Why does bombing civilians — despite laws against it — remain a military tactic?
Western notions about what constitutes a just war go back to St. Augustine
Over the last hundred years, bombing technology has evolved from grenades getting tossed out of a hot air balloon, to drone strikes that can obliterate one specific vehicle in a crowded line of cars.
But there is one unchanging constant in the history of bombing: civilians die.
And there's another constant: a spokesperson will call the civilian deaths a tragedy, collateral damage, and will claim was unintended: "We don't kill civilians."
So why do they keep getting killed?
IDEAS producer Naheed Mustafa looks at a century of bombing civilians to try and answer that very question.
"When assessing cases of indiscriminate bombing, I think it is important to consider the history of the justification for mass killing of civilians. And the logic behind it has always been that it would demoralize the enemy and hasten their surrender. The fundamental question is why this theory justifying mass killing has persisted for so long?" historian Yuki Tanaka told IDEAS.
"And, why, variations of it are still being used to some extent to justify, now it's so-called the collateral damage of precision bombings in wars such as those in Afghanistan, Kosovo, Iraq and now, Gaza."
To listen to this documentary, download the IDEAS podcast from your favourite app.
Guests in this episode:
Yuki Tanaka is a historian, emeritus research professor of history at the Hiroshima Peace Institute.
Mark Selden is senior research associate in the East Asia program at Cornell University, and the founder of Asia-Pacific Journal.
Azmat Khan is a professor of journalism at Columbia University and an investigative journalist with the New York Times.
*This episode was produced by Naheed Mustafa.
