JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 354
The "information bomb" as an idea is old, but as technology quickened over the centuries so has this particular bomb--it has gotten bigger, larger, more potent, more disasterously visible and more subtle (sometimes at the same time). Impossibly more effective than could've been imagined when these two prints (below) were published; impossible to the best and most creative storytellers. It is interesting to think about how information was released quickly in points in the past, and what that form looked like; and of course what situation perpetuated the release, or "bombing".
But for right now I'd like to look at two situations of information bombs that were quite literally so.
I've written about Sven Lindqvist's History of Bombing
(published 2000) earlier in this blog, and in it he points to this image as being about the earliest use of the airplane to drop anything at all on its enemies. In this case it happens to be pamphlets, although the bombs were soon to follow, particularly against brown-skinned people, in 1911 and 1912. The first image is entitled "War-News from the Flying Enemy; Pamphleteering by Aeroplane--Cirularizing his enemy's foes; an Italian Airman, who announced that Beirut had been bombarded, dropping political pamphlets to the Turks and their Arab Allies..." and appeared in The Illustrated London News for 27 April 1912. The Italians waged a nasty war against the Turks, taking to bombing soldiers and civilians alike across all of northern Africa, setting themselves some nasty first-time records for killing civilians from the air. In this instance, though, the airplane was dropping propaganda, trying to force the resisting Arab allies (in Tripoli) to surrender as Beirut had been bombed. the pamphlets didn't do the job; they were soon followed by exclamatory explosives.
The second image is an expansion of the first, without the explosive bit. This one too comes from The Illustrated London News, 25 May, 1929 (page 895), and was entitled "Science in the General Election; Wonders of Modern Canvassing" for the British election series in the spring of 1929. The information bomb at that point also took the forms of "radio, loud-speakers, talking films; aircraft; motor boats, and the new aids to the diffusion of political speeches", and that included canvassing constituents from the air by dropping pamphlets from an aircraft.
In general though this would be about the limit of bombing people with information, except of course for dropping surrender tickets and propaganda leaflets on fighting forces during WWII.
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