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Notes -
The word “civilization” is never used to refer to just the political faction currently in power. If you google “Chinese civilization”, you will not find anyone using this term as a stand-in for Xi’s current regime. So this would be a brand new use of the term. The content of the tweet also goes against your interpretation as Trump claims there already has been total regime change:
So he can’t just be referring to the regime, as there has been “complete and total regime change”.
Thanks for digging up the actual tweet, I think it speaks for itself. Also, if he meant the Ayatollah regime with civilization, he would not express regret but glee at their removal.
@Poug: I am not claiming that he threatened to murder every last ethnic Iranian. (Doing that with Iran would surpass all historical genocides in scale, I think.) However, the crime of genocide does not require that you kill everyone.
The act of genocide is the intentional destruction of an ethnic group as a distinct culture -- which is damn close in concept space to 'destruction of a civilization'. Outright murder is a typical strategy, but not the only one. Mass sterilization or the forcible transfer of children to other ethnic groups are likewise ways to destroy a group.
However, context matters, and the context does not do Trump any favors here. The 'softer' variants like cultural genocide generally do not work overnight. Nobody could mistake Trump's threat as "we will occupy Iran, outlaw Shia Islam and the speaking of Farsi, force everyone to speak English and eat at McDonald's to destroy any distinction of the Iranian people and turn them into generic Americans" -- not that that would have been acceptable.
The only way Trump could possibly destroy the Iranian civilization overnight would have been to nuke their cities, killing most of their urban population and industrial base, so that the survivors would find themselves in a mixture of Fallout and rural Afghanistan, neither of which qualify as civilization. This would still dwarf the Shoa and the Holodomor in total deaths, even if the Nazis were more meticulous about murdering every last one of their victims.
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