In real time, the United States government is bombing schools. Not accidentally. Systematically. It is providing open political cover for what serious legal scholars are calling genocide. It has deliberately destroyed civilian infrastructure across Iran with the kind of precision that requires planning, targeting committees and signed orders.
It is seizing oil tankers on international waters, which is, to use the correct nautical term, piracy. And it is weaponising the global financial system against over a billion ordinary people who had the misfortune of being born in the wrong country at the wrong time.
These are not controversial opinions. These are things happening. On camera. With press releases.
Trump, Hegseth, Rubio and their expanding cabinet of catastrophe are not bumbling into these outcomes. They are cheerfully, publicly and proudly engineering them. Evil, it turns out, does not always arrive in a grey uniform with a toothbrush moustache. Sometimes it arrives in a suit, posts on social media about it, and then goes to play golf.
The Germans, at least, had the excuse of a devastated post-war economy, hyperinflation and a sophisticated propaganda machine. What is America’s excuse? Netflix was working fine. The economy was functional. And yet here we are.
And here is the part that should genuinely keep these men awake at night, assuming they possess the basic neurological equipment required for guilt. Their children are going to carry this. Their grandchildren will change their surnames. Just as generations of German families quietly buried their connection to men who signed the wrong orders, the descendants of Trump, Hegseth and Rubio will spend decades explaining, distancing and in many cases simply disappearing into new identities. The name will become the shame. That is not a prediction. That is history, repeating itself with depressing reliability.
May history be fractionally kinder to those who watched this with open eyes and turning stomachs than it will be to the men giving the orders.
Because those men are burning their names into the record of human civilisation right now. And unlike tweets, history does not have a delete button.
Centre for Nigeria Progress 