The year is 2026, the day—September 22. American President Donald Trump is delivering a speech at the United Nations General Assembly, during which he utters the following words:
Will a deal be made with Iran that lets them rebuild and create a far greater country than it ever was before—maybe one of the greatest in the Middle East or even the world? Or do I annihilate the Islamic Republic and do it quickly, never giving them a chance to kill and destroy people and countries again? Do I drive them into hell with no chance of survival and no hope of future greatness or generations?
Flashback to 1939, the day—January 30. German Führer Adolf Hitler is delivering a speech addressing the Reichstag, and this is what he has to say:
If international finance Jewry inside and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, the result will be not the Bolshevization of the earth and thereby the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe!
Both leaders—the American and the German—deploy the same severe threat, encapsulated in the words annihilate or annihilation. They both set a condition meant to trigger steps aimed at bringing total destruction to a nation or a country. The conditions appear almost identical: the Jewry is accused of attempting to plunge the world into a global conflict; the Iranians are charged with the intention of killing people and destroying countries.
Adolf Hitler’s words have long been universally denounced. Has there been a comparable outcry in response to President Donald Trump’s words? Yes, there was an outcry of sorts, but by no means was it as strong as such reprehensible rhetoric deserved. Yet, we vividly remember the massive international outcry raised around the utterance spoken by Ayatollah Khomeini (and later repeated by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad), to wit: “This regime occupying Jerusalem must be erased from the page of time.” These words were famously twisted in translation to “Israel must be wiped off the map” to make them sound even more severe.
Did Israeli diplomats protest President Donald Trump’s words? Far from it. And yet, they should be highly sensitive to that specific vocabulary. It was their nation that was once subjected to such threats; it was their nation that had an enemy carry out those threats of annihilation. Can it be they have forgotten? No. Can it be they wish a similar fate on Iranians? Can it be that the suffering of their previous generations has failed to awaken them to the imminent suffering of another nation?
Whether President Donald Trump will follow through on his threat is a separate question. Karl Marx famously wrote that history repeats itself—first as tragedy, second as farce. If we assume that the deeds of Adolf Hitler played out as tragedy, then the deeds of Donald Trump must unfold as a farce. And so they are.
