TEHRAN — Iran’s Foreign Ministry has sharply criticised US President Donald Trump over remarks reportedly dismissing the human cost of war, warning that the idea that death is inevitable — and therefore inconsequential — represents a dangerous form of “modern nihilism.”
Spokesman Esmaeil Baghaei made the comments in a post on X on Thursday, responding to revelations by American media personality Tucker Carlson about a private conversation he said he held with Trump in the Oval Office days before the war began.
In a clip attached to his post, Baghaei quoted Carlson, who said he had warned Trump that the conflict was not genuinely about Iran’s nuclear program and that Israel was pushing the United States toward war.
“I said this to Trump to his face in the Oval Office, days before the war began. And he looked at me and said: ‘Yes, you’re right. But in the end, we all die anyway. So it doesn’t matter.’ That’s exactly what he said,” Carlson stated.
Carlson made the account public in an NPR interview released on September 24, describing Trump’s reported response as “nihilism” and insisting that the lives of those affected by the war do matter.
A Caligula parallel
Baghaei opened his post by quoting the reported remark and drew a parallel with Albert Camus’s play Caligula, in which the Roman emperor concludes that because life ends, the suffering of others is meaningless.
“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,” the diplomat wrote.
The danger today, he argued, is magnified by modern destructive
Reference: PressTv