PELONI: A very timely review of history.
The Sleepwalkers and the Abyss: Why the West’s New Appeasers Are Envying the Rope
Harry Liberman
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America is not unique, and it is not immune to this cyclical law of history. As the borders of the West disintegrate, from the burning suburbs of France to the radicalized streets of London, Dearborn, and New York, the internal rot accelerates. Uncontrolled immigration and a total refusal to insist on cultural assimilation have imported the very conflicts the West once sought to contain.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in France, where sweeping student-led riots and far-left agitators have turned school districts into zones of lawlessness. With hundreds of schools shuttered, barricades set ablaze, and emergency services facing physical assault, one cannot help but imagine Charles Martel—who famously halted the advancing Umayyad forces at the Battle of Tours in 732—looking down in horror as the nation he fought to preserve systematically facilitates its own cultural and structural self-destruction.
We are sleepwalking into the collapse of our civilization, perfectly captured by the dark, prophetic words of Jim Morrison and The Doors:
“This is the end, beautiful friend. This is the end, my only friend, the end. Of our elaborate plans, the end. Of everything that stands, the end.”
In the late 1930s, Neville Chamberlain returned from Munich clutching a worthless piece of paper, proclaiming he had secured “peace for our time.” He genuinely believed that the ravenous beast of totalitarianism could be satiated with a few territorial concessions. Standing almost alone in the political wilderness, Winston Churchill issued a haunting warning to the House of Commons that reverberates through the decades to our present hour:
“You were given the choice between war and dishonour. You chose dishonour and you will have war.”
Later, reflecting on the psychological surrender of the West, Churchill observed that an appeaser is simply “one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last.” Today, the Western world stands frozen in that same paralyzing posture of dishonour.
We are governed by a modern class of Chamberlains—sophisticated technocrats, political careerists, and progressive intellectuals—who look at the theological fascism of the Islamic Republic of Iran and convince themselves that it can be managed, house-trained, or bought off with sanctions relief. They have forgotten that the crocodile’s appetite is never sated; it is only whetted. The contemporary Western elite is not just feeding the crocodile; they are actively starving their own defenses while rationalizing the motivations of a regime that has explicitly promised their destruction.
To understand the sheer madness of allowing Tehran to acquire a nuclear weapon, one must look past the sterile language of diplomatic communiqués and confront the raw, sacrificial theology of the regime. The West measures deterrence in GDP, infrastructure, and human life. The Ayatollahs measure victory in child sacrifice and martyrdom in the name of Islam.
We have seen what this Islamic regime is willing to do to its own children.
During the Iran-Iraq War, the regime purchased thousands of Taiwanese-manufactured plastic keys. They hung them around the necks of the Basij—children, some as young as nine years old—and marched them onto the battlefield. The regime tried using donkeys to clear Iraqi minefields first, but animal instinct caused the beasts to flee at the sound of the first explosion. Human children, systematically indoctrinated into a death cult, did not run. Armed only with their “keys to paradise,” fifty thousand children marched forward in human waves, their bodies torn to pieces, later gathered in blankets by grieving families. Even the battle-hardened Iraqi soldiers facing them were reported to be physically sickened by the spectacle of slaughter.
If a regime is entirely willing to incinerate fifty thousand of its own children as human minesweepers, what makes the modern Western mind believe it will hesitate for a single second to risk its population in a nuclear exchange? For a theological autocracy, a nuclear weapon is not a tool of deterrence; it is a mechanism for the apocalypse.
This apocalyptic mindset was perfectly personified by former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
April 24, 2006, cover story for The New Republic titled “Ahmadinejad’s Demons: A Child of the Revolution Takes Over”, authored by German political scientist and historian Matthias Küntzel. [1]
In the opening paragraphs of this influential essay, Küntzel explicitly details how Ayatollah Khomeini imported 500,000 plastic keys from Taiwan during the Iran-Iraq War. He describes how these keys were hung around the necks of young Basij children—some as young as twelve years old—who were sent in human wave formations to clear Iraqi minefields with their bodies, promised that the plastic trinkets would immediately open the gates to paradise.[1]
Küntzel uses this historical horror to explain the ideological background of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who rose to power through the Basij student movement and whose worldview was profoundly shaped by this sacrificial theology. [1]
In a series of confrontational addresses delivered to the United Nations General Assembly and to internal clerical groups, Ahmadinejad openly proclaimed his regime’s core mission was to set the stage for a global endgame. Invoking messianic motifs, he claimed that a mystical “aura of light” surrounded him during his UN speeches, spoke openly of communicating with spiritual entities and preparing a literal highway for the return of the Hidden Twelfth Imam (the Mahdi), and actively welcomed an impending clash of civilizations. To Ahmadinejad, earthly destruction is not a risk to minimize, but a holy obligation to hasten.
Yet, the most glaring warning of history is being ignored by the very people it should terrify most: the Western progressive left. History records that when Ayatollah Khomeini orchestrated the 1979 revolution, he did not do it alone. He relied heavily on an alliance with Marxist progressives, student radicals, and left-wing intellectuals who viewed the Islamic movement as a partner against Western imperialism. They believed in a shared future of power-sharing. They were fatally wrong.
Between June 1981 and March 1982, Khomeini initiated a brutal, extra-legal purge. Operating through newly minted Islamic Revolutionary Courts that lacked any semblance of fair trials, the regime systematically slaughtered over 3,500 documented political dissidents from leftist factions like the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK) and the communist Tudeh party. They were branded as Mohareb (“enemies of Allah”), hanged from construction cranes, and buried in unmarked mass graves. In the world of totalitarians, there is no room for power-sharing. There is no room for useful idiots.
In a display of staggering historical amnesia, today’s progressive left has formed a grotesque, unwritten “Green-Red Alliance”—a marriage of convenience between radical environmentalism/cultural progressivism and militant Islamism. Academically and philosophically, this synthesis represents a profound intellectual bankruptcy. On paper, it unites two fundamentally incompatible worldviews: a secular, hyper-permissive progressive left ostensibly committed to third-wave feminism, LGBTQ+ rights, and radical bodily autonomy, alongside a hyper-patriarchal, theological fascism that enforces gender apartheid and executes homosexuals by hanging.
How do they bridge this chasm?
Through the cynical architecture of post-colonial theory, neo-Marxist deconstruction, and intersectionality. Post-Cold War theorists, having lost the traditional European industrial proletariat, cast about for a substitute. They settled on the global Ummah and anti-Western militant movements as the “new proletariat”. In this warped philosophical framework, the ultimate moral metric is no longer individual human rights, but a collective binary of power dynamics: the West is the “oppressor,” and anyone fighting the West—no matter how regressive, violent, or theological—is the “oppressed”. Coherence is sacrificed on the altar of a shared pathological hatred for Western liberal democracy and the Jewish state.
The material contradictions of this alliance are laid bare by the cold realities of energy economics. For years, the American progressive left championed the destruction of domestic energy security. Under the banner of climate activism, they fought fracking, killed pipelines, and cheered the dismantling of Western fossil fuels.
Under the Biden administration, political choices and geopolitical emergencies triggered a massive hollow-out of the nation’s energy buffers. Following the historic 180-million-barrel emergency release in 2022, and subsequent international releases triggered by Iranian aggression freezing tanker traffic in the Strait of Hormuz, the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) plummeted to 283.8 million barrels—a catastrophic 44-year low not seen since October 1982.
The modern Western progressive left has entangled itself in an intellectual knot so tight it has paralyzed their capacity for basic logic.
We are told by the high priests of the climate movement that carbon dioxide is an existential monster, an invisible engine of inevitable global doomsday. For over a decade, radical climate activists like Greta Thunberg have stood before the United Nations Climate Action Summit, furiously declaring
“How dare you!” to world leaders while demanding a total, immediate shutdown of the global fossil fuel economy.
Yet, this blind fixation on the absolute elimination of carbon reveals a staggering ignorance of ecological reality. Agronomic and atmospheric sciences demonstrate that carbon dioxide is not a toxic pollutant, but the foundational catalyst of terrestrial life. In fact, if atmospheric \(CO_{2}\) levels were ever successfully dropped by roughly 70% from our current baseline of ~420 ppm down to the 150 ppm “Line of Death,” plant respiration would collapse, photosynthesis would entirely cease, and terrestrial plant life would systematically wither and die. Without vegetation, the global food chain would experience absolute extinction, making the progressive campaign to purge \(CO_{2}\) an inadvertent blueprint for ecological suicide.
As the geopolitical landscape fractures under the shadow of a threshold nuclear state in Tehran, a glaring philosophical contradiction has been laid bare. Logic dictates that if climate change is an absolute existential threat, these very activists should be singing hymns of praise for the supply contractions that force carbon reduction, rather than appeasing a theological regime whose ultimate goal is a nuclear dawn.
Harry Liberman: Child of the Holocaust , baby of the family, studied my fathers survived history firsthand. In an industry obsessed with convenient omissions, you can hide a source, you can’t erase a witness.
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