Trump: "A Whole Civilization with Die Tonight"

Reflections on the deliberate destruction of entire civilizations

Last night, just before bed, I posted an essay on Mark Levin’s exhortation to President Trump to use nuclear weapons on Iran. This morning I woke up to to President Trump’s announcement on Truth Social.

This prompted me to review incidents in history in which a great power has, as a matter of policy, destroyed another civilization. Three of the most notorious examples in history were:

• Rome’s annihilation of Carthage.

• The Mongol devastation of the Khwarezmian Empire and Abbasid Caliphate

• Spain’s destruction of the Aztec civilization

The Roman Republic’s destruction of Carthage in 146 BC is the archetype in western historical literature. The Romans grew impatient with contending with Carthage— a commercial and naval rival in the Mediterranean. Cato the Elder repeatedly demanded“Carthago delenda est” —“Carthage must be destroyed.”

In the Third Punic War, Roman legions besieged the city for three years, then razed it block by block. Survivors were sold into slavery, the site was plowed and symbolically sown with salt, and Carthage’s libraries and temples were obliterated. The Roman goal was extinction—that is, ending Punic civilization. Rome thereby secured unchallenged control of the western Mediterranean, but at the cost of one of antiquity’s richest urban cultures.

I suspect that George Lucas was thinking about this episode when he wrote the screenplay for Star Wars and scripted the destruction of Alderaan—Princess Leia’s home planet and the home of her adoptive parents, Bail and Breha Organa. Grand Moff Tarkin—whose surname is an allusion to the Tarquin kings of Rome—ordered the destruction to demonstrate the power of the Death Star and to punish Alderaan for its ties to the Rebel Alliance. Princess Leia also seems to be an allusion to the Punic Queen Dido in Virgil’s the Aeneid.

In 1219-1221, Genghis Khan, chief of the Mongol Empire, waged a campaign against the Khwarezmian Empire in Central Asia. The Mongols attacked Samarkand, Bukhara, and Urgench, massacring the populations, destroying the irrigation systems, and wrecking farms. Later, in 1258, Hulagu Khan’s forces sacked Baghdad, killing hundreds of thousands and ending the Abbasid Caliphate—the symbolic heart of the Islamic Golden Age. Libraries were burned, canals wrecked, and scholars slaughtered. The Mongols deliberately annihilated this civilization.

Spain’s conquest of the Aztec Empire (1519–1521) involved similar cultural annihilation. Hernán Cortés, allied with indigenous rivals, besieged and leveled Tenochtitlan. The Spanish outlawed the Aztec religion, burned codices recording history and science, and wrecked their temples. Thus, the Spanish administration deliberately ensured that Aztec imperial civilization could never resurrect itself.

A notoriously treacherous and dishonorable destruction of a people and their culture was perpetrated by the US government against the Sioux Nation after the Treaty of Fort Laramie in 1868, granting them the Black Hills in what is now South Dakota and Wyoming. After the Sioux Nation was commanded to stay put on this land, the US government reneged in 1874, after the discovery of gold in the Black Hills, at which point the Sioux were told to beat it. This led to the Great Sioux War of 1876, which the Sioux ultimately lost despite defeating General Custer at the Battle of Little Bighorn.

In 1915, during World War I, the Ottoman government’s (Committee of Union and Progress - CUP) targeted Armenian populations living in the the Ottoman Empire for destruction. Beginning in 1915, Ottoman authorities organized mass deportations and killings, resulting in the deaths of over one million Armenians through forced marches, starvation, and direct execution.

During the 1920s and 30s, Lenin and Stalin set out to destroy the relatively wealthy class of landowning peasants in Russia and Ukraine called the kulaks. This campaign culminated with the Holodomor (Ukrainian “famine extermination”) in the winter of 1932-33, caused by Stalin’s forced collectivization of agriculture and confiscation of the farms of prosperous landowning peasants. To enforce the confiscation, the soldiers took all their grain, seed stocks, and even home stores of food so that the kulaks would be unable to mount any resistance. An estimated 3.5 million to 5 million died of starvation.

Between 1933-1945, the regime of Nazi Germany set out to annihilate the Jewish diaspora in Europe—a policy of systematic, industrialized murder that remains the most infamous in the history of Europe.

In 1948, during the Arab-Israeli war, Zionist paramilitary forces—including the Haganah, Irgun, and Lehi—carried out the dispossession and destruction of Palestinian Arab society, displacing approximately 750,000 people from cities such Lydda, Ramle, Haifa, Jaffa, and Tiberias.

The Palestinians call this episode the Nakba (“catastrophe”). Dr. Peter McCullough’s wife’s parents were expelled from their home in Ramle, which eventually resulted in their emigration to Canada. This unhappy occasion had the future silver lining of bringing Peter and Maha together.

If President Trump carries out his threat to kill the entire civilization of Iran, he will join the ranks of Cato the Elder, Genghis Khan, Cortez, and other villains in history who chose the policy of destroying an entire civilization.

Needless to say, this is not what Washington, Madison, Adams, Jefferson, and Franklin had in mind when they founded the US Constitutional Republic.

Members of the US government—as well as We the People—should think about the reflections of multiple Roman authors who regarded the total annihilation of Carthage as an outrage and repudiation of Rome’s republican values and virtues.

In the Aeneid, Virgil frames the Punic Wars as a fateful conflict initiated by the Punic Queen Dido's curse on Aeneas's descendants. I interpret this as Virgil’s way of condemning the “unspeakable” destruction of Carthage.

The American people should be aware of the fact that if our US government does indeed annihilate the Iranian nation forever, it will certainly have a vast array of terrible consequences for us and for all of mankind.

Among other disasters, it is likely that millions of Iranians will be forced to flee to other lands, including those of Europe. Many young men who see their mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters suffer will be animated with a burning desire for revenge. I anticipate great horrors ahead for all of us.