Explored: What ‘A Civilisation Will Die’ Really Means…

So said the ‘Prince of Peace’ in a badly judged and widely condemned public statement on Tuesday.

 

Yes, much has been made of Trump’s ominous statements about annihilating Iranian civilisation, whether it was ultimately just a bluff or not.

 

The language was so extreme that some even feared an imminent nuclear strike.

 

Come the arrival of Trump’s self-announced deadline last night, he backed off from his initial threats: at least for now. The present ceasefire arrangement may or may not be another trap or red herring: we’ll see.

 

So that’s what we’re doing here. Because ‘civilisations’ have already died. And that is the important context for understanding the full weight of these comments.

 

Irrespective of whatever happens in the next weeks, yes, the language is alarming. But actually somewhat in keeping with the Netanyahu type rhetoric about Amalek, Purim and the like. And with the apocalyptic terms in which the Iran War was being couched from the beginning.

 

Trump’s unhinged statements can be described a lot of ways. But what it isn’t is surprising. Trump is simply more honest in his language than other leaders have been: he says the quiet parts out loud.

 

Talking about ending an entire civilisation may seem alarming coming from a US president: but it exposes an underlying reality of either cultural, civilizational or racial (take your pick) supremacy that views the world in terms of superior and lesser cultures.

 

The superior culture has the right to annihilate the perceived lesser culture if it so desires. I touched on some of this in this article on the new or modern Colonialist era.

 

But I actually think the more telling – and disgusting – comment wasn’t the ‘civilisation dies’ one, but a comment from days earlier about bombing Iran back to ‘the stone ages’. The same statement was later repeated by unhinged Secretary of War Pete Hegseth.

 

 

 

 

The extraordinary part is reading Trump’s full sentence: “bomb them back into the stone ages… where they belong.”

 

It’s that last part: ‘where they belong‘. What does that mean?

 

Well, it’s obvious. In this worldview, an inferior culture or race like Iran doesn’t *deserve* to develop itself. It’s right to develop itself is a privilege entirely dependent on the whims or tolerance of superior cultures that *do* have the right to decide what civilisation prospers and what one collapses.

 

In other words, we can bomb you back to the stone age… because it’s where you ‘belong’ anyway. You can develop your country only if we *allow* you to.

 

It’s one of the most extraordinary things that’s ever been said out loud by a modern world leader.

 

But it reveals so much about what has previously been left unsaid in foreign policy discussion.

 

This mindset doesn’t originate with Donald Trump: but he and his unhinged collaborators and enablers are the most open about it that we’ve ever seen from a US administration.

 

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So let’s establish a key point here. Wiping out a civilisation – not a population, but a civilisation – is something we’ve already seen done in the Middle East multiple times in the last two decades.

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It’s just that it was never couched in those terms, so we never broadly looked at it that way. But let’s talk about this properly. And then we’ll come back to now and Iran.

 

To start with, a visual illustration helps. Here’s a series of images of various Middle East or Arab cities from recent years. Images sometimes speak louder than words.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There are, I would suggest, three levels to destroying a civilisation. One is the basic level of destroying national infrastructure.

 

That’s the one we observe most clearly: as the above sequence of pictures illustrates.

 

And it’s not just about bombing cities, and targeting things like power plants, bridges and ports. Why, for example, are universities and scientists being targeted in both Iran and Lebanon right now? They’re not military targets or strategically significant. They’re targeting the smartest people, the most educated, and the places where the country’s expertise is developed.

 

The International Union of Scientists has addressed this recently, stating ‘We recognize this violence as a continuation of the scholasticide perpetrated in Gaza, where US-backed Israel destroyed all of Gaza’s universities as part of their genocide. By killing scientists, the US and Israel aim to destroy the futures of the people of Lebanon and Iran…’

 

But that’s part of how you destroy a nation.

 

 

In Iraq, which had a developed and sophisticated state and infrastructure, the US-led War destroyed infrastructure and entirely dismantled every aspect of the state apparatus that had been built up for decades.

 

 

 

In Libya, the most developed country in all of Africa and one of the fastest developed countries in the world was bombed into oblivion by NATO warplanes in 2011. Decades of infrastructure and development under Gaddafi was reduced to rubble in just months.

 

One of the most successful and sophisticated Arab nations – a real world ‘Wakanda’ – was then turned into a failed state, where warlords, terrorist entities and criminal networks roam freely. Actual slave markets became a thing.

 

A Libyan golden age was ended: a total civilisational collapse – created by the warplanes and bombs of the West.

 

In other words, again, they ended Libyan civilisation.

 

 

 

 

I made the point in my book The Libya Conspiracy that pilots from some NATO countries that were involved in the bombing in Libya revealed that the targeting was highly questionable in nature: one revealed that when he asked his superiors what targets to bomb, he was simply told to bomb ‘anything that looks valuable‘.

 

In other words, it wasn’t just strategic bombing for regime change purposes: but deliberate civilisational destruction.

 

You could argue they did the same thing in Syria: manufacturing years of bloody Civil War that tore the historic country apart.

 

Even aside from the million-plus death toll, we could argue that the sheer scale of population displacement, as well as the substantial material devastation to cities and towns, and the eventual collapse of the Syrian state, all amounted to the dismantling of a civilisation.

 

Syria, like Libya and Iraq, was a developed, sophisticated state with a strong infrastructure, and an almost incomparably rich cultural, historic and religious tapestry.

 

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The point being that we have seen multiple Middle Eastern ‘civilisations’ destroyed in just the years since 9/11. Iran would only be the latest.

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These weren’t some stunted ‘Third World’ countries or quaint villages ruled by old-world entities like with Afghanistan and the Taliban: these were modern, sophisticated states that had worked hard to build themselves up in the aftermath and long shadow of Colonialism.

 

Beyond destroying infrastructure (which Trump has been openly threatening to do in Iran), the other key ways to destroy a civilisation are destroying the cultural make-up or harmony of a society and also destroying the history.

 

In terms of the former, we’ve obviously seen that happen: in Syria and Iraq, for example, where sectarian bloodshed and hatred was nurtured and weaponised for the purposes of regime change. Shias and Sunnis were unleashed against each other, while ethnic and religious minorities lost their safety (observe the ethnic killings in Syria recently as the latest example).

 

The rampage of the Islamic State terror group or ‘caliphate’ was the most obvious symptom of that, but they were just the most sensational part of the broader civilisational collapse.

 

This being in countries that had otherwise been multiculturally stable and broadly harmonious under secular national governments – until they were destroyed or destabilised from the outside.

 

The plight or exodus of Middle Eastern Christians (the oldest Christian communities in the world) as a result of all of this civilisational collapse was also made much of: I wrote about that here years ago, for example.

 

 

 

 

So, destroying the cultural fabric is part of it.

 

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Destroying the history is another part. And again, in both Iraq and Syria, the destruction of historical sites and heritage was a big deal.

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I documented that subject here in 2015: about how the tangible historic heritage of Iraq and Syria was being wiped out – by the Americans in Iraq to start with, then by general warfare, and eventually openly by the Islamic State thugs.

 

Destroying a culture’s historic legacy is a key part of civilisational erasure. The historical legacy is intimately tied to the sense of national identity.

 

Iraq and Syria in particular were historic cultures with almost incomparably rich archaeological treasure. In Syria alone was a unique tapestry of human history: classical Graeco-Roman ruins existing alongside golden age Islamic architecture, early Christian cultural artefacts, etc.

 

Syria’s capital is the oldest inhabited city on earth. And Iraq was literally the cradle of civilisation: the land of Mesopotamia, Babylon and Ancient Sumer and the first city states.

 

So much of it was destroyed. Historic and cultural sites are meant to be protected under the rules of war.

 

 

 

And even beyond physical destruction, so much archaeological looting and black market misappropriation of historic artifacts went on, literally robbing the countries of their past.

 

As quoted in this older article, Kino Gabriel, one of the leaders of the Syriac Military Council, summarised the situation over a decade ago when he said simply that “the birthplace of human civilisation is being destroyed.”

 

That’s all part of it.

 

 

So let’s ask why Israeli airstrikes, for example, were targeting historic heritage sites so early in the US/Israeli war in Iran?

 

We know that UNESCO has confirmed at least four World Heritage Sites damaged so far, with Iranian authorities reporting some 131 cultural sites damaged. UNESCO has warned that landmarks of “outstanding universal value” are at risk, with sites across Tehran, Isfahan and western Iran already affected. This has included a strike on the famous Golestan Palace.

 

Likewise, in its present Lebanon invasion, the Israelis have targeted historic sites in Lebanon. For example, an Israeli strike hit dangerously close to the Roman ruins in Tyre. The ancient city of Tyre, with its Phoenician, Persian, Roman and Byzantine history, has already been damaged by Israeli attacks multiple times. The Israelis have previously also attacked the world famous ruins at Baalbek.

 

Iman Brin documents the substantial Israeli destruction of Lebanese cultural heritage, including old mosques and churches, in this article from last February: and those tracking the damage believe it is a deliberate policy (along the same lines as the targeted cultural destruction in Gaza).

 

It doesn’t serve strategic purposes. Targeting Roman ruins or churches in Lebanon or ancient markets in Iran doesn’t provide any advantage over Hezbollah or the Iranian regime respectively: the answer is that it is targeted cultural destruction, aimed at civilisational degradation or erasure.

 

 

It’s what was done in both Iraq and Syria.

 

So when Donald Trump says something like ‘a whole civilisation dies tonight’, the language is revealing much more than just what the surface statements imply. Even more so with the ‘stone age’ remarks. Claiming you’re going to bomb a country back to the Stone Age is essentially saying you want to erase or reverse decades or centuries of development.

 

This has been a policy in the Middle East, as we’ve highlighted here: destroying both nations and cultures.

 

If Iran’s civilisation does ‘die’ as Trump threatened, it’s obviously in the realm of war crimes. But it would also just be part of the ongoing pattern.

 

Even if nothing on that scale ends up happening, just the fact that this language is being used is illustrative enough of an extremely ugly underlying reality and worldview.

 

 

 

PALMYRA of the Centuries: The History, the Fall & the Restoration…

 

The Destruction of the Historic/Cultural Heritage of IRAQ and SYRIA…