“I want to
give them every last chance before decapitation,” President Donald Trump said on Tuesday when asked about his floundering war with Iran. “It’s a very, very tough thing to do.”
Trump was assumedly talking about wiping out Iran’s leadership — a strategy that
failed
him earlier in the conflict. But the horror from which that shorthand derives, the literal taking of heads, has long been employed as a method of psychological warfare from
ancient times
until today. (
I’ve seen it firsthand
.) Such atrocities were, in fact, central to 19th-century colonial warfare from Africa to Asia. In the former, to take one example, a white military officer “
ornamented
his flower beds with heads of twenty-one natives killed in a punitive expedition,” a horror later retold as fiction in Joseph Conrad’s classic “Heart of Darkness.”
Trump may not advocate for such conspicuous atrocities, but his brand of warfare shares some of the key hallmarks of such unrestrained colonial extermination campaigns. To understand the magnitude of this horror which has mostly gone unacknowledged, take a trip with me into Trump’s own heart of darkness; an exploration of his world of wars that might best be described as a war of the worlds.
—
Nick Turse, editor of TomDispatch
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Channeling His Inner-Martian
As his war in Iran has imploded, his poll numbers have plummeted, the U.S. economy has cratered, and he finds himself in the
grip
of a steep
cognitive decline
, President Donald Trump has increasingly lashed out, calling for cataclysm, slaughter, and even
genocide
. As he tries desperately, if ham-handedly, to extricate himself from a losing war, the commander-in-chief of the world’s most destructive military offers up deranged rants, baying for blood and issuing orders that throw the concept of
proportionality in warfare
out the window.
Trump’s bloodthirsty rhetoric has been borne out in asymmetrical sl
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