{"id":18050,"date":"2011-07-21T15:57:28","date_gmt":"2011-07-21T22:57:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/oooorgle.com\/BeyondTheCorral\/?p=18050"},"modified":"2014-11-17T20:54:35","modified_gmt":"2014-11-18T03:54:35","slug":"imperial-priorities-obedience-first-%e2%80%93-character-last","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/oooorgle.com\/BeyondTheCorral\/imperial-priorities-obedience-first-%e2%80%93-character-last\/","title":{"rendered":"Imperial Priorities: Obedience First \u2013 Character Last"},"content":{"rendered":"

FreedomInOurTime<\/a> | Singer recalls asking a drone pilot \u201cwhat it was like to fight insurgents in Iraq while based in Nevada. He said, `You are going to war for 12 hours, shooting weapons at targets, directing kills on enemy combatants, and then you get in the car and you drive home. And within 20 minutes, you\u2019re sitting at the dinner table talking to your kids about their homework.\u201d Meanwhile, somewhere in Iraq (or Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, Somalia, Yemen, or another country yet to be identified), families are picking through the rubble of their homes in the rapidly evaporating hope that their own children have somehow survived this most recent act of imperial generosity.<\/p>\n

Do such keyboard bombardiers ever experience misgivings about what they do? Perhaps \u2013 but the perverse fun is simply irresistible.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s like a videogame,\u201d one cyber-samurai told<\/a> Singer. \u201cIt can get a little bloodthirsty. But it\u2019s f****g cool.\u201d<\/p>\n

Oh. Well, alrighty then.<\/p>\n

But what happens when the novelty wears off, and conscience starts to press its claims? When \u201ccoolness\u201d loses its allure, conformity \u2013 displayed by obedience to \u201cauthority\u201d — will fill the void. \u201cIf his cause be wrong,\u201d insisted one of Henry V\u2019s soldiers in Shakespeare\u2019s rendering<\/a>, \u201cour obedience to the king wipes the crime of it out of us\u201d \u2013 even if this means waging aggressive war, murdering disarmed prisoners, and using the threat of mass rape and the slaughter of children to compel cities to surrender.<\/p>\n

For those on the delivering end, drone-facilitated atrocities seem utterly antiseptic. One scientist employed by the Pentagon to refine and expand the technology of remote-controlled mass murder \u201csaid that no ethical or legal issues arise from robots in war,\u201d Singer recalls. \u201cThat is, unless the machine kills the wrong people repeatedly,\u201d interjected the Strangelovian bureaucrat. \u201cThen it\u2019s just a product recall issue.\u201d<\/p>\n

Of course, the specific tool doesn\u2019t kill anyone; it is an instrument employed by a morally accountable human being to accomplish that end.\u00a0 We\u2019re not discussing Colossus<\/a>, or Skynet, the Cylons, or any of the other variations on the Golem legend that are common in science fiction. The Regime\u2019s apparatus of state slaughter is proudly described<\/a> by retired Lt. Col. John Nagle as \u201can almost industrial-scale \u2026 killing machine.\u201d Its most important components are individual Americans who have been taught that \u201csubmitting to authority\u201d validates any action, no matter how abhorrent, and sanctifies the indulgence of any appetite, nor matter how depraved.<\/p>\n

In the imperial hierarchy of values, obedience ranks much higher than moral integrity, particularly for those employed as agents of state-licensed violence. The Regime, both the federal level and through its state and local franchises at the state and municipal levels, has spent a great deal of money on subsidized \u201ccharacter\u201d instruction, paying special attention to the military and law enforcement<\/a>. Read Entire Article<\/a><\/p>\n


<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

FreedomInOurTime | Singer recalls asking a drone pilot \u201cwhat it was like to fight insurgents in Iraq while based in Nevada. He said, `You are going to war for 12 hours, shooting weapons at targets, directing kills on enemy combatants, and then you get in the car and you drive home. And within 20 minutes, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[294],"tags":[972,971,343],"class_list":["post-18050","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-article","tag-conscience","tag-drones","tag-war"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/oooorgle.com\/BeyondTheCorral\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18050","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/oooorgle.com\/BeyondTheCorral\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/oooorgle.com\/BeyondTheCorral\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oooorgle.com\/BeyondTheCorral\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oooorgle.com\/BeyondTheCorral\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18050"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/oooorgle.com\/BeyondTheCorral\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18050\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/oooorgle.com\/BeyondTheCorral\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18050"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oooorgle.com\/BeyondTheCorral\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18050"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oooorgle.com\/BeyondTheCorral\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18050"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}