In the past those of us distant from war could only see it in the print media and television. It was curated with the intent to gain sympathy, or conceal the brutality of those who we were supposed to be sympathetic for. As censored as it was at times graphic, though it was just in fragments. Now, we have an endless stream of images and video. If we dare to see them.
War is a peculiar thing, it allows for the most horrible to occur on a grand scale. It is precisely because of the scale of such acts and who is committing them, that the insufferable horror continues on. Despite the savagery and suffering, it’s articulated to have great meaning. In the parliaments, lecture halls, on television panels, on podcasts and in the comment sections of social media, it’s given context or debated. The suffering, the innocent, those in pain, the dead and the mourning victims or deserving, depending on ones narrative. Online it’s usually content, watermarks of @accounts, phonk sountracks, AI slopovers narrating and X threads turning the footage lifted from another’s telegram channel into a revenue post.
A human being or entire populations, forfeit. They don’t matter or simply are described to be deserving of their suffering. These opinions and views are not held or spoken by brutes, but by elected officials, common people, bots and bot brained posters a like. It’s not a pariah opinion, in most cases it’s an allowable one. An opinion that is rewarded. An opinion of mature sophistication, considerable delicacy of intellect but also one of base tribalism. It’s both, depending on whose espousing it. To be antiwar, not pacifist but opposed to the slaughter of the innocent, to collective punishment of regions or groups, is devalued as childish, immature. Unsophisticated. Naive.
Beyond the voyeur, in a distant field.
A lone Russian man, young, tired. Resigned to his fate as a drone hovers around him. The open grass field he is in, cold and empty. He has nowhere to run, even if he could. He can’t surrender because the suicide drone has one mission, to kill. The man sits, his head lowered. There is no mercy, no humanity. The distant drone operator steeled by idealism, or revenge or maybe apathy, is far away. The drone lingers. Hesitation from the killer? Or maybe torment? Perhaps a conversation is being had, to kill or not? The man waits. The decision is made. The drone detonates. Another life gone. A dead man. A son, A brother, A lover, A friend, A comrade. Now Dead.
On that same social media feed, a young boy with a bullet hole punched through his chest, lays limp. Palestinian, barely ten. Shot by an Israeli soldier. The parliaments, lecture halls, podcasts, television, comment sections discuss, debate, cheer and condemn. They can afford to, it’s not their child. It’s not them. The civilised conjure up definitions of genocide, whether the child deserved to die or who is really to blame. The soldier pulling the trigger, had no choice it’s claimed. The child is dead. Murdered. Except in war, when nation states wage them, murder is an ugly word that gets contextualised away. A little boy, among thousands more, remains dead.
You see, it’s not immoral or even a war crime, whatever that means, when it’s them dying. The Russian man, maybe still a teenager, is an invader. A Russki. The Palestinian boy, belongs to a pariah group according to the civilised West and it can be figured, is close enough to fighting age. Ten year old male, old enough to arrest, torture and kill. Soon, it’s argued, he will be a terrorist. Radicalised, a threat. Better to snuff him out now. Argues some in parliaments to podcasts to comment sections. He’s just a child under any other context.
There is nothing to be gained in appealing to reason or consistency. Invader! It’s easy to mention the allied and US invasions of foreign lands. That’s meaningless. That is how exceptionalism works. This soldier, is not an American, or doesn’t speak English at least. Therefore his participation in an invasion or police action, is illegal, immoral. He is the enemy, there is no mercy. The purported values and dignities of Western civilisation, they don’t matter. Or they only matter when an enemy is revealed as brutish, inhumane, lacking in such values.
The little boy, he belongs to a pariah race, a people that are the other. He may as well be a ‘Gypsie’, another group still mostly allowed to be hated and despised, suspect. He may as well be a Jew in Europe’s own past. In these examples he is a savage, not a boy or child. Another creature. That is how it’s possible to kill so many, make sure that enough of the world agrees. Enough of the influential, powerful agree or don’t care. It’s how you can starve millions to death from Yemen, Iraq to last centuries Germany in that first Great war. It’s how you can carpet their bomb cities, or stuff them into carriages to be gassed, bayoneted or shot to death. They are subhuman, vermin. The civilised and those with values, often declare it as such.
One can as easily find the denials. It’s not really happening. It’s fake. Manufactured. The moral side is that precisely because it claims to be. The same Nazi German government that invited the Red Cross and Allied POWs to inspect the mass graves of the Poles massacred by the Soviets at Katyn, were themselves responsible for countless other massacres, genocides. Grandstands of moral virtue signalling. Countless commies will claim that the Katyn massacre never occurred or that the Soviets themselves were never that bloodthirsty and oppressive. Jew-haters will also claim that the Nazi’s were incapable of mass genocide, even one of such a scale that the term holocaust has now become Holocaust,inc. Denial is a form of enabling. The dead children in Palestine, some claim that’s not happening as well.
Arguments and debates become digital wallpaper, entertainment. Comment sections polluted by bots and paid posters blending with the ideological and trolls. The definitions of morality and right and wrong or good and evil, ever fluid. Non-binary-moral. Ever in transition depending on who does it, and who is killed. Everything is fluid, especially murder.
Soon there won’t be a human peering through the screen while operating the drone, guiding it to hunt and kill. Will automation change anything? Indiscriminate and intentional murder of the innocent is ancient, technology and institutions of civility, laws and religion only seemed to have enhanced it. The gladius wielding Romans could commit a genocide as easily as the National Socialist empire of Germany with 20th century science. If the human killers and those distant humans, lack empathy, compassion and a regard for human dignity, how will a machine be any worse.
Maybe the machine with it’s logic and reason and rationales, a lack of ideological vileness, no religious contradictions, no sociopathic desire and greedy incentives, will be less evil? Who knows? The question remains, what does it say about us? Despite so much literature, achievement, apparent love of a creator or ages of reason, and atheistic morality that embraces justice and rights. Here we are.
“And when they were in the field, Cain stood up against his brother Abel and killed him.”
May as well be Johnny Reb bayoneting Billy Yank or a distant drone operator steering an exploding drone into a man in a grass field. It seems that despite all of these faiths, ideological versions of control, Utopian coercion’s and monopolies of order, the result is the same.
Maybe evil never existed. It’s just us. Humanity invented the devil and moral frameworks to satiate our spirit for murder with alibi, and excuse. God Wills It! or the Devil steered a hand, To kill for empire, nation or as a reaction to empire, nation. To kill for conquest, for freedom. To kill for spiritual nirvana or economic Utopia. To kill for jealousy, greed, hatred, lust, or just because. The reasons may vary, the killers always there. The State makes it legal or illegal. To murder is immoral regardless of the States reasons.
The soldier, his body in a field, ripped to pieces. That little boy, held by weeping family members. Another lost. I want to say it’s pointless, but it isn’t. Not for the killers and advocates of the killing. There is a goal, an ambition. Whether it’s policy or conquest. That is what drives them. The victims, they are not allowed to exist or live in peace. That should be understood as evil. But we are educated to understand it’s complicated. The benefactors decided.
The purity of evil gets washed, domesticated and civilised. Many may say they hate war, most believe that they are not evil. Some even do everything in their ability to not be like that, to reject it. We need the idea of good-evil to exist to pretend we are capable of being better, to believe that we can be good, are good. But most seem to only believe in the lesser evil, that being their side. They also believe that the end, justifies the means. That being whatever nationalist, ideological, cultural, political or religious end or simply put whatever satisfies greed and comfort. Or, they don’t care.
The soldier is dead. The little boy, dead. More to follow. That’s evil. But apparently it’s not.
