All I ask of "progressives" is a little...perspective. A little balance, at the very least!
I'm not like Joshua Foust. I don't justify drones in any way. I have grave misgivings about how moral it is to be battling by remote control as if you were in a video game like this. I'm not persuaded that the supposed good done from drones -- taking out various terrorist leaders who are known to attack US troops (and that's why I don't put "suspects" coyly around the term) -- outdoes the harm. The harm is turning the population against you if you have too much "collateral damage" -- or any, especially if it's children.I haven't been persuaded, like a lot of people, that the good achieved in curbing terrorism has been outweighed by the wrongs perpetrated against the innocents and the incitement of anger and hatred in the population.
But hey, let's get a little perspective on this, shall we? I don't even mean the perspective that might come from examining the actual terrorists killed and examining their actual bad deeds -- something that the press should do more of than it does.
I mean the perspective that comes from looking at other bad things in the region, and seeing what they're about, too, which, like Iraq, comes from admitting that the overwhelming majority of civilians are killed not by US troops or NATO troops but by the Taliban and its allies, i.e. terrorists.
Yesterday, I had to watch as all the liberal youth shared around with each other hundreds of thousands of times a picture taken with Instagram of a child's head in the sights of a sniper's gun. The child wasn't killed; it was just a picture of a sniper showing a child in his sights. This picture, whose provenance was said to be somewhere else online (which I couldn't find, using Google image search), was posted by a young IDF soldier. And so lefties like Jillian York @jilliancyork who has openly advocated a "one-state solution" that would involve obviously diluting the Israeli population deliberately and changing the nature of its society, were part of what spread this picture around (she has something like 26,000 followers around the world). Her comment? To put in scare quotes "the most humane army in the world". I don't know who says this or whether its an IDF motto, but I think we'd have to concede that by contrast to lots of other things in the world, including the US military, the IDF is more careful - it has gotten so through vast experience -- about trying to avoid the killing of civilians.
So today, we read all the stories of 90 Shi'a Pakistanis killed by Islamist terrorists who don't like their brand of Islam. That's just one day. Ninety people! People who were so angry that they refused to bury their dead in protest. Imagine, for Muslims whose religious ritual demands that they bury the dead quickly. Then, the pictures of Western news services of wailing people clinging to dead bodies with the headline "Letting Go," as if they need therapy, and a recognition of the Western-devised stages of grief, instead of continuing their outrage at the abnormality of losing civilians in this fashion, due to terrorism.
And none of those hundreds of thousands of Twitterers who could cluck in indignation at an Israeli soldier putting up an indecent and vicious picture of a sniper with a child in his sights could find it in their hearts to protest the mass murder of these 90 -- from one day. And there are incidents like that constantly, which is why the numbers of civilians killed by terrorists in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and Libya are so much greater than by any Western troops involved. Not to mention the 60,000 or more killed in Syria, many children. Never one-tenth of the rage about *that*, sponsored by Russia, in contrast with the fueld outrage of the BDS movement over Israel.
So along comes the New York Times, which in its quest for readership and clicks and revenue is now putting up cartoons and interactive thingies to try to attract the Internet children upon whom their future relies. The NYT would never have published such a crude, propagandistic screed in its pages as journalism or even an op-ed piece, but the lure of interactivity and visuals let them put up Drew Carie's clever anti-drone propaganda.
Propaganda, because he crudely portrays a KGB agent as gleefully gloating over the US "becoming not like itself" -- which of course only distracts from the fact that among the clients for drones in the world is Vladimir Putin, a real KGB agent who is really in power, not just in a cartoon. And so on.
Propaganda, because not only does he create a one-sided if funny cartoon without any sense of context about the rest of the world, he actually has the nerve to cite Zamyatin's We -- a work of literature protesting the Soviet Union -- and make it somehow morally equivalent to the United States.
Propaganda -- because to the extent the US has become like Jeremy's Panopticon, it's more due to Google than the NSA.
Propaganda -- because in fact, as the cartoon shows, forces opposed the use of drones in Seattle and stopped them.
My response below, in the NYT comments.
***
By making his fictional character as a KGB
man gleeful that America has become like his own agency, ostensibly from
the Cold War, he handily distracts from the fact that the real dangers
from drones will not come from America, which is a liberal democratic
state under the rule of law with a free press, but from Russia, which
still has an actual KGB agent as its leader, or China or other
authoritarian states that jail cartoonists like Drew Christie instead of
publishing them in a leading newspaper. It creates hysterical
self-absorption by the "progressives" who fuel their fantasy that
America is the greatest evil in the world.
Putting the focus on
the government's surveillance also has the function of distracting from
Google and Facebook other Big IT companies that do far more surveillance
of us, with our avid and enthusiastic participation, than any
government drone, and with far less recourse to due process. Google is
making an unmanned car and will be able to further scrape data from your
every movement once you start using it, and nobody is caring about
that, only big scary Obama drones or Seattle drones. I'm all for
watching those, as they shouldn't be run by the CIA and innocent people
have been killed by them and their families cannot even be compensated
because they are in a secret program.
As usual, there is no
perspective on the left. Obama kills two US citizens deemed to be
terrorists; in Pakistan in just one day, 90 Muslims were killed by their
fellow Muslims.