Anyone who listens to Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, and compares his witty, reasonable, thoughtful, pertinent, reality-based comments to the mad drivel emanating from the likes of Trump and Hegseth and Netanayahu, can see that Iran is the civilized party to the current conflict, while the other side is led by drooling barbarian lunatics. It's a wake-up slap in the face, but it's in-your-face-undeniable: We Americans, who like to think of ourselves as the pinnacle of human civilizational achievement, have become stupid, evil, and massively uncivilized. We are the equivalent of frenzied stone age cannibals screeching like rabid hyenas as we try to storm the gates of a highly cultured, literate people in hopes of ripping them to shreds and devouring their flesh.
How did it reach this point ? Isn't the United States of America the world standard-bearer for Enlightenment values: reason, tolerance, reflection, and skepticism of claims that can't withstand critique ? Why are we lined up behind a certifiable narcissist maniac, Donald Trump, whose statements are so randomly incoherent and without any discernible relationship to reality that they are hardly worth critiquing, not to mention almost impossible to satirize?
As a moderately pro-Enlightenment guy who studied literature during the heyday of postmodernism, I'm skeptical of sweeping claims finding patterns of meaning in history. My False Flag Weekly News colleague Dr. E. Michael Jones, who discerns God's Hegelian hand directing historical dramas, offers interpretations that strike me as brilliant and fascinating but not always convincing. So I am uncharacteristically going out on a limb here by invoking the work of sociologists Strauss and Howe, who have unearthed a pattern of meaning in US history based on generational cycle theory. (I was reading Strauss and Howe long before Steve Bannon made them famous.) Strauss and Howe's paradigm shines an uncannily plausible light on the current conflict between the West, led by genocidal criminally-insane child-rapists and their blackmailers, and the Islamic Republic of Iran, which has become the standard-bearer for human civilization.
The Strauss & Howe Paradigm: 80-Year Cycles
Strauss and Howe posit the existence of 80-year cycles, each one represent four 20-year generations. (Keep in mind that I'm simplifying for clarity; some prefer to posit 4 cycles of 21.25 years each producing an 85 year mega-cycle.)
Each roughly 80-year cycle, like a human lifetime, transits through a process of birth, growth, decay, and death.
Each generation does its work, and puts its mark on its era, during early adulthood-between the ages of 20 and 40. The "death and rebirth" phase of the 80-year cycle-including the beginning of each new cycle-is presided over by a "hero generation" that grows up during a crisis or "great unraveling"-a time of feeble institutions, rampant hyperindividualism, and cultural decay-and reacts by going to the other extreme of team-oriented collectivism, including its extreme manifestation, militarism, in order to destroy the old order and create a new, higher order out of chaos.
The elephant in the room of Strauss and Howe's theory is the uncomfortable fact that every "hero generation" (until now) has "rebuilt order out of chaos" by fighting a horrifically bloody war. The first American hero generation came of age in 1780, the second in 1860, the third in 1940. Notice a pattern ? That's right: Each of those years marked a bloody conflict between "yankees" (progressives/liberals) and conservatives. And in each case, the yankees won.
In 1780, the progressive-liberal yankees or whigs were the Enlightenment-inspired revolutionaries, while their conservative tory opponents championed God and country-the country at that time being the British empire. It was actually a civil war, and a very bloody one, between progressives and conservatives. It wasn't Americans-versus-foreigners, as children's history books pretend. Neighbors slaughtered neighbors. Historians today say a little over 40% of North American colonists supported the whig revolutionaries, while approximately half that number were tories, with the rest neutral. Atrocities, chiefly inflicted by progressive-liberal revolutionaries on their conservative opponents, were commonplace.
The same pattern repeated itself in 1860, with what was actually the Second American Civil War. The progressive-liberal yankees or whigs of the North once again committed most of the atrocities as they inflicted another massively bloody defeat upon the God-and-country conservatives or tories of the South, who were fighting for the traditional Constitutional understanding of the relationship between states and the federal government. That hero generation of yankees consolidated central power out of the ruins of the war, turning the USA into a single federally-administered entity rather than a loose confederation of largely independent states.
In 1940, the same kind of civil war erupted, but it was projected outward. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, leader of the liberal-progressive yankee or whig faction, was facing political death during the late 1930s as the Great Depression dragged on. His opponents, the tories, were the God-and-country conservatives of the America First movement. Roosevelt inflicted a bloody defeat on them not directly, as in the two previous civil wars, but indirectly, by orchestrating World War II as a ploy to end the Depression and get re-elected.
"Wait a minute ! I thought HITLER started World War II!"
No, if any single historical figure deserves credit or blame for World War II, it's Franklin Delano Roosevelt. For details, read Ron Unz's revisionist essays on the subject, including " American Pravda: President Franklin Roosevelt, the Great Depression, and the New Deal."
As in the two previous American Civil Wars, the yankees of the 1940s committed the worst atrocities: the firebombings of German and Japanese cities, the nuclear obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the mass extermination of Germans during the war's immediate aftermath. And once again the victors airbrushed their atrocities out of their victors' histories, portraying themselves as the good guys and their opponents as benighted villains. Like the yankees of 1780 and 1860, those of 1940 excused their bloody escapades by arguing that the newly-empowered yankee government emerging from the ruins would use its centralized powers to enforce justice on the benighted tories. The post-1780 yankees had said their new government would protect property rights and eliminate taxation-without-representation. The post-1860 yankees had bragged that they had ended slavery. The post-1940 yankees claimed they had defeated racism in general and antisemitism in particular. FDR (and later JFK) even had visions of ending European colonialism before they were cut down.
FDR's party of liberal-progressivist whigs emerged from their (bloodiest-yet, though externalized) American Civil War III with even-more-consolidated-and-tyrannically-centralized federal power. And just as the "hero generations" of 1780 and 1860 had rewritten history to crush the memories and perspectives of their tory opponents, so too did FDR's yankees erase the leading non-yankee and even antiwar-yankee intellectuals of the 1920s and 1930s from collective memory. For details, I once again recommend Ron Unz's essays, beginning with " American Pravda: Our Great Purge of the 1940s."
To summarize, the first three 80-year cycles began with "hero generations" destroying the old order, and creating a new one with increased federal powers by way of an ever-bloodier war. In each case, the yankees (pro-federal-power secularist progressives) defeated the tories (God-and-country limited-government conservatives) and rewrote history to reflect their point of view and erase that of their opponents.
Where Is the Hero Generation, and Great War, of 2020?
Strauss and Howe's paradigm fits the 80-year-cycles beginning in 1780, 1860, and 1940. But what about 2020 ? Are the yankees still fighting the tories ? And what happened to the bloody war destroying the old order and creating the new one ? If the 1861-1865 war was bigger and bloodier than the 1776-1783 war, and the 1939-1945 war was even bigger and bloodier than that, shouldn't the war that starts around 2020 be the biggest and bloodiest of all?
At first glance, our current situation doesn't seem to fit the paradigm. Here we are in 2026, and though there are rumblings of a possible civil war between reds (tories) and blues (whigs), nothing on the scale of the 1780 or 1861 civil wars has yet erupted. Nor has our leadership managed to externalize that civil conflict, as FDR did, by inciting an even bloodier war outside our borders...though Trump's Zionist handlers seem to be working on it.
One discomfiting possible answer: If it's actually an 85 year cycle, we aren't quite at "peak destruction" yet.
But keeping in mind that IF a huge "hero generation" conflict was scheduled for 2020, it's rather uncanny that that very year featured the high point of the red-vs.-blue conflict-the January 6 "insurrection." The pro-Trump forces, today's equivalent of the God-and-country tories of yesteryear, have pushed back hard against today's ultra-progressivist woke whigs, who have gone off the rails with their bizarrely misguided attempts to right the world's wrongs via federal power enforcing affirmative action, open immigration, LGBTQolatry, and their wars on transphobic Russians, male chauvinist Muslims, and so on.
According to the Strauss and Howe paradigm, we should expect the civil conflict of 2020 to explode into a bloody war, presumably the bloodiest yet, burning down the old order so the secular-progressivist yankees can rebuild it with even more formalized, centralized federal power and even less tradition and religion. Could that, in fact, be what is happening now?
It could be argued that we are currently in the middle of a slow-burn civil war that has been partially externalized into a slow-burn world war. As the reds (tories) fight the blues (whigs) for control of a declining US empire, that empire itself is lashing out in chaotic, poorly-thought-out wars ostensibly aimed at slowing or reversing its decline.
Are we in the middle of Stealth World War III ? If so, did it start with the Maidan Coup of 2014 sparking the Russia-vs.-Ukraine (actually Russia-vs.-US) war of 2022 ? Or was the first shot of Stealth World War III actually the October-November 2019 US bio-attack on China and Iran that triggered the COVID pandemic ? Or maybe the most important front is the ongoing US-Israeli war on Iran, whose opening shot was the murder of Gen. Soleimani in 2020, and whose current round threatens to collapse the global economy and transform the international power structure?
Are we living through World War III but not noticing it ? Have nuclear weapons forced the belligerents to proceed more cautiously and stealthily than in previous wars ? So far, despite seven million deaths from the 2019 American bio-attack on China and Iran, the carnage is far below levels that might have been expected based on the ever-increasing death counts from two previous world wars, not to mention those of the US wars of 1780, 1860, and 1940.
A good case can be made that we are entering a decisive phase in World War III as the Iran front implodes the global economy. The current world war can be described quite simply: The Zionist-occupied US empire is fighting to maintain its position as global hegemon. On the other side, Russia, China, Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea, and to lesser extents various other states are fighting for their sovereignty-and for a truly multipolar world in which sovereignty would be possible.
The American yankees have won the past three huge wars fought by their earlier hero generations circa 1780, 1860, and 1940. And after each war, the Americans, and their dominant yankee faction, emerged stronger. Will the same happen again?
In a word: No. It seems vanishingly unlikely that the US will not only somehow win its current ill-starred war, but emerge in the postwar period with even more relative global power than it enjoyed in 1946. Barring some deus ex machina like the emergence of hegemonic American AI or the landing of red-white-and-blue flag-waving extraterrestrials, the US empire seems doomed to lose its war for total global hegemony. That's because the US and its closest Western colonies control an ever-shrinking share of global GDP. The Global South, led by China, has caught up and surpassed the West economically, meaning that power relations will have to be reshuffled to downgrade the West and its imperial hegemon, the United States. That downgrading is precisely what the World War III raging all around us is accomplishing.
So for the first time in US history, a hero generation is going to lose a war. How will that play out domestically?
The most obvious scenario: Trump's risible simulacrum of a tory (God & country) coalition will go down in flames thanks to their idiotic decision to let Netanyahu goad them into attacking Iran. The 2026 and 2028 elections will together amount to yet another domestic triumph for the whig (secular-progressivist) forces. In other words, just as in the 1780s, 1860s, and 1940s, the whigs will defeat the tories and preside over the rebuilding of a new order from the ashes of the old one.
But this time the whigs will inherit a weakened, humbled, perhaps even humiliated USA. The American power bubble, which kept expanding from its birth in 1776 through the post-Cold War era, will deflate if not pop. The whigs will preside over an America that will no longer fancy itself the biggest and best and brightest, the light unto nations, the eternal winner of all its biggest wars, and of course the ultimate global good guy. They'll be running a country forced to pay war reparations or maybe even genocide reparations, a country with only two-thirds of the purchasing power it was accustomed to, a country that has lost its Middle East bases and the petrodollar they guard, a country that can no longer afford to plant military bases everywhere and push other countries around, a country that has suddenly become as universally despised as it once was universally admired. The whig ideology of endless progress, endless improvement through governmental and social tinkering, endless problem-solving through endlessly-increasing federal power, is going to take a huge hit. I'm not sure the current hero generation, the millennials, are up to the task of reconstructing an optimistic, progress-worshiping new order under such unpropitious circumstances. But who knows, maybe they'll make everybody happy, or at least keep them alive, through AI-powered Universal Basic Income, and call it a victory for social justice.
There is also an off chance that the tories, Trump's MAGA crowd, could actually win this particular civil war. They certainly won the 2020 round, thanks to the Democrats' spectacular political incompetence. But Trump's potential to emerge as the leader who could rationally manage the inevitable US retreat from hegemony by drawing down the empire and focusing on domestic priorities (and restoring conservative values) has been sabotaged by the neocons, who are worse than whigs, indeed worse than jacobins. They are, in fact, zio-nihilist lunatics. By hijacking the Trump administration and launching a doomed war on Iran, they have almost certainly ensured a crushing US imperial defeat that will be blamed on Trump and lead to an equally crushing defeat for the tories and the traditional values they espouse.
A 240+-Year Cycle of Birth, Growth, Decay, and Death?
As mentioned earlier, Strauss and Howe posit an 80-year (or perhaps 85-year) cycle, paralleling a human lifetime, beginning with the birth pains of a hero generation, passing through stages of growth and maturity, and finally decaying to set the stage for a new cycle. That roughly 80-year cycle consists of four twenty-year sub-cycles, each representing a generation with a particular set of dominant characteristics.
But what if each 80+-year cycle is likewise a sub-cycle of a larger 320+-year cycle ? What if the young adults of 1780 were the founding, hero generation of that larger cycle ? Then the young adults of 1860 would be not just a hero generation in the 80 year cycle, but also an artist generation in the 320 year cycle. And the young "hero" adults of 1940 greatest generation would be a prophet generation in the 320-year cycle. Finally, the "hero" millennials of today, who certainly don't seem all that heroic, would be the nomads-the inhabitants of chaos and unraveling-of the 320 year cycle.
Translating that Strauss-and-Howe nomenclature to the birth, growth, decadence, and death of the United States of America, we posit the birth of the USA circa 1780, its coming to young-adult maturity and consolidating itself circa 1860, its arrival at middle age and its career peak in 1940, and its senescence and demise circa 2020. In other words, the current hero generation of millennials has inherited a nation that is itself somewhere between retirement, death, and putrefaction. No wonder they can't figure out how to be heroic and come together to fix things.
It's the Zombie Protestantism, Stupid
The yankee/whig impulse that gave birth to the USA and presided over its growth, maturity, decay, and current collapse itself arose from the Protestant revolt against traditional (Catholic) Christianity. But by the time the USA was founded in 1776 Protestantism was already on the wane. That's why American yankee/whig progressivism can best be understood by invoking Emmanuel Todd's notion of zombie Protestantism. According to Todd's 2024 magnum opus The Defeat of the West, the USA has always been a zombie Protestant society. In other words, prior to the 1776 revolution, American culture was predominantly Protestant. But the American Revolution was driven by deists and other Enlightenment thinkers, and during the course of US history America's cultural Protestantism became more and more zombified: People continued to live their lives according to Protestant values (the work ethic, self-restraint, personal probity, literacy, individualism, sanctity of property, and so on) even as they gradually stopped believing and going to church. Though the metaphysical foundation of Protestant values had eroded or disappeared, the values themselves, and the behavior they inspired, took longer to wane and finally vanish. But wane and vanish they eventually did, Todd explains, yielding the current situation: total nihilism. Today, the USA is a society of fat, porn-addicted, semi-literate, narcissistic, sociopathic war criminals, as epitomized by their Epstein-blackmailed Commander-in-Chief and his drunken, tattooed Secretary of War. That's because even the zombie Protestantism is mostly gone, leaving sheer nihilistic depravity in its wake. To call Americans barbarians would be an insult to Conan and his friends.
And that brings us-finally-to Iran. The Iranians, of all people, seem to have been divinely appointed to administer the coup de grace to the reeking, moribund ex-zombie-Protestant-now-Zio-nihilistic US empire. Perhaps that is because today's Iran is, of all contemporary Western countries, almost uniquely civilized.
Iran qualifies as a Western country because it, like other Western countries, includes as a large portion its cultural basis a blend of Athens and Jerusalem-the classical Greco-Roman tradition overlapping with Middle Eastern Abrahamic monotheism. And while it might be objected that Iran also enjoys its own classical Persian tradition, which itself overlaps not just with Greco-Roman influence but also with the great civilizations of India and China, that doesn't really detract from its Abrahamic-classical core, which predominates in the seminaries where much of its governing class is educated. More than any other educational system on Earth, the Iranian network of seminaries participates in the great Western tradition of higher education. Students there study Plato and Aristotle and the series of footnotes that followed. They study classical theology and its emanations. They study the great mystics. They study the greatest examples of world literature. And some of them study science, while all of them encourage the advanced study of science in post-1979 Iran's flourishing scientific and technical institutes and modern universities.
A scholar with a time machine who visited the best higher educational facilities on Earth beginning millennia ago and continuing through today would notice that Iran's seminaries of 2026 offer the closest modern equivalent of a rigorous classical Western education. The Academy of Athens...Al-Karaouine...Al-Azhar...Oxford...the University of Paris...the great Italian universities...these and similar places are where the great Western tradition flourished and evolved. Today's secular-materialist vocational schools are as kindergartens compared to the magnificent universities back in the days when Western civilization was rising, not falling...and compared to today's great seminaries in Iran, where the clerical class implementing Wilayat al-Faqih, the Guardianship of the Jurist, is educated. I have visited seminaries in Qom and participated in discussions there, at least twice in the company of E. Michael Jones, and have been impressed by both the hospitality and erudition of the seminarians. (For a lively portrait of these amazing Iranian seminaries, the last outposts of civilization in today's New Dark Age, read Roy Mottahedeh's The Mantle of the Prophet: Religion and Politics in Iran.)
So if America represents nihilist barbarism in the current war, Iran's leadership class is precisely the opposite: Cultivated, articulate, reflective, spiritual, and carrying the heritage of not only Athens and Jerusalem, but also the treasures of Persian civilization and its elements that blend with East as well as West. Thanks to the Wilayat al-Faqih system founded by Imam Khomeini, Iran's leadership class is the polar opposite of the Epstein class. They are the products of a lifetime of training in cultivating the higher self and restraining the lower one-rather than the other way around, as is so obviously the case with such vulgar, criminally-insane narcissist imbeciles as Trump and Hegseth, or such demonic monsters as Netanyahu.
So it's the Great War for Civilization. Iran embodies civilization, while the Zionist-occupied USA is the epitome of nihilist vulgarity.
Today's American hero generation, the millennials, are going to have to face the unfortunate fact that their entire civilizational project-Protestantism followed by Zombie Protestantism collapsing into nihilism-has run its five-century course. As Emmanuel Todd explains, the only alternative to nihilism is religion. Non-religious ethical/spiritual peoples are just zombies doomed to backslide into nihilism. So if the millennial heroes want to rebuild anything, they're going to have to rediscover religion of one flavor or another.
For me, as for René Guenon and other Traditionalists, Sufi Islam seems the most sensible alternative for a post-Protestant or post-Christian person or society. But it isn't clear that most post-Protestant Westerners are smart enough to figure that out. So maybe the millennials will turn to Catholicism, like E. Michael Jones' followers, or Orthodox Christianity, or Shia Islam (whose spiritual energy is finishing off the Empire of Nihilism)...or perhaps something else entirely. In any case, the coming religious revival is going to have to integrate actual religious experience-what the mystics cultivate, and what ordinary believers "taste" through their rituals and practices-and not just rules, dogmatic verbal formulations, and professions of belief.
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