The stinging metallic bees of death and destruction

 

The drones came and changed the war. They are more effective than fighter jets and ballistic missiles. A cost-effective mechanical killing by coordinates. Safe sustainable murders measured in pixels. Distance from the war fronts is no longer a measure of safety. Death is delivered remotely. An annihilative silence before sudden erasure, bodies falling, screens going dark.

Death no longer a tragic, intimate, bloody reality. It’s something remote, algorithmic, unblinking, surgical, clinical. Even death disembodied from its evil but still human game of providing chance at equal footing to the combatants, for blood at both ends, for casting the dice for either a win or loss. It’s completely bloodless at one end, the end that holds the cursor and clicks a command from a remote cozy coffee-tabled safe cocoon.  

When low on battery, having failed to attack a military target, the bloodless vultures can stealthily wait and then suddenly take off and attack some civilian target who happens to be near around—some jogger, cyclist, a couple in love or a car full of innocent civilians. Target locked autonomously by the mechanical agent of death, the machine-led relentless predatory prowl and then the precision kill.

Russia is honing the art of drone warfare: the dehumanized, mechanically calculated, cold, inhuman sky-borne violence. The drones smirk like gods without heartbeats. The killers who never blink an eye before slaughtering an innocent life. Death outsourced to these darkly buzzing angels in the sky.

Recently Israel used a bird drone to eliminate a Hezbollah leader in Lebanon. Soon we will have fly drones, followed by mosquito drones and still more mini drones, micro drones, to enter the next level of taking the frontlines to streets, courtyards, small alleys and bedrooms.

We have great capacity to manifest violence in myriad ways. A predilection to disarray, disorder and chaos. We are steeped in the tradition of violence.

Given the digital footprint, each global citizen can be scanned, surveyed, analyzed, condemned and punished by using these micro-drones without the sufferer realizing how and why did it happen.

A new kind of violence and punishment. From sporadic vicissitudes, war will turn an eternal reality. The air humming, buzzing with the underpinnings of some lethal machine barely visible to the naked human eyes.

War reduced to cursor’s movement. Fingers which never touch blood can safely fly steel vultures in the sky to unleash a violence with no witnesses. Massacres would turn mere footage. Just footage.