A nation of anti-Christs — banality made us do it?

21 April 2026

In the midst of the Iran War

Edward Curtin implicitly picked up on Kevin Barrett's idea, regarding what I describe as America's nationally embodied anti-Christ.

Curtin wrote that — here in excerpts:

Many people are saying that Donald Trump is insane.

But if so, it is a form of insanity that includes the calm sanity of Adolf Eichmann [see here] and Harry Truman as they went about their business of mass extermination.

If Trump is insane, how did he twice become the president of the United States?

Do “sane” people . . . not realize that Trump is the nominal head of an immense system whose history is one of mass murder from Wounded Knee to the recent U.S. slaughter of hundreds, mostly young girls, at the elementary school in Minab, Iran[?]

Trump gave the orders, but he did not launch those missiles. Nor did Netanyahu massacre Palestinians with his own hands.

As the Trappist monk Thomas Merton wrote in his profound book of essays, Raids on the Unspeakable,

It is the sane ones, the well-adapted ones, who can without qualms and without nausea aim the missiles and press the buttons that will initiate the great festival of destruction that they, the sane ones, have prepared.

What makes us so sure, after all, that the danger comes from a psychotic getting into position to fire the first shot in a nuclear war?

Psychotics will be suspect. No one suspects the sane, and the sane ones will have perfectly good reasons, logical, well-adjusted reasons, for firing the shot.

They will be obeying sane orders that have come sanely down the chain of command.

And because of their sanity they will have no qualms at all. When the missiles take off, then, it will be no mistake.

We can no longer assume that because a man is “sane” he is therefore in his “right mind.”

The whole concept of sanity in a society where spiritual values have lost their meaning is itself meaningless.

Examples

In the absence of a declaration of war and equally absent legal due process — the US Navy officers, who were directly involved in blowing up people and boats off the coasts of Latin and Central America — knew that they were committing serial murders outside the bounds of war.

Similarly in Iran, military command officers, pilots, drone operators and troops must be aware that they are committing war crimes by intentionally exploding civilians and infrastructure.

No excuses possible. War criminality, after all, is repeatedly defined during the American military's initial training and subsequent promotional processes.

The moral? — As Kevin Barrett pointed out . . .

'We have met the Antichrist, and he is us.'

PeteFree.com

A nation of anti-Christs — banality made us do it?