It is easy to see that Iran is run by an oppressive regime. Women who do not wear a head scarf there face fines and prison sentences. Christians and followers of other religions regularly face suppression and persecution. Meanwhile, Iran’s military routinely shouts “death to” both Israel and America.
The current supreme leader of Iran is Mojtaba Khamenei, whose predecessor and father was killed by an Israeli airstrike earlier this year. The new leader, like his father, wields both ultimate political authority and ultimate religious authority, which can be a dangerous mixture. This is why America and Israel do not want Iran to have a nuclear weapon.
The unabashed mixing of politics with religion in Iran also contains a sobering reality. It’s not surprising that the abused Iranian people cannot put together any significant resistance to the current regime—even with plenty of outside forces willing to support them. Airstrikes by America and Israel may be enhancing the regime’s power by suggesting the necessity of partaking in an ideological struggle that they had been warning about. There is likely no other idea in Iranian society big and strong enough to compete with what is provided by the regime. Thus, there is currently no easy solution.
But consider for a moment that the key to victory in Iran is perhaps first confronting China. Iran’s current existence is made possible by China, which is Iran’s largest trading partner and the primary buyer of Iranian oil.
Now consider that Beijing is run by dangerous religious fanatics. “Communism a religion?” you ask. Absolutely. Despite its name, the party is far more like a religion than what we Americans consider a political party or anything else.
Chinese Communist Party (CCP) members in China are required to attend weekly study sessions and treat the writings of Karl Marx, Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, and other party leaders as unquestionable documents—holy scriptures. Local party secretaries—priests—require ideological conformity and punish resistance. To attend higher education or receive a job promotion, one must pass a political examination giving party-approved answers—rituals. The Party is treated as god, denying all other religions as part of state-sponsored atheism. (Religions do exist in China to keep up appearances, as described below, but leaders must be party members.)
Furthermore, this is a fanatical, evil religion—a cult. Deng Xiaoping recommended “killing two hundred thousand people in exchange for twenty years’ stability.” Communism since its origin—publication of the “Communist Manifesto”—has endorsed violence as a necessity for dealing with class conflict, which is a constant reality until all nations turn fully communist or socialist. The outlook for those who don’t buy into communism is indeed apocalyptic. It is also no surprise political suppression and killings are a constant reality in societies run by the fanatical cult of communism.
“Ah, but unlike Iran, China is at least shrewd in business, self-serving, non-suicidal, reasonably pragmatic, and down-to-earth,” you may say.
This is where the proverbial wool is pulled over the eyes of the West. The deeply engrained Asian attitude of saving face and keeping up appearances gives the façade of normalcy. The enormous internet firewall and legions of internet police also help, stomping out anything that doesn’t fit this faux normalcy. All publicly facing events in China are meticulously calculated not to ever appear fanatical. Political decisions and changes are made behind closed doors, and China’s dubiously elected “People’s Congress” rubber stamps them with mundane uniformity—usually passing laws by a 95 percent to 100 percent margin—a farce of democracy.
Of course, the reality of the CCP’s constant human rights atrocities tells another story. Suicide by the state exists every day in its killing of its own, innocent citizens, whether democracy advocates, Falun Gong practitioners, Christians, Tibetan Buddhists, Uyghurs, or anyone else who runs afoul of the Party—including its own party members.
That is to say, it’s not that the Chinese Communist Party is any less dangerously stupid and fanatical than the Iranian regime. The CCP is just better at hiding it. The ultimate example of this is the COVID-19 pandemic, which was caused by an extremely dangerous bio-weapon that leaked out of a poorly run lab, killing at least 1 million Americans (not counting vaccine deaths), not to mention millions more around the world. The Iranian regime has never created that scale of death.
President Trump’s recent railings against communism are getting closer and closer to the mark. He’s doing it out of necessity because of the local rise of Democratic Socialism—communism by another name, which is being propagated by publicly funded education at all levels. The sooner that we realize communism is essentially a fanatical religious endeavor, the sooner the problem can be solved through economic decoupling, aggressive soft power, and returning to traditional culture and values both at home and on the world’s stage.
Another way to put it is that we are now at war with fanatical governments that combine religious and political power into one diabolical force. The power center of this malicious fanaticism is squarely in Beijing.
