Good to know that Samar, My Lai and Abu Ghraib were all *departures* from the American way of making war. Some weapons-grade US exceptionalism (i.e. acute historical amnesia) from Jonathan Horn here...😑 www.wsj.com/opinion/sple...

The youngest wanted to be an android geisha for Halloween - one more addition to the collection...

Well, that's exciting - Michael Mann working on a new Vietnam war movie:

During the Philippine–American War, the US Army’s massacre of between 600 and 1,200 civilians made for “sensational news in the United States when it was first reported…. Eventually the event disappeared from popular consciousness and barely figured in popular accounts.” —Vicente L. Rafael

More people were killed during the Bud Dajo Massacre in 1906 than at Wounded Knee and My Lai combined - and yet this American atrocity has been largely forgotten. Review of my book 'Massacre in the Clouds' by @vrafael82.bsky.social in @nybooks.com: www.nybooks.com/articles/202...

Just bought this on Ebay for $5 - Alfred (of 'Mad Magazine' fame) as Lt. Calley, 'National Lampoon', August 1971

If only someone had written a book about this particular form of historical erasure...🤔

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...