By Marc Jampole
It’s so easy to kill an animated figure on a screen in a
video game. And then another, and then another, each of them so realistic in their
detail that they could almost be human. Pretty soon you’ve knocked off hundreds
of imaginary people.
Not so easy, though, for most of us to pull a trigger,
knowing that a bullet will rip through someone’s heart and stop their
existence. Perhaps we instinctively empathize with the victim and fear for our
own lives. Or maybe most of us kill with difficulty because the taboo against
killing is so strongly instilled in us, that moral sense that taking the life
of another human being is wrong, sinful?
The problem with all advanced military technologies is that
they turn war into a video game, and by doing so distance the possessors of the
technology from their adversaries. Whether the attack is by conventional bomber,
missile, drone or the robot weapons now under development that will make
decisions independently of their human masters, the technology turns the enemy
into video images. I know that this distancing leads to fewer deaths among the
attackers. But remote warfare dehumanizes the enemy and makes it easier to kill
lots of them without giving it a thought. The bombardier doesn’t see the
victims below, or if he can, they look like specks. The operator of the drone
is even farther away from his intended victims.
At a distance, distinguishing between terrorists and the
innocent is difficult, if not impossible, as the latest admission by President
Obama that our drones killed two hostages tragically demonstrates. Keep in
mind, this incident is just the latest drone fiasco. As the New York Times reports, every
independent investigation of our drone attacks has found far more civilian
casualties than administration officials admit. “When operators in Nevada fire missiles into remote tribal territories
on the other side of the world, they often do not know who they are killing,
but are making an imperfect best guess.”
For most of human history, it took a man to kill a man, or
perhaps a man to kill 10 men. Soldiers knew full well when they were killing
other soldiers and when they were killing civilians, and would often face the
full moral force of human society and history when they did the latter.
But now a small group of men can kill 70,000 people with the
push of a button, without even considering how many were children and adult
noncombatants. I use the number 70,000, because that’s how many people died
within hours when the United States dropped a rudimentary atomic bomb on
Hiroshima some 70 years ago.
By lowering the cost of battle in human terms, military
technology makes it easier for leaders, generals and military industrialists to
convince countries to go to war. It makes it easier to propose and implement
extreme acts of violence, both from the operational and the moral point of
view. Only afterwards, when we read that people we were trying to rescue were
killed in our drone attack or that from 150,000 to one million Iraqis died in
our war built on lies, only then do we recognize the enormity of our crimes and
the bad judgment that went into perpetrating them. Look how it easy was for
Obama, who voted against the Iraq War, to get sucked into using drones to
target terrorists.
We would have been better off without the invention of bombs
and missiles. We would have been better off without the invention of guns. But
those genies are out of the bottle. Let’s learn from our mistakes, though, and
stop the development of robot weapon systems and stop the use of military
drones.
Those who believe that it will be harder to fight the
terrorists without drones are living in a delusional world in which American
exceptionalism means we’re the only ones who bother manufacturing military
technology. Automated weapons efficiently kill the other side, whether it’s the
enemy or us. In a few years, the terrorists will also have military drones,
unless we stop their development and sign treaties to make sure no nation works
on them.
Of course, we can always develop the next generation of weaponry and continue our militaristic death spiral that started with machine guns, tanks and nerve gas.
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