freedom is love

In Star Trek: A Taste of Armageddon, the crew of the enterprise find themselves on a planet which claims to be in a state of war, but there are no clear signs of it. No explosions, no battered bodies, nothing.

As it turns out, the “war” is taking place on computer systems a la war games. When the computer simulation deems that an area has been “hit”, all inhabitants of that area report to disintegration chambers to meet their fate.

The local inhabitants claim that this is much more civilized than the wars that used to take place, and they accept it as a part of life in their modern society. However, the war has been going on for a very long time and it continues to take millions of lives.

Captain Kirk, being an outsider, has a different perspective. He notes that the bombs of war, the destructive power of all-out real war, the fear induced by the pain and the threat of pain; these things are what make it real, and make it worth avoiding. When it’s whitewashed, it’s too easy to just continue on with the war.

Rewind a couple of centuries, and bop out of fiction. 21st century America has been at war for years now. It sure doesn’t feel like it to me. Sure, I pay some taxes, and once in a while when I check the news I hear some vague things about US drones flying over Afghanistan or Iraq.

Drones. This is war at it’s cleanest so far, at least for us Americans. We don’t even have to send a real person anywhere near the place we want to bomb now. War is so cheap, so easy that we hardly even notice it happening.

How many armchair fox-news watching neocons do you think would still be pro-war if the abstraction was removed? If our guys were going over there and dying in the same numbers as we’re killing with our drones?

Or God forbid if we were being bombed by Afghani drones? How long would that situation last?

Perhaps we need some visitors from outer space to come break their prime directive and set us straight .

We have war, and killing, including as always some amount of killing of innocents.

Nobody wants to be responsible for that part! And perhaps nobody is, fully.

The soldier is only responsible for following the order to kill an innocent, or kill someone who may or may not be innocent, or perform an act which has a decent chance of killing some innocent bystanders. But he does not give the order.

The drone designer is only responsible for enabling the killing process to take place more efficiently. But he does not take part in any actual killing.

The drone pilot is responsible for killing from afar, but he neither gives the order nor sees the reality on the ground — he’s simply playing a video game.

The general is responsible for giving the broad order, but he doesn’t do any actual killing.

The president is responsible for allowing the war to continue, or in some cases even starting the war. But he’s very far removed from the killing.

The congress is responsible for allowing the president to usurp war powers and for funding the wars. But they’re not giving the order to go to war, that’s the president.

The voter is responsible for voting for someone who takes a position against his own conscience, because it is the “lesser of evils.” But how can he be blamed, he’s been given such crappy choices.

The taxpayer is responsible for footing the bill, for buying the bombs, for paying the soldiers and generals and drone factories. The dollar-holder is similarly responsible, for funding the war through the inflation of savings. But neither feels fully responsible, because taxes and inflation are not optional.

When we divide up responsibility like this, is it that nobody is responsible enough to consider the killing an act of their own volition? The soldier is just doing what the general tells him; the congress is just doing what the constituency seems to want; the taxpayer is just doing his civic duty. And we are all conveniently moving our thoughts away from our own role.