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Excerpt from an Article on TomDispatch.com:
- The history of war-atrocity snapshots did not start with the Abu Ghraib screen-savers from hell. After all, photography itself came into being as the industrializing West was imposing its rule on much of the planet. That imposition meant wars of conquest; and such colonial wars, in turn, meant slaughter.
- From the moment the wooden sailing ship mounted with canons took to the high seas and Europeans began to seize the coasts of the planet, technological advantage lay with them. When others resisted, as they regularly did, the result was almost invariably an unbalanced slaughter that passed for war. Even in the relatively rare instances when European powers, as at Adowa in Ethiopia in 1896, lost a battle, the casualty figures still tended to run staggeringly in the other direction. In 1898, at the victorious battle of Omdurman, the British, using Maxim machines guns and artillery, famously slaughtered perhaps 11,000 Dervishes, wounding many more, at a cost of 48 British casualties. ("It was not a battle," wrote one observer, "but an execution.")
- With the one-sided slaughter their technological advantage in arms (and in the industrial organization of warfare) offered came the presumption by the Europeans, the Americans when they joined the imperial game, and the Japanese when they too leaped in, that there was some deeper kind of superiority -- racial, religious, or civilizational -- at work determining events. And so, above the repetitious fact of slaughter was invariably unfurled a banner with glorious slogans about delivering the benefits of "civilization" (in the French case, literally, the mission civilatrice; in the American case, "democracy") to the ignorant or benighted heathen and barbarians of the backward parts of the planet.
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