After the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, some have asked whether the West hadn’t sown the seeds of its own destruction. That’s not a new idea: A hundred years ago, Robert W. Coles wrote a novel called The Struggle for Empire in which Anglo-Saxons conquer the world by destroying or absorbing all other races. Triumphant and enraptured by technology, the Anglo-Saxons invent flying machines and encounter a race of aliens called Sirians. The Anglo-Saxons bomb Sirian city after Sirian city until the aliens surrender unconditionally. In 1923, Anderson Graham’s novel The Collapse of Homo Sapiens has Africans and Asians stealing atomic secrets and bombing the Anglo-Saxons back to the Stone Age.
It’s suddenly difficult to dismiss such predictions from fantasy novels. The West has bombed Arab lands, not to mention African and Asian, and is doing so again. Arab militants have meted out what they may or may not see as a first strike, and will doubtless try for more, maybe next time with true weapons of mass destruction.
In A History of Bombing, published before the September 11 attacks on America, we learn that the first time airplanes were ever used for a bombing mission, they were used by Europeans to bomb Arabs. In 1911 Italian aviators dropped grenades on nomadic camps in the desert of Tripoli, in North Africa. Newspaper reports recorded the effect on the ground: “Noncombatants, young and old, were slaughtered ruthlessly, without compunction and without shame.” The Italian air command reported that the bombs had “a wonderful effect on the morale of the Arabs.” Seeing the effectiveness of aerial bombardment, other European powers quickly followed suit. Between 1915 and 1920 Britain bombed Arab towns and villages in Egypt, Transjordan, Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan–all this three-quarters of a century before the Gulf War. So perhaps it shouldn’t be a big surprise if the morale of the Arabs has returned to haunt us.
But what does this prove? For Sven Lindqvist, the author of A History of Bombing, it suggests that white Westerners were the first to use airplanes and bombs for terrorism, and that racism was the reason they did. Lindqvist is partly wrong about this. But in a more horrifying way–which has nothing to do with racism–he’s also partly right.
Most people blame the Germans for the Holocaust. Lindqvist, a Swedish scholar and journalist, first made a name for himself by pointing the finger elsewhere. In a short travelogue called Exterminate All the Brutes, penned from the Sahara Desert and published in English in 1996, Lindqvist leveled his gaze in an unexpected direction–at the British, the Americans, the Spaniards, the Belgians. Lindqvist noted that these countries were the first colonial expansionists, the first to invent the idea of inferior races. They condoned genocide in Africa and the Americas well before Auschwitz. The Germans didn’t have much in the way of colonies abroad. When the Germans started exterminating a local gypsy tribe called the Jews to make room for German expansion, they were just trying to keep up with their European neighbors, at least according to Lindqvist.