She looks up and pleads for mercy. Then the drone operator makes the decision to kill her.
We get to see the life and death of war, the intimate terror as the mostly young are killed on the battlefield. Social media accounts share the misery with pornographic delight, the human beings in fear and pain who die are props or disregarded as objects. For a gaming addicted online world, maybe they are just seen as NPC’s.
If they are a Ukrainian, then some take glee at the thought of their destruction as though it is a slight against their government or Western foreign policy itself. If it’s a Russian then the soldiers may as well be a flesh and blood effigy of Putin. It seems that put simply they are not people. The woman killed, likely a press ganged Russian prisoner serving on the front line to commute her sentence. She can only watch as the machine kills her. We have seen other soldiers begging, praying and some defiantly swatting at the machines. The cheap drones are easier to make than human beings.
In another clip a young Russian soldier hides behind a tree, the drones find her. One watches her while another hunts her down. She runs, fires her weapon then the drone explodes. The shrapnel tearing her down. Fellow soldiers come to her aid. From high above the drone operator watches as they tend to her wounds. Minutes pass as she lays in pain while her comrades do what they can. Another killer drone strikes. Death.
The comments speculate and celebrate the deaths. Others articulate with autistic clarifications that no one asked for. Others stream in with indifferent sloganeering, disdainful and politically charged. Then putrid words of a generation fed on memes, gaming, it’s all funny to them. Now that we see women soldiers dying, the “equal rights and equal lefts,”spew onto the screen. It’s entertaining. The dystopian realities of nightmares that were once fiction are on our screens and for those in distant lands it’s their day to day and night by night.
We are all in the city now, watching with deplorable voyeurism those distant die and fight. Online for many war is The Hunger Games. Those who adore government cheer for the policies that fund mass murder, the orgies of death that snatch generations and communities and now through our screens we watch or pretend it isn’t happening. Some excited and thrilled by what they see others moan about their mental health, while wanting more more more. They just won’t watch what they support.
Western Values…
The mantra churns on that for some reason a set of dignities and honourable conduct permeates from only the West, it is in the Western man that a set of values exist. And here we witness many Westerners online cheer for the death of innocent people because they are Palestinian. Eagerly calling for a genocide of an entire population because they are Jews. And, as we see in the Ukraine-Russian war Western domestic politics infects the thinking and sense of human decency. The combatants are proxies not for national foreign policy, rather it seems at times for domestic politics.
To kill surrendering soldiers, is often at least imagined to be a wrong. Whether it was universally observed or not matters little, the belief that it was and should be viewed as wrong is understood and yet as we see from the drones perspective, if they are Russian, Ukrainian or Palestinian or Israeli, whatever ones bigotry decides then they should be killed. Even if unarmed and surrendering.
“So much death.”
In a late 2024 interview a Ukrainian drone operator, “Siri” wept as she was filmed in action, killing Russians from behind a screen. The twenty-two year old had not just witnessed death but she was the killer. She had only been in the army for a year and is now a veteran of the modern form of combat. The university graduate has likely killed more than just tanks or men in active combat, but those sleeping, eating, surrendering or even tending to a fallen comrade.
Though, that’s war.
The callous calculation is that we should accept that war allows for all forms of death, pain, torture and suffering. It is that special exemption when those who believe themselves to be moral can either directly or via proxy accept and tolerate great evils.
Now we can watch on with shock and indifference or excitement and sadness as the drones are perfected with greater versatility. Improving optics allow us to see the whites of the eyes of those who are about to die. Soon, we can even hear the prayers as soldiers and civilians alike beg for a reprieve. And eventually “Siri” will be obsolete, the drones will operate themselves, to kill anyone with who looks a certain way, is in a specific uniform or who is not wearing a Friend or Foe tag on them.
Killing by drones is not new, it’s now as accepted as a weapon of war as the rifle. It shall evolve and will become a device to govern, police and impose imperial policy while also to be used for crime, terror and liberation. But the rifle is not self shooting yet, drones however very soon shall be.
It’s just war. As it always has been, and always will be. The machines will learn from us, we will teach them and as those far from danger watch on with indifference or perhaps sadistic delight, maybe in time the machines will do humanity better than we have.
