The machine that only Kills: Epistemology of Fear, Normalization of Extermination and the Decline of the Word
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https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8243-757X
Abstract
This article reads H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1898) not as mere science fiction, but as a text with epistemic status: a radical allegory of modern extermination and one-sided violence without reply. Building on Wells’s explicit reference to the systematic destruction of the Tasmanian Aboriginal people, the article argues that the novel crystallises a matrix of ontological asymmetry in which one pole is reduced to sheer vulnerability and the other becomes a killing machine that does not negotiate. Through a phenomenology of flight (the “running body” with no possible refuge) the essay traces a genealogy from Tasmania to the bombing of Guernica, the Nanjing Massacre, Hiroshima, Vietnam, and contemporary forms of necropolitics: drones, sanctions, militarised borders, algorithmic warfare. Drawing on debates on the coloniality of power (Quijano, 2000), the coloniality of knowledge (Mignolo, 2012), structural and gendered violence (Segato, 2003), and necropolitics (Mbembe, 2003), it contends that Wells’s Martian machine anticipates a historical regime that has now become global: a system that normalises death without mourning, empties victims’ words of efficacy, and renders the witness increasingly powerless. Within this framework, the essay calls for an archive of a disappearing world: a practice of writing and memory that, even if it cannot stop the machine, resists its claim to erase entirely the experience of those who flee and are annihilated.
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