Denmark Vesey: A New Bomber with No Pilot? The Secular Satanic Impications of Killing People With Machines

Monday, April 14, 2008

A New Bomber with No Pilot? The Secular Satanic Impications of Killing People With Machines

First it was missile-bearing drones. Now pressure is growing on the Air Force to make its next bomber remote-controlled.

"Anyone who has been paying attention to the wars the U.S. is now waging in Iraq, Afghanistan and — yes — Pakistan, knows that the U.S. military and the CIA have mastered a new way of killing "bad guys". Instead of dispatching pilots into hostile skies to dodge enemy missiles and anti-aircraft fire, they're increasingly targeting suspects using missiles and bombs carried on unmanned drones, some of them controlled from as far away as greater Las Vegas. Advocates say such unmanned systems are just as accurate, cheaper and don't put U.S. personnel at risk." TIME

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"There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized."

The founders of the American state understood that the proper functioning of a democracy required an educated electorate. It is this understanding that justifies a system of public education and that led slaveholders to resist the spread of literacy among their chattels. But the meaning of "educated" has changed beyond recognition in two hundred years. Reading, writing, and arithmetic are no longer sufficient to decide on public policy. Now we need quantum mechanics and molecular biology. The knowledge required for political rationality, once available to the masses, is now in the possession of a specially educated elite, a situation that creates a series of tensions and contradictions in the operation of representative democracy.

Margaret Sanger. Woman, Morality, and Birth Control. New York: New York Publishing Company, 1922. P

Lord Bertrand Russell, The Impact of Science On Society (Routledge Press: New York, 1951).

"At present the population of the world is increasing at about 58,000 per diem. War, so far, has had no very great effect on this increase, which continued throughout each of the world wars.. War has hitherto been disappointing in this respect, but perhaps bacteriological war may prove effective. If a Black Death could spread throughout the world once in every generation, survivors could procreate freely without making the world too full. The state of affairs might be unpleasant, but what of it?"