The Unthinkable Has Been Thought, The Unsayable Has Been Said

A Civilizational Erasure

Image by Mehmet Deniz Aydın

It’s the day after. The day after Iranians waited for their end. The day after, the world waited to see whether we would all collectively watch the commission of crimes against humanity. It’s the day after the world was awash with cortisol.

Yesterday…is gone, and today we are assessing. The damage. The suffering. The trauma. The moral violence that was inflicted on all of us. The day after, our abuser decided to give us a reprieve.

Oh, how lucky we all are to have been granted his mercy.

This morning, when I woke, I was still exhausted from the emotional maelstrom that I endured yesterday. Frightened about where we might end up, I busied myself with self-talking, trying to soothe.

“He won’t do anything.”

“Well, you don’t know, you can’t know.”

“No, he’s just trying to get their (the Iranian regime) and all of our attention.”

“How can you say that? He is clearly buoyed up, drunken even, on the rescue of the airmen.”

“Just look at him! His body reads ‘I own this place!’”

I willed time to slow down so as not to give him his hour. I hoped for something to happen to take his attention away. A new gold something sent from a European Royal, extolling his greatness above all men. Lifting him on high. Anything to shift the man’s attention.

But my terror was not the terror of people in Iran. Theirs was different. They were the targets of his promise. They’ve been exposed, are closed off, unfree to run, have no place to hide. Their terror was material in a way that mine could not be.

I heard this morning on the UK’s LBC radio from people in our parts of the world who were able to reach family in Iran. Their loved ones were worried that they would not see them again; some were preparing for the end.

Those were expressions of a fear that my imagination could not structure. A people unfree, enduring the wrath of their internal overlords for years, who for six weeks have been bombarded from the outside by a President who promised them help. It was “on its way;” now they were making plans for their end times.

Iranians have been battered, and some have been killed. The warring and murdering leaders have given them a break. A pause, they say. More time to strategize about spoils that will remain after the battle, when they’ve had their fill of death, destruction. No compensation will be offered. No acknowledgement of the trauma they carry. There is no possibility of a trial at the Hague.

“Terrorism” became frequent in our heads and on our lips immediately post September 11^th. Pumped up on fear from real attacks and imagined ones, many of us lived cautiously. We were not victims of serial bombings; their possibility sufficed to cause us fear. Iranians know terror. Many, many of them have endured real terror. The missive sent their way yesterday was a weapon of terror. It functioned to create just the kind of state that we know well, because we endured it, but oh so briefly.

For 12 hours, hanging over their heads, Iranians worried, some planning that their lives, the lives of the people that constitute their nation, the things that they hold dear, and so their civilization may cease to be. With callous scorn, our President wrote those words. He left those words out in the open. Marinading into our minds, making us attend to him. Talk about him.

For some of us,¹ it was an exercise in reasoning through his moves. Some people were certain that he would renege. He’s “pathological, sick.” He “needs a ramp to lower himself to the ground.” Others of us, our heads on fire, were anguished by the reality of the kind of world that the President and his underlings wish us to live in.

We were on the sidelines of his excrement, but it was aimed at the Iranians. What they endured was a trauma of moral significance. It was wrong. It should be a crime.

At the end of this day, I’m still checking that I had not dreamt the events of the previous day. The day that began with the news that the President had promised the demise of the Iranian people.

A civilizational erasure. I will remember.

1. This was written on April 8th, 2026, the day after the President’s threat.