In a post on his X account, Foreign Ministry spokesperson Esmaeil Baqaei shared part of comments by Tucker Carlson recounting his chat with US President Donald Trump days before the start of the US-Israeli war of aggression against Iran, in which the consequences of the military onslaught against Iran were discussed.
Baqaei condemned the attitude reflected in Trump’s remark that “we all die anyway,” drawing a comparison with Albert Camus’s ‘Caligula’ and warning about the dangers of using mortality to dismiss human suffering.
“’In the end we all die anyway, so it doesn't matter.’ This is no conventional political statement; it echoes Albert Camus’s Caligula at the exact moment existential 'absurdity' curdles into tyranny - where the 'inevitability of death' is used to strip the living of their value. Because life ends, Caligula reasoned, the suffering of others is inconsequential,” Baqaei wrote.
“The terrifying difference today is leverage. Caligula had only the primitive tools of Rome; modern nihilism commands vast stockpiles of mass destruction,” the Iranian spokesman added.
“The greatest geopolitical danger is not a leader confronting mortality. It is a system that uses the inevitability of death to justify indifference to human suffering. ‘We all die’ is a fact; ‘so it doesn't matter’ is the leap where existential dread becomes a political weapon,” he noted.
“Those who think they can appease Caligula forget that the absurd recognizes no rule or contract. Appeasement buys no safety - it merely negotiates the order of the victims,” Baqaei stated.