https://www.noemamag.com/the-shrouded-sinister-history-of-the-bulldozer
According to an 1881 obituary in a Louisiana newspaper, the word "bulldozer" was coined by a German immigrant named Louis Albert Wagner, who later committed suicide by taking a hefty dose of opium dissolved in alcohol. Little else is recorded about Wagner, but his term became a viral sensation in late 1800s America, going from street slang to dictionary entry in just one year. It likely originated from a shortening of "bullwhip," the braided tool used to intimidate and control cattle, combined with "dose," as in quantity, with a "z" thrown in for good measure. To bulldoze was to unleash a dose of coercive violence.
If, like gods, we aspire to create machines in our own image, then it's fitting that the original bulldozers were humans. Leading up to the corrupted U.S. election of 1876, as the Southern states were being reconstructed following the Civil War, terrorist gangs of predominantly white Democrats roamed about, threatening or attacking Black men who they thought might vote for the Republican Party. The thugs were the bulldozers, and the acts they carried out were bulldozing.
It's not commonplace to associate bulldozers with war, and yet they were as important to the Allied victory as the aircraft engine, the radar or the atomic bomb. "Of all the weapons of war," wrote Colonel K.S. Andersson of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in 1944, "the bulldozer stands first. Airplanes and tanks may be more romantic, appeal more to the public imagination, but the Army's advance depends on the unromantic, unsung hero who drives the `cat.'" The war was largely defined by control of the air, and airplanes needed airfields within operating range of their targets. If dispatched from seafaring aircraft carriers, then those ships needed docks and dry docks. And those airfields, docks and dry docks needed bases and road systems. In essence, for airplanes to stay mobile as the front shifted across the planet, an entire network of ordinarily immobile infrastructure had to become mobile to. Bulldozers move wars.
The bulldozer in this view was a creator, not a destroyer. Yet the legacy of that period still scars Guam, where the rainforest has fallen silent. The ships that brought the machines during and after World War II may have also accidentally carried with them an invasive species: the brown tree snake. With no natural predators, its population exploded, turning Guam into one of the most snake-infested places on Earth, wiping out 10 of its 12 native forest bird species by the 1980s and nearly erasing the sound of wild birdsong. Those birds used to eat the spiders and now there are too many of them, too.
But "illegality" in the built environment is extremely common in India. In Delhi alone, estimates suggest that anywhere between 30% and 80% or more of properties could be considered illegal.
"For many marginalized groups around the world, heavy earthmoving equipment has often been the visible part of the faceless bureaucratic megamachine that runs roughshod through communities in the name of urban renewal, beautification or 'slum' clearance."
"It was clear that it was only Muslim houses being targeted," [Fahad] Zuberi told me. In the wake of the demolitions, BJP politicians publicly celebrated them as a form of "vigilante justice," and the phenomenon became known as "bulldozer raj" (rule by bulldozer). The anti-Muslim overtones were clear: in a now-deleted Twitter post from 2022, a BJP spokesperson equated the letters JCB with "jihadi control board."
Around the country that year, widespread glorification of the machine engulfed certain sections of society. Processions of JCB vehicles started appearing at BJP political rallies, adorned in flowers and carrying people in their buckets, while crowds of onlookers waved toy bulldozers in the air. Pop songs about the machines racked up millions of hits on YouTube. Grooms rode to weddings atop earthmovers, and shops sold "JCB Gorilla" condoms - further emphasis on the machine's enduring associations with a particular notion of hypermasculine heroism. At a mass wedding in March, newlywed couples were given toy bulldozers as gifts to "symbolize the victory of good over evil and also order in life," according to a guest at the event.
JCB, or J.C. Bamford Excavators Limited, is a U.K. company founded in 1945 by Joseph Cyril Bamford, who began by making agricultural machines from war surplus materials in a rented garage. Today, the company is among the world’s largest manufacturers of construction machinery [...] The company is now run by Bamford’s son, Lord Anthony Bamford. 2024 was a good year for Bamford and his family, one of the wealthiest in the U.K. [...] Renowned as both a flamboyant socialite and political kingmaker, he’s among the top donors to the U.K. Conservative Party and is close friends with former Prime Minister Boris Johnson, whose wedding he hosted in 2022. Bamford is also currently being investigated for hundreds of millions of pounds in tax avoidance. He and his wife, Lady Carole Bamford, live in the Cotswolds, a quaint pastoral utopia for the U.K.’s rich and famous, in a Georgian mansion once owned by a former British governor-general of India [...] The day after the destruction in Jahangirpuri, Lord Bamford happened to be in India with Johnson, who was still the U.K. prime minister. They were inaugurating a new JCB factory in Gujarat, the home state of India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi. At one point, Johnson climbed into the cab of a machine and leaned out to wave at photographers. Neither he nor Bamford made any comments to the press about the violence in Delhi.
A bomb is a clear and blatant act of violence, but a bulldozer can appear banal and bureaucratic. The violence the machine enacts is slow, rumbling, grinding, drawn out. Not an instantaneous vaporization.
In the spring of 2022, Russian soldiers looted 27 machines worth nearly $5 million from a John Deere dealership in Melitopol, Ukraine, and shipped them 700 miles back to Russia. But when they tried to turn the machines on, they had been remotely "kill-switched" by the dealership. What enabled this remote disabling was a practice known as "VIN-locking," which manufacturers use to prevent unauthorized repairs to their products, instead requiring a licensed or official company technician to do so. It is a controversial practice that has been at the heart of the "right-to-repair" debate in the U.S. and has resulted in widespread "tractor hacking" by farmers who wish to mend their own equipment. As the sci-fi author and tech journalist Cory Doctorow wrote in his analysis of the Melitopol story, "The technology was not invented to thwart Russian looters... [I]t was invented to thwart American farmers."
Ralph Waldo Emerson [in a book of essays "The Conduct of Life"], in one chapter titled "Fate," Emerson sought to address "the question of the times" - "How shall I live?" he wrote: "You have just dined, and, however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity."
