“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” and “them” as the East and South. He argued that there was no common cause between the peoples of the West and those of the Islamic world.
As we know, the war on terror became a war of terror, in which hundreds of thousands of Afghans and Iraqis were killed, their countries blown to bits and it all helped create new terrorist groups.
Afghanistan was occupied by the US, Britain and Australia in the Coalition of the Willing’s longest-running war, so far, in the 21st century. They were only forced to leave in 2021 because Afghans put up fierce resistance. However they left the Taliban in charge — one of the terrorist groups the warmongers had supposedly gone in to eliminate.
These terrible wars tell us a lot about the West’s general imperialist approach — to recolonise countries and establish proxy dictatorships which will act in the interests of big capital and help subdue local movements for democracy.
Israel’s genocide on Gaza, which the West has provided cover for, is another form of recolonisation — only in this case which proxy is to be put in charge remains unresolved.
While Labor remains tight-lipped about Trump’s outrageous rants, the Nationals and the Liberals have been more critical in a bid to make themselves relevant in the face of the rise of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation.
National’s leader Matt Canavan and Liberal MP Andrew Hastie, both of whom are fervent supporters of AUKUS and Israel’s Gaza genocide, are now doing their best to sound like they have a genuine interest in working people’s budgets, which are being hit hard by the Strait of Hormuz oil blockade. Of course, they do not care one bit about the real interests of the Australian working class, let alone the Iranian or Lebanese working class.
The Liberals and Nationals both supported Labor’s new asylum seeker law which gives the Home Affairs minister extraordinary powers to decide who comes to this country and who doesn’t — just as John Howard said he was doing in 2001.
This new law, which can be applied to people fleeing Iran and Lebanon, essentially breaks the Refugee Convention, which Australia helped draft 75 years ago after European countries, as well as Australia, barred Jewish refugees from fleeing to safety from Nazi-controlled Germany.
Labor, One Nation, the Liberals and Nationals are all war parties, having given cover to Trump and Netanyahu. But now they need to try and run for cover as Trump’s “Emperor has no clothes” moment impacts a larger section of the ruling class.
The war parties are all on the same page when they need to deploy a racist dog whistle to shut people out, or cut immigration because “there is not enough housing”.
The Liberals and Nationals are repositioning themselves to sound a bit critical of Trump’s war on Iran because they know it is so unpopular.
But this is a worthless and hypocritical posture, and we need to call it out.
To genuinely support the people of Iran, Lebanon and Palestine, we need to cut ties with Israel and scrap AUKUS — the military alliance with the US that makes our foreign policy subservient to its’ wars of choice and the war crimes it is so brazenly perpetrating.
But the war parties fully support the military alliance with the US. They are all guilty of fostering the resurgence of racism and Islamophobia in this country, and the hate and division that comes with this.
We have more in common with Iranian, Lebanese and Palestinian workers and communities than we do with governments turning us against people who follow a different religion, have a different skin colour or speak a different language.
It means we need to push back against the parties of war and racism.
[Pip Hinman is an anti-war activist and a member of Socialist Alliance.]