Kurt Schlichter:

The true nature of the world is savagery.

The world's true nature is that good is forever pitted against evil.

That has never changed. What happened over the last 70 years or so was an interregnum of peace in the West, created by violence against barbarians and facilitated by people willfully looking away from the butchery still continuing at the fringes of the map. The West managed to build a civilization that was -- for the first time in history since perhaps the Pax Romana -- generally internally peaceful. And the West convinced itself that this was normal.

But it was not normal. It was an anomaly, a glorious one, but an anomaly nonetheless. The world is not a peaceful place, and it never was, and it never will be. Despite the best efforts of the arrogant left, human nature has not changed. Human nature is vicious and cruel. Rousseau's noble savage nonsense, which we are still dealing with today in the form of eager sophomores in Che t-shirts slobbering over Hamas psychopaths -- is a giant fraud. Savages are not distinguished by their nobility. Their savagery distinguishes them. And we need to find the moral strength to do what is necessary to defeat them.

We must learn again to kill. We must learn again to destroy. We must learn again to be ruthless in defeating our enemies. The big lie that Western civilization tells itself is that there are no real enemies, that there are no bad people -- except the people of the West themselves, who bear some sort of original sin for not being corrupt and inept Third World barbarians.

We do have enemies, as we have seen. We do have enemies, as they tell us. When they talk about decolonization, they are talking about de-you-ization. When they talk about killing settlers, you need to understand that you are a settler, and they mean killing you. They mean raping your daughter in front of you. They mean chopping your baby's head off. They mean slaughtering your wife or husband, sons and daughters, and even your dog. And they mean enjoying it, reveling in the ecstatic glee of mass murder, and being so proud of it that they call home to their daddies and brag about it, or put up their body cam videos on TikTok.

The world was always a savage place. What happened on October 7 was not an anomaly. It was normality. What do you think happened to sacked cities in the past, which is what these Gaza-adjacent towns in Southern Israel essentially were? The attackers captured their objective, burned and razed the buildings, stole everything they could carry, raped anyone without a penis and some with, and piled corpses in the streets. We're stunned simply because we forgot what a sack is, but for most of human history, people lived in terror of it happening to them, hoping for the chance to inflict one upon their neighbors.

We in the West, of which Israel is a part and thereby is hated, forgot about this. Worse, we have forgotten our strength and our courage. We have forgotten that we survive not through gentle hugging but through sword-swinging. For example, we have forgotten how to conduct a siege. The idea that Israel should somehow give these Hamas barbarians food, water, and electrical power even if it surrounds Gaza and prepares to attack is mind-boggling insanity. The moral illiteracy of expecting Israel to care more about the Palestinian people than other Palestinians do is simply bizarre.

...

The hard truth is that the world contains bad people who must be crushed through ruthless violence, which shocks and horrifies modern sensibilities. But it is reality nonetheless. When people want to kill you, you are at a decision point. You can either let them kill you or stop them. But stopping them often involves aesthetically displeasing actions, such as blowing them into little bits with bombs or shoving a bayonet into their guts and watching them die in agony. And it necessarily means inflicting death and damage on the noncombatant camp followers around them. That's why they say war is hell. And that's why starting one is probably not a good idea. But when someone else starts one, you have to choose them or you. Someone's going to die badly, and you know, I propose it is those other guys.

More at his full column at Townhall.

Unbelieviably, Colonel Schlichter's words are so powerful they convinced... Biden NSA Spokesman John Kirby?

OMG I can't believe I'm saying this, but....go John Kirby?

TV Globo's @RKrahenbuhl: "So, besides saying that he doesn't have confidence in these numbers, the President went further to say that innocents will die and that this is the price of the war. You also said that."

Kirby: "I have indeed."

Krhenb�hl: "Don't you think this is insensitive? There's being very harsh criticism in about it. For example, the Council of American-Islamic Relations said it was deeply disturbed and call on the President to apologize. Would the President apologize?"

Kirby: "No."

Kr�henb�hl: "And does he regret saying something like that?"

Kirby: "What's harsh -- what's harsh is the way Hamas is using people as human shields. What's harsh is taking a couple of hundred hostages and leaving families and anxious, waiting and worrying to figure out where their loved ones are. What's harsh, is dropping in on a music festival and slaughtering a bunch of young people just trying to enjoy an afternoon. I could go on and on. That's what's harsh. That is what's harsh and being honest about the fact that there have been civilian casualties and that there likely will be more is being honest, because that's what war is. It's brutal. It's ugly. It's messy. I've said that before. President also said that yesterday. Doesn't mean we have to like it. And it doesn't mean that we're dismissing anyone of those casualties each and every one is a tragedy in its own right...It would be helpful if Hamas would let [Gazans] leave....We know that there are thousands waiting to leave Gaza writ large and Hamas is preventing them from doing it. That is what is harsh."