Kim A. Wagner's avatar

Kim A. Wagner

@kimatiwagner.bsky.social

1354 followers 901 following 387 posts

Professor of Global and Imperial History, QMUL|The Wylie Agency| New book: 'Massacre in the Clouds: An American Atrocity and the Erasure of History' - www.publicaffairsbooks.com/titles/kim-a-wagner/massacre-in-the-clouds/9781

Kim A. Wagner's avatar Kim A. Wagner @kimatiwagner.bsky.social
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“For now at last”, she concluded, “we are looking at the same picture; we are seeing with you the same dead bodies…” Today, it should be obvious to anyone that Woolf was wrong, even naïve - as Susan Sontag also noted. 3/

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Kim A. Wagner's avatar Kim A. Wagner @kimatiwagner.bsky.social
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Woolf answered her own question in the affirmative and argued that the power of the photograph was capable of transcending differences and thus constituted a universal ‘language’ that could effectively mobilize opposition to war. 2/

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Kim A. Wagner's avatar Kim A. Wagner @kimatiwagner.bsky.social
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“Let us see then whether when we look at the same photographs we feel the same things.” On the eve of the Second World War, the writer Virginia Woolf reflected on the effect that images of death and destruction had on people from different walks of life. 1/

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Kim A. Wagner's avatar Kim A. Wagner @kimatiwagner.bsky.social
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👍🏻

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Kim A. Wagner's avatar Kim A. Wagner @kimatiwagner.bsky.social
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I was 14 when I got my first copy of Philip Meadows Taylor's classic 1839-novel 'Confessions of a Thug'. And today I received the new edition in the Oxford World's Classics series - which I edited and wrote a foreword for.

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Sardonicus 's avatar Sardonicus @sardonicus.eu
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Goodnight. Yasaka pagoda, by Takeuchi Seiho

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Kim A. Wagner's avatar Kim A. Wagner @kimatiwagner.bsky.social
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I can't vote (I'm a dirty foreigner after all) so you'll have to do it for me 👇🏼

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Kim A. Wagner's avatar Kim A. Wagner @kimatiwagner.bsky.social
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Siri: How much academic integrity can you get for $300k?

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Kim A. Wagner's avatar Kim A. Wagner @kimatiwagner.bsky.social
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I attended the funeral ceremony for an old friend in South Korea and spent a lot of time walking in the mountains around Songgwangsa Temple where I grew up. Here are some of the photos I took.

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Kim A. Wagner's avatar Kim A. Wagner @kimatiwagner.bsky.social
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Several reviewers have criticised the level of detail in my account of Bud Dajo - one of the worst massacres in US history, which has been ignored by historians for over a century. That was a deliberate choice on my part and when the stakes are this high, to paraphrase Raoul Peck, you go for broke

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Kim A. Wagner's avatar Kim A. Wagner @kimatiwagner.bsky.social
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Twenty years after Abu Ghraib, we still struggle with photos of atrocity that force us to look at violence through the eyes of the perpetrators. The problem, I argue, is not that we have seen too many images of suffering but that we haven't looked closely enough:

newlinesmag.com/argument/a-n...

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Kim A. Wagner's avatar Kim A. Wagner @kimatiwagner.bsky.social
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Congratulations to Niall Ferguson's research assistants...

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Kim A. Wagner's avatar Kim A. Wagner @kimatiwagner.bsky.social
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*Apocalypse Now - rejected by Donald Rumsfeld

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Kim A. Wagner's avatar Kim A. Wagner @kimatiwagner.bsky.social
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Or to describe deliberate strategic decisions as unavoidable tragedy...

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Kim A. Wagner's avatar Kim A. Wagner @kimatiwagner.bsky.social
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Look up Amritsar 1919, look up Sétif 1945. Disproportionality is a key feature of colonial violence and a state willing to kill tens of thousands of civilians in response to 1200 dead will think nothing of killing hundreds to save 4.

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Kim A. Wagner's avatar Kim A. Wagner @kimatiwagner.bsky.social
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Now I suddenly don't feel so bad about slagging off Burns in my book...

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Sardonicus 's avatar Sardonicus @sardonicus.eu
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Henrique Alvim Correa - War Of The Worlds Illustrations, 1906

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Kim A. Wagner's avatar Kim A. Wagner @kimatiwagner.bsky.social
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At a conference in Rome and had some time to walk around by myself.

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Kim A. Wagner's avatar Kim A. Wagner @kimatiwagner.bsky.social
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Reminds me of the male anthropology student who carried out fieldwork among prostitutes in Thailand by...yes, you guessed it.

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Kim A. Wagner's avatar Kim A. Wagner @kimatiwagner.bsky.social
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'IT MUST BE EMPHASIZED THAT THE RULES OF INTERNATIONAL LAW APPLY ONLY TO WARFARE BETWEEN CIVILIZED NATIONS...' Colonial violence - functioning without legal restraint since 1899. (Slides for an upcoming talk)

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Kim A. Wagner's avatar Kim A. Wagner @kimatiwagner.bsky.social
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I wrote a book about how people can watch an atrocity unfold before their very eyes yet still insist they see nothing. Or worse, they see a massacre and call it a 'battle'. It's about a massacre that took place in 1906 - and I never imagined it would be so tragically relevant in 2024...

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Kim A. Wagner's avatar Kim A. Wagner @kimatiwagner.bsky.social
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Your daily reminder that the concept of 'human shields' has been used to justify atrocities for well over a century - this is how the commander of the American forces in the southern Philippines justified the slaughter of 1000 men, women and children at Bud Dajo in 1906:

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Kim A. Wagner's avatar Kim A. Wagner @kimatiwagner.bsky.social
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Reminds me of this print by Koho Shoda:

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Kim A. Wagner's avatar Kim A. Wagner @kimatiwagner.bsky.social
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I guess that this is one obvious difference between the political landscape on either side of the Atlantc - in the UK, there's a sense that things can only get better from hereon out (which isn’t saying much, obvs), whereas in the US, they're about to get a lot worse...

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Kim A. Wagner's avatar Kim A. Wagner @kimatiwagner.bsky.social
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Apropos of nothing, here's what Jonathan Schell said about the exceptionalism of the American gaze following the publication of the My Lai photos in 1969:

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Kim A. Wagner's avatar Kim A. Wagner @kimatiwagner.bsky.social
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First they came for the war criminals, and I did not speak out...

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The Author, Séamas O'Reilly's avatar The Author, Séamas O'Reilly @seamas.bsky.social
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why mike what's america done?

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Kim A. Wagner's avatar Kim A. Wagner @kimatiwagner.bsky.social
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The irony that the two major powers that did not sign the ban on expanding bullets in Hague in 1899 - because they needed them to fight 'savages' - are also the ones to reject the ICC warrants today is not entirely lost on me...

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Kim A. Wagner's avatar Kim A. Wagner @kimatiwagner.bsky.social
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I think the symbolism is pretty obvious...and pretty obviously colonial

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Kim A. Wagner's avatar Kim A. Wagner @kimatiwagner.bsky.social
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When I teach my students about Western imperialism - settler violence, the rule of colonial difference and the conceit of the civilizing project - I will have to ask them to stop reading about the 19th century and just look at the world around them right now. It's all here...

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Kim A. Wagner's avatar Kim A. Wagner @kimatiwagner.bsky.social
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"Imperialism...Western civilization...rule of law...something something..."

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Daniel Larison's avatar Daniel Larison @daniellarison.bsky.social
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I reviewed Massacre in the Clouds, a masterful history of the 1906 Bud Dajo massacre in the Philippines: t.co/bsUY5Y5b8l

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Kim A. Wagner's avatar Kim A. Wagner @kimatiwagner.bsky.social
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They might as well have gone with 'Bentham 2000'...

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