My current project on the My Lai Massacre is heavily influenced by the polyphonic structure of 'Rashomon'/'In the Grove' - and it's quite reassuring to find that contemporaries themselves drew that comparison. This commentary is from December 1969, just after the story first broke:

Not really a fan of Chomsky, but he was quite perceptive and clearly ahead of his time when he denounced the use of 'remote-controlled unmanned aircraft' in 1970, during the Vietnam War...

As a historian, writing about the past - no matter how violent or horrific - increasingly feels like escapism...

My approach to research these days is to read absolutely everything I can put my hands on that will help me get the 'feel' of an event or time-period right. Next up is Jean Larteguy's (author of 'The Centurions') fictionalised account of the disappearance of Sean Flynn in Cambodia in 1970...

I'm listening to the Lewellen recording of the pilot communication at My Lai for the first time. In the background, you can hear the wop-wop-wop of the Huy choppers and follow the progress of the operation minute by minute. Is there any other massacre in history that was audio-recorded live?

What's the best audio-to-text converter?

Question for the law peeps: is it a war crime, technically speaking, if there is no armed conflict? www.independent.co.uk/news/world/a...

What in the liberal exceptionalism is this?

I have been looking forward to @tommenger.bsky.social's book on colonial warfare for some time now, and it's amazing to see that it's finally out. A must for anyone who's interested in the study of violence in a transimperial comparative framework...

Tom Menger's new book is out now - with @kimatiwagner.bsky.social blurb "In The Colonial Way of War, Menger presents a masterclass in transimperial history", congrats @tommenger.bsky.social! www.cambridge.org/core/books/c...

This post inadvertently reveals exactly why war studies is a marginalised and often parochial academic field. Just imagine a historian studying genocide in order to learn how to do it better - and lacking the self-awareness to realise that this is what they're doing...

How long till the old 'bullets-dipped-in-pigs'-blood' story makes a come-back? 😑

This implies that fascism in Germany somehow came from the outside, like an illness invading the body. This notion victimizes the perpetrators, veiling that fascism actually was built on a long history of antisemitism, nationalism, militarism etc. and on a lot of complicity. 1/

Private Eye wasn't pulling any punches during the Vietnam War - Feb, 1968.

'There was a map of Vietnam on the wall of my apartment in Saigon and some nights, coming back late to the city, I'd lie out on my bed and look at it, too tired to do anything more than just get my boots off.' Michael Herr, Dispatches Finally got an old French map of my own...

You know your book project is going well when the research material requires its own piece of furniture...

Reading this classic for the first time. Reminded *once again* that I cannot be convinced #perpetratortrauma has any conceptual value aside from clinical, therapeutic purposes

Giving away my old hardcopy of Hobson-Jobson feels like a final step away from studying British colonial India...

It's not as if historians have studied the dynamics of rumours for more than half a century or anything like that...🤦‍♂️ www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Performatively reading a book? Level up. I’m performatively writing a book

Introducing Dr. Olivia Wyatt! I’m overjoyed to share that I successfully defended my thesis last Friday, and that I have started a new position as Teaching and Research Fellow in Black British History at the University of Edinburgh. I’m incredibly grateful to my supervisors and examiners

Paywall link: archive.md/miguy

What world does legal scholars inhabit? 'This prohibition on war has been remarkably effective: Wars of territorial conquest, once common, have become exceedingly rare—and the world has been more peaceful and prosperous than ever before as a result.' carnegieendowment.org/research/202...

Someone please commission me to review 'Primitive War'... www.google.com/search?q=pri...

Llms are like any other machine. They're either a benefit or a hazard. If they're a benefit, it's not my problem.

'When people think of themselves as the 'good guys' regardless of the violence they inflict, there is ultimately no atrocity they are not willing to justify.' Textbook example of how the debate on genocide is not a debate about evidence or interpretation - it's about cognitive dissonance...

Your daily reminder that it doesn't matter when and it doesn't matter where - genocide denial is still genocide denial.

Sorry, but that is quite clearly the night-catbus...

I bought a small plastic 'pagoda' on Temu for £4 and turned it into a Rashomon nightlight.

Just finished the first draft of the first part of my current book - it's just the prologue, but still... Here I'm setting the scene for what happens in March of 1968, which includes everyone from Michael Herr to James Baldwin, Norman Mailer, Jefferson Airplane and the Chicago 7 etc. etc.

😑...

Thanks AI, explaining how race riots in March of 1968 were triggered by the assassination of MLK in April of that year really helped clearing up some things for me...

Historical research is wondrous. While working on my book about the My Lai Massacre, which took place on March 16, 1968, I just found out that Marlon Brando and James Baldwin introduced Dr Martin Luther King at a fundraiser that same day! And you can listen to it here: youtu.be/xU71kk27nQU?...

It's been almost 60 years since the My Lai Massacre, and I see that we're still trauma-washing atrocities by focusing on the 'suffering' of the perpetrators...

AI-update - to avoid the confusion between image and text, I asked Google Genesis to produce the same timeline as in my original prompt (1885-1945), but this time without any words...🤷‍♂️

Sorry, but it wasn't ChatGPT that almost killed a guy - it was the guy's own gullibility that almost killed him. AI is catnip for the kind of people who 'do their own research'...

I did a follow-up in which I refined the prompt, and to be completely honest, the result is so much better.* (*It's not...)

Thanks AI, this historical timeline is incredibly useful and will really help my students...😑

Hard disagree - a well-conceived and fully-integrated edited volume takes years to bring to publication, and unless you pay for open access for individual chapters, it's going to cost £100+ for the hardback. Also, shit floats and it's almost impossible to achieve anything like consistency in quality

They made a desert and called it self-defence...

Your daily reminder that 'war' is a euphemism...

Centrism at it's finest...🤮

The argument that Palestine should not be recognised as a state as it can not comply with the obligations of a state reminds me of the 1899 Hague Convention, which excluded 'uncivilised' people from attempts to minimise the cruelty of war - because they were deemed incapable of observing such laws.

"Taking the classics of New Journalism as my source of inspiration, the book reimagines what the story of the My Lai Massacre would look like had it been written by a Michael Herr – this is an intimate and deeply immersive history." I usually hate writing book proposals, but this one is different.

I can't get over how fundamentally Iris Chang misunderstood the central point of Akutagawa's 'In the Grove'/ Kurosawa's 'Rashomon' in her book about the Nanking Massacre...

What novels and films touch on the ghosts of the Vietnam War and the motif of the haunted veteran? I am familiar with the classic Vietnam War narratives, of course, but here I am thinking of less obvious examples, like Stephen King's short stories, or 'True Detective' season 3, for instance.

“We wanted to rid ourselves of the fashions of historiography,” Burns summarized at one event, “and make a film that simply shows what happened.” That’s not how history works though. You’re making an argument about what happened & what mattered even if you don’t realize you’re doing it. 🗃️

Interesting piece on Ken Burns, whose particular brand of liberal exceptionalism I have very little time for. Here's what I had to say about his take on the Sand Creek Massacre in my last book: www.politico.com/news/magazin...

You've seen bad-faith arguments and made-up footnotes - but have you ever seen a book that tries to settle a big historical question based on an interview with the spirit of a deceased author? That's some next-level Rashomon right there...