When the human mind becomes
too affixed to a political ideology, rather it is “right,” “center,” or “left,”
one way that the excessive attachment can be seen by other people is by perspectival
distortion. A very basic illustration of this cognitive-perceptional lapse is
when someone claims that only X but not Y is problematic even though both X and
Y can be criticized using the same or even related criteria. Besides the fact
that ideology is inherently partial rather than wholistic, “sins of omission” concerning
X or Y (but not both) due to a cognitive-perspectival distortion, which in turn
comes from the partiality of any ideology, can easily be viewed as unethical in
virtue of being patently unfair as well as self-serving, ideologically. This
very abstract paragraph sprang from news reports of U.S. Senator Linsey Graham
referring to Iran’s Khamenei as a Hitler-figure while giving Israel’s Netanyahu
a pass even though by January 11, 2026 when Graham spoke, the large-scale
killing and suffering of a people had easily dwarfed the few thousand Iranian
protesters who had been killed on the street. Even mentioning an equivalence
would have been sufficient in terms of which leader comes closer to being a 21st
century Hitler. As a result, the U.S. senator’s credibility undoubtedly took a
hit—except, interestingly, to people sharing the senator’s foreign-policy
ideology. This too flags political ideology itself as problematic for the human
mind.
On the Fox News’ program, “Sunday
Morning Futures,” Graham urged regime-change in Iran. “If I were you, Mr.
President, I would kill the leadership that are killing the people,” Graham
said.[1]
On the very same day, activists said that “Iran has killed at least 544 people
and even more are feared dead.”[2]
That Because Graham had very recently joined President Trump on a flight on Air
Force One, the senator’s statements had likely been planned in order to prepare
the American people a possible American military action to remove Iran’s
dictator, whose democratic legitimacy was probably as great as Putin’s in
Russia given all of the hand-picked “opposition” candidates.
Although Graham’s statement, “You
gotta end this,” can be thusly construed as having really come from Trump
himself, that the line applied even more so to what the Israeli
government had been inflicting in Gaza for years by then and yet Graham did not
mention this obvious point evinces the sort of ideological distortion that can
so easily flag a politician’s credibility.
With the Qatar News Agency
reporting also on January 11, 2026 that the death toll in Gaza had reached
71,412, with 171,314 injured (and with entire cities destroyed, perhaps over a
million people homeless and hungry), it is significant that Graham referred to
Iran’s leader as a “modern-day Hitler” without even mentioning even the
possibility that the holocaustic genocide still going on in Gaza qualified
Netanyahu, a war criminal still wanted by the International Criminal Court, for
the same infamous title.[3]
In fact, with some high officials of the Israeli government having stated that
death is not enough for the residents of Gaza—all of whom being presumably culpable
for Hamas’ attack in October, 2023 in which less than 1,500 Israelis were
killed and/or taken hostage—the holocaustic, extra-suffering, extension
from “mere” genocide arguably qualified Netanyahu and his henchmen as
democratically-elected “Nazis” for wanting to exterminate a subjugated people. Even
though Iran’s government could claim to have been democratically elected
through a legal fiction of “opposition” candidates pre-selected by Iran’s
highest body of clergy, the case of Israel demonstrates that a democracy is capable
of conducting a holocaust, or at least a genocide. Incidentally, German’s
President Hindenburg appointed Hitler as Chancellor in 1933, so Hitler came to
power in a democracy, so the distinction between autocracy and democracy with
regard to going on to perpetuate crimes against humanity (and war crimes) is
not as clear as politicians such as Lindsey Graham would like to suppose.
Essentially, Graham ignored
the elephant in the living room—the invisible elephant in plain view—while abhorring
just over 500 Iranian protesters having just been killed. This slight, I contend,
was no oversight, and it demonstrates just how culpable political ideology
itself can be when firmly held by the human brain. The resulting distortion, or
warping, can enable even enormous suffering and death unleashed by a state with
impunity. By implication, no one power in the world can be counted on to play
the role of the global “policeman.” Rather, the U.S. could go in to protect the
Iranian protesters while another large power, such as China, could go in to exterminate
the Israeli troops in Gaza, and perhaps even in the West Bank. This would be
superior to a partial action, but even more superior would be a world
federation with enough delegated military power of its own or on call to protect
civilians in any country or occupied territory, and thus fairly, in
which the scale and severity of unmitigated and unjustified atrocities committed
by a military reach a threshold.
Lest a world federation with limited governmental sovereignty checkable by a qualified-majority of countries, whether sovereign states or political unions, seem too far-fetched, it is worth reflecting on the enabling by large-scale organizational management (i.e., efficiency) and military technological “progress” (i.e., bigger, more powerful weapons) of the drastically increased scale and severity of the genocidal holocausts of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Eichmann’s application of efficiency to the network of trains going to and from the concentration camps, and the Israeli ability to bomb or bulldoze each and every building even in large cities in Gaza demonstrate just how large the destructive capacity of humans directed at entire peoples can be. So the value that a world federation—one that would be unlike the UN and the ICC in that enforcement powers would be included—in the 21st century is much greater than in the eighteenth century when Kant wrote his treatise on perpetual peace. In that book, the European philosopher argues that the establishment of a world federation would make world peace possible but admittedly not probable. Although such odds may apply three centuries later, human nature remaining constant, the need for a world federation has become much greater.
The President Trump’s government giving
Netanyahu’s Israeli government a pass and negotiating with Russia’s Putin on the
latter’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine,
while extracting the sitting president of Venezuela and hinting that Iran might
be next is so dogmatic in the sense of being arbitrary from a global rather
than self-interested perspective that leaving the world order in the hands
of impotent international organizations (i.e., the U.N. and the ICC) can be
considered to be downright reckless. The ideological and related self-centered vulnerabilities
of the human mind, together with the enhanced scale and severity of the
infliction of suffering and even death, render a world-order based on absolute
sovereignty at the nation-state and political-union levels as antiquated, and
yet we continue to rely on just such an order. That’s the idea.
2. Jon Grambrell, “Death Toll in Crackdown on Protests in Iran Spikes to at Least 544, Activists Say,”
