(Danny Moloshok/Invision/AP)
Now that President Donald Trump has added Steve Bannon to his National Security Council (after removing the director of National Intelligence and the chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff), it's worth looking again at how Bannon sees the world and specifically how he sees national security.
The former Breitbart chief discussed his views at length during a meeting of the Human Dignity Institute, a conservative religious group that held a conference at the Vatican in 2014. A recording of the meeting was obtained by BuzzFeed.
In the meeting, Bannon painted an apocalyptic picture of modern history. He said the West had only recently emerged from the "new Dark Age" that was the early 20th century. Though capitalism had ushered in a brief era of prosperity, he said, it had become threatened by what he described as the "new barbarity" of Islamic terrorism that he said threatened to be a turning point that could wipe out centuries of progress.
"We're at the very beginning stages of a very brutal and bloody conflict," he told the conference. "This new barbarity that’s starting, that will completely eradicate everything that we've been bequeathed over the last 2,000, 2,500 years."
Those views are especially interesting given the immigration order signed Friday by Trump that temporarily bars travel from seven majority-Muslim countries and indefinitely suspends acceptance into the US of refugees from Syria.
Here is a digest of his speech, taken from that meeting. You can read the entire transcript here.
He called the 20th century "a new Dark Age" of death and destruction triggered by World War I:
"That war triggered a century of barbaric — unparalleled in mankind's history — virtually 180 to 200 million people were killed in the 20th century, and I believe that, you know, hundreds of years from now when they look back, we're children of that: We're children of that barbarity. This will be looked at almost as a new Dark Age."
That Dark Age, he said, was ended only by the rise of Western prosperity. But he said capitalism had become threatened by a "new barbarity":
"And we're at the very beginning stages of a very brutal and bloody conflict ... this new barbarity that's starting, that will completely eradicate everything that we've been bequeathed over the last 2,000, 2,500 years."
He said ISIS would spread throughout the West if it were not stopped:
"We are in an outright war against jihadist Islamic fascism. And this war is, I think, metastasizing far quicker than governments can handle it. We're at the very beginning stages of a global conflict, and if we do not bind together as partners with others in other countries, then this conflict is only going to metastasize. They have a Twitter account up today, ISIS does, about turning the United States into a 'river of blood' if it comes in and tries to defend the city of Baghdad. And trust me, that is going to come to Europe. That is going to come to Central Europe, it's going to come to Western Europe, it's going to come to the United Kingdom."