What actually is ‘civilisation’? The dark and loaded history behind Trump’s threat against Iran

By Bruce Buchan, Professor of History, School of Humanities, Languages and Social Science, Griffith University

In the midst of a war of his own choosing, the president of the United States, Donald Trump, recently tried to threaten his way out of it. On April 7, he posted on Truth Social that unless Iran buckled to his will, “a whole civilization will die tonight”.

He presumably meant to amplify his earlier claim that he intended to bomb Iran back to “the stone age”.

Trump’s words are rarely to be taken at face value. Yet his recent…

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