04.08.26
Civilizational erasure
A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will. However, now that we have Complete and Total Regime Change, where different, smarter, and less radicalized minds prevail, maybe something revolutionarily wonderful can happen, WHO KNOWS? We will find out tonight, one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the World. 47 years of extortion, corruption, and death, will finally end. God Bless the Great People of Iran!
That was Trump’s post on Truth Social yesterday, around 8 AM. It got 12.9 “retruths” and 53.8 likes.
It is worth parsing the whole thing.
The first sentence is an announcement that the U.S. is about to commit genocide.
The second is a denial of responsibility.
The third is a fantasy.
The fourth is another denial of responsibility.
The fifth is another fantasy.
As for the last, God had better Bless the Great People of Iran, because God’s hit man is about to ice a lot of them, either immediately or slowly.
The general reaction has been that the man has gone entirely mad and must be ousted. The trouble is, the idea of genocide is not so mad any more. It is becoming normal.
The first step toward the normalization of genocide may have been taken during the Serbia-Herzagovina war in the early 1990s, when the press blithely adopted Slobodan Milošević’s euphemism for forced displacement and genocide, “ethnic cleansing.”
The term “ethnic cleansing” does not appear in any legal document, wrote Genocide Watch’s founding president Gregory H. Stanton in June 2023. It has no official definition. Sometimes it means forced deportation, but, Stanton points out, genocide and displacement often go together because fear of being murdered impels people to flee.
Genocide does have a legal definition, and it’s a high bar to reach. But when the bar is reached and the word is applied, other nations and transnational bodies are compelled under international law to intervene (Stanton says the intervention must be military) and to hold the perpetrators accountable.
“Ethnic cleansing,” like “atrocity,” does not require intervention. It invites anguished condemnation — and gives tacit permission.
Since the Balkans wars, numerous genocides have been called “ethnic cleansing,” and allowed to proceed without much interruption. Stanton names many. Among the perpetrators is Myanmar’s government:
Genocide is precisely what the Myanmar government and supporting militias have committed against the Rohingya since 2012. . . .
Over 700,000 Rohingya fled into Bangladesh in 2017 to escape systematic massacres by the Myanmar army that killed at least 10,000 Rohingya and burned over 400 Rohingya villages to the ground. Yet the so-called ‘international community’ (which exists only in popular imaginations) still avoids using the word ‘genocide.’
The UN, press, human rights groups, and many governments still call the Myanmar Army’s aggression, genocidal massacres, and forced deportation against the Rohingya “ethnic cleansing.” Since 2012, the term “ethnic cleansing” has been the dominant term used for the Rohingya genocide in articles in the New York Times, Washington Post, the Guardian, in statements by United Nations officials, in statements by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. and in statements by the U.S. State Department.
By the time Putin invaded Ukraine and began bombing hospitals, apartment buildings, and power plants, it was as if committing war crimes — including genocide if necessary to meet one’s aims — was just another option to be considered. Not only the Ukranians but also the Russian people have paid the price of the invasion— between the start of the full-scale invasion in 2022 and the end of last year, Russian forces have suffered 1.2 million casualties, including as many as 325,000 deaths. But Putin may suffer no consequences; under a Trumpian “deal,” he may even be rewarded with another chunk of Ukraine.
Then, following the Hamas-led attacks on October 7, 2023, Israel started to bomb, displace, and starve Gaza’s civilians, to murder journalists and humanitarian aid workers, and reduce the entire territory to rubble. In September 2025, the UN’s human rights commission determined that the Israeli government was committing genocide in Gaza. But for Netanyhu there has been no downside aside from becoming a pariah in the eyes of much of the world. Like Trump, he doesn’t care about that. And materially and politically, he’s doing okay. Both U.S. Democrats and Republicans keep supplying him with arms and money. And he’s still not in prison.
“Civilizational erasure”—what Trump is about to do to Iran—is how the 2025 U.S. National Security Strategy describes the presumed result of political integration and humane immigration policies under the auspices of the EU and other transnational bodies: European “national identities and self-confidence” will be destroyed, and Europe (that is to say, the seat of white Christiandom) “will be unrecognizable in 20 years or less.” The document does not mention the civilizational erasure of Palestine by Israel.
Now Trump has pronounced the erasure of a “whole civilization,” its history, its modernization, and its future for a long time to come.
To Putin, Trump, and Netanyahu, Ben-Gvir and Miller, there are some ethnicities that are already clean and some of which a country must cleanse itself; some civilizations that must be saved and others that can or should be erased—if they were ever “civilized” in the first place. To Trump and Netanyahu, Iran is in the latter category.
And now we have another euphemism for genocide: “civilizational erasure.”