Leaving to one side the ignoramuses of the left, more knowledgeable progressives pretend not to get things because they’re committed to globalization and the managed decline of the West, which they view as an illegitimate civilization. They have transnational corporate power behind them, which one can understand, given that Trump is antithetical to globalist ambitions.
On the other side, however much they wrap their commitments in Christian paper, the alt-right—Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes, Candice Owens, and their ilk, mostly Catholic—pretend not to get things because they despise Israel. They despise Israel because they loathe the Jews. Antisemitism is still a problem on the right, and these voices make that abundantly clear. They believe Trump is a puppet worked by the hand of Zionism. Indeed, all American politicians will be puppets of the Jews until the ties between Israel and the West are broken.
This explains the hysteria on social media about Donald Trump’s post on TruthSocial threatening the Islamic Republic with annihilation.
When President Trump writes that a “whole civilization will die tonight,” what is he talking about? He ends the post with “47 years of extortion, corruption, and death will finally end. God Bless the Great People of Iran!” This tells us what he means. It does not mean wiping out Iranians. It means ending the clerical fascist regime known as the Islamic Republic in the same way that the United States ended National Socialism in Europe—only this time before a species of fascism can visit mass death and destruction on those around it.
In Marci Shore’s reaction to Trump’s post, which I have shared above, she claims that Americans ask her how the Holocaust was possible. How, they wonder, could Germans have “enabled a madman reveling in mass murder to carry out his plans.” One is supposed to believe that what has unfolded over the last several weeks confirms her fantastical beliefs about Trump. “Now we can see in real time how this is enabled,” She continues, “now we have front-row seats.
Shore is a professor of intellectual history at the University of Toronto, where she specializes in the history of literary and political engagement with Marxism. An interest in Marxism does not necessarily disqualify an opinion, but her project, combined with her actions, does. Shore used to be on the faculty of Yale, but left, along with her husband and a colleague, for Canada after Trump was reelected president. She explained her reasoning in a New York Times op-ed, “We Study Fascism, and We’re Leaving the US.” The title alone telegraphs the op-ed’s content. Its authors see the world through a hysterical lens.
I share Shore’s post because it’s paradigmatic of present-day academic thought. Consumed by loathing of Western civilization, academics like Shore forget their own studies in history. My response was to help Shore recall those studies. “You should know, then, that many lives would have been saved had we intervened earlier in Germany,” I wrote. But she appears to draw no lessons from history—or, more accurately, draws the wrong ones. One gets the impression from reading her words, and those of other social media commenters, that the world should have left in place Nazi civilization, or at least waited until the casualties numbered in tens of millions of humans before doing something about it. America did, in fact, wait, permitting the atrocities to continue for years. When people say, “Never again,” do they mean it?
Surely Shore knows that the Nazis framed their ambitions as the creation of a civilization, one built upon a deeply destructive and exclusionary vision. The Nazis equated civilization with the dominance of the “Aryan” race, portraying Jews and others as threats to the social order. Their ambition for a new civilization justified territorial expansion under the guise of bringing German culture to the world, all the while committing mass murder and stamping out freedom everywhere they found it.
At home, the Nazis sought to engineer society through architecture, art, education, literature, and science, contriving and promoting works that reflected order, strength, and tribal purity while condemning “degenerate” modernist movements. Mythic and historical narratives of ancient Germanic greatness were used to legitimize their ideology. The Nazi notion of civilization radically diverged from traditional European concepts of cultural and moral advancement. The Nazis were profoundly illiberal. They were paradigmatically authoritarian.
Shi’a revolutionaries likewise frame their ambitions as the creation of a civilization—one also built upon a deeply destructive and exclusionary vision. They equate true civilization with the dominance of Shi’a Islamic governance, portraying Sunnis, Jews, Christians, secular Muslims, and liberal societies as existential threats to the divine order. Their concept of civilization justifies territorial expansion and influence under the guise of exporting the Islamic Revolution and liberating “oppressed” Muslim lands, all the while supporting proxy wars, terrorism, and systematic persecution of minorities.
At home, they seek to engineer society through architecture, art, education, literature, science, and especially religious seminaries and state media, promoting works that reflect strict Shi’a piety, clerical purity, revolutionary zeal, and martyrdom culture, while condemning secularism and “Western degeneracy.” Mythic and historical narratives of ancient Islamic greatness, the suffering of the Imams (like the suffering of Hitler), and the anticipated return of the Hidden Mahdi are used to legitimize their ideology.
The Shi’a revolutionary notion of civilization radically diverges from both traditional Sunni Islamic concepts of governance and from modern notions of cultural and moral advancement through pluralism and individual rights. Like the Nazis, the Shi’a theocratic regime is authoritarian and profoundly illiberal.
The “civilization” Trump is referring to in his post is Shi’a Islam. This is how Shi’a Islam sees itself. Persia and the Islamic Republic are different things. The Persian civilization was one of the first great empires of the ancient world, stretching from the Indus Valley to the eastern Mediterranean. It was known for its sophisticated administrative system and an extensive network of roads that facilitated trade and communication. Persian rulers promoted cultural and religious tolerance, allowing conquered peoples to maintain their traditions. The civilization made advances in architecture, art, and science, leaving a lasting legacy on governance and cultural exchange in the ancient world.
The 1979 revolution that brought the Shi’a Muslims to power is antithetical to that legacy. The largest group within Shi’a Islam is the Twelvers, who believe in a line of twelve divinely appointed Imams. Twelver Shi‘ism obsesses over Islamic doctrine, spiritual authority, and devotion to Imams. The Twelvers seek to impose Islamic rule on the world (not to be confused with the Sunni Muslim concept of the caliphate). The Twelver vision of the future era is one in which all humanity will be united under righteous rule guided by the will of Allah. If permitted, Shi’a Islam would shroud the world in darkness. The world has tolerated for too long the gathering of power by these clerical fascists.
I wrote in a recent essay (Donald Trump’s Grand Vision: Make Western Civilization Great Again) that the President’s strategy involves a redeemed Europe—redeemed by populist-nationalist movements across the continent—allied with the Western Hemisphere (Canada and parts of South America also need redeeming) and Eastern regions around the world, including Sunni Muslim countries, forming a global alliance committed to marginalizing China and halting the spread of Islam—the twin toltarianisms of our age. The core of the strategy requires marginalizing the most apocalyptic movement in Islam’s history, which uses Iran as its base of operations. Far from destroying the Iranian people, the goal is to liberate them from the civilization that Shi’ia Islam is building.
At first, I thought “civilization” was not the best word for Trump to use. “Barbarians” strikes me as the appropriate way to characterize Shi’a Islam. But upon further reflection, I understand that the President is talking about the Islamic Republic as it sees itself. The message is directed at the Twelvers. If a US president had, in the 1930s, told Adolf Hitler that his civilization “will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” what lover of humanity would regard that as a genocidal threat?
Trump also says in that post that, as a consequence of joint US-Israeli military action, “different, smarter, and less radicalized minds prevail, maybe something revolutionarily wonderful can happen.” The hope is that a revolution will overthrow the Twelvers and make Iran great again. Without US intervention, the likelihood of such a thing is remote. We saw what the Islamic Republic did to Iranians who rose up against the regime.
freedom and reason 