A Weapon with Wings

The Centenary of the Wright Brothers' Flight Should be a Day of

International Mourning

by George Monbiot

They will probably be commemorating the wrong people in Kitty Hawk, North

Carolina, tomorrow. Five months before the Wright brothers lifted a flying

machine into the air for 12 seconds above the sand dunes of the Outer Banks,

the New Zealander Richard Pearse had traveled for more than a kilometer in

his contraption, without the help of ramps or slides, and had even managed

to turn his plane in mid-flight.

But history belongs to those who record it, so tomorrow is the official

centenary of the airplane. At Kitty Hawk, George Bush will deliver a eulogy

to aviation, while a number of men with more money than sense will seek to

recreate the Wrights' first flight. Well, they can keep their anniversary.

Tomorrow should be a day of international mourning. December 17 2003 is the

centenary of the world's most effective killing machine.

The airplane. was not the first weapon of mass destruction. The European

powers had already learned to rain terror upon their colonial subjects by

means of naval bombardment, artillery and the Gatling and Maxim guns. But

the destructive potential of aerial bombing was grasped even before the

first plane left the ground. In 1886, Jules Verne imagined aircraft acting

as a global police force, bombing barbaric races into peace and

civilization. In 1898, the novelist Samuel Odell saw the English-speaking

peoples subjugating eastern Europe and Asia by means of aerial bombardment.

In the same year, the writer Stanley Waterloo celebrated the future

annihilation of inferior races from the air.

None of this was lost on the Wright brothers. When Wilbur Wright was asked,

in 1905, what the purpose of his machine might be, he answered simply:

"War." As soon as they were confident that the technology worked, the

brothers approached the war offices of several nations, hoping to sell their

patent to the highest bidder. The US government bought it for $30,000, and

started test bombing in 1910. The airplane. was conceived, designed, tested,

developed and sold, in other words, not as a vehicle for tourism, but as an

instrument of destruction.

In November 1911, eight years after the first flight, the Italian army

carried out the first bombing raid, on a settlement outside Tripoli. Then as

now, aerial bombardment was seen as a means of civilizing uncooperative

peoples. As Sven Lindqvist records in A History of Bombing, the imperial

powers experimented freely with civilization. from the skies. Just as the

Holocaust was prefigured by colonial genocide, so the bombing raids which

reduced Guernica, Hamburg, Dresden, Tokyo and parts of London to ash had

been rehearsed in north Africa and the Middle East.

As the enemy was reduced to a distant target in an inferior sphere, greater

cruelties could be engineered than any effected before. The British knew

what they were doing in Germany. Directive 22 to Bomber Command in 1942

ordered that the "aiming points" for fire-bombing be "built-up areas, not,

for instance, the dockyards or aircraft factories". The Americans knew what

they were doing in Japan. Major General Curtis LeMay, who incinerated

100,000 civilians in Tokyo, admitted: "We knew we were going to kill a lot

of women and kids when we burned that town. Had to be done." Japan sought to

negotiate peace, but the Allies refused to talk until they had taken their

firebombing to its logical conclusion, in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. LeMay

later became chief of staff of the US air force. He was the man who, in

1964, promised to bomb Vietnam back into the stone age.

I doubt much mention will be made of all this at the centenary celebrations

tomorrow. Instead we will be encouraged to concentrate upon the civil

applications of this military technology. We will be told how the airplane.

has made the world a smaller place, how it has brought people closer

together, fostering understanding and friendship. There is something in

this: the people of powerful nations might be reluctant to permit their

leaders to destroy the countries they have visited. But commercial flights,

like military flights, are an instrument of domination. As tourists, we

engage with the people of other nations on our own terms. The world's

administrators can flit from place to place enforcing their mandate. The

corporate jet-set shrinks the earth to fit its needs. Those with access to

the airplane. control the world.

The men who attacked New York and Washington on September 11 2001 drove one

symbol of power into another. The airplane., more precisely than any other

technology, represents the global ruling class. In the past we raised our

eyes to the men on horseback. Today we raise our eyes to the heavens.

Those hijackers had turned the civilian product of a military technology

back into a military technology, but even when used for strictly commercial

purposes, the airliner remains a weapon of mass destruction. Last week the

World Health Organization calculated that climate change is causing 150,000

deaths a year. This figure excludes deaths caused by drought and famine,

pests and plant diseases and conflicts over natural resources, all of which

appear to be exacerbated by global warming. Flying is our most effective

means of wrecking the planet: every passenger on a return journey from

Britain to Florida produces more carbon dioxide than the average motorist

does in a year. Every time we fly, we help to kill someone.

This morning, our government is expected to give a grand 100th birthday

present to the airplane. Despite almost 400,000 objections to the expansion

of airports in Britain, the transport secretary will announce new runways at

Stansted and Birmingham, and more flights to Heathrow. This, the government

hopes, will help accommodate a near-tripling of the number of journeys into

and out of Britain by 2030. By then the 400,000 won't be the only ones

wishing that Wilbur and Orville (if indeed they were responsible) had stuck

to mending bicycles.

The $1,000 those men spent on developing their beast is just about the only

expenditure on this doom machine that has not been state-assisted. All over

the world, the aircraft industry was built by means of government spending.

All over the world, it is sustained today through tax breaks and hidden

subsidies. Mysteriously exempt from both fuel duty and VAT, airlines in

Britain dodge some £10bn of tax a year. The airplane., in other words, is

still treated by governments as a social good.

This might have something to do with the fact that prime ministers and

presidents use it more often than anyone else. Or it might reflect the

perennial male obsession with the instruments of control.

Just as Alexander the Great worshipped his horse, George Bush, the new

conqueror of Persia, will tomorrow worship the airplane. Our societies are

built upon these technologies of war: the current world order fell from the

hatches of the airplane. At 10.35am, North Carolina time, George Bush and

the other enthusiasts for domination will bow down before it. The rest of us

should observe 12 seconds of silence, in commemoration of the deeds wrought

by those magnificent men in their killing machines.

© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003