Was thinking about this…

So Donald Trump called the Iranians “animals,” yesterday, as justification to destroy their power plants, bridges, cities, etc.

Let’s slow that down for a second. Seems relevant since now the ceasefire seems over and we’re back to ending civilization.

Persia — what we now call Iran — is one of the oldest continuous civilizations on earth. You’re talking about a state tradition that runs alongside — and often in competition with — Mesopotamia, not beneath it.

And the Persians weren’t exactly primitive.

They built large-scale irrigation systems and qanats that still function today. They created one of the first truly continental road networks — the Royal Road — and paired it with a state-run courier system that looks a lot like an early postal service. They standardized administration across a multi-ethnic empire in ways that later states copied outright.

They contributed to early chemistry and fermentation at scale. They advanced glasswork and optics. Cavalry culture out of the Iranian plateau is likely where trousers — actual pants — enter widespread use, for a very practical reason: riding a horse without them is miserable.

And yes — there’s a reason the conversation about “rights” keeps circling back to Cyrus Cylinder.

Dated to the 6th century BC, it records the policies of Cyrus the Great after the conquest of Babylon. Among other things, it describes the return of displaced peoples to their homelands and the restoration of religious practices and temples.

That’s not modern human rights law. Let’s not oversell it.

But in the context of the ancient world — where mass deportation, enslavement, and annihilation were standard operating procedure — it represents a materially different model of imperial rule.

It’s also why Cyrus shows up in the Book of Ezra as the ruler who allows the Jews to return and rebuild the Temple.

So yes — the cylinder is propaganda. All of these inscriptions were.

But it’s propaganda about restraint and restoration rather than domination and terror. That alone is telling.

Which brings us back to the present.

You can oppose the Iranian regime. You can view it as hostile, dangerous, even adversarial in the strongest terms.

But collapsing an entire civilization — one of the oldest on earth — into “animals”?

That’s not analysis.

That’s rhetoric substituting for thought.

But, I’m shocked, SHOCKED I SAY, to find out the President is an uneducated uncouth racist ignorant slob.