This is another brief Nederlog in the
crisis series. It's theme is future wars in this century, that I
expect are very likely to come and also will be quite horrible, though
they may also solve - or perhaps "solve" or at least dissolve - many of
the current problems (global warming, economic crisis), namely by
removing most of the human players, for example by drones of war.
And here is how - which also shows why it
will seem very feasible to many politicians, namely without any losses
to Our Side, except perhaps in cute gadgets, that can be manufactured
cheaply and in large numbers:
Professor
Kumar of Penn State showing
some of the Brave New World to come (Youtube 16 min)
There is lot more on the theme - I mean
drones: small flying objects, possibly directed from the other side of
the globe - on the internet, and the reader should realize that what
professor Kumar shows, while undoubtedly clever, also is very probably
not the latest, and that Real Soon Now one may not be able to say
oneself whether what one sees or hears buzzing by in the shade is a
mosquito or a drone spying on one, while it also is mapping one's
house, as shown near the end of the video.
Indeed, the first deaths by drones have
occurred already. Here is a link to a Fox News article of September
last that shows how things have changed under "Yes We Can" Obama:
That is, not only does the U.S.
government kill its own citizens these days as if that is a matter of
course: It does so by way of drones, if that seems a convenient way to
get it done.
Next, here is an article of today on NPR,
by someone who has been following the war by drones for six years:
Foreign
Policy: My Drone War
I quote from the article, namely its
first paragraph and from the body of the article:
"We don't even sit together to chat
anymore," the Taliban fighter told me, his voice hoarse as he combed
his beard with his fingers. We were talking in a safe house in Peshawar
as the fighter and one of his comrades sketched a picture of life on
the run in the borderlands of Waziristan. The deadly American drones
buzzing overhead, the two men said, had changed everything for al Qaeda
and its local allies.
(...)
This is how it has gone with the drone
war, a beat I have covered for six years, first for Newsday and
then the New York Times. By the time I left Pakistan in the
summer of 2010, the job had become nearly impossible, though it had
always been a dauntingly difficult story to tell. The drone campaign is
one of the U.S. government's most secret programs. Although the
most authoritative study on the subject, by the New America
Foundation last year, calculated that 283 drone strikes had occurred in
the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region since 2004, Obama never even
publicly acknowledged them until this past January.
It doesn't make me more optimistic: Soon,
most of mankind can be taken out or spied on with the help of drones,
possibly no larger than a mosquitos, and mass produced for little
money, and directed from some bunker somewhere on the globe, by who
knows who for who knows what end.
The reason why I am not optimistic? War
and history show that whatever can be abused will be abused, by humans,
if it seems to assist Our Side, and that will also be deemed Good by
Our Side or indeed "God's
Will":
"Actions are held to be good or bad,
not on their own merits but according to who does them, and there is
almost no outrage - torture, the use of hostages, forced labour, mass
deportations, imprisonments without trial, forgery, assassination, the
bombing of civilians, which does not change its moral colour when it is
committed by 'our' side." (The Collected Essays, Journalism and
Letters of George Orwell, vol 3, p. 419)
