the language of temporal rape
This essay was originally posted on social media on April 2, 2026.
I hate this rhetoric with my entire being. Hated it ever since the Bush Administration promised to bomb Afghanistan “back to the Stone Age” at the start of its “war on terror” that created an endless signifier + the bottomless blank check against an enemy that could be anywhere. “Bomb back to the Stone Age” is the language of temporal rape.
It is saying: we will strip you of everything that makes you recognizably human. We will debase you to the level of unthinking stone. Reduce all you have built to rubble. Mercilessly shred complex culture, astounding architecture, tender bodies. Drunk frat boys promising to clear-cut the old growth forest of an ancient civilization. Razing and hazing. Obliterate vast libraries without being able to understand a single book contained within. Then boast and gloat about it. Hearts turned to stone. Populations petrified.
It is saying: I do not know you and will destroy you. You will know me by my destruction. We will return you to bare survival, to start from evolutionary scratch. Like this regime of sociopathic reality TV stars wants to create “Naked and Afraid” on the world stage, safe in the dominator spectator position. Watching perhaps one day, from the Moon.
Reality is a more grave concern than rhetoric, of course. And parroted rhetoric like this does a lot of work. “Stone Age” is the most extreme othering in time.
The blazing version of Armageddon Epic Fury Imperial Psychosis that calls for mass destruction, uses “Stone Age” along with “terror” as thought-stopping language that shuts down any sense of the other’s humanity, of Iran’s humanity. It makes killing possible in the imagination before in physicality. Shuts down critical thinking and critical compassion.
The cooler rational sounding version operates as the commonplace colonial lens that represents other cultures as simply living in Stone Age (or pre-modern) stasis. Chrono-racism. Chrono-supremacy. Sounds like: “Their present is our past”. The colonial binaries doing their centuries old hypnotizing work: we are modern/they are backwards, we are advanced/they are primitive, we are dynamic/they are unchanging, we have history/they are timeless, we are the adults/they are the childhood of humanity, we are civilized/they are savages.
I remember hearing some white relatives in 2001, horrified by our government’s murderous rhetoric and yet reinforcing the head shaking liberal racism version: “I can’t believe they are saying they will bomb Afghanistan back to the Stone Age, I mean, Afghanistan is already IN the Stone Age!”, Is it, really? What does that even mean? What are we saying when we say that? That they have no shiny tools and we have no historic context?
Back in the “Axis of Evil” days, an Iranian-American friend and I would give presentations at different schools and conferences on representations of the Middle East. People in the audience were often shocked to see ski slopes in Iran, images of thriving markets, and everyday moments. We would welcome the surfacing of shock and follow the question of why we are shocked to all the places it leads. Unlearning dehumanization. What is inside and outside the media frame.
The U.S.’ brand of lethal ignorance + arrogance, a familiar global broadcast, has reached levels that are so beyond. It is plain to see who the barbarians are.
The sun finally set on the British empire. So many have longed for the sun to one day set on the U.S. empire. Here we are. Less of a sunset than an imperial supernova.
May “Bomb back to the Stone Age” be quoted in future war crime trials. If there is no escape from impunity on Earth, perhaps tribunals can take place one day, on the Moon.
