Everyone holds Trump responsible for the killing of civilians in Iran. And rightly so. He is unquestionably a deranged, bloodthirsty, and utterly unprincipled figure, bound by no moral code, with no regard for honour or conscience; the blame for this war and its crimes lies squarely with him, with his warmongering regime, and with every nation that has deliberately turned a blind eye. Yet a historical truth must be grasped here: Trump is a symptom, not the disease. Long before the bombs fell on Iran, this pattern of American criminality had a history stretching back far beyond mere savagery, and it constitutes a deeply rooted historical continuum.

 

When the indigenous populations of what is now the United States faced genocide and the plunder of their lands – from the Pequot and Susquehannock of the east, to the Timucua of the south, to the Yuki and the Yahi of California (the latter exterminated to the very last individual) – were systematically annihilated, reduced to a vestigial remnant now confined to reservations that operate as de facto concentration camps, dispossessed and imprisoned on their own ancestral lands (Dunbar-Ortiz, 2015; Calloway, 1997; Stannard, 1993) [1]; when black Americans endured the most brutal crimes of chaining, lynching, and segregation; when the bombs fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, on Vietnam, on Korea, on Afghanistan, on Iraq, on Libya, on Syria, and on dozens of other territories whose names have either faded or been erased from global memory; when the United States perfected the machinery of inhumanity – invading sovereign nations, pillaging their wealth, assassinating political leaders, abducting civilians wholesale, subjecting detainees to industrialised torture, institutionalising rape, and enacting the sadistic debasement of Abu Ghraib; when the US overthrew the governments from Guatemala in 1954 to Chile in 1973, and today imposes hunger upon Cuba through economic siege, conducted a brutal pacification campaign in the Philippines at the turn of the century – employing concentration camps and systematic torture – and later backed genocidal massacres across Guatemala and Indonesia – in none of those catastrophes did Trump play any role. Yet those crimes happened nonetheless; all were carried out by a regime that wears the mask of civilisation, speaks the language of freedom, invokes God and democratic principles, and simultaneously commits atrocities of such magnitude that if any other state had carried out even a fraction of them, its acts would be unequivocally condemned as war crimes and crimes against humanity. Trump did not create this inhuman regime; he merely pulled off its mask. He is not the root cause; he is a marker and symptom of a cancer – a colonial inheritance now nearing collapse and disintegration, delivering its final deadly convulsions to the world.

 

As Mark Mazower correctly observed in 2009, in his major survey of Europe’s bloody legacy, Nazism was the most extreme expression of a continental imperial tradition, not a break from it (Mazower, 2009). By the same logic, the United States inherits that same tradition and that same destructive dynamic of Europe, except that this dynamic has been amplified to a degree Hitler could never have imagined. As I have argued elsewhere (Suren-Pahlav, 2026a), America is a hyperterrorist regime – a Third Reich on anabolic steroids, dressed in the deceptive guise of freedom and parading a hypocritical exceptionalism. Its technological supremacy and global reach have enabled it to enact, on a planetary scale, what the Nazis could only manage on a continental one. Consequently, America – the last remnant of the Old World’s exhausted colonialism, the final custodian of a racial hierarchy from which a vast swathe of humanity has long since moved on – represents the single greatest existential threat to human survival in all known history.

 

Thus, the killing of nearly 3,500 civilians in Iran during the recent illegal war of aggression instigated by Israelis (Suren-Pahlav, 2026b), including the murder of 168 school children in Minab and the latest attack on a wedding venue in the town of Kuhestag on 1 September 2026 (Hafezi and Erickson, 2026), which killed and injured nearly 70 people, among them children, along with the broader pattern of killing innocents, genocide, and mass murder by America, are never errors or military-political miscalculations; they are the very core of US political doctrine. To frame such atrocities as miscalculations is no more credible than claiming that the Nazis' systematic ethnic cleansing was a mere operational oversight. Therefore, savagery and violence are woven into the culture and identity of its population, where the right to bear arms, the obsession with weaponry, war, and action films are not hobbies or diversions but foundational cultural rituals of a society that venerates bloodshed, practises it daily, and calls it freedom. Yet, as noted, America is in its death agony, and with its demise the world’s peoples will bury the last legacy of antique colonialism, giving way to a new era in which the first stones of global peace may be laid upon America’s grave and corpse.

 

Until that time – and finally, to those ignorant Iranian pretenders abroad, particularly those living in the United States, who continue to peddle the myth and lie that America’s war of aggression against Iran is a war against the Islamic regime (Suren-Pahlav, 2026c): either you are complicit in this crime, or you are clinically afflicted with stupidity. Indeed, the stupidity and lack of honour of this lot are so glaring that even Trump, one of the most stupid and dishonourable presidents in American history, humiliated and mocked them in front of the leaders of the G7 countries during their summit in France, declaring: ‘Not a single country has come to us and said: “Please, sir, keep dropping bombs on them. Please, continue the bombing.” That is the sort of thing stupid people say…’ (The White House, 2026; United States Government Publishing Office, 2026) The killing of civilians, the destruction of infrastructure, and the threat of nuclear obliteration of Iran are not tools of liberation; they are weapons of annihilation. This war is not against the Islamic regime and its tyrannical, sanctimonious rulers; this war is against Iran and against every Iranian who draws breath on this ancient soil. You are therefore not fighting the regime; you are fighting your own nation. You are betraying your country and your fellow citizens, and your names will forever be recorded in history as collaborators with foreign powers and traitors.

 

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Footnote:

1 – The main reason why the United States cannot condemn Israel's illegal occupation of Palestine and its atrocities against the Palestinians is that to do so would be to condemn its own founding. The Palestinians – who, before the Arab conquest of the Levant, were the indigenous Hebrew inhabitants of that land – occupy the same structural position as America's own indigenous peoples: they are the rightful owners displaced and exterminated by a foreign, European-derived settler population. The US's silence and complicity regarding the genocide in Gaza and the ongoing occupation of the West Bank are not diplomatic calculation; they are existential necessity – a settler-colonial state cannot oppose another settler-colonial state without calling its own ideological foundations into question and thereby unravelling them.

 

 

References:

• Calloway, C.G. (1997) New Worlds for All: Indians, Europeans, and the Remaking of Early America. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

• Dunbar-Ortiz, R. (2015) An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.

• Hafezi, P. and Erickson, B. (2026) ‘US-Iran strikes raise fears of renewed war across the Middle East’, Reuters, 2 September. Available at: https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/us-iran-exchange-attacks-lull-war-appears-over-2026-09-02/ [Accessed: 02 September 2026].

• Mazower, M. (2009) Hitler’s empire: how the Nazis ruled Europe, New York: Penguin Press.

• Stannard, D.E. (1993) American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World. New York: Oxford University Press.

• Suren-Pahlav, S. (2010) ‘A Historical Fabrication at Its Best: Esther and Purim, From Babylonian Children's Story to Jewish Historical Identity’, suren-pahlav.com (27 February). Available at: https://www.suren-pahlav.com/en/historical-fabrication-esther-and-purim-from-babylonian-children-story-to-jewish-historical-dentity.html [Accessed: 02 September 2026].

• Suren-Pahlav, S. (2026a) ‘When the Mask is Off: The United States, War, Terrorism and Genocide Without Its Alibi’, suren-pahlav.com (19 March). Available at: https://www.suren-pahlav.com/en/when-the-mask-is-off-the-united-states-war-terrorism-and-genocide-without-its-alibi.html [Accessed: 02 September 2026].

• Suren-Pahlav, S. (2026b) ‘The ‘Beautiful Armada’: Perso-Sino Trap and the End of U.S. Hegemony, or the Somalisation of Iran’, suren-pahlav.com (28 January). Available at: https://www.suren-pahlav.com/en/beautiful-armada-and-the-perso-sino-trap-the-strategic-unravelling-of-american-hegemony.html [Accessed: 02 September 2026].

• Suren-Pahlav, S. (2026c) ‘Annihilation at Iran’s Doorstep: Greed, Delusion, a Cult of Xenophilic Iranian Diaspora, and Treason’, suren-pahlav.com (29 March). Available at: https://www.suren-pahlav.com/en/annihilation-irans-doorstep-greed-delusion-xenophilic-diaspora-cult-treason.html [Accessed: 02 September 2026].

• The White House (2026) ‘President Trump breaks down the Iran deal to close out the G7 Summit in Évian, France’, The White House, 17 June. Available at: https://www.whitehouse.gov/videos/president-trump-breaks-down-the-iran-deal-to-close-out-the-g7-summit-in-evian-france/ [Accessed: 02 September 2026].

• United States Government Publishing Office (2026) The President’s News Conference in Évian-les-Bains, France, 17 June. Daily Compilation of Presidential Documents, DCPD-202600410. Available at: https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/DCPD-202600410/pdf/DCPD-202600410.pdf, p.1 [Accessed: 02 September 2026].