His chilling declaration that “a whole civilisation will die tonight”, in reference to Iran’s ancient heartlands, lays bare his unambiguous genocidal intent, shredding millennia of heritage to embers under the Star-Spangled Banner. America’s continental hegemony demanded precisely this Indigenous genocide, its Manifest Destiny doctrine providing a pious fig leaf, draping Christian supremacy and racial entitlement over the deliberate destruction, bodily and spiritual, of those who rightfully held the soil. The same grim architectural logic defines Israel, where the establishment of a sovereign ethno-state required the genocidal efficiency of the Nakba to “disappear” the Palestinian population.

In both instances, the birth of the nation-state remains inseparable from the death of the Indigenous Other, revealing a shared imperial DNA where the “civilising mission” serves as a thin veneer for the calculated mechanics of extermination. In Neither Settler nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities, Prof Mahmood Mamdani identifies the US as creating the violent template for modern settler colonialism, a framework later mirrored by regimes in apartheid South Africa and Israel. He argues that through the 19th century the model emerged in North America, where genocide and internment on reservations created a native underclass and the physical and ideological spaces in which new immigrant identities crystallised as a settler nation.

Cormac McCarthy’s novel Blood Meridian sees the sadistic protagonist Judge Holden intone that “Men of God and men of war have strange affinities”. The observation fuses religious zeal with the violent Westward Expansion, indicting a nation built on conquest, where violence obliterates distinctions between civilisation and savagery, with Holden incarnating war as the ultimate validation of existence. Across West Asia, Israel and America’s religiously sanctioned military campaigns against Palestinians, Lebanese and Iranians mirror the supremacist pattern, infusing ethnocide and genocide with an ideology that dehumanises the “Other” as an existential threat, unleashing Armageddon on Iran and Palestine.

To understand the shared trajectory, one must look to the legal architecture established by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish-Jewish lawyer who lost 49 relatives in the Holocaust. Lemkin’s 1944 definition of genocide — “the destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group” — transcends mere physical slaughter, identifying it as a “coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups”. The mission finds its insidious twin in ethnocide, which destroys the cultural spirit by erasing language and memory.

Together, they function as a war against the soul, targeting political institutions, religious identity, memory and dignity to render a people spiritually extinct. By demolishing the historical essence of a nation, survivors are converted into hollowed shells, ensuring that annihilation is as absolute as it is eternal. From its blood-soaked founding to its current stature, America embodies an arrogance laced with what Said termed “Orientalist contempt”.

Said identifies the pathology: “Part of the main plan of imperialism … is that we will give you your history, we will write it for you, we will re-order the past.” This erases Indigenous memory in favour of empire. Anxiety: In the TV series American Primeval, fear is cited as what fuelled the systematic elimination of everything the settler could not master. In the TV series American Primeval, an Indigenous woman asks a white settler: “Why do your people have so much hunger to kill?” She answers: “Fear.” The primal anxiety fuelled the systematic elimination of everything the settler could not master.

The Westward Expansion was a crusade of paranoia, where religious zeal and the hunger for land justified exterminatory raids on Indigenous men, women and children. The conquest of the Indigenous Indians was a blueprint for erasure, as populations plummeted from 15 million to a mere quarter-million by 1900. Manifest Destiny cloaked the purge, sanctifying bloodbaths from Sand Creek to Wounded Knee. In California, the state industrialised killings through scalp bounties, while the boarding school system perfected ethnocide by stealing 100 000 children in what Captain Richard Henry Pratt described as his philosophy of assi