A year later, memorials to the 7 October attacks use art, virtual reality and dark tourism to stir support for limitless violence. But there is a different way to remember
Includes fruitful comparisons with the response to anticolonial rebellions of ages past.
Even more striking parallels can be found in older, colonial history. For instance, when I discussed this research with my colleague Kavita Philip, a scholar of technology and literature, she encouraged me to look into the wave of British art created in response to the Indian rebellion of 1857-58. It was like gazing through a portal in time.
In 1857, Indian sepoy soldiers rose up against their commanding British officers as part of a wider rebellion against the tyrannical regime of the British East India Company. The rebellion expanded well beyond the military, to include peasants and landholders suffering under colonial rule. As on 7 October, the strength of the uprising took its targets by surprise: the rebels quickly reached Delhi, overtaking the British arsenal. British troops responded with furious violence, burning villages to the ground, and sepoy soldiers also committed atrocities: in the most notorious incident, roughly two hundred British women and children were taken hostage and eventually massacred.
In the months that followed, a subgenre of horror-filled propaganda art emerged in Britain and went on tour throughout the empire. In sketches, lithographs, and engravings, rebelling Asians were portrayed as simian savages or ferocious tigers, while murdered British women were angelic and Ophelia-like. Most impactful were huge 360-degree panoramas, some with moving tableaux, which gave viewers an immersive experience of being on the battlefield – a low-tech precursor to the VR trauma experiences offered today.
Then as now, speed was of the essence: while the battles still raged on the subcontinent, Londoners could go to Leicester Square, pay one shilling, and be surrounded by Robert Burford’s panorama painting, The Action Between her Majesty’s Troops and the Sepoys at Delhi – or the gorier lithograph The Treacherous Massacre of English Women and Children at Cawnpore by Nena Sahib.
The shocking scenes stoked a desire for revenge, building vital support for the British repression that followed the uprising, which included roving lynch mobs and such spectacular displays of imperial dominance as executing rebels by tying them to cannons. The campaign would eventually kill at least 100,000 Indian civilians, with hundreds of thousands more dying from starvation and epidemics that formed part of Britain’s retaliation. Imperial soldiers didn’t have TikTok to share their atrocity porn back then, but painters vividly captured the rebels strapped to the mouths of cannons, and political cartoonists in the UK showed mighty British “Justice”, sword in hand, crushing brown bodies under her feet.
History is crowded with chapters in which Indigenous peoples, starved and immiserated by colonial oppressions, finally rebel, with those rebellions at times including atrocities. This, in turn, becomes the pretext for their colonial overlords to unleash unhinged “exterminate all the brutes” rampages, to the point of genocide. As Israel ramped up its genocidal threats on Palestinians it termed “human animals” one year ago, scholars of anticolonial history such as Ghassan Hage and Shailja Patel pointed to these parallels on social media and in small journals – drawing on histories of “colonial punitive expeditions” everywhere from Namibia to Minnesota. But they rarely had access to large platforms in North America and Europe to provide this context.
Honestly, even if it results in some excesses (which should of course be worked against and prevented as best as possible), I hope that the west gets a taste of their own medicine (and unlike western blood libel, everything the global south would have to accuse them of would be fully true and not even scratching the surface of the evil).
Human propensity to forget (forgiveness is another matter, but forgetting is inexcusable) strikes me as the doom of our species, if we let it continue as it is. There’s no reason why people all around the world should trust the Anglo or European regimes, no reason why they should look up to them while internalizing self-hate, not for 1000 years and then some. Every country and people ravaged by the west, should have made that trauma and struggle a pillar- perhaps even the pillar- of their identity, to maintain at any and all costs, so as to ensure it can never happen again. Every time people forget, entirely preventable disasters happen (like the fall of the Soviet Union, etc).
Oftentimes it’s “politically inconvenient” to hold onto and protect the memories of these crimes, but letting it go leads to destruction- the likes of which I’ve seen (thankfully not to the point of national destruction- or perhaps, not yet? Hopefully not) in my own family who was deeply mentally colonized, and which has certainly plagued the broader region (ASEAN) they came from. The crimes and genocides the west inflicted or instigated on ethnic Chinese across ASEAN, for instance (in regards to my family’s experience), have been swept under the rug- and similarly, the legacy of colonialism has been far too often forgotten (the Philippines being the most explicit example in the region- seriously, a country that brought back the Marcos strikes me as hopeless, no offense). The entire world should have remembered and taken whatever pains necessary so as to forever remember and maintain their independence- their economic, political, etc. independence and dignity.
Honestly, even if it results in some excesses (which should of course be worked against and prevented as best as possible), I hope that the west gets a taste of their own medicine (and unlike western blood libel, everything the global south would have to accuse them of would be fully true and not even scratching the surface of the evil).
Human propensity to forget (forgiveness is another matter, but forgetting is inexcusable) strikes me as the doom of our species, if we let it continue as it is. There’s no reason why people all around the world should trust the Anglo or European regimes, no reason why they should look up to them while internalizing self-hate, not for 1000 years and then some. Every country and people ravaged by the west, should have made that trauma and struggle a pillar- perhaps even the pillar- of their identity, to maintain at any and all costs, so as to ensure it can never happen again. Every time people forget, entirely preventable disasters happen (like the fall of the Soviet Union, etc).
Oftentimes it’s “politically inconvenient” to hold onto and protect the memories of these crimes, but letting it go leads to destruction- the likes of which I’ve seen (thankfully not to the point of national destruction- or perhaps, not yet? Hopefully not) in my own family who was deeply mentally colonized, and which has certainly plagued the broader region (ASEAN) they came from. The crimes and genocides the west inflicted or instigated on ethnic Chinese across ASEAN, for instance (in regards to my family’s experience), have been swept under the rug- and similarly, the legacy of colonialism has been far too often forgotten (the Philippines being the most explicit example in the region- seriously, a country that brought back the Marcos strikes me as hopeless, no offense). The entire world should have remembered and taken whatever pains necessary so as to forever remember and maintain their independence- their economic, political, etc. independence and dignity.
thanks