Colonial punitive expeditions framed village destruction as ordinary administrative ‘pacification.‘

Evidence

An instance of “pacification” in the Near East was described at great length by T. E. Lawrence in an article “France, Britain and the Arabs” written for The Observer (1920): “There is a preliminary Arab success, the British reinforcements go out as a punitive force. They fight their way …to their objective, which is meanwhile bombarded by artillery, aeroplanes, or gunboats. Finally perhaps a village is burnt and the district pacified. It is odd that we don’t use poison gas on these occasions. Bombing the houses is a patchy way of getting the women and children…By gas attacks the whole population of offending districts could be wiped out neatly; and as a method of government it would be no more immoral than the present system.” — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2209

Categorization

• XREF: Lawrence’s euphemism analysis and lethal-administration framing connects to necropolitics and the banality-of-cruelty theme in Arendt’s later chapters.
• SEED: Lawrence’s dry satirical point — that gas was ‘no more immoral’ than the current bombing — is a sharp angle for an essay on how administrative vocabularies launder violence.