Back to the Stone Age: The Iran War Is On Civilization Itself
Civilization is not a given, nor is its dominance uncontested.
Civilization
“Civilization and violence are antithetical concepts.” —Martin Luther King, Jr.
It should go without saying that most people see civilization as a good thing. While we’ve had endless conflicts about how civilization should be organized and managed, there are very few who would openly argue against civilization itself.
Nevertheless, civilization is not a given, nor is its dominance uncontested.
The history of civilization can be seen as a repeating battle for control over powerful new technologies which are neutral about whether they serve civilization or its destruction. These technologies—Bronze Age weapons, chariots, writing, money, radio and television, the atomic bomb, AI—share a common feature: they give a small group of people leverage over many. Wars are fought, empires rise and fall, and humanity finds a way forward only to the extent it can contain these technologies—and their abuse by elite, extractive, anti-civilizational forces.
Back to the Stone Age
When Donald Trump said on Wednesday he would bomb Iran “back to the Stone Age”—a threat mirrored by his “War Secretary”—he was openly vowing to use his technological capacity to erase civilization from a country of ninety million. The Stone Age, defined loosely as the era humans needed to use stone tools, may sound primitive and alien to civilized people, but it accounts for 99% of homo sapiens’ 300,000 year existence.
Historically, civilization is the aberration, not the other way around.
The threat was not idle. Trump and Hegseth followed through by destroying the tallest bridge in Iran—not a military target—in a double-tap strike that killed rescuers.
Trump’s glorification of the destruction of civilian infrastructure—in Iran and Washington DC—is emblematic of those who seek to sabotage civilization because it threatens their unfair advantage over the population.
What do we mean by civilization? And why would it be challenged in this way by, of all entities, the U.S. government?
Civis
The English words civil, civilian, and civilization derive from the Latin civis. The etymology is roughly:
civis = citizen
civilis = relating to a citizen, public life, or the polity
civitas = the civic body, state, commonwealth
civilitas = courtesy, civic order, refinement proper to citizens
From its origin, the concept of civilization has meant preserving the power of the citizen in the face of technologies which could be used to dominate them, especially military force. That’s why the word “civilian” has come to be defined as someone who isn’t in the military.
But Donald Trump wants to reverse the polarity of civilization. In a civilized country, the military exists to protect civilians. But in Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth’s America, civilians only exist to provide resources—and bodies—to the military.
The Morals of a Government Are Found in Its Budget
This inversion of American morality was made clear by Trump’s proposed 2027 budget: $1.5 trillion in military spending, a 40% increase over this year, paired with sweeping cuts to services and entitlements.
On Good Friday, thinking he was off-camera, Trump explained his budget to a room of evangelical Christians in the White House:
“I said to Russell [Vought], the United States can’t take care of daycare… We’re fighting wars. It’s not possible for us to take care of daycare, Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things… We have to take care of one thing, military protection.”
This is as clear an abdication of the civilized world as you can find in the 21st century: the “one thing… we have to take care of” is our ability to kill other people—not “all these individual things” like healthcare and children.
“Even if they’re bad people”
But Trump’s malignant narcissism and increasing disinhibition did not allow him to stop his confessional there. He went on to deliver one of the most telling and honest things he’s ever said.
“You know, we’re not supposed to be seduced that way, right? But I am. When someone’s nice to me, I love that person. Even if they’re bad people. I couldn’t care less. I’ll fight to the end for them.”
This is not the logic of the civilized world; it is the dead-end logic of clans, mafias, and cults—authoritarian groups that use coercion, lies, and violence instead of law, and elevate personalist loyalty over everything else. It also explains why he started the war in the first place: Trump internally justifies his un-American actions as “loyalty” to his allies like Netanyahu, MBS, Putin, and the billionaires who helped him attain power—even though “they’re bad people.”
Theft Is Bad, Right?
One thing most people would agree is uncivilized is theft. You don’t walk into another person’s home and take their stuff. There is even a Commandment about it. Nevertheless, the president thinks it would be fine to steal Iran’s oil, just as he did in Venezuela.
Since his plans for a Venezuela-like quick strike on Iran to coerce the regime into cooperation failed, Trump is now threatening Iran again—with another deadline. As I wrote early in the war, Trump has plans to take Kharg Island in the Persian Gulf because he believes that, if he controls Iran’s oil infrastructure—which he has called “the pipes” for decades—he can monetize the oil himself.
This is an absurd, dangerous fantasy that he nevertheless appears to be determined to pursue.
Subhanallah
Trump’s latest threat Saturday morning includes the English translation of Subhanallah—“Glory be to Allah”—reframed through a Christianized lens. This is a deliberate effort to transform a military fiasco into an existential holy war—and mirrors Pete Hegseth’s racist Arabic “infidel” tattoo, which also inverts the meaning of an Islamic phrase.
Hegseth is increasingly paranoid about his position and about the willingness of the military to go along with illegal actions. On Friday, in the middle of a war, Hegseth fired more than a dozen generals and admirals.
The most prominent of these was the Army Chief of Staff, a 36-year veteran 4-star general, who Hegseth replaced with his own assistant, Christopher LaNeve—who was on the call that delayed the National Guard on January 6th, along with Charles Flynn, Kash Patel, and others. According to former DC National Guard Chief Earl Matthews, LaNeve was a big part of a cover-up inside the Pentagon.
Another of the generals fired was William Green, Chief of Chaplains, who apparently was unwilling to conform to Hegseth’s Christian Nationalist requirements. Hegseth also lifted the ban on troops carrying personal firearms on military bases arguing that carrying firearms is a “God-given right.”
Hegseth’s “faith” comes from Doug Wilson, a revanchist extremist who preaches that women shouldn’t vote or choose whether to have sex with their husbands, that slavery had its upsides, and that America should not just be a theocracy; it should be a theonomy—government by Christian divine law.
Document of Barbarism
Since the Stone Age, and at an accelerating pace, humans have invented technologies that give them an advantage over others. And each time, with varying degrees of success, civilization integrates these and marches forward.
To be able to read and write was once a privilege only extended to elites. The farther you go back in time, the more the written word could protect the powerful because it was reserved for a few who could wield it against the many—through decrees, taxes, and laws imposed by fiat. Education, one of the crown jewels of civilization, absorbed that technology and distributed it as a tool to the population, never perfectly but more widely over centuries.
The technology that created Egypt’s pyramids is a marvel of human innovation—and a monument to the messianic narcissism of the pharaohs who created them.
The latest invention to present a true challenge to the civilizational paradigm is the computer and the world of technology it spawned: the internet, personal devices, and artificial intelligence. As with many other times in history, the land grab to take advantage of this technology was led by elites, who have sought not just to develop and monetize it, but to control and weaponize it.
Civilization is not the accumulation of power, or the building of grand monuments to a leader or a nation. It is not creating the greatest capacity for violence, posting the highest number in a stock market’s history, or adding chatbots to the kill chain. To the contrary, it is the ability of a population to constrain those very powers that defines whether it is truly civilized, or merely a sacrificial battleground.
“There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” —Walter Benjamin
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They're bombing themselves back to the Stone Age, thinking they're reaching the pinnacle. No more self awareness than a dog licking its own a**hole in public, as Stonekettle says.
When is the rest of the Western and civilized world going to snap out of their slumber and wishful thinking and confront this barbarism? At least Iran appears to understand what they are dealing with, and I have to give them full credit for that. American democracy is DOA as soon as Trump replaces what's left of the military command structure with a collection of obedient sycophants, something he has been working at breakneck speed to accomplish. That's the last straw, authoritarian takeover complete.