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\u2019s own heart of darkness; an exploration of his world of wars that might best be described as a war of the worlds. <\/p>\n
\u2014 Nick Turse, editor of TomDispatch<\/p>\n
If you haven\u2019t yet, sign up to receive TomDispatch in your inbox here.<\/a><\/p>\n Channeling His Inner-Martian<\/p>\n 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<\/a> of a steep cognitive decline<\/a>, President Donald Trump has increasingly lashed out, calling for cataclysm, slaughter, and even genocide<\/a>. As he tries desperately, if ham-handedly, to extricate himself from a losing war, the commander-in-chief of the world\u2019s most destructive military offers up deranged rants, baying for blood and issuing orders that throw the concept of proportionality in warfare<\/a> out the window.<\/p>\n Trump\u2019s bloodthirsty rhetoric has been borne out in asymmetrical slaughter, with Iranian fatalities exceeding American deaths by multiple orders of magnitude. And this follows similarly lopsided casualty tolls in Trump\u2019s conflicts in Somalia, Venezuela, Yemen, and on the high seas. This low-risk butchery masquerading as warfare harkens back to 19th-century extermination campaigns in which so-called inferior races were massacred in spectacles of slaughter \u2014 colonial violence that wiped out ethnic groups<\/a> and set the stage for 20th-century genocide.<\/p>\n \u201cEvery time Iran kills an American Soldier, they will pay for that killing many times over!\u201d Trump recently announced<\/a> on Truth Social. \u201cThis directive has been passed on to Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Daniel Caine, and every Leader in the Military.\u201d<\/p>\n This unhinged command for disproportionate retaliation \u2014 which may amount to a violation<\/a> of international humanitarian law \u2014 was featured, mostly without further remark, in news reports with bland headlines<\/a>, like \u201cTrump pays respects to 4 US service members killed in the Middle East.\u201d It was also, for example, tucked deep inside and presented without further comment in a New York Times article<\/a> about impending testimony before the Senate Appropriations Committee\u00a0by Hegseth and Caine.<\/p>\n Trump\u2019s order, and the matter-of-fact coverage from the Times, reminded me of a report by a different Times, almost exactly 199 years earlier: an article from Van Diemen\u2019s Land, the Ireland-sized island to the southeast of Australia that we now know as Tasmania. <\/p>\n White settlers poured onto the island in the early 1800s, wiping out the kangaroos and replacing them with sheep. They treated the Indigenous people no differently. \u201cThousands were hunted down like wild beasts,\u201d according to the local press<\/a>. When one of the white people were killed by locals, the Colonial Times reported that other settlers exacted revenge on the Indigenous people that left \u201csixty of them killed and wounded.\u201d\u00a0The next year, when members of settler police and military forces were pelted with stones<\/a>, they responded with gunfire and a bayonet charge that \u201ckilled seventy of them, dragging the women and children from the crevices of the rocks, and dashing out their brains.\u201d<\/p>\n The slaughter in Tasmania was the inspiration for author H.G. Wells\u2019s late 19th-century sci-fi classic \u201cWar of the Worlds,\u201d in which Martians with superior technology, advanced firepower, and no compunction about annihilating humanity invade England, laying waste to London and driving out its population. \u201cAnd before we judge of them too harshly we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought,\u201d the narrator says<\/a> in the book\u2019s open. \u201cThe Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years. Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cAre we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit?\u201d<\/p>\n When lawyer Raphael Lemkin formulated the idea of \u201cgenocide\u201d after World War II, almost 50 years after Wells wrote \u201cWar of the Worlds,\u201d he considered Tasmania a historical case study<\/a> of his concept. It\u2019s unclear if Trump ever read \u201cWar of the Worlds,\u201d though he attended<\/a> the New York City premiere of the 2005 Steven Spielberg film adaptation; I doubt he understood Wells\u2019s allegory, presuming he knows what an allegory is.<\/p>\n The Tasmanian carnage was part of an age of slaughter and genocide carried out across the globe by European powers and the United States<\/a>. Trump has long been in the thrall<\/a> of the precepts of this era of colonial conquest: Might makes right; territorial acquisition through armed intervention; and colonial relationships with, and resource extraction from, conquered foes and weaker nations.<\/p>\n Trump<\/a> often invokes<\/a> and praises<\/a> Andrew Jackson, his 19th-century predecessor in the White House, who owned slaves and implemented a policy of \u201cIndian removal\u201d that culminated in the Trail of Tears, the military\u2019s forced displacement of Native Americans, during which thousands died. Trump advocated \u201cfurthering President Jackson\u2019s legacy, expanding his vision, [and] honoring his memory\u201d earlier this year<\/a>, pronouncing that Old Hickory embodied the \u201cbest of the American Spirit.\u201d\u00a0Trump has even employed America\u2019s contribution to the eradication of indigenous peoples as a punch line. He has made light, on social media, not only of the\u00a0Trail of Tears<\/a> but also the Army\u2019s massacre of hundreds of Native Americans at Wounded Knee<\/a> in South Dakota.<\/p>\n Even the Army\u2019s official history portrays Wounded Knee as a Tasmanian-scale slaughter in which an effort to disarm a group of Lakota religious revivalists resulted in an errant shot, possibly an accidental discharge, that \u201cled immediately to heavy and indiscriminate firing from soldiers,\u201d including the use of artillery, \u201cdespite the presence of numerous noncombatants.\u201d In the end, up to 300 Lakota, including women and children, lay dead while \u201cArmy casualties totaled 25 killed and 39 wounded, some of whom likely were hit by friendly fire.\u201d<\/p>\n Such disproportionate mass killings and exterminations were a hallmark of the 19th century. This \u201cdestruction of the \u2018inferior races\u2019 of four continents prepared the ground for the destruction of six million Jews in Europe,\u201d as the author Sven Lindqvist observed<\/a>, in his classic text \u201cExterminate All the Brutes.\u201d We look back on these Holocaust-precipitating slaughters as beyond abhorrent. Or at least we did.<\/p>\n The death toll disparity at Wounded Knee doesn\u2019t compare to the carnage of Trump\u2019s war on Iran. The estimated 3,375<\/a> to 6,000<\/a> Iranian deaths dwarf the 19 U.S. deaths by 180 to 320 times, or more than two orders of magnitude. (The official U.S. Iran war death toll stands at 18, with the Pentagon omitting<\/a> one widely reported loss.)\u00a0The 60-to-1 Tasmanian toll of dead and wounded is a similar ratio as the estimated 39,806 total Iranian casualties compared to the official U.S. count of more than 700 troops who have been killed or wounded.<\/p>\n We\u2019re independent of corporate interests \u2014 and powered by members. Join us. <\/p>\n Join Our Newsletter <\/p>\n Thank You For Joining! <\/p>\n \n Original reporting. Fearless journalism. Delivered to you. <\/p>\n Will you take the next step to support our independent journalism by becoming a member of The Intercept?\n <\/p>\n By signing up, I agree to receive emails from The Intercept and to the Privacy Policy<\/a> and Terms of Use<\/a>.<\/p>\n Trump has also repeatedly touted<\/a> the lopsided nature of his punitive expedition in Venezuela, a short war in which the U.S. deposed and kidnapped<\/a> President Nicol\u00e1s Maduro, creating a de facto U.S. colony run by a quisling<\/a>. \u201cTo have a few injuries, but no death on our side, is really amazing,\u201d Trump bragged after the invasion, later comparing the lack of U.S. fatalities<\/a> to the substantial death tolls of the (much longer) Korean and Vietnam wars. The 100 or more Venezuelan and Cuban military personnel and civilians killed compared with a handful of U.S. injuries shares a lineage of battlefield massacres like the 1863 U.S. slaughter of 250 to 500 Shoshone \u2014 including at least 90 women, children and infants \u2014\u00a0at Bear River<\/a> at a cost of 24 U.S. troops<\/a>, and the up to 6,000 Zulus<\/a> armed with shields and spears cut down by Gatling guns and artillery compared with 10 British troops killed at Ulundi in southern Africa in 1879.<\/p>\n Trump\u2019s 2025 war against the Houthi government in Yemen \u2014 Operation Rough Rider \u2014 was similarly lopsided. The airstrike monitoring group Airwars tracked reports of at least\u00a0224 civilians in Yemen killed<\/a>\u00a0by U.S. airstrikes. This nearly doubled the civilian casualty toll in Yemen from U.S. attacks since 2002, meaning that almost as many civilians were reportedly killed in\u00a052 days\u00a0as the previous\u00a023 years\u00a0of airstrikes and commando raids combined. The\u00a0Yemen Data Project<\/a>\u00a0put the death toll at 238 civilians, at a minimum, and another 467 civilians injured. The U.S. also\u00a0killed hundreds of Houthi fighters and numerous Houthi leaders, according to CENTCOM spokesperson Dave Eastburn, who referred to \u201ccredible open sources<\/a>\u201d citing 650 Houthi casualties. The U.S. did not suffer a single reported fatality during the campaign. And Trump\u2019s relentless strikes in nearby Somalia<\/a> have amounted to up to 420 deaths<\/a> at a cost of zero American lives.<\/p>\n The Trump administration\u2019s boat strike campaign<\/a> in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean, which has killed at least 221 people without the loss of even one U.S. life, is a still more egregious slaughter. In this case, only unarmed civilians<\/a> are targeted, victims akin to the fleeing Tasmanian women and children who had their skulls bashed in.<\/p>\n There are, of course, myriad differences between Trump\u2019s ongoing war on the world and 19th-century colonial extermination campaigns in Africa, America, Australia, and elsewhere. Trump doesn\u2019t, for example, explicitly assert racial superiority as a reason for his military interventions even if he often lapses into racist rants<\/a> and is making war in Somalia while deriding Somalis as \u201cgarbage<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n But Trump\u2019s more than 20 military interventions<\/a>, armed conflicts, and outright wars have heightened the increasing trend toward \u201criskless warfare,\u201d a term coined more than a quarter century ago by Paul Kahn, the director of Yale Law School\u2019s Schell Center for International Human Rights. \u201cIt is an image of warfare without the possibility of chivalry,\u201d the prescient Kahn later observed<\/a>. \u201cAt the heart is a violation of the fundamental principle that establishes the internal morality of warfare: self-defense within conditions of reciprocal imposition of risk. Without the imposition of mutual risk, warfare is not war at all.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Earlier this decade, in a study of drone warfare<\/a>, Neil Renic, a scholar of military ethics, refined the concept as \u201cradical asymmetry,\u201d in which \u201cone side has, in a practical sense, overcome the type and degree of physical vulnerability that has long been regarded as an expected and unavoidable feature of war.\u201d Renic sees the drift toward unilateral violence leading to the increasing \u201cperception of the weaker party \u2026 from an opponent to be fought and overcome, to one that must be hunted and\u00a0done away with,\u201d contributing to \u201cdehumanization\u201d of the enemy which, \u201cin some cases \u2026 has led to a more severe decline in the targeting practices of the United States, from the morally questionable to the morally indefensible.\u201d This feature of modern warfare harkens back to the age of extermination, when Tasmanians and others were also hunted and done away with.<\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n As Trump has reveled in asymmetrical body counts and called for more disproportionate deaths, he has increasingly fancied himself an alien destroyer like Wells\u2019s Martians; even if he himself doesn\u2019t quite realize it. In one bizarre AI-slop image<\/a> he posted on Truth Social as the Iran war went south, Trump appears to be striding from a spaceship \u2014 on some platform high above Earth \u2014 as legions of weapons-toting alien warriors flank him. In another, a gigantic Trump is seated at a command console in a space station floating high above the world. On screens above him, we see huge explosions apparently going off simultaneously back on Earth. On still another, an indistinct country is seemingly being ravaged by lasers.<\/p>\n \u201cThen in a moment the\u00a0Heat Ray\u00a0was brought to bear, and the town became a heap of fiery ruins,\u201d wrote Wells in \u201cWar of the Worlds,\u201d describing the Martians\u2019 weapon of mass destruction. \u201cThe houses caved in as they dissolved at its touch and darted out flames; the trees changed to fire with a roar.\u201d Wells referenced the \u201cmassacre of mankind\u201d and \u201cthe rout of civilization.\u201d As Trump has made disproportionate slaughter his signature accomplishment from Latin America to the Middle East to Africa, he has channeled his inner Martian. \u201cA whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,\u201d he\u00a0wrote<\/a>\u00a0of Iran on Truth Social, promising<\/a> the \u201centire country could be taken out\u201d and warning he might bomb Iran\u00a0\u201cback to the Stone Ages<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n
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