Thomas: The United Arab Emirates just put a ban on Emirates going to university in the UK out of fears that students are getting radicalized by the Islamic Brotherhood.
Meanwhile in Iran, protesters are setting mosques on fire. The protests in Iran are against Islam as much as they are against the government.
Jonathan: That is not a surprise. We have known this for fifteen years.
Thomas: The UAE is one of the wealthiest per capita Arab nations. The fact that they see the UK as a greater hotbed of radical Islam than the UAE shifts how Europeans see themselves.
Now contrast that with Iran. Right before we went live, I saw footage of mosques on fire in Iran. Iran is experiencing nationwide protests against the government and against the religion itself. Reports suggest many mosques are empty. People are turning to anything but Islam. Christianity is rising. Atheism is rising. We are now in Jonathan’s area of expertise.
Jonathan: I spent my Marine Corps years focused on the Islamic Middle East. I have done research and briefings. Here is the short version.
Americans use the term “fundamentalist” as if Christian and Muslim fundamentalists are interchangeable. They are not. You have to look at the fundamentals of the religion.
Islam is survivalist. Do what you have to do to survive. Early Islam emphasized accommodation. Later, once it had power, it became expansionist and coercive. The religion of submission is literal. You do not even have to believe it, you just have to say the shahada: “There is no god but Allah, and Muhammad is his prophet.” Under their rules, saying it makes you Muslim.
Now apply that to Iran.
Iran is Persia, an ancient civilization. It modernized in the twentieth century, then the Islamic Revolution imposed a theocratic model where obedience to the government was framed as obedience to God. The hijab became law. Women who dress differently are attacked.
After decades of pressure, people still alive remember Iran before the revolution. Now they look at what Iran has become and blame Islam.
Then Trump destroyed their nuclear facility a few months ago and threatened further strikes. He warned the Iranian military not to massacre protesters.
Jonathan: Which gave the protesters confidence. They now believe an outside power may restrain the regime. They are looking to something beyond the regime’s religious authority, because the regime has used religion as a tool of control. Now the country is on fire.
Thomas: The photos coming out of Iran are more radical than most people realize. When you see a woman protesting with her hair visible, she is already breaking the law and risking her life.
There is a viral image of a woman lighting a cigarette with a picture of Iran’s supreme leader while her hair is uncovered. Many people think the radical act is burning the picture or smoking. The radical act is showing her hair.
This contrast is fascinating. We may be seeing the beginning of a civilizational shift where the center of Islam moves toward Europe the way the center of Christendom moved into Europe.
Christianity began in the Middle East. The churches in Revelation are in regions that are now predominantly Muslim. Syria, Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon, and Turkey were once largely Christian. Islam spread through those regions violently over time. Now we may be seeing a reverse dynamic. Meanwhile, inside Iran, people are rejecting it.
We do not know if this spreads beyond Iran. Iran’s version of Islam is different from what emerges from Saudi Arabia.
Sunni is closely associated with Saudi Arabia. Shiite is closely associated with Iran.
Civilizational shifts move slowly. Islam has pushed into Europe before. It was stopped by Charles Martel. Spain was conquered and later reconquered. Later advances were stopped at Vienna. There is something about Vienna.
Jonathan: This connects directly to what “hero” means right now. Trump acted as a catalyst by doing what leaders have only talked about for decades. Policymakers tried to pacify Iran to avoid confrontation. Militaries planned for years around the assumption that Iran’s defenses and capabilities were serious.
Then Trump acted. When Iran threatened nuclear proliferation and violated treaties, he struck their nuclear facility with stealth bombers that were not detected until they were already on the way back. He did not just hit a strategic target; he hit a symbol of power that the regime claimed Allah was protecting.
When Iran responded by firing missiles at Israel and nothing meaningful happened, it exposed weakness. If you have lived under oppression and been told, “God is in charge and God will punish our enemies,” and then God does not, that creates a crisis for the regime. A hero from outside the system just demonstrated how impotent that system is.
Then protests begin, and that hero says, “Touch these protesters and the American military gets involved.” After what happened last time, that is a credible threat.
Jonathan: We have talked about this in the context of the turnings. There is a kind of hero who is not a builder. He is a destroyer. He destroys evil systems. Trump fits that archetype. He is not a good person, but he is a disruptor.
Thomas: Solomon Kane, who just entered the public domain, is a similar kind of hero.
Jonathan: Exactly. He is here to upend the system, “drain the swamp.” You can hear it in the rhetoric. He destroys, then other people rebuild. That is more like Marco Rubio’s role.
Thomas: This connects to narrative fiction. The Muslims surround Vienna, and the city is about to fall. Poland sends the Winged Hussars. Poland and Vienna had a complicated relationship. The Hussars appear out of nowhere, charge the Muslims from the rear, rout them, and save Vienna.
Guess who took that narrative and worked it into a novel? J. R. R. Tolkien. That charge becomes Gondor and Rohan. The ride of the Rohirrim echoes the Winged Hussars.
Part of why that moment lands is because it resonates with history. You do not have to know the original event for it to hit, but the fact that a version of it really happened gives it verisimilitude. It feels real, and that makes it more emotionally powerful.
Jonathan: If you look at social media, which is a shallow reflection of culture, you see a desire for destroyers. In these stories, the destroyer is not trying to rebuild society. He is there to break what is corrupt.
Think of Darksiders. Hell descends to earth, demons attack civilians, angels fight them, and the war between heaven and hell spills onto the world. That summons War, one of the Horsemen, whose job is to keep heaven and hell in check and protect humanity.
War does not focus on reconstruction. He focuses on killing angels and demons. At the end, he breaks the seventh seal, calling down the apocalypse, and summons his siblings, Death, Strife, and Fury. He is a destroyer.
Nobody wants the Doom Slayer to build anything. They want him to rip and tear. Nobody wants John Preston in Equilibrium to build a new government. They want gun fu. That is the archetype.
Trump’s major threat to the world is that he does not play the game by the rules everyone else is using. He breaks the system. When people react to him, they are often trying to preserve the rules that gave them power.
You see this in the rhetoric. Instead of saying, “It is wrong to blow up drug traffickers,” people say, “You are breaking the rules,” or “You are committing a war crime.” The outrage is often about rule-breaking because the rules are what protect the system. Destroyers do not care. In fact, the rules are part of what they destroy.
Thomas: That is part of what they are destroying. It is very Conan. Conan does not follow society’s rules. He relies on strength.
Jonathan: And this is a core concept for storytelling. Ask yourself, what is the threat to the innocent? Sometimes the threat is the law. Sometimes the threat is the rules, designed to benefit a few.
This has been a core concept on the left for a long time. The system is racist. The system is sexist. The problems are systemic, therefore the system must be destroyed. That produces destroyer-style heroes. This archetype works across the aisle.
What does this mean for writers trying to reach an audience?
Jonathan: People are responding to destroyers right now. Trump gets the strongest positive and negative reactions I have ever seen toward a president. People either hate him or worship him. Very few are neutral.
So when you write stories, consider that audiences are strongly responding to destroyer heroes.
Thomas: And your audience is likely on one side or the other. I cannot name many stories that appeal equally across the political divide. This might be part of why anime and Japanese media are doing so well. They are not coded left or right in the same way. The culture is different. Japan is on a different turning.
Jonathan: The problem is that once you pick a side, people expect you to respond to the other side. Sometimes people just want to play the game.
That is why audiences get frustrated. “I just want to play Assassin’s Creed. I want to climb a building, jump off a roof, stab someone, and disappear.” They do not want it to become a political lecture about identity in a setting that does not match the story they came for.
