'There is no remembrance of former things'

Sven Lundqvist illustrates the cyclical nature of air war — the ebb and flow of imperial power from the sky — in A History of Bombing.

The aftermath of a Russian airstrike on Kyiv, Ukraine. 16 May 2023. Wikimedia/Interior Ministry of Ukraine. Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.

“The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.
Is there any thing whereof it may be said, See, this is new? it hath been already of old time, which was before us.
There is no remembrance of former things; neither shall there be any remembrance of things that are to come with those that shall come after.” Ecclesiastes 1:9-11.

The Book of Ecclesiastes is one of the strangest, most touching parts of the Hebrew Bible. It is a long monologue by “Qoheleth, son of David, king in Jerusalem” about the meaninglessness of life in this world and the foolishness of humanity. Some have interpreted Ecclesiastes to represent a godless existentialism, which is not quite correct, because the meaningless of this world is compatible with faith in the hereafter. (The Qur’an, warning believers about God’s judgement, similarly states that “the life of the world is nothing but the pleasure of delusion.”) But Ecclesiastes certainly stands out in the Bible, because it moves from a linear concept of time to a cyclical one, from a story that progresses from creation to a cycle of suffering.

I thought about the wisdom of Ecclesiastes while reading A History of Bombing by the late literary historian and Swedish diplomat Sven Lunqvist. While the book is written in chronological order, it is designed to be read in a non-linear fashion. Each section includes instructions to jump forwards or backwards in time to another. The book has 22 possible “entrances,” each of which leads back to the beginning. One of them, for example, starts with Lundqvist’s diplomatic posting in China, continues through the Vietnam War, jumps back to the Chinese invention of explosive weapons, and then jumps forward again to the development of fragmentation bombs and incendiary warfare in Vietnam.

This structure makes sense for the book because the story of bombing is a cyclical spiral. Airpower was first discovered by colonial powers, who were delighted to find a terrorize their overseas subjects without any threat of retaliation. But they soon found themselves fighting an enemy who could retaliate: each other. Meanwhile, people bombarded by colonial air forces learned to adapt, and bombardment was no longer a trump card. Then the United States won World War II with a new form of airpower, nuclear bombing, that were truly unmatched. Until the Soviet Union got a nuclear bomb of its own. Thus the feelings of power and vulnerability continued to ebb and flow.

Almost everything about bombing today — the legal and moral and strategic dilemmas — happens according to patterns set a century ago. The British Empire’s hypocrisy could have been transplanted to a Washington briefing room, with minor changes, today. The superpower insisted that it would never aim to kill civilians, while pursuing policies that only made sense in terms of civilian mass murder. This hypocrisy was barely concealed beneath thin pretenses on the colonial frontier. (Even the targets are the same, Iraq and Afghanistan.) When it came to bombing other Europeans during the world wars, however, the killing of civilians had to be wrapped up in much thicker deception.

Perhaps most surprising to me was the fact that post-apocalyptic literature had existed from the very beginning of flight. Decades before the first nuclear bomb was tested, Anglophone writers were imagining that airplanes delivering chemical or radiological weapons would reduce humans to Stone Age conditions. The images could have easily come from Mad Max or Fallout, with the survivors living in bands of barbarian raiders and vermin inheriting the Earth. Some of these stories were the kinds of warnings we would be familiar with, in which modern civilization destroys itself through folly. Others were hawkish fear porn, a warning about enemy capabilities.

A surprisingly large number were straightforward racist power fantasies, in which the white man is finally able to wipe out hordes of subhuman colored enemies, and hold onto his colonies forever without being inconvenienced by the colonized peoples. From there comes the insight that, in the words of Leon Trotsky, “not every exasperated petty bourgeois could have become Hitler, but a particle of Hitler is lodged in every exasperated petty bourgeois.” America and Britain did not end up committing the Holocaust, yet they had elites who were enthusiastically preparing for industrial genocide, and their “genocidal fantasies recur with striking regularity,” Lundqvist notes.

To some extent, those who did commit the Holocaust or ally with its perpetrators were simply re-importing colonial tactics to Europe. Francisco Franco bombed Chefcháuen in Morocco before he bombed Guernica in his own country. Italy strafed hospitals and dropped mustard gas in Ethiopia. (Swedish missionaries played the same role there as the West’s humanitarian conscience that Swedish human rights activists do today.) Japan terrorized Chinese cities from the air, before the same death was rained down on Japanese cities a thousandfold by America. Germany, lacking an adequate air force, tried instead to exterminate the natives through a chilling combination of lower-tech starvation and higher-tech concentration camps.

After the Axis threat was defeated, Britain and France went right back to low-cost colonial policing from the air. America followed suit in Korea and Vietnam. It was less effective than before, because even people without an air force learned to absorb the immense human cost and fight back on the ground. The United States also attempted to protect its sphere of influence without a large land army through threats of “massive retaliation.” If either the Soviet or U.S. bloc advanced past its limits, the other would unleash its doomsday devices, purifying the world with atomic fire. As in the colonial-era apocalypse novels, the “winner” would rule over ashes. That fantasy actually reappeared during the early Cold War; none other than Robert Heinlein wrote a novel about Americans winning a high-tech racial holy war against the Red Chinese empire, saving the world from slavery by destroying half of it with wonderweapons.

Contrary to the conventional wisdom, Lundqvist argues that the Cuban missile crisis only increased the world’s comfort with the threat of nuclear annihilation. “The relief that nothing had happened eased imperceptibly the illusion that nothing could happen,” he writes. “To protest the bombs that were actually being dropped on the Vietnamese seemed more vital than protesting the bombs that threatened — but up to now did nothing more than threaten — to exterminate all of humankind.” When the 1977 supplement to the Geneva Conventions finally clarified that “it was no longer true that anything would be allowed against savages and barbarians,” in Linqvist’s words, the great powers made sure that the new laws of war had nothing to say about nuclear weapons.

The book ends in the late 1990s, the era of total American dominance, in which apocalypse bombing appeared to be obsolete. “What did the Chinese or Indians achieve with their nuclear weapons? What good was an atom bomb to Israel, in the face of stone-throwing Arabs? The hydrogen bomb had not helped Great Britain or France keep their empires,” Lundqvist wrote. The Soviet Union went under without a war. Yet Lundqvist saw the seeds of destruction in the new world order, because “dependence also creates vulnerability,” and global inequality “forces us to hold onto genocidal weapons, with which our fantasies can be realized whenever we like.”

We are living in another shift in the balance of airpower. Drones, weapons initially designed to enforce colonial-style control, have now become weapons of the weak. Turkey’s Bayraktar drone was deployed first in the counterinsurgency against Kurdish guerrillas before it became known as a nimble weapon of Ukrainian resistance, helping sink lumbering Russian warships. Iran has dispersed a variety of cheap remote-control weapons among Middle Eastern militias, allowing Yemeni peasant rebels to go toe-to-toe with the U.S. Navy, and has even begun to export these weapons to Russia, previously the titan of non-American military industry.

This process of leveling is not some glorious revolution. There is no romantic heroism in being chased by a screeching quadcopter with a grenade zip-tied to it. And as the Israeli razing of Gaza demonstrates, states still have the resources to inflict more damage through conventional bombing and shelling. But the fantasy of effortless control from the air has again been broken, replaced with a new arms race in which anyone can participate. Qoheleth says, “this only have I found, that God hath made man upright; but they have sought out many inventions.” What is the result of those inventions, those “schemes,” as the verse is sometimes translated? The Qur’an says, “they plotted, and God plotted, and God is the best of plotters.”