Can the same Trump who lies constantly, flouts the norms of the rule of law, fans the flames of racial resentment, and attacks basic notions of fact and evidence offered by journalists and his own law enforcement and intelligence agencies, can this same man be right about leaving the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) Iran nuclear deal of 2015? This instance of cognitive dissonance, of holding two or more contradictory beliefs in our minds at the same time, is staring us in the face. The serial liar, that man who has undermined our alliances and replaces rational explanations with conspiracy theories, has made the right decision to leave the JCPOA and to restore and intensify the economic sanctions on Iran in an effort to bring about a definitive end to both its nuclear program and its regional imperialism in the Middle East. In the polarized climate he has done so much to create, Trump supporters forget Trump the liar while agreeing on policy while those of us who oppose him reject any policy he advocates. The desire for consistency generally overwhelms the discomfort of cognitive dissonance. In the following, I make the case for living with the discomfort of accepting that this awful man who is wrong about most everything is right about this issue.
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Jeffrey Herf’s “An Age of Murder: Ideology and Terror in Germany” appears in Telos 144 (Fall 2008). An excerpt follows below. Click here to read the full article (in PDF format). It is best to begin with the obvious. This is a series of lectures about murder, indeed about an age of murder.[1] Murders to be sure inspired by political ideas, but murders nevertheless. In all, the Rote Armee Fraktion (Red Army Faction, hereafter the RAF) murdered thirty-four people and would have killed more had police and intelligence agencies not arrested them or prevented them from carrying out additional “actions.”[2] Yesterday, the papers reported that thirty-two people were killed in suicide-bomb attacks in Iraq, and thirty-four the day before, and neither of those war crimes were front-page news in the New York Times or the Washington Post. So there is an element of injustice in the amount of time and attention devoted to the thirty-four murders committed by the RAF over a period of twenty-two years and that devoted to the far more numerous victims of radical Islamist terror. Yet the fact that the murders of large numbers of people today has become horribly routine is no reason to dismiss the significance of the murders of a much smaller number for German history. Along with the murders came attempted murders, bank robberies, and explosions at a variety of West German and American institutions. The number of dead could have been much higher. If the RAF had not used pistols, machine guns, bazookas, rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs), remote-controlled bombs, and airplane hijackings, and if the West German radicals of the 1970s through the 1990s had only published turgid, long-winded communist manifestos, no one would have paid them much attention at the time. I doubt that the German Historical Institute would have decided to sponsor a series about Marxist-Leninist sects of the 1970s. On November 16, 2007, Jeffrey Herf delivered this talk in Frankfurt as part of the public lecture series “Römerberggespräche.” He argues that the postwar German mandate to “come to terms with its past” and face the legacy of the Holocaust has renewed relevance today facing the antisemitism of radical Islam. In a key passage he writes: ” . . . today’s radical Islamists have much in common with their fascist and Nazi predecessors. The ideological attack on liberal democracy and cultural modernity, on full equality for women, on the priority of the freedom of the individual in the face of the pressures of collectivism, the vision of a totalitarian society and especially and most of all the murderous hatred of the Jews, all of this returns now enveloped in a religious discourse. As their fascist and Nazi predecessors once did, now the radical Islamist propagate paranoid conspiracy theories combined with fanatical anti-Semitism and the radical anti-Americanism that is bound up with it. With these ideological foundations, the Islamists, just as the Nazis of the 1940s, have legitimated the murder of defenseless civilians.” The full text is here. |
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