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The foundational myths of the modern West are inscribed in the chronicles of inexorable progress. Yet in truth, for any colonial entity to root itself on Indigenous soil and thrive, the natives must be exterminated, physically liquidated and culturally pulverised, their very breath an existential affront to the invader’s dominion.
By FAIZAL DAWJEE
President Donald Trump’s latest snarling dehumanisation of Iranians as “animals” exposes the supremacist rhetoric, where the racial Other is reduced to vermin fit for slaughter, thereby licensing the eternal erasure of the “lesser” world.
His chilling declaration that “a whole civilisation will die tonight”, in reference to Iran’s ancient heartlands, lays bare his unambiguous genocidal intent, shredding millennia of heritage to embers under the Star-Spangled Banner.
America’s continental hegemony demanded precisely this Indigenous genocide, its Manifest Destiny doctrine providing a pious fig leaf, draping Christian supremacy and racial entitlement over the deliberate destruction, bodily and spiritual, of those who rightfully held the soil.
The same grim architectural logic defines Israel, where the establishment of a sovereign ethno-state required the genocidal efficiency of the Nakba to “disappear” the Palestinian population.
In both instances, the birth of the nation-state remains inseparable from the death of the Indigenous Other, revealing a shared imperial DNA where the “civilising mission” serves as a thin veneer for the calculated mechanics of extermination.
In Neither Settler nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities, Prof Mahmood Mamdani identifies the US as creating the violent template for modern settler colonialism, a framework later mirrored by regimes in apartheid South Africa and Israel.
He argues that through the 19th century the model emerged in North America, where genocide and internment on reservations created a native underclass and the physical and ideological spaces in which new immigrant identities crystallised as a settler nation.
Cormac McCarthy’s novel Blood Meridian sees the sadistic protagonist Judge Holden intone that “Men of God and men of war have strange affinities”. The observation fuses religious zeal with the violent Westward Expansion, indicting a nation built on conquest, where violence obliterates distinctions between civilisation and savagery, with Holden incarnating war as the ultimate validation of existence.
Across West Asia, Israel and America’s religiously sanctioned military campaigns against Palestinians, Lebanese and Iranians mirror the supremacist pattern, infusing ethnocide and genocide with an ideology that dehumanises the “Other” as an existential threat, unleashing Armageddon on Iran and Palestine.
To understand the shared trajectory, one must look to the legal architecture established by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish-Jewish lawyer who lost 49 relatives in the Holocaust.
Lemkin’s 1944 definition of genocide — “the destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group” — transcends mere physical slaughter, identifying it as a “coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups”. The mission finds its insidious twin in ethnocide, which destroys the cultural spirit by erasing language and memory.
Together, they function as a war against the soul, targeting political institutions, religious identity, memory and dignity to render a people spiritually extinct. By demolishing the historical essence of a nation, survivors are converted into hollowed shells, ensuring that annihilation is as absolute as it is eternal.
From its blood-soaked founding to its current stature, America embodies an arrogance laced with what Said termed “Orientalist contempt”. Said identifies the pathology: “Part of the main plan of imperialism … is that we will give you your history, we will write it for you, we will re-order the past.” This erases Indigenous memory in favour of empire.
In the TV series American Primeval, an Indigenous woman asks a white settler: “Why do your people have so much hunger to kill?” She answers: “Fear.”
The primal anxiety fuelled the systematic elimination of everything the settler could not master. The Westward Expansion was a crusade of paranoia, where religious zeal and the hunger for land justified exterminatory raids on Indigenous men, women and children.
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The conquest of the Indigenous Indians was a blueprint for erasure, as populations plummeted from 15 million to a mere quarter-million by 1900. Manifest Destiny cloaked the purge, sanctifying bloodbaths from Sand Creek to Wounded Knee. In California, the state industrialised killings through scalp bounties, while the boarding school system perfected ethnocide by stealing 100 000 children in what Captain Richard Henry Pratt described as his philosophy of assimilation: “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.”
In perhaps the greatest single act of ecological warfare, a frenzied US army systematically slaughtered 40 million buffalo, a scorched-earth strike designed to starve Indigenous peoples. By turning the Great Plains into a charnel house and proving that species extinction is the prerequisite for human erasure, the American nation was born from deliberate genocide.
In the 21st century, the playbook has been adopted and adapted by Israel. Said’s Orientalist lens extends seamlessly here, as Palestinians and Iranians are cast as the “reviled Other”, primitive, fanatical Semites whose erasure affirms a self-constructed supremacy.
Sven Lindqvist’s A History of Bombing finds its modern parallel in Israel’s aerial doctrine, where “precision strikes” rationalise mass civilian death as “mowing the lawn”.
The 1948 Plan Dalet provided the strategic template for the Nakba, authorising the torching of 400 villages and the massacre of thousands of Palestinians.
Even right-wing historian Benny Morris identifies the mandate as the ideological anchor for the Nakba, which culminates today in Gaza, where 70 000 tons of explosives — triple the tonnage dropped on Dresden — have extinguished at least 75 000 Palestinian lives.
By invoking “Amalek”, Netanyahu mirrors the theological bloodlust of American frontiersmen, providing divine cover for war. This is a systematic erasure of the Palestinian soul, where the destruction of 80% of cultural landmarks and every centre of learning obliterates memory and future alike. From the ruins of Al-Shifa to settler-led pogroms in the West Bank, the “Other” is hunted as a demographic threat.
In Vietnam, imperial racism rebranded peasants as “gooks” to justify butchery. From Agent Orange to My Lai, the US executed a “kill anything that moves” doctrine.
The inherited path of expansionism has led to escalation against Iran, where American troops are being rallied with apocalyptic fervour that reconstructs modern warfare into a divinely sanctioned crusade. Commanders have framed the conflict as “God’s divine plan”, in which Donald Trump is “anointed” to ignite the “signal fire” in Iran.
The American and Israeli jets hammering Iran’s cities of poets and philosophers signals a staggering ethnocide. By cratering cities that have stood for seven millennia, they are attempting to fracture an ethnic mosaic and obliterate heritage that predates the West. The bombing of more than 120 museums and cultural sites in Iran serves no strategic value except cultural vandalism.
From its inception to the present day, the US has functioned as a relentless engine of global intervention. The addiction to kinetic force reveals a state that views the world as a theatre for violent assertion of primacy. Each military deployment constitutes a repudiation of diplomacy.
The “scarlet thread” binding the horrors is impunity. From medals for Indigenous mass murderers to US vetoes shielding Israel, to International Criminal Court warrants treated as suggestions, accountability is absent. Both powers weaponise Orientalism, framing destruction as self-defence.
The genocidal mentality of the US and Israel is a supremacist nexus of settler colonialism and endless wars. With Trump and Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu presiding, the logic replicates with renewed force.
From the 15 000 Indigenous souls who perished on the Trail of Tears to the 10 000 Gaza children starved into oblivion, the patterns signify an unbroken continuum of extermination proclaimed as destiny. Lindqvist’s verdict endures: “Exterminate all the Brutes” remains the civilising mission’s core logic.
Faizal Dawjee is a former director of media services at GCIS and a former journalist
