<nettime> Centennial of Aerial Bombing 1911/11/11

Full article with illustration and links can be found at:

http://limpingmessenger.wordpress.com/2011/11/11/centennial-of-aerial-bombing_primordial_air-power/

â11 November 2011 ~ 11 November 1911, today is the centennial of one hundred years of aerial bombing, the first example being the bombing of Turkish troops by Italian airplanes during the Italo-Turkish War in Libya in 1911. Some grenades hand held, dropped onto troops below. Aerial bombing is in fact incorrect as the launching of airborne missiles date back much further in time. Balloons have for instance been used by the Austrians when they beleaguered Venice in 1849 using unmanned balloons filled with explosives that could be triggered by electro-contacts using long wires (the idea of drones which are used in a more advanced way nowadays is born here). So today it is the centenary of airborne attacks by humans launching explosives from flying contraptions. The idea of airborne attack goes back into mythical times, though.

[â]

We are one century from the moment that a grenade was dropped by hand from an Italian airplane circling over an oasis in the Libyan desert onto the heads of a few Ottoman soldiers. The Italian colonization of Libya that followed the break down of the Ottoman empire â at that time â created the circumstances that lead one century later to renewed usage of air force. We may have progressed in technical sense a lot, but politically speaking we have not yet freed ourselves of crude imposture of imperial power.

written on the aerial bombardment centennial day in Phnom Penh

Tjebbe van Tijen