Hiper Bomb

In this essay, I explore the phenomenon of the Bomb as a soul reality, following the appearance of the bomb in several dreams I had in the mid-nineties.

Environmental Humanities, 2018

Argumentation and Advocacy, 2019

In April 2017, the United States military dropped the GBU-43/B Massive Ordinance Air Blast (MOAB), colloquially known as the “Mother of All Bombs,” in Eastern Afghanistan. This essay fore- grounds the MOAB as an intensified manifestation of argumentum ad baculum (appeal to force). I argue the weapon forwards dynamic material and symbolic appeals to force, and also satisfies sadistic appeals of force, to buttress American militarism from public opposition. After assessing the MOAB’s argumentative capacity to deliver convincing claims to international and domestic audiences, I conclude by calling for adoption of object-oriented sensibilities to understand and defy the forceful force of argumentative weapons.

Residential buildings being targeted by bombs, killing civilians, destroying civilian objects is today common. In armed conflicts those who are involved in hostilities do not respect the law of war by killing civilians with impunity in contravention of the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949. Use of explosive devices in densely populated areas by both state forces and non-state forces is emerging as a new menace to peace and security of humanity. The author seeks to illustrate the facts of violations of international humanitarian law and challenges facing the United Nations in guaranteeing peace and security. Reading this article will reveal how much the world still requires to maintain peace and security to civilian populations. Explosions leave emotional harm to persons causing them unnecessary anxiety, psychosocial trauma and in some cases terminal illnesses.

History Workshop Journal , 2020

Abstract The recent surge of scholarly writing on seditious material in British India tends to focus on the reception and analysis of the content of proscribed publications. We still have scant knowledge of how revolutionary literature was produced and disseminated, partly because of the necessary secrecy in which this took place. Intelligence reports and revolutionary memoirs alike tend to describe the distribution of revolutionary literature in vague terms, almost invariably using the passive voice – ‘offensive pamphlets appeared’ or were simply ‘found’ in such and such a place – as though they somehow distributed themselves. In this paper, I turn my focus to the ways in which revolutionaries of the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association (HSRA) distributed ‘The Philosophy of the Bomb’ in January 1930. Following the HSRA’s daring attempt on the life of the Viceroy in December 1929, the Government of India’s search for key members and their sympathizers took on a renewed urgency. In an attempt to trace the revolutionaries and to break ‘the steel frame of the violence movement’, the Intelligence Bureau turned its attention to the distribution of this polemical document (a four-page riposte to Gandhi’s critique of revolutionary praxis. Analysis of modes of distribution of material on the verge of proscription, I argue, enables a more textured understanding of the thrust of revolutionary literature and its reception. This paper therefore aims to inject the spirit of insurgency into the archive by explaining the ways in which a key document of the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association (HSRA), ‘The Philosophy of the Bomb’, was disseminated in early 1930. The paper is organized into three sections. The first section provides a background for the political context of ‘The Philosophy of the Bomb’ amid debates about violence and nonviolence in the broader nationalist movement. The second describes the different ways in which the document was disseminated in early 1930, drawing on both revolutionary and intelligence reports. The paper then concludes by considering the alignment between the dissemination and impact of the revolutionary manifesto and the bomb itself.

Technology and Culture, 2008

Mike Davis’s important and uncomfortable Buda’s Wagon deserves to be read by historians of technology as a stellar example as well as a dire warning about the possibilities and pitfalls when writing a global history of a contemporary technology. Here Davis, as our time’s Lewis Mumford, provides an explicit technological history of an urban phenomenon in order to contemplate and castigate contemporary global politics. Its title refers to the 1920 Wall Street bombing where the alleged perpetrator, militant anarchist Mario Buda, used a prototypical car bomb in the form of a horsecart with dynamite and iron slugs to maim hundreds of passersby. Since then, car bombs have become urban terrorism’s “brutal hardware and quotidian workhorses,” and the car bomb, “like any triumphant modern technology, deserves its proper history, with particular attention paid to key technical and tactical innovations” (p. 7). Davis follows the car bomb from its emergence in the alleyways of 1940s Haifa and Jaffa through bomb-infested streets and parking lots across five continents to its end at the marketplaces of contemporary Baghdad and Jaffna. The many fascinating stories he has recovered include the importance of the F-100 Vietcong urban terrorist command as the inspiration of modern truck bombings, the 1969 American invention of the fertilizer- based ANFO car bomb “that elevated urban terrorism from the artisan to the industrial level” (p. 5), and the “greatest transfer of terrorist technology in history” (pp. 94–95) in the 1980s, when the United States provided sabotage expertise for training foreign and Afghan mujahedin. Davis’s perspective and sweep could make any historian of technology proud: it is a genuinely global history “from below” about technological empowerment, about use rather than innovation. It exemplifies how a somewhat traditional history of technology can illuminate one of the central issues of our time. Traditional it is: an episodic, descriptive, and at times almost boring history of a technological artifact, including many lists with dates, places, and numbers. But—and it is a huge “but”—Buda’s Wagon is at the same time an immensely powerful, dark, and overwhelming interrogation of a material underpinning of what Davis in a previous work aptly described as our contemporary “ecology of fear.” This rich and comprehensive history shows the car bomb being embraced by substate militants and criminals as well as by the governments of the United States, Britain, the Soviet Union, Israel, Iran, and Pakistan. Its development and use to a large degree provides a history of global cold war politics, Western imperialism, and state repression—where the car bomb becomes “the classical ‘weapon of the weak’” and “the ‘poor man’s air force’ par excellence” (pp. 11, 8) and its development dialectically connected to the legitimate and clandestine violence of states. Although condemning the “mass terror against civilian populations” and “state terrorism” of Western states as well as blaming Western imperialism for leading to resentment and militancy, Davis does not imply any “sympathy for the devil” (pp. 10, 114). The sympathy is always with the bombed, never with the bombers, regardless of whether they are rebels, revolutionaries, or regimes. Inevitably, this book shares some weaknesses with many works of contemporary political and military history. It is primarily based on sparsely referenced and unverifiable accounts by journalists, politicians, security advisors, and intelligence sources, and its long and global sweep leads to an understandable but regrettable loss of depth. It is not an intimate history, and Davis keeps his distance, which leads to an ironic weakness in the work of such an outspoken Marxist as Davis in the lack of materialism and labor perspective. We do not get any intimate knowledge of the bombs nor of their makers. The individuals we mainly get to know are the bomb industry’s “executives”: terrorist leaders, crime lords, and CIA directors. The story’s central characters, the bombs, do not speak much about themselves or the work of their makers. This gives an impression that the motives propelling these killing machines are those of leaders, organizations, and states rather than those of their makers and users. The worn adage that the devil is in the details would never have been more fitting than here. These shortcomings aside, Buda’s Wagon is a powerful history that takes an important step toward making the historical and technological underpinnings of contemporary state terror and terrorism understandable.

Conference paper written together with Bernard Geoghegan. Furher material here http://terrormindedness.blogspot.se/2008/08/terror-by-word-from-above-and-below.html

2009