(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
Are we really aware of what the US's use of US drones for regular executions will mean in the future? This was discussed both in connection with the film Drone during a panel debate at the Nobel Peace Center this November, in the latest issue of the journal Vagant, and in new revelations made by the US online magazine The Intercept, which reveals alarming tendencies to militarize our surroundings.
It is believed that around 4000 people have been executed using drones in recent years. According to Tonje Hessen Schei, the director behind Drone, only two per cent of cases succeed in executing "high value militants". Most of those killed are civilians, but are nevertheless classified as enemies killed in fighting. Drone operator Brandon Bryant, the announcer featured in the film, told the Nobel Peace Center that only two percent of US politicians have military experience. The decisions behind the use of drones come from people who know little about what kind of hell war is and what it entails by trauma. Bryant himself is on the ISIS death list, and they have included his grandmother as well. His whole family despises him. Brandon also said that a report from US veterans (from 2009 – 2012) estimates that 22 former soldiers are killed daily because of trauma. If you investigate, the figure is probably lower if you take a longer period of time – but among the veterans in the US, 50 percent commits more suicides than in the rest of the US population.
Brandon himself was not far off when he struggled worst with self-contempt after killing 14 people via the computer screen. He was as far down as possible to come when he took with them both intelligence and heart what they had actually been dealing with. After writing an article in Der Spiegel, he ended up as a participant in the Norwegian film success Drone, and now travels the world with the film. Drone premieres in New York later in November.
The point is that it is urgent to have a reflected relationship with this. As it is written in the latest issue of Vagant (# 3 – 2015), it is the mentality that comes with this new surveillance and deadly technology that has the greatest impact on society. And then we are not talking exclusively about little girls in Pakistan, Yemen or Afghanistan who do not dare to play outside or go to school because they have seen or heard about innocents who get blown up in rags. Bryant even saw a little girl run to safety when she heard the drone he was leading. He had already shot at the building the little girl was running towards, so she was still killed by Bryant's hand. (See also the article "A Little Piece of Norway" on page 4.) We also talk about the general effects this has on our entire culture: What mental climate is it that has arisen? One thing is that many people in Pakistan and Afghanistan are now mostly in gray weather, since the drones prefer to fly under blue clear skies. Nevertheless, I mostly think of the dehumanization that is going on on a large scale. The distinction between war and peace is erased. When the United States has chosen to liquidate people – almost purge away so-called "terrorists" or people who can pose a danger even before they have done anything wrong – then we are in a new era, where human life is taken away without the possibility of any trial. This allegedly clinical, but more correct, cynical attitude toward fellow human beings has spread, so fear-creating propaganda about "the others" easily gets grounded. I am not the only one with a cousin who exclaims that "there are about 200 billion Islamists in the world!"
Interestingly enough describes Norway's perhaps most reflected journal of the time, Vagant, how Howard Hughes – a flier, filmmaker and entrepreneur and one of the world's richest – barricaded himself for his last ten years in hotel rooms, pulling down the curtains, throwing the clock and just sitting and watching movies over and over again. A retreat from the world he had conquered with his planes. "He wanted the world to be accessible, but at a distance," the article states. After setting speed records with his new airplanes at a man's age, followed by an enormous fatigue all over, the eccentric hermit isolated himself in the dark behind the screen.
How many of us have been passivated behind the scenes, as we see through news or the internet dead people and military operations, or war movies where you can hardly distinguish between reality and fiction? You look without looking at what we see, according to the philosopher Virilio (in the book Krig och Film, quoted in Vagant). Here we have a kind of third window where the world is illuminated without being visible, or in turn military strategies with invisible weapons that make visible, ie radar, sonar, spy satellites and now drones. The latter is also silent, so the noise should strategically create anxiety – no one should feel safe for the new ubiquitous form of power.
As the philosopher Grégoire Chamayou writes in the book Drone Theory (2015), "the strategy of militarized human hunting has been developed in part to avoid the internment of terror suspects in places such as Guantánamo". The new thing now, as mentioned in Vagant, is to encircle a small three-dimensional area, a so-called "kill box", whose virtual lid is opened and closed as needed if military operations are carried out outside conflict zones, ie where the suspect moves. We have thus, as Chamayou writes, "temporary autonomous slaughter zones".
The Peace Center panel, including philosopher Henrik Syse, was concerned about a future where drones are so automated that they kill off certain algorithms, where face recognition or suspicious behavior is the only criterion for launching a rocket. Before this is realized, we need to know that here in the "peace nation" Norway, a whole drone industry is being developed without significant political reflection, and without seeming to know what we are doing. (See article page 4.)
truls lie
