Homo whataboutus, Homo belligerensis: A field guide to some new species in times of war

Walking through a mesh of memories of death and destruction requires endurance – as I found out while visiting the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City in March.

The photographs recapping the Vietnam war do not let you look away. And the museum does not bother with euphemisms. It simply shows you what happens when nations decide that bombs are a form of diplomacy.

There is the iconic photograph of a girl running naked down a road, her skin burning from napalm. Villages turned into charcoal sketches of themselves. American soldiers posing with severed human heads like trophies. Farmers lying where their rice fields once promised harvests.

Then there are the victims of Agent Orange, the experimental chemical warfare that stripped millennia-old forests and left behind children born with deformities – even foetuses with six eyes and three mouths.

If Vietnam was not sobering enough, a few days later I went to Cambodia to the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum: a former school that the Khmer Rouge converted into a torture centre. Under the dictatorship of Pol Pot, nearly two million Cambodians were systematically murdered in a campaign that combined ideological purity with chilling logistical efficiency.

Two days later, while still in Cambodia, came the news of the US-Israel...

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