knows how to contrast it.
So she is, in her own way, you know, we sometimes say the left is a dividing force.
She's a dividing force, but she's dividing against the left.
Or she's trying to put it differently.
She's unifying Italy against the left.
And what a contrast with so many of the kind of conservatives and Republicans in this country who are just such lifeless duds.
I mean, just think of someone like McConnell or McCarthy, who half-heartedly put out, now that we're just two months from the election, here is our agenda, we're going to be doing this and we're going to be doing that.
First of all, it's not even clear that you can believe them.
Second of all, this agenda is nothing more.
All they've done is go back to recycled papers from the last election or perhaps even from 25 years ago.
And this is a kind of a warmed over agenda.
Yeah, this time we're really going to be serious.
Look, we don't have an alternative.
We have the Republican Party.
We have to work through the Republican Party.
But all I'm saying is that we could sure use some more Georgia Maloney's over here.
I want to talk about how Giorgio Meloni's victory in Italy is ushering in a second crisis of Marxism.
And here's what I mean. Well, I'll start with a little data point.
And this is a graph that I saw on one of these websites.
Working-class Southern Italy seems to have completely abandoned the Italian left.
And it shows a graph of the Italian left's success in Southern Italy, which is, by the way, the left wing of Italy.
Italy, by the way, has had the strongest Communist Party in Europe for many decades.
Let's think back to the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci was, of course, Italian.
And the Italian left has always been strong.
It still is strong, but it's just the right has proven to be stronger.
But the movement of working class people away from the left, just as in this country we're seeing working class people moving away from the left and from the Democrats, a very important, perhaps the most important political trend of our time.
Now, the crisis of Marxism.
There was a crisis of Marxism at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century.
Basically, Marxists saw that the working-class revolution that they were hoping for and that Marx had predicted would happen inevitably was not happening.
And so, the left realized that they need a different kind of Marxism to keep Marxism alive.
How are you going to produce this proletarian revolution?
And their answer was, we need to do two things.
First of all, we need a professional class of revolutionaries.
This was kind of Lenin's solution.
That the working class is not going to revolt in Russia, but the revolutionaries could establish a kind of communist dictatorship of the proletariat, and that's what they did.
Now, in the West, led by Gramsci, the left moved in a different direction, a direction that only really came to full fruition in the 1960s and has continued ever since, which is, let's take over the institutions of culture.
Let's take over the universities.
Let's take over the schools.
Let's try to infiltrate the churches.
Let's try to infiltrate big business.
Let's try to take over even the military.
And so this project, let's call it cultural Marxism, was the solution to the failure of economic Marxism.
Since economic Marxism didn't seem to be strong enough to produce this true fissure between the bourgeois and the proletariat, let's use cultural Marxism as a weapon.
And identity politics was born out of that.
It was born out of cultural Marxism.
Let's not just emphasize the economic divide.
Let's emphasize the racial divide and the gender divide and the transgender divide.
And I think what's interesting is that Giorgio Maloney in Italy basically said, all right, you want to play on the cultural field?
Let's play.
And so her approach has been to fight largely on the cultural front.
She hasn't been primarily doing battle on the economic front.
Now, there are a couple of her adjoining parties, including Silvio Berlusconi's party, that are more, you could say, traditional conservatives emphasize economic interests and low tax rates and privatization and so on.
But Giorgio Maloney's campaign has been basically, no, we are basically going to fight over God.
We're going to fight over family.
We're going to fight over morality.
And we're going to fight over country.
And that's the kind of four prongs of the Maloney campaign.
And what she's shown is you can beat cultural Marxism at its own game.
You don't have to be on the defensive about identity politics.
You don't have to change the topic.
You don't have to say, well, what really matters is inflation— No.
Inflation matters, but immigration matters.
And immigration, of course, a critical issue for Maloney, a critical issue for Republicans, as I think Republicans now realize here in this country.
And so what I think is coming about, and it's going to be delightful to see it reach its conclusion, is not just the smashing of economic Marxism, which has now occurred over more than a century, but also the smashing of its replacement, which is cultural Marxism as well.
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Guys, I'm delighted to welcome to the podcast, well, he's been on before, my son-in-law, Brandon Gill.
Brandon used to work for a prestigious hedge fund in New York.
He is now the editor of the DC Inquirer.
He has his own social media company.
I like to have him on to talk about economic issues in particular.
Hey, Brandon, the last time you came on, you talked about ESG. So I want you to kind of refresh people about what this ESG business is and then talk a little bit about how The climate activists are worried that the ESG money is all talk and no action.
Right. Thanks for having me on again, Dinesh.
Just as a bit of a refresher, ESG stands for environmental, social, and governance.
And it's a set of liberal principles sort of codified into an investment framework that the government pushes on investing institutions, which they then push on American businesses.
And it's a sort of framework for how they should operate, that they should have so many women on their board, they should hire based on Take into account the race of the applicant whenever they're hiring people and they should look at how their businesses affect the environment.
Now, interestingly here, I'm seeing an article in Bloomberg that Al Gore is upset that some of the companies, when they realize the extremism of these ESG demands, are bailing out.
And Al Gore is like some of the other companies that have stayed in the ESG coalition are professing rhetorical fidelity to the ESG goals.
But when it comes to actually doing anything, they're a little more reluctant.
That's right.
Well, what they're really realizing now is that ESG really is sort of more of a Ponzi scheme than anything else.
So they create these left-wing economic ideals that funds and businesses need to operate under.
So you have a difference between the underlying economic Quality of the business and the valuation that that business is being given in the free market because these funds are investing based on non-economic principles.
But once that discrepancy gets bigger and bigger and bigger, eventually something has to give.
It's a literal asset bubble, and that's what we're seeing.
Now, some of these funds are starting to push back a little bit now because they've sort of had enough of it.
They're tired of investing in unsustainable businesses.
You see this on the national level too in Europe, where ESG, under the guise of ESG, the UN and the EU have sort of pushed national governments and local investment firms to move away from fossil fuels, and now they're stuck with an economy that has no energy infrastructure.
And where energy prices are skyrocketing right in front of the winter.
Wow. Interesting comment on social media by a guy named Matthew Peterson.
And he makes the point, which I take to be slightly different than traditionally what conservatives have believed.
You know, Milton Friedman, I think, took the view a generation ago.
Companies should not care about social values at all.
They should just focus on the bottom line and on business.
But what Matthew Peterson is saying is that there's an alternative to ESG. Instead of promoting stupid stuff...
Why don't you promote the traditional family?
Why don't you promote bringing jobs back to America?
Why don't you promote excellence instead of equity as the goal of corporations?
So I think what he's talking about is a kind of a positive framework.
He's not against the principle of using capital, but his point is, let's use the principle to do constructive and good things, not bad ones.
Right, exactly.
Let's use capital to help Underpin the society that allowed these businesses to become successful in the first place.
So what we have right now is a group of elitist left-wing corporate leaders and investment professionals who have decided that all of the things that allowed them to sort of make their way up the economic ladder to the top are no longer priorities.
So things like meritocracy, hiring people based on the quality of their work rather than the color of their skin.
Things like having a successful energy grid that we can rely on, not just getting rid of fossil fuels with no adequate alternative.
You know, things like, let's not promote things like Black Lives Matter, which is promoting lawlessness throughout the entire country, making America less safe to live on, and explicitly undermining the nuclear family.
Why don't we actually promote the things that has allowed America to be the greatest economic force the world has ever seen, to do great things all over the world?
Let's promote the nuclear family.
Let's promote efficient Home-produced energy and let's base our economy on meritocracy rather than on racial preferences.
I think he's exactly right.
I mean, it seems clear that Republicans, you know, we tend to criticize the bad things the left is doing.
But what I like about what Peterson is saying here and that you've affirmed is putting forward a positive agenda and saying, listen, you know, if we are in charge, we will use our leverage in a constructive way, not in a destructive way.
Brandon Gill, thank you very much for joining me.
Look forward to having you back.
Thanks for having me on. You've heard me say it.
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I've spoken about the FBI as a group of thugs with badges.
And we have seen the ways in which the FBI arbitrarily raids Trump's residence, Mar-a-Lago.
We've seen the FBI's orchestration of the Whitmer kidnapping.
And we have not fully seen, although it's beginning to come out, the FBI's role in January 6th.
Interesting as the government tries to make a...
A conspiracy case, a sedition case against Oath Keepers.
They are now admitting there were FBI informants embedded in the Oath Keepers, and they're trying to create the idea of some sort of an Oath Keepers plot.
As far as I can see, it's nonsense, but interestingly, FBI infiltration is a reality.
But I want to show that the FBI is going beyond this to terrorize ordinary Americans.
And by ordinary Americans, I mean ordinary Americans who are right of center, who are Republican, who are conservative, people like us.
And I want to focus on the case of Mark Houck.
So Mark Hauck is a family man, seven kids, wife, lovely family, founder of an organization called The King's Men, which promotes Christian virtues among men.
He's also a sidewalk counselor, and what that means is that he's an activist.
He's a pro-life activist, and he doesn't hesitate, along with others, to show up to these abortion clinics and attempt to do sidewalk counseling of women.
Now, sometimes what happens is that there is There were altercations, not surprising, between people who work at those clinics and the sidewalk counselors.
So apparently what happened is that one of these clinic volunteers was entering into an altercation not with Mark Hauck himself but with his 12-year-old son.
And the clinic guy, who is an older man, began to scream at the young boy and go into his face.
And what Mark Hauck did almost instinctively with a paternal impulse to protect his son is he pushed the guy and the guy fell.
Now, big deal.
This can happen. This is almost something that can be anticipated.
And when you have confrontations, there's always a risk that somebody's going to get shoved.
In any event, this guy was not particularly harmed.
He later tried to make a complaint against Mark Houck.
But the complaint was thrown out.
It was basically one of those cases where, what, you know, I slipped, I fell, and what, I had to put on a Band-Aid, who knows?
Nevertheless, the point is the court didn't even take this seriously.
The whole thing was thrown to the sidewalk, so to speak.
And then what happens is...
Mark Houck suddenly gets raided by the FBI. There's some dispute about whether there were 10 agents or 15 agents or 20.
Well, there were a lot of agents. And they came in and they began to try to break down the door.
They had weapons drawn.
And they terrify, of course, Mark Houck's children.
And they claim that he's violating a federal law.
And the federal law apparently is one of those laws that is called the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Law.
So supposedly, you're not allowed to block people from entering a clinic.
Well, Mark Hauck wasn't doing that.
He wasn't blocking anybody from doing that.
In that sense, he was not interfering with the freedom of anybody to make their own decision about whether to go to the clinic.
He was merely trying to counsel them when the Planned Parenthood or the clinic activist shows up and begins to berate Mark Hauck's son.
Mark Hauck sort of instinctively tries to defend his own kid.
So Mark Huck doesn't pose a threat to anyone.
This is somebody, the situation got a little bit out of hand, but not even that much out of hand.
And yet, here's a guy who's not only raided by the FBI, but is facing years in prison.
Apparently, the maximum sentence is 11 years and fines of up to $350,000.
Now, it's hard for me to believe it will even get to that, but we're living in a strange America.
First of all, this offense should not even be charged.
This is absolutely absurd.
Well, when you find out that the U.S. attorney responsible is a left-winger, a Biden appointee, who brags in a press release that, quote, she is the first woman of color and the first person to identify as LGBTQIA+. To lead the office.
So I think we know what we're dealing with here.
We're dealing with a far left-wing activist.
And when you begin to read the charges, they're so stupid.
There are actually two counts, and they almost verbatim repeat themselves.
And they basically say BL was, this is the individual who was pushed, was and had been providing reproductive health services.
And it claims that That Mark Hauck, quote, by force intentionally injured, intimidated, and interfered with BL from providing reproductive health services.
So apparently this, when you begin to kind of confront...
My kid, if I push you, I'm interfering with you providing reproductive health services because you fell to the ground and had to get up.
So this is the FBI. Again, think of who the biggest bully here is.
Frankly, it's not the clinic worker, and it's certainly not Mark Houck.
It's the FBI. Those are the real thugs here.
And they're The thugs because they're criminalizing what is essentially an argument that got slightly out of control.
The court itself was wise to recognize there's really nothing here.
No real harm was done.
It's not as if Mark Howe pistol whipped the guy or wrestled him to the ground or choked him.
None of that. So this is something that should never have gotten to court and hopefully it will not go much further.
With the CPI, the Consumer Price Index, increasing yet again, the stock market has been in absolute turmoil.
Well, what's our illustrious leader doing to quell the surge of inflation that's destroying so many American families?
Oh yeah, spending more money and adding to the burden.
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Guys, I'm really delighted to welcome to the podcast a friend of ours, Stelio Cervante, an award-winning South African actor and producer.
He's been in a ton of movies, including a movie that Debbie and I made called Infidel, with Jim Caviezel in the lead.
Stelio has a new movie.
It's called Pursuit of Freedom.
Debbie and I watched. We loved it.
Terrific film. It opened in theaters September 16th.
It's also available on demand.
Stelio, thanks for joining us.
First of all, you played an infidel.
You played an Israeli Mossad agent in the new film, Pursuit of Freedom.
You play an Eastern European pastor and I just want to commend you at the kind of versatility of the roles that you play.
You're completely credible even though you're playing people in different walks of life and from different countries.
So we really enjoyed this film.
Talk a little bit about the film and also about your role in it.
Thank you, and thank you for having me on.
I absolutely had a blast shooting the film Infidel.
Very proud of that film.
This film is based on a true story, Dinesh.
We shot it in Indiana.
Lonnie Norris found the story because he was living in Europe as a missionary, very heavily involved in ministry.
They were sitting around a table.
He met several other people who had been involved and said, this really needs to be made into a film.
To make a long story short, we fast forward.
He had known the director, George, from having actually built the man's home.
Unbelievable, because Lonnie's not from show business.
He's from a completely different background.
George adapts the story.
We spend a little bit of time getting to know and hear the story of the real people because their identities are concealed in the film on this incredible journey to rescue Anna and her children who are human trafficked.
I mean, this is the theme, right?
The theme of the film is human trafficking.
A woman with small children gets separated from her children.
she goes through.
Horrific experiences.
Now, the film, I think, handles that beautifully.
It does not go full on in showing you all the brutality, and yet it conveys the trauma that this woman went through.
And of course, the story is how she came into contact with missionaries who helped reunite her with her children.
I mean, just powerfully moving.
It's emotionally a little overwhelming toward the end.
Talk a little bit about the, well, you play a Christian pastor who is sort of tasked with trying to bring this family together against considerable odds.
Yes, I'm playing Bedros, Armenian missionary who was out in the field.
They were actually all present at a conference.
There were people and delegates there from 22 different countries.
A phone call comes in, and despite his wife's best advice, he decides now she actually makes fun of him being a private investigator, which he's most definitely not.
The Lord called. We have to go out.
We have to help. We have to go find these children.
We have to try to help reunite them with their mother.
And I couldn't agree more.
I love that the filmmakers chose not to be gratuitous.
As I've said in the past, sometimes the suggestion of something is actually stronger than having it seen.
Because the human imagination, especially in a great medium like film, I think you can convey a lot by showing less.
And what we've been so surprised with, Dinesh, is how the secular mainstream critics have responded to it.
This film isn't necessarily made for a Christian audience.
It's made for a significantly bigger audience.
It's shot like a European film.
Depending on how you appreciate or consume film, The layers kind of unravel slowly, and the third act is heavily emotional.
As you said, there wasn't a dry eye in the house when we had the Los Angeles screening.
We have been playing in theaters, and it's available on demand everywhere right now.
One little touch that I found, and this confirms your point about the kind of European perspective of the film, you have, of course, the famous kind of Eastern European and Armenian, you know, I would call it the stoic style, and you introduce a note of comedy in the film because you have this sort of American pastor, and he's a great guy, but he's totally over the top.
He laughs, he cries, he goes to emotional extremes.
And you can see that how from the European perspective, this is all, well, let's just say all too American.
It most definitely is.
And I liked that there was the humor in there.
I felt that that levity, especially because this film is heavily dramatic.
It's based on a true story.
The stakes couldn't be higher.
To have that little bit of levity in there is terrific.
Robert Amaya was wonderful to work with.
He just had a film...
That was theatrical about a month and a half to four hours.
So to be able to work with him was good.
We shot it, as I said, in Indiana.
There was a little bit of B-roll that was shot in Armenia.
We are hoping, because obviously there's a war now, it's gotten very tense again in Eastern Europe, very tumultuous part of the world.
But we are hoping to have a screening, a release there.
We'll have to see what the coming months bring.
But our distributor is very, very confident about it.
Guys, you need to check this out.
Debbie and I have seen the film.
We loved it. It's called Pursuit of Freedom.
And it opened in theater September 16th.
Also available on demand.
Stelio Cervantes, thank you so much for joining me.
Really appreciate it. Thank you.
Thank you for having me. Appreciate it.
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Odysseus, leaving the land of the Cyclopes, cannot resist lashing out at At Polyphemus.
And essentially by doing that, he identifies himself.
I'm Odysseus. And now that the Cyclops knows who Odysseus is, the Cyclops utters a curse.
And curses in the ancient world had to be accompanied by the name.
You have to identify who you're cursing.
And so if Polyphemus didn't know who Odysseus was, it would just be like, I don't know who to curse.
But since Odysseus told him The Cyclops prays out loud,"'Lord Poseidon.'" Now, the Cyclops is the son of Poseidon.
"'Lord Poseidon, acknowledge me, your son, and be my father.
Grant that Odysseus, the city sucker, will never go back home, or if it is fated that he will see his family, then let him get there late and with no honor, and let him find more trouble in his own house.'" Now, Odysseus does in fact get back home, but he has problems along the way, as we are about to see, and he finds some major trouble in his own house when he gets there.
That's in fact the last several books of the Odyssey.
So, Poseidon grants the prayer of the Cyclops.
And so, you can see here that Odysseus, uncharacteristically, has made a big blunder.
Now, the blunder is sort of understandable.
It goes against Odysseus' circumspect and cautious character.
Normally, Odysseus, and we saw this with the Phaeacians, was reluctant to say who he was.
He's like, let me figure out who I'm dealing with first.
He only reveals his identity toward the end.
And by then he has already won these people over, and of course they are even more amazed and astonished and pleased that they have the great hero from the Trojan War, Odysseus, with them.
But here with the Cyclops, it's kind of gratuitous because Odysseus could have just gotten away, But of course, for Odysseus, it's also about kleos.
It's about honor. It's like, you know what?
You tried to get me, but I got you.
This is, of course, not the same as killing someone on the battlefield, but you can kind of see the analogy.
Odysseus has outwitted the Cyclops kind of in the same way that he outwitted the Trojans by coming up with the device of the Trojan horse.
So that's why Odysseus does it.
But the Cyclops curse essentially governs the next section of the Odyssey because we'll see trouble for Odysseus at sea and then we'll see more trouble for him when he gets home.
Now, Odysseus and his men take off.
And they reach the floating island of Aeolus.
Now, Aeolus is the god of the winds.
And interestingly, at the beginning, Odysseus gets very good hospitality, very good zinnia.
Aeolus welcomes Odysseus and his men.
Odysseus says,"...he made me stay a month and asked for news of Troy, the Argive ships, how the Greeks went home.
I told him everything." And then I told him, at last I told him, he should send me on my way.
And not only does Aeolus point Odysseus in the direction of home, which is Ithaca, but he also says, I'm going to give you a favorable wind.
Remember, he's the god of the winds.
So what Aeolus does is he takes all the bad winds, let's call it the winds that are pushing Odysseus, In directions contrary to where Odysseus needs to go, he takes all these winds and he sort of traps them into a bag and he gives Odysseus a gift.
He goes, listen, there are a lot of bad winds that otherwise would have made trouble for you.
I've got them. I've trapped them into a bag and so I'm going to give you the bag as a gift.
Keep the bag closed because these are all the winds that will take you off course.
And away from home, so don't open the bag.
Odysseus, of course, knows this, but this is just the way Homer tells his story, is that Odysseus is now approaching Ithaca.
He's actually close.
He says, Odysseus is telling the story, he goes,"...we were so near, we saw men tending fires." Odysseus is almost home.
And let's remember the very first scene of the Odyssey where we first encounter Odysseus.
What is he doing? He's sitting on Calypso's Island.
He's pining for home.
And he says, all I want to see is the smoke rising from my home country.
He's not even saying I want to necessarily be home.
I just want to be close enough where I can see and perhaps smell the aroma of the smoke rising from the fires of my own country.
But here... He is at that point.
He can see the fires in his own country.
Homer, of course, masterfully keeps the same image.
It comes right back here.
But Odysseus is exhausted, and so he falls asleep.
And his men begin to talk among each other.
His men basically go, we saw that Aeolus gave Odysseus a gift.
It's probably gold or silver, who knows what.
They go, well, I wonder if Odysseus is going to share any of it with us.
Let's find out what's in the bag.
Wow. And so what do these men do while Odysseus is sleeping?
They open up the bag.
All the bad winds or the contrary winds rush out.
And Homer writes, in Odysseus' narration, a sudden buffet seized us and hurled us back to sea in the wrong direction, far away from our home.
So they're sucked and pulled by a terrible wind away from Ithaca.
And Odysseus wakes up.
And he says, what's going on?
What's going on? And he realizes to his horror that his men have foolishly, obviously unwittingly, released the bad winds that have pulled him now away from home, the home that he was so close to.
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Odysseus was almost home, and then his men released these contrary winds out of a bag that had been given to Odysseus by the god of the winds, Aeolus.
And what happens is Odysseus now is blown back to sea.
He's far from Ithaca, and he's unable to navigate back to Ithaca.
In fact, he's blown really right back to Aeolus' island, and so he decides, let's go back.
Maybe the, maybe Aeolus will help us a second time.
And but this time, Aeolus is not receptive.
Aeolus basically goes, wait, wait, wait, what, what?
Didn't I send you on your way?
Didn't I, didn't I chart your course for you?
Didn't I give you all the bad contrary winds trapped in a bag?
You're back?
What happened?
And Odysseus goes, it's not me.
It's my men.
I fell asleep.
It's my bad luck and basically Aeolus says you're bad luck.
He goes, the gods must be against you.
They must not want you to get home.
And if the gods don't want you to get home, then certainly I, one of the gods, don't want to go against the will of all the other gods.
You must be kind of hated by the gods.
So he basically tells Odysseus and his men, I'm not going to help you.
You get out of here. And Odysseus and his men have to take off this time without assistance and really without any clear sense of where they're going.
So off they sail and they land at an island.
And what they don't know is it's an island inhabited by giants.
And these giants are called the Lacedragonians.
Odysseus doesn't know about them.
They kind of pull up to the shore.
And there's a girl standing by the seashore.
She's kind of a child, but she's rather large.
But it doesn't strike them as all that odd.
She says, no problem.
I'm going to introduce you to Antiphetes, who is the king of the Laestragonians.
And it's only when Odysseus and his men...
Begin to approach the town that they realize everyone's huge.
These are basically their giants, and as Homer says, giantesses walking around.
And the moment the king is introduced to these men, what does he do?
He grabs one of them and eats them.
So this is a little bit of a replay of the cyclops.
Cannibalism once again, but in this case, not so much a kind of, not a cyclops, not a one-eyed monster, but in this case, a giant.
And so, the others begin to run, to go back to the ship, and the giants begin to chase them.
As the men reboard the ships, the giants pick these huge boulders, Homer says, bigger than a man could lift, and start pelting us from the cliffs.
And Odysseus says,"...we heard the dreadful uproar of ships being broken and dying men.
They speared them there like fish, a gruesome meal." So basically, Odysseus' men are being killed all around him.
And Odysseus says,"...my ship was lucky and we reached the sea.
The rest trapped in the bay together were destroyed.
We reached Eia, the home of the beautiful, dreadful goddess Circe." But not before Odysseus has lost all his other ships.
So Odysseus now is down to one ship.
His own with a handful of men.
Let's remember, Odysseus went to Troy with many ships.
He was down to 12 ships sailing back.
And we saw that he's been losing men along the way.
And he lost some men because of the Cyclops.
Cyclops ate some, killed some.
And now we see that the giants have not only eaten one, but thrown heavy boulders and damaged these ships and caused people to fall into the sea.
They also speared some of them and ate them.
So, by and large, Odysseus is now...
This is an explanation that we're getting from Odysseus, which is, this is how I lost my men.
This is how, he's going to have to say to the Fakians, this is how I ended up here on your island alone.
This is why I alone am making my way back to Ithaca.
But, so we've had these kind of episodes.
The Lotus Eaters, the Cyclopes, the Laestragonians, the short episode with Aeolus, and now Odysseus is going to arrive at the island of Circe.
Now, Circe is...
An enchantress.
And she is, well, perhaps witch is the wrong word.
She's kind of a goddess.
She's kind of an enchantress.
She's certainly a tempter.
And she's going to keep Odysseus with her.
For quite a while.
Not entirely unwillingly, as we'll see.
And this creates some problems in the narrative because supposedly we have Odysseus, dutiful family man.
He's on his way home.
But we discover that he'll spend a year on Circe's island.
And Circe, the goddess, the enchantress, is sexually interested in Odysseus.
So we have this question, which I'll talk about, which is to say the question of, wait a minute, we have Penelope at home, supposedly it's essential for her to be completely faithful to Odysseus.
Here's Odysseus.
And he is taking up with Circe, later on with Calypso.
What's going on here? What kind of double standard is this?
And what was the rationale inside of Homeric society for that double standard?
We will take up these topics tomorrow and in subsequent days.
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