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The awful irony of New Zealand's PM Christopher Luxon taking sides, at the expense of his hard-up nation, with possibly the two most unpleasant characters on the world stage - UK's Keir Starmer and Ukraine's Volodomyr Zelenskyy - will not escape our readers. As the world teeters on the brink of total, global war, Luxon's allegiance to the Deep State of Davos Inc has aligned New Zealand with war-mongrels, while white-anting the peace-making efforts in Ukraine of POTUS Donald Trump.
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| Luxon cuddles up to Starmer |
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| And Zelenskyy |
The Third World War no longer appears in fragments, but as a unified whole. A war to be seen as the inevitable continuation of the Cold War, which in truth never ended, contrary to what geopolitical scholars have taught for decades.
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On June 13th, Israel launched a blitzkrieg that, within a few hours, effectively ensured the near-total victory of the Jewish state not only over Iran, but over the entire Middle East. The Israeli-Palestinian war, now evolved into an Israeli-Iranian conflict, represents—quite clearly—only a regional development of a war that, it is pointless to deny or pretend not to recognize, has become global and total.
All the major powers of the world are involved (at least by proxy) in this war, and even the vassal states are now aligned, often on the front lines.
The Third World War no longer appears in fragments, but as a unified whole. A war to be seen as the inevitable continuation of the Cold War, which in truth never ended, contrary to what geopolitical scholars have taught for decades.
The struggle for world dominance between the Soviets and the Americans did not end with the implosion of the Third Rome in 1991, nor with the détente of the preceding period. The Cold War merely shifted its axis—from Moscow to Beijing—while the Fourth Rome, namely Washington D.C., held a temporary global supremacy.
Temporary: meaning lasting about a political generation, roughly 30 years—the time needed to reap in China the seeds once sown in Russia.
If Moscow could, in some way, lay claim to being the Third Rome, Beijing cannot pretend to be the Fifth. China is an empire that shares nothing with the so-called Western tradition—not even partially (unlike Russia)—and this makes it a far more effective, yet also incredibly more vulnerable, revolutionary geopolitical actor. Thus, whereas Russia once influenced China, since the 2000s the relationship has gradually reversed: China now influences Russia (above all economically).
What binds Iran to Russia and China, culturally?
But let’s return to Iran. In recent hours, international affairs observers have been questioning the true intentions of Benjamin Netanyahu. According to official reports, the IDF’s attack was intended to decapitate Iran’s growing nuclear power, but the truth may be something else—far more fundamental: the destruction of Iran itself as a geopolitical center.
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WE WILL NOT LET ISRAEL CONTINUE ITS GENOCIDAL WAR IN GAZA. |
Iran, in fact, is the main reference point for the Shia Islamic world. As is well known, the Islamic world is divided into two major branches: on one side the Sunnis, and on the other the Shiites. From a geopolitical standpoint—beyond doctrinal differences—these represent two spheres aligned with the two main blocs competing for global dominance.
The Anglo-Zionist alliance and its European appendage have the Sunni world on their side, orbiting around Saudi Arabia. The Russo-Chinese axis, by contrast, can count on the support of the Shiite world, gravitating around the Iranian ayatollah.
Islam is a complex world, and this is not the place to analyze it in depth. However, what makes this religion particularly susceptible to (others') power games is its unique conception of law, right and justice—Sharia. By virtue of this, Muslim theologians and jurists are unable to conceptually distinguish moral authority from civil power, and therefore tend to merge them into a single entity.
For this reason, the State as conceived in modernity—founded upon and legitimized by itself—has always appeared particularly “aligned” with Islamic legal sensibilities, as have various political ideologies that are offspring of modern statism; that is, all shades of socialism. In fact, it is within the Islamic world that socialism witnessed the birth of a specific variation that overlaps class struggle with religious struggle (see Gaddafi’s Green Book or the Ba'ath Party in Syria).
This element—melding together nationalism and pan-Arabism, mosque and power, proletariat and imamate—is a hallmark of all Arab dictatorships in recent decades, from Hussein, Assad, and Gaddafi to Hamas, Hezbollah, and Khomeini’s Shiite theocracy.
The distinction between moral (religious) authority and civil power has been one of Catholicism’s great achievements—an enduring legacy of the philosophical, ethical, and legal traditions of the three great worlds: Greek, Roman, and Germanic. These traditions the Church has wisely welcomed into its fold and baptized.
This distinction, without separation, between authority and power has allowed the Church, on the one hand, to remain free from the influence and interference of those who sought to subordinate the salus animarum to the interests of the State, and on the other, to support and guarantee this very freedom—libertas Ecclesiae—through the exercise of private property.
Both the popes and the monarchs hostile to the Church have always been aware of this. For this reason, in the East, the Byzantine emperors consistently sought to keep the Church devoid of property—and thus subject to their power. This is the heresy of Caesaropapism, or “Byzantinism” as it is called: the merging in the figure of the political sovereign of both moral authority and civil power, ultimately subordinating the good of the Church to reasons of State.
This is one of the two defining characteristics of the so-called Orthodox Churches (the other being episcopal synodality), and it’s no coincidence that these same two elements are shared by the Eastern schismatics and the Churches born from the Protestant Reformation: Luther, Calvin, Henry VIII, and the other so-called reformers all sought to place the king at the head of national Churches, after having dispossessed monks and priests of all their material goods.
(To explore further, the reader is kindly invited to consult my article: “Economic Thought Deriving from the Protestant Revolution and the Catholic Reformation”, in The Angelus, March-April 2025, pp. 18-23).
The subjugation of religion to power is a common thread linking the Islamic world to the Orthodox world (which today survives most coherently in Moscow, and certainly not in Constantinople), as well as to China.
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| 53 hostages are trapped in the dungeons of Gaza. Up to 22 are presumed alive, at imminent risk of death |
The religious situation in China is, of course, quite sui generis. However, it is precisely in this light that one must understand the project Xi Jinping has been pursuing for decades to foster a revival of Confucianism. Xi often cites Confucius in his speeches, presenting himself as a junzi (a virtuous person) and drawing on Confucian values such as social harmony, respect for authority, discipline, and loyalty.
Regarding the cultural power of Confucianism in its ability to generate “social consensus” and reduce man to an ant, one need only consider what occurred in China during the COVID-19 pandemic. Unlike in the West, almost no Chinese citizen thought to rebel in the name of their individual or social rights. And this was not only out of fear of State repression.
From this perspective, the revival of Confucianism by the Chinese Communist regime is not merely a cultural or educational undertaking—it is a profoundly political strategy. As in Islamic sharia or Russian Orthodox theology, Confucianism also assigns the figure of the ruler a sacred aura.
The Leader of the Chinese Communist Party is viewed as the guarantor of cosmic and moral order, and therefore cannot be separated from—let alone questioned on—the grounds of ethical legitimacy. In this way, ethics is absorbed by the State, and the State becomes the arbiter of good and evil.
What unites Iran, Russia, and China today—beyond their different cultures, religions, and histories—is a shared framework in which civil power becomes totalizing precisely because it claims to be moral.
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| self-explanatory |
The New World of Zionism
But that is not all. This common thread goes further and connects the East—represented by the Russo-Chinese-Shiite axis—with the secularist soul of the West. Modern secularism, in fact, is based on a false premise: that the State can be “neutral” with regard to the good. Yet, the very moment it rejects any higher moral authority, the modern State sets itself up as the source of good and evil.
The West is schizophrenic. It possesses two main principal souls, two clashing and incompatible personalities. On one hand, the secularist soul, which not coincidentally often winks at China and the Islamic world, despite not sharing many of the values they uphold. On the other hand, the more “European” soul—not in a geographic sense, but a cultural one.
Properly understood, Europe is the great project built by the Catholic Church upon Greek anthropology, Roman right, and the Germanic model of society. Yet this second soul has been cast aside and placed under siege. This is Revolution.
Between these two extremes lie countless gradations and nuances that render the Western world shapeless, weak, and diseased—agonizing. The Anglo-Zionist Alliance, which constitutes the other geopolitical pole opposing the Axis, fully represents neither of the West’s two souls.
In this regard, it is worth recalling the appeal made by Pope Leo XIV on June 15, 2025, at the conclusion of the Jubilee Audience: “The commitment to building a safer world, free from the threat of nuclear weapons, must be pursued through respectful encounter and sincere dialogue, to build lasting peace founded on justice, fraternity, and the common good.
No one should ever threaten the existence of another. It is the duty of all nations to support the cause of peace by initiating paths of reconciliation and promoting solutions that ensure security and dignity for all.”
These were clearly words addressed both to Iran—which, through the Ayatollah, has long called not only for the disappearance of the Zionist state but even for the eradication of all Jews from the face of the Earth—and to Israel, which does not hesitate to unleash conflict in order to eliminate a nuclear threat that, to this day, might not even exist.
Zionism is, ideologically speaking, another form of socialism, and theologically speaking, a case of immanentizing eschatology: it seeks to bring about here and now what, in Orthodox Judaism—and even more so in the Catholic Faith—can only occur with the breaking-in of the Messiah into history (for the former, yet to happen; for the latter, already fulfilled).
In this light, Zionism bears strong affinities not only with atheistic secularism, but even with Islamic sharia, Russian nationalism, and neo-Confucian Chinese communism: all are offspring of the same heresy that blurs moral authority and civil power.
What divides them is not so much the structure or conception of power, but rather the claim to exclusivity. The Islamic world—particularly Shiite Iran—views Israel not merely as a foreign power, but as a theological usurpation (and vice versa): Jerusalem cannot belong to those who have rejected Muhammad.
Zionism, for its part, bases its identity on a concept of peoplehood that refuses to share election with any other nation. Each claims a sacred power—but a sacredness reserved for itself alone, excluding all others.
Zionism chose its alliance with the Anglo-American West not out of cultural affinity, but as a matter of strategic opportunism. This becomes particularly evident when confronted with the bizarre pro-Israel apologetics of American evangelical communities, which even regard the Zionist state as a manifestation of divine will and hope for the reconstruction of the Temple as “necessary” for the return of Christ.
Zionism, the Islamic world, Russian nationalism, and neo-Confucian communism all claim the final word in history. They are all forms of immanentized eschatology, each viewing its own civilization as the ultimate endpoint of human order.
Thus, none of these worlds can truly form a lasting alliance with one another, except in the service of a common negative cause—such as opposition to the (now-vanished) Catholic West or to a competing hegemonic model.
Yesterday, Zionism fought against “imperialist Christianity”; today it wages war on the Shiites. Tomorrow, will the open conflict be with the Russians—and why not—with China? There is no righteous side in this conflict, and—of this we can be sure—God will intervene by unexpected means, according to His appointed times and in ways unimaginable, to restore the one true order: the Christian Catholic order.
The entire world today is dominated by powers that, though rivals, share the same corrupt root: the gnostic usurpation of the sacred by the political.
In an age where the world fights to dominate its neighbor, the Church’s mission remains to struggle and resist so as not to be conformed. And Catholics have the grave duty to speak the truth—about man, about God, and even about power—even when all the powers of the Earth reject that truth. The Remnant Newspaper - Iran and the New World
O Sacred Heart of Jesus, have mercy on us
