Drone porn hits Youtube
(Updated)
Image by Getty Images via Daylife
The Defense Department recently began placing the Predator and Reaper mission clips on YouTube. Ranging from relatively detached wide shots of bombings taken by onboard cameras to startlingly graphic close-ups, the so-called “drone porn” has been a smash hit, as it were, tallying over 10 million views.
Now, I don’t want to launch into a “kids these days” diatribe about how the human race is de-evolving into a pack of bloodthirsty, warmongering savages. I don’t believe video games, or violent films, make kids any less human or more prone to attack each other. However, I do blame a disconnection from the consequences of battle for this kind of war fetishism.
The drone footage looks like a video game (admittedly a shitty one,) and of course the footage doesn’t show the targets’ lives (if they had a family, what their favorite book is, when they had their first kiss, etc.) The clips don’t even really show their faces. They are anonymous targets. The US military tells us these are The Bad Guys, so they are guilty, and deserve to die. Trials: unnecessary. Evidence: superfluous.
The “drone porn” phenomenon is nothing new. In fact, the entire military is a powerful hierarchy of the “fucker” and the “fuckee” as Alicia Simoni explains using a passage from the book Jarhead: A Marine’s Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles. This is how author Anthony Swofford describes his first day as a scribe in the Marine Corps, when he learned the language of the military:
“Now, hands were dickskinners, the mouth was a cum receptacle, running shoes were go-fasters, a flashlight was a moonbeam, a pen was an ink stick, a bed was a rack, a wall was a bulkhead, a bathroom was a head, a shirt was a blouse, a tie was still a tie and a belt a belt, but many other things would never be the same.”
With that kind of frame already in place, it’s easy to see how anything — even drone footage — gets its personalized sex jargon.
Additionally, the very nature of a drone attack makes war highly impersonal. The army itself seems self-conscious that war has shifted from a level playing field between two equally armed, uniformed foes, to the US military obliterating faceless targets from thousands of miles away with the help of drones.
All of the army’s commercials still feature young men and women doing heroic things like jumping out of helicopters and caring for injured brown children in some foreign-looking field.
No army commercial shows Steve pushing a button located in Creech Air Force Base, Nevada to kill a Pakistani thousands of miles away. That might look boring — at worst, cowardly.
“If you watch these commercials for the military, they still show people jumping out of airplanes, but in reality, they’re actually closing all of these parachuting schools, and there hasn’t been a parachute invasion in like 70 years,” says SPC Michael Anthony, a former operating room medic in Iraq, and author of Mass Casualties.
But the drone aspects of war are also clearly appealing to young people. The “point and shoot” video games are all the rage right now, which is partly why drone porn exists. Yet, the moral hazards of such extrajudicial killings are never explored in video games, or drone attacks, and all the usual human safeguards against killing during a ground invasion (namely that you have to look your target in the eye while killing them with your bare hands) are no longer an obstacle. Long ago, hand-to-hand combat gave way to guns, which gave way to better guns, which gave way to human-navigated aerial assault that has now been replaced by robotic drones.
It’s never been easier to kill each other, or rather, for the fucker to kill the fuckee. And the fucker is whoever has the most bombs, which happens to be the US military.
“Drones are a technological step that further isolates the American people from military action, undermining political checks on . . . endless war,” says Mary Dudziak, a professor at the University of Southern California’s Gould School of Law.
Since the army is all about conquest and pillaging, it makes sense that sex (albeit more like rape) is so intimately related to war. Drone porn simply takes depersonalized war to its logical conclusion.
* Update: A reader sent me this extraordinary passage from a Conservative’s blog:
IED = Coward
This is the way that cowards, who are supposedly willing to die for Allah, fight. If they were so sure of those 72 virgins awaiting them, why would they use remote detonators instead of fighting to-to-toe like real men?
“Instead of fight toe-to-toe like real men.” Who is he talking about, exactly? The cowards navigating robotic drones from thousands of miles away, or the ground forces armed to the teeth with thousands of dollars of vastly superior weaponry? Or the bloggers jerking off to their fantasies of glorious battle?
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Allison,
I must disagree that the Army is all about ‘conquest and pillaging’. That is a rather trite statement. While I agree that posting these videos on YouTube is in very poor taste – a blanket condemnation of our soldiers seems a little over the top. They are doing their duty – slam the leadership (both civilian and military) for extremely poor judgment.
I fail to understand this thing many have with separating the perpetrators from deeds.If its the grunts that are doing the fucking its the grunts that should get the blame.
In response to another comment. See in context »So – you support anarchy in the military? Suggest that you should only obey orders when it suit you? You know (or perhaps YOU don’t), the orders they swore to obey, upon joining the military.
Your average soldier is not fighting, killing and dying for Bush or Obama. They are doing this for their buddies, their squad mates.
Unless you believe we can continue to live as a free nation with no military at all. A blanket condemnation like that deserves no respect as it demonstrates little to no knowledge of what our service people’s lives are like – get real.
In response to another comment. See in context »[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by allisonkilkenny and jamiekilstein, jamiekilstein. jamiekilstein said: RT @trueslant Drone porn hits Youtube – Allison Kilkenny – Unreported – True/Slant http://ow.ly/1njvVd [...]
It’s always struck me as strange that our reaction to fears that violence in the media is desensitizing kids to violence is to allow kids to see only cartoon violence with no blood: in other words, to shield kids from the consequences of violence.
Given that it’s hopeless to shield kids from violence entirely, it seems like our approach should be just the opposite: to give kids access to media that shows the tragic consequences of violence, as disturbing as they can be. Building these counternarratives is the only way to be sure we don’t take violence lightly.
It’s disturbing that we tend to view themes related to violent defeat (or victimization) as “adult,” but images of violent triumph as suitable for children.
But Allison, this is all brought to us by Obama 1.0, who is also bringing us all affordable health care……and Obama is going to be compassionate with us americans who refuse to sign up for obamacare, he isn’t going to kill us, he will only fine and jail us…
Although drones look like a new miracle weapon, they are bound to have serious and unpredictable side effects, side effects for which we have to pay later. The “Collateral damage” (killing of innocent civilians) which the drones are inflicting will inflame hatred toward America. Each time a drone attack kills an innocent person, it hands al-Qaeda a propaganda victory.
Being attacked by remote control will make the terrorists feel superior to an adversary who obviously is too much of a coward to confront them in person.
The local population feels terrorized by the United States because we are killing people by remote control on their home soil. The population will support al-Qaeda, because al-Qaeda is fighting their common adversary. Terrorizing a civilian population will only strengthen its resolve, as I learned while growing up in Germany during World War II. The Allies were bombing the German cities, terrorizing and killing the civilian population. This terror bombing, rather than weakening the population’s resolve, increased their determination to resist. It was a matter of survival.
The operator of the drone, safely based at some Air Force base in Nevada, pushes a button to kill by remote control. Killing Pakistanis thousands of miles away, as if it was a video game. At the end of his shift of killings this operator safely goes home to his family. Unless such a drone operator is already a psychopath to begin with, he is bound to eventually experience guilt and post traumatic stress when he finally realizes what he has done to other human beings, to innocent people and their families.
It will only be a matter of time before the drones come home to roost. The Immigration Department is already using drones on the border with Mexico. How long will it be before our government will use drones to spy on its own citizens, or shoot at “outlaws”?