Genocidal Intent, and the Quiet Deaths of Millions

Donald Trump’s early April statements of genocidal intent in the war he has waged against Iran have rightly received a great deal of attention—though no major news outlets I’m aware of have dared to describe them as “genocidal.” On April 1 Trump made the following statement: “We are going to hit them extremely hard over the next two to three weeks. We are going to bring them back to the stone ages where they belong.” That was not an offhand remark made in haste through a tweet on Truth Social; the words were part of a prime time address to the nation, and are recorded in the official White House transcript. A few days later (on April 7) he threatened similar action: unless Iran reopened the Strait of Hormuz by midnight that night, he declared, “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”

Is it going too far to describe such words as statements of genocidal intent? A good many respected authorities have judged that it is not—among them Mathias Risse of Harvard University’s Center for Human Rights: “Trump’s statement,” Risse has written, “is the clearest case of declared genocidal intent in modern international criminal law.”

It’s worth comparing Trump’s words with the words that have been used by others inciting genocide. “If international finance Jewry inside and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, the result will be not the Bolshevization of the earth and thereby the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe,” Hitler declared on 30 January 1939.” All Tutsis should be "erased from human memory" and "wiped from the surface of the earth," blared radio broadcasts in Rwanda in 1993. The similarities are all too clear.

No one suggests that Trump and Hegseth will kill as many in Iran as the 800,000 who were killed in the Rwanda genocide or the 6,000,000 who were killed in Europe in the Holocaust.

Trump’s other actions, though, may result in the quiet deaths of many more. The most heinous action of the Trump administration—among seemingly endless heinous actions—may may be the decision early on to quickly and brutally shut down America’s foreign aid programs. One report—from the Harvard School of Public Health—estimates that the USAID shutdown has already led to hundreds of thousands of deaths (https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/usaid-shutdown-has-led-to-hundreds-of-thousands-of-deaths/); another—from an equally reputable source, the Lancet—estimates that the shutdown may well result in 14,000,000 deaths by 2030. (https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2jjpm7zv8o ).

Quiet deaths from starvation or from lack of essential medicines may not have the worldwide emotional impact that deaths associated with the word “genocide” always seem to carry. But the millions of people dying probably won’t care what words are used to describe the horror.

These, of course, are not deaths in places that the likes of Trump have been in the habit of recognizing as “civilizations.” The great civilizations of Benin, or of the Mali empire, or of Great Zimbabwe are ones that Trump and the world of MAGA seem entirely unaware of. Their traditions are the traditions of what Trump, in one of the most horrific statements of his first administration, called “shithole countries.” Who really cares if people in those sorts of places die in record numbers?

If we do care, we should do more than care; we should press rich world governments not to follow Trump in cutting foreign aid—and we should give as generously as we can to every aid agency that is working to save the people that the Trump administration is happy to let die.