Colonial machine-gun wars killed en masse while inflicting near-zero white casualties

Evidence

Bell might well have added that the desire to take out one’s enemies from a safe distance was never better satisfied than in the “glorious” episodes of colonial wars, in which natives were felled en masse while the armies of the whites were hardly scratched. On the evening following the “battle” of Omdurman, in Sudan, on September 2, 1898, there were forty-eight dead on the side of the Anglo-Egyptian forces under Kitchener’s command, as against the nearly ten thousand dervishes cut down by the bursts of bullets from Maxim machine guns. Many other examples could be given. — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 338

Categorization

• XREF: Provides the historical concrete grounding for the drone’s asymmetry, and foregrounds colonial precedent central to the reader’s postcolonial concern. — connects to: The battle of Omdurman killed ten thousand with only forty-eight colonial casualties; Colonial violence destroyed traditional mourning rites by making every death colonial; War dislocates society so all deaths are attributed to colonialism — Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, 389

Related

• The battle of Omdurman killed ten thousand with only forty-eight colonial casualties (similarity 0.91)

Broader Connections

• Colonial violence destroyed traditional mourning rites by making every death colonial #expands (0.60)
• War dislocates society so all deaths are attributed to colonialism #corroborates (0.60) — Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, 389