“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” United States President Donald Trump said on Truth Social on April 7, before adding that he would bomb it back to the Stone Age “where they belong”.

Trump’s expletive-laden missive came a few hours before he announced he had agreed to a “ceasefire” with Iran.

At the time of writing, Iran has declared the Pakistani-brokered two-week ceasefire, declared on April 8, null and void, because Israel is continuing to bomb Lebanon and the US has sent drones into Iran’s airspace.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is using similar “messaging” in relation to Lebanon, calling on the country’s citizens to free themselves from “terrorists”.

Trump and Netanyahu are relying heavily on racism and xenophobia to prosecute their illegal wars. It’s a time-honored imperialist script rulers have used to great effect to divide and rule.

President George W Bush deployed the reactionary Samuel Huntington’s 1993 “clash of civilizations” theory to justify his “war on terror”, which spread from Afghanistan in 2001 to Iraq in 2003.

Huntington’s racist theory centred on the idea that wars were largely defined by culture, rather than materialist reasons. His culture war defined “us” as “the West”........

© Green Left Weekly