Trump Is Resolute in Opposing Evil – The American Spectator | USA News and PoliticsThe American Spectator

It is delicious to hear Iranian diplomats complaining without the least irony about Donald Trump’s negotiated in bad faith. Why, whoever would have thought to do such a thing?! After 40-plus years of Iranian bad faith swallowed by Western elites who have lost faith in their own civilization, the diplomats still expect to find the West popping another soma pill and playing centrifugal bumblepuppy rather than facing reality.

It is delicious to see psychopaths stripped naked yet still acting as if their fabric of lies is covering them. Only a week ago, they seemed to be in control, confirming to a complacent, illusion-addicted world once again that no matter how much Iran loses in war, they always win the peace.

Peace for a psychopath and for a psychopathic leadership always means a strategic breather, a time to gather strength to make war when the odds are more in their favor. They do not intend peace for peace’s sake.

The Hebrew word for peace, shalom, means wholeness. When all are whole, there is no reason to fight any more. But for the psychopath, the wholeness of the other is of no interest. Others are only to be used and then discarded. Peace for them means at a mere cessation of hostilities, used to lull their targets into passivity. It is only a tool of their aggression.

In the same way, truth for the psychopath is only a performance, plausible enough to take advantage of the trust that is the core of a good society. Good societies value truth and build their trust by truth’s exacting and eternal measure.

Psychopaths see trust as gullibility, a cardinal weakness to be exploited. Truth is therefore merely instrumental to that gulling their opponents. It is nothing by which they measure themselves and so hold themselves accountable. Their words are meant only to seem true to their enemies.

Societies that measure themselves by truth build up trust as their most valuable capital.

Societies built on trust minimize the use of coercion. The freer they are, the more that they rely on their own citizens to govern themselves truly, the less their energies are wasted in protecting themselves from themselves and the more are those energies devoted to creating an ever-greater abundance. Such societies feel deeply and intuitively the waste of war, on any level. They esteem peace and that esteem prospers them, which in turn reinforces the esteem – a virtuous cycle that imitates the divine beneficence, which is not merely static and beyond the world, but ever-increasing in its manifest goodness within every part of creation.

The psychopathic society sees trust as a finite, exploitable resource. The more their own ends become revealed, the less trust remains for them to exploit. Therefore, they conceal themselves deliberately until, as they plan, their power is overwhelming, and their prey cannot escape. Their deity is only power, and they worship it by holding themselves unaccountable to anything other than their own power. For the psychopaths — the Nazis, the believers in Foucauldian wokeism, the mullahs — this is their only truth.

It is up to trust societies to recognize the truth of how psychopathic societies operate. The severe measure of truth leaves no place for naivete or indulgent cynicism.

Neville Chamberlain stands as the paradigm of a civilized leader whose naïve trust was exploited by a psychopathic opponent. He realized it in tragic words on the day he declared war on Nazi Germany:

Everything that I have worked for, everything that I have hoped for, everything that I have believed in during my public life, has crashed into ruins. There is only one thing left for me to do; that is, to devote what strength and powers I have to forwarding the victory of the cause for which we have to sacrifice so much.… It is evil things that we will be fighting against —  brute force, bad faith, injustice, oppression and persecution — and against them I am certain that the right will prevail.

Leaders of America and the West have allowed themselves to walk down the same garden path on which Hitler led Chamberlain. That Iran’s leaders wore beards and clerical garb instead of a toothbrush moustache and a uniform should not have confused them. But the West’s headlong relegation of God to public irrelevance left a gaping hole in the collective mind and heart. We know we are missing something crucial and we crave for it. Blaise Pascal memorably wrote about this absence:

This craving, and this helplessness, proclaim but that there was once in man a true happiness, of which all that now remains is the empty print and trace[.] This he tries in vain to fill with everything around him… though none can help, since this infinite abyss can be filled only with an infinite and immutable object; in other words, by God himself.

Many in the West, especially among the ever-less accountable ruling class, have lately tried to fill that void by adopting radical Islamists as a kind of mascot. They condescendingly and indulgently have funded their cause, willingly blind to the barbaric and ungodly ends that their recipients have never seriously hidden. They have made an art of double standards and moral equivalence, trying desperately to throw a sacrifice to the Deity they have offended. And in this they seek a perverse and satanic justification of the blackest stain on West’s own religious history — the long track record of sacrificing the Jews to achieve their own uplifting.

Iran’s leaders have been as skilled as Hitler at stoking the guilt of their trust-society enemies. They flatter the egos of Western leaders who think themselves godlike, uniquely able to bring Iran into the common civilization of trust. The mullahs are happy to indulge them in that illusion: “The fools believe that their truths are self-evident and compelling. How useful for us! How easily we can play that!”

Self-evident truths are only self-evident to those willing to consider their truth. The mullahs of Iran, like the fascists of the Thirties, have a prioris that classify the Western consensual society of trust as decadent and weak. So every time the Western leaders defer to Iran’s regime, believing this will persuade the Iranians to be civilized, the mullahs just see more weakness, confirming their own axiomatic contempt for Western values.

So have they succeeded in playing the West for nearly fifty years. Almost enough time to build accurate ICBMs and nuclear payloads for them to carry, at which point they could dispense with the charade.

President after president ignored the psychopathy of Iran and kicked the ball down the road, relying, perhaps only subconsciously, that a Churchill might arise and do what he didn’t dare. Some were more fully fooled and believed, like Chamberlain, that if only they conceded a little more, if they washed their hands of the Jews, then they might be crowned as the great peacemaker. No more squalid example than Obama’s guarantee of Iran’s nuclear weaponry in ten years and his removal of all sanctions upon them (repeated a few years later by whoever was running the Biden show). Awarded the Nobel Peace prize for nothing, he delivered even less.

As Obama’s ten-year date has arrived, though, civilization has found leaders who understand that naivete is fatally ruinous to a trust-centered civilization. Its leaders embraced a doctrine that Churchill himself expressed, in of all places, Teheran.

While Hitler distrusted his allies and everyone else, the Allies were able to maximize their power by a coordination of their forces unparalleled by the Axis enemies. Even the notoriously duplicitous Josef Stalin found this useful, at least until Hitler’s ruin became certain.

In 1943, in Teheran, Churchill, FDR, and Stalin met together for the first of two times. There was a delicious irony in meeting in the country whose name originally meant the land of the Aryans, the name Hitler used for the German race he considered the destined rulers of the world. While discussing the need in war for deceiving the enemy about one’s aims and tactics, Churchill said to Stalin’s warm approval: “In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.”

To Stalin, no doubt this was fine propaganda. To Churchill, this expressed a signal truth: for the civilization based on trust to survive, it must employ means adequate to the task. It must develop the discernment to know when deception must be employed and when it is safe enough to come out of the shelter. It cannot bind itself to rules only it will follow and concede immense advantage to enemies who would exploit that.

Trump Demands ‘Unconditional Surrender’

Trump and Netanyahu, like Churchill, have had the courage and discernment to realize that. They fight fire with fire. They beat the mullahs at their own game and exploited the psychopath’s narcissistic belief that they are always smarter than their opponents.

The mullahs worship absolute power and try to model that in their own regime. People and the world are to be considered as nothing at all unless utterly subservient or dead. In this, they are no different than the Nazis or the Japanese militarists.

Trump senses this, and therefore he has made his demand not for a ceasefire but for surrender. Unlike all his recent predecessors in the West, he has not flinched. He has from the get-go called for denying Iran nuclear weapons. Trump appreciates the horror and waste of war, and so he has given Teheran chance after chance to transform itself by renouncing its dark aims. At the same time, he makes clear if the mullahs choose war, the result will be their destruction.

So far, the mullahs reveal only how stupid they are. They cannot admit there is a truth greater than the lies of their own psychopathy. They still imagine they can fool their way out.

In his history of World War II, Churchill saw the same trap dooming the Fuehrer: “In Hitler we had the supreme ally in the shape of his own folly.”  Whether it was in halting his tanks at Dunkirk, thinking he had already vanquished Britain completely, or in his believe in his own lunatic hatred that caused him to divert the rail cars that could have helped his army to the task of murdering Jews, Hitler’s cancerous certainty in himself hurried him to his doom.

But that doom only came because of the resolution of Churchill and the allies to oppose him at all costs. And now there is a president who is similarly resolute.

Just this week, Lee Smith neatly summarized this story of the past near-half-century:

U.S. leadership has routinely appeased a terror regime sustained only by maniacal hatred of America, while U.S. elites from the worlds of policy and academia, media and culture, have adopted the style and language of perfumed third-world obscurantists. All it took was for an American president to keep his word.

In his ability to identify the true enemy and fight it, Trump is close enough to Churchill. He seems properly intent on seeing things through to a decisive victory. We await the death knell for the new Nazism and for all those in the West whose lack of vision and character has been exposed to apologize and withdraw.

Make the West great again!

READ MORE from Shmuel Klatzkin:

The West Has a Chance to Defeat the New Nazism

The Mind Masters the Heart, but Not God