“Stupid Fury”: Trump’s neocolonialism explained by German theologian Bonhoeffer

Milena Rampoldi, March 15, 2026

Since the outbreak of the Usraeli aggression against the Islamic Republic of Iran I feel like the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer when he was in the Nazi jail even if my home office in Istanbul is much more comfortable. In his cell, Bonhoeffer started to reflect on the reasons and roots of the brutal Hitlerian regime by understanding that the cause of it was not the maliciousness/the evil but simply the pure and blank stupidity.

The same paradigm can be applied to the presidency of Donald Trump and his epically furious war against the Satanic regime of Iran while in reality it is nothing else than the brutal and headless aggression against a sovereign State in the Mashreq.

“We sought repeatedly to make a deal. We tried. They wanted to do it. They didn't want to do it again. They wanted to do it. They didn't want to do it.”

In his letters written from jail, the theologian Bonhoeffer affirmed that stupidity was a more dangerous enemy of the good than maliciousness and/or the evil itself. For me personally, this conclusion he made has a strong impact on how to struggle against human rights violations like the US wars against sovereign Muslim states. We experience an important paradigm shift if we abandon the point of view according to which we should struggle against the US-evil and if we instead say that US-stupidity is the enemy of the sovereign Muslim countries of the Mashreq like stupidity is the enemy of political self-determination and anti-colonialism/anti-imperialism.

“The lives of courageous American heroes may be lost and we may have casualties, that often happens in war. We're doing this, not for now, we're doing this for the future, and it is a noble mission.”

 However, Bonhoeffer even goes a step further in his reflections by showing that violence is not even capable of opposing to stupidity while it is an effective means when we have to oppose to evil. If we start from the assumption that Trump represents stupidity and not evil, we will understand that we have to change our strategy to oppose to his neo-imperialist children-killing phantasies in Muslim and other (Venezuela, Cuba and more) countries.

Why is stupidity so dangerous in politics? Bonhoeffer has the answer: Stupidity is put into brackets by the majority of people because many think that it is not worth of being considered. And this is a mistake because we then do not understand the essence of stupidity which – if we put it into the words of Bonhoeffer himself – is not an intellectual but a “human” defect.

If we analyse the phenomenon of stupidity from a psychological and then sociological point of view, we understand a fundamental characteristic of it: stupidity appears in groups more than in isolated persons. Trump and his stupidity are part of a system, of an American way of life where taxpayers finance stupidity-driven attacks of girl schools,  museums and hospitals in Iran.

“But yeah, you know, we expect some things. Like I said, some people will die. When you go to war, some people will die.”

If we listen to what Bonhoeffer suggests we need to move from the isolated puppet Donald to the “Epstein” system he is part of. This means that stupidity is not a psychological but becomes a sociological issue. This is why we should establish the so-called “sociology of stupidity” to analyse Trump neo-imperialism to overcome the US occupation of Muslim and other countries.

In a neo-colonialist regime like the United States, the power of the ruling class of the power-hungry AIPAC neo-Zionists of needs the stupidity of the blind US taxpayers to survive because stupidity and neo-imperialist megalomania is the exact opposite of moral courage and struggle against injustice. Stupid people believe in the narrative of the ruling class. And this results in the persistence of a U.S. neo-colonialism shaped by the Zionist 2.0 regime driven by Eretz Israel phantasies. Here in the following, I would like to translate the section taken from Bonhoeffers letters written from jail entitled “Stupidity”[1] into English to let readers think about it, to re-shape their own moral courage as we need a war against stupidity and not against evil:

“Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of good than evil. Evil can be protested against, it can be exposed, it can be prevented by force, if necessary, evil always carries the seed of self-destruction in that it leaves at least a feeling of unease in people. However, we are defenceless when it comes to stupidity. Neither protests nor violence can achieve anything here; using reasoning to oppose stupidity is useless; facts that contradict one's own prejudices need simply not be believed - in such cases the stupid person even becomes critical - and if these facts are unavoidable, they can simply be brushed aside as meaningless and isolated cases. In contrast to the wicked person, the stupid person is completely satisfied with himself; indeed, he even becomes dangerous by becoming easily irritated and going on the attack. We will never again try to convince the stupid person by reasoning since it is pointless and dangerous.

In order to know how we can deal with stupidity, we must try to understand its nature. This much is certain, that stupidity is not essentially an intellectual, but a human defect. There are intellectually extraordinarily agile people who are stupid, and intellectually very slow-witted people who are anything but stupid. We make this discovery to our surprise in certain situations. We get the impression not so much that stupidity is an innate defect, but that under certain circumstances people are made stupid, or allow themselves to be made stupid. We also observe that people who live in isolation and solitude show this defect less often than people and groups of people who tend to socialise or are condemned. So perhaps stupidity seems to be less of a psychological problem than a sociological one.

Stupidity is a special form of the influence of historical circumstances on people, a psychological side effect of certain external conditions. A closer look reveals that every strong external development of power, be it political or religious, strikes a large proportion of people with stupidity. Indeed, it seems as if this is a sociological-psychological law. The power of some needs the stupidity of others. The process here is not that certain - for example, intellectual - human dispositions suddenly atrophy or fail, but that under the overwhelming impression of the development of power, man is robbed of his inner independence and that he now - more or less unconsciously - refrains from finding his own behaviour to the resulting life situations. The fact that the stupid person is often stubborn should not obscure the fact that the person is not independent. When talking to this person, you can almost feel that you are not dealing with the person itself, but with slogans, mottoes etc. that have become powerful over it. The person is under a spell, blinded, has been abused and mistreated in its own being. Having thus become a will-less instrument, the stupid person will also be capable of all evil and at the same time incapable of recognising this as evil. Here lies the danger of diabolical abuse. This will enable people to be ruined forever.

But it is also quite clear here that it is not an act of instruction but only an act of liberation that could overcome stupidity. We will have to come to terms with the fact that, in the vast majority of cases, genuine inner liberation will only be possible after external liberation has preceded it; until then, we will have to forego all attempts to convince the stupid. Incidentally, this situation will also explain why, under such circumstances, we endeavour in vain to know what "the people" actually think and why this question is so superfluous for those who think and act responsibly - always only under the given circumstances. The word of the Bible that the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom (Psalm 111:10) says that the inner liberation of man to live responsibly before God is the only real overcoming of stupidity.

Incidentally, these thoughts about stupidity are comforting in that they do not allow us to consider the majority of people stupid under all circumstances. It will really depend on whether those in power expect more from stupidity or from people's inner independence and cleverness.”

The simple conclusion is that neo-colonialist Trumpism and neo-imperialist Donaldism are a serious sociological problem interwoven with stupidity appearing as evil. And from stupidity you can just be freed, stupidity cannot be opposed to with violence, and this is exactly the case when we look at the occupation of the Middle East by the Usraeli army. While the Zionist Israel 2.0 needs implosion, self-destruction and deconstruction, Trumpism and Donaldism need an international war against stupidity.

[1] The passage is taken from Bonhoeffer D., Widerstand und Ergebung: Briefe und Aufzeichnungen aus der Haft, Gütersloher Verlagshaus, München 2005.