Back to the Stone Age

Article by UK Menon, Co-Editor, Aliran Newsletter, 20 April 2026

Recent threats from US President Donald Trump and Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth vowing to bring Iran “back to the Stone Age” reveal a profound moral hollowness at the centre of current US foreign policy.

Iran’s stinging rejoinder – that it had a flourishing civilisation long before the ancestors of these men had progressed from grunts to articulate speech – is more than a clever historical jab. It is a necessary reminder that technological advancement is not synonymous with civilisational maturity.

But to do so would be to ignore a chilling reality: we are increasingly ruled by men who are no longer anchored in the moral or legal principles developed over millennia.

From the ancient Code of Hammurabi to the establishment of the United Nations and the great treaties that followed, humanity’s greatest evolution has not been in its tools of destruction, but in the collective agreements created to prevent war and protect human life and rights.

The Epstein shadow

In threatening to send Iran back to the Stone Age, Trump and Hegseth reveal that they may already be living there.

The Epstein Papers reveal a depravity that is not without precedent but remains staggering in scope. Epstein’s network allegedly was built on blackmail and coercion, where young girls were victims. The papers reveal a parade of leaders who stood in line to satisfy their lust in what some have called a scale never seen in recent history.

It is only a primitive, savage mind that could have supplied the armaments and stood by watching a genocide of proportions rarely seen before.

Evidence of such depravity is there also in the partnership with the rogue state of Israel, formed to expiate Europe’s Jewish guilt and which through some twisted version of the Stockholm Syndrome seems to have taken a fetish fascination for the murderous actions that were once inflicted on its people.

Civilization's long climb

The Stone Age, spanning roughly 3.3 million years, accounts for over 99% of human history. It was the era that set the foundation for everything we know today. Far from being a time of mere brutishness, it was a period in which humanity began to recognise itself.

As the Iranians pointed out, the eventual transition out of this era was marked by landmarks such as the Cyrus Cylinder – often described as one of the world’s first charters of human rights. While it is a royal proclamation rather than a modern legal document, it advocated for religious freedom and the protection of certain civilian populations.

If a leader two and a half millennia ago could recognise the sanctity of the individual, what does it say of a 21st-Century leader who threatens to dismantle a modern nation’s entire civilian infrastructure?

The answer is clear enough. Such leaders do not consolidate power through might alone but undermine the very moral foundations of civilisation.

The classroom and the bomb

As an educator, I see these developments as a failure of our collective memory. We have veered from the humanistic path that changed our history from a story of endless killing into a quest for peaceful coexistence. Education must be the primary tool to restore these values.

And there lies a danger, too. It is no coincidence that those who threaten to send a civilisation back to the Stone Age are the same people seeking to control universities and other educational institutions.

By defunding major research institutions, dismantling academic freedom through “patriotic” mandates, and targeting progressive curricula, the current US administration seeks to narrow the very minds capable of challenging its worldview.

It is urgent, therefore, to teach our students that civilisation is not a permanent state, but a fragile achievement that requires constant upkeep.

When our leaders use the language of “primitive” eras to justify 21st-Century destruction, they are failing the most basic test of historical literacy: the understanding that our past was a difficult climb toward the light of rights and reason.

The danger signalled in the speeches of Trump and his colleagues is not that any nation will physically revert to the Stone Age. It is that those controlling the world’s most sophisticated weaponry may not have evolved beyond a mindset more primitive than the era they invoke.

We are witnessing a troubling paradox: 21st-century technology wielded by those who think in the oldest terms of all – brute force.

The real 'primitives'

The real “Stone Age” is not a historical epoch defined by flint and bone. It is a condition where power is the only language spoken, and the moral principles embedded in religions and philosophy are cast aside.

If we do not use education to warn our students of these risks, we risk losing not just our civilisation, but our humanity.

Until those in power speak and act at the level of the civilisations they threaten to destroy, it is they, not their targets, who remain the “primitives”.