« The Jewish Solidarity SpinNetanyahu Appoints Hardline Peace Negotiator »

Why Elites Love Drones

May 21st, 2015

Robert J. Burrowes

I sometimes read that drone strikes are counterproductive to western security interests because each person killed by a drone results in more new 'terrorists'. See, for example, 'The more civilians US drones kill in the Mideast, the more radicals they create'. http://rt.com/op-edge/252705-drone-operation-us-strategy-military/

However, this analysis completely fails to understand what is driving elite military policy, carried out by the United States elite and key elite allies within NATO and elsewhere. In brief: drone strikes work precisely because they provoke violent responses which help elites to 'justify' their perpetual war to secure control of the world's diminishing supplies of fossil fuels, water and strategic minerals while tightening control of domestic populations through expansion of the security and surveillance state.

Elites want more violence. They are unconcerned that innocent civilians are killed. In fact, they kill civilians deliberately. See, for example, 'Israel "directly targeted" children in drone strikes on Gaza, says rights group'

http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/rania-khalek/israel-directly-targeted-children-drone-strikes-gaza-says-rights-group and '41 men targeted but 1,147 people killed: US drone strikes – the facts on the ground'. http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2014/nov/24/-sp-us-drone-strikes-kill-1147

Violence, particularly by demonised 'others' who often have to be seriously provoked into responding with violence, makes it easier to scare domestic populations into accepting restraints on their civil liberties, massive military expenditure at the cost of domestic social and environmental programs, military attacks against innocent 'foreigners' and massive profits for those few corporations and individuals who benefit from military spending.

Attacks by drones on innocent civilians, such as wedding parties in Afghanistan, serve the purpose of provoking retaliatory responses brilliantly. And by not mentioning the violence that provokes the retaliations while emphasising the retaliations themselves, elites and their agents are able to 'justify' western military policy for those not paying much attention or gullible enough to believe the warped perspective presented by compliant academics and the corporate media.

So do elites want to kill people just to make a profit? No. It's not that simple. Elites want to kill people because they are insane. See 'The Global Elite is Insane'. http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/PO1402/S00056/the-global-elite-is-insane.htm

If you think this is overstated, it is only because you have spent a lifetime unconsciously adjusting to absurd and dysfunctional behaviors that you could not explain: an outcome of suffering the 'invisible' and 'utterly invisible' violence that adults inflicted on you during your childhood. See 'Why Violence?' http://tinyurl.com/whyviolence and 'Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice'. http://anitamckone.wordpress.com/articles-2/fearless-and-fearful-psychology/

Until we participate in comprehensive strategies to resist elite (and other) violence exclusively with strategically applied nonviolence, we will continue to be their 'complementary doubles', and thus victims, in the use of violence. Activists, scholars this are simply playing into elite hands.

Of course, having the emotional and intellectual capacity to resist violence with strategically applied nonviolence is a big 'ask' of anyone. But while our fear gets in the way of us learning how to intelligently analyse and strategically resist the psychology that drives violence, we condemn ourselves to perpetual victimhood and assist elite efforts to victimise us even further.

While we play the game by elite rules and rely on violence to confront them, we ensure our own defeat: the military-nuclear-industrial complex is under their control and the smaller weapons we have at our disposal are only useful as tools for them to use to scare us into fighting each other or to justify their violent attacks, including by their police, on us.

If you are interested in devoting your emotional and intellectual capacities to a strategy that makes violence irrelevant in the medium term, you might consider signing the online pledge of 'The People's Charter to Create a Nonviolent World'

http://thepeoplesnonviolencecharter.wordpress.com and participating in 'The Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth'.

http://tinyurl.com/flametree And if you want to develop nonviolent strategies to resist elite military violence, see 'The Strategy of Nonviolent Defense: A Gandhian Approach'. http://www.sunypress.edu/p-2176-the-strategy-of-nonviolent-defe.aspx

We might fail. But I would prefer to implement a strategy that can work rather than repeat, for the umpteenth time, a strategy that history teaches us never works. And history does teach us that violence never works although elites work hard to convince us that, in this or that context, violence succeeded.

This is a delusion. Violence always sows the seeds for the next bout of violence (World War I led to World War II which led to...) and/or shifts the violence to the structural domain (where, for example, economic structures cause poverty) and/or the cultural domain (so that, for example, 'ending' slavery in the US gave way to institutionalised racism).

So I invite you to consider participating in a comprehensive strategy that is designed to undermine violence, in all of its manifestations, and to break the cycle that is driving us to extinction.

The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. once said: 'The enemy is violence.' But I believe the true enemy is our fear: the fear of nonviolently resisting violence, in all of its manifestations. Are you afraid?

-###-

Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of 'Why Violence?' http://tinyurl.com/whyviolence snd The Strategy of Nonviolent Defense His email address is flametree@riseup.net and his website is at http://robertjburrowes.wordpress.com

Tags: drones

No feedback yet

Voices

Voices

  • By Mark Powell They bomb children, rob the treasury, cover up Epstein's client list, and term it democracy—what they're running is a pathocracy, and it's happening today. American Pathocracy/Kleptocracy history and current news, untainted by Google,…
  • By Mark Aurelius “When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another… “ It’s that time again, actually way past due, as the lists of grievances are even fatter…
  • Dr. Vladislav B. Sotirovic The 2018 Skripal Attack Case The current orchestrated Western policy of total Russophobia, directed by Collective West, can be recorded to start by the British Cabinet of Theresa May – the focal servant-dog to US global…
  • By Sally Dugman This proactive Palestinian Pulverizers of humans, D. Trump who is indirectly responsible for the deaths of many thousands of Palestinian people of all ages, has no standing to say something like this utterly stupid statement about Putin:…
  • Tracy Turner When the Republic Betrays, the Body Must Answer Protest is not a right—it is a judgment passed upon power. A corrupt state standing above law and beyond justice forfeits its legitimacy, and we, the people, are compelled to answer—not with…
  • Tracy Turner The Reclamation of the Republic When, in the Course of human events, it shall become absolutely necessary for the People to dissolve the political ties which have united them to a government that has betrayed its trust to obtain their…
  • Tracy Turner SMELE's (Slow-Motion-Extinction-Level-Events). Not yet common in academia, but it should be. I. Introduction: The Timebombs We Ignore "Not with a bang but a bureaucratic shrug, the world ends." - Revisionist reading of Eliot by the…
  • By David Swanson I wish U.S. academics would spend less time fantasizing choices between various murders with trollies, or playing games with theories about how greedy robots might do diplomacy, and more time on the impeachment problem. The United…
  • Cathy Smith Hidden Bombshells in Trump’s “Big Bodacious Pill” “The most dangerous place to be is between power and its reckoning.” —Rewritten maxim of Beltway survival In the dark guts of Trump’s 2025 legislative monolith—cheekily christened the Big…
  • Robert David A global exposé of how corporations distort science, erase truth, and turn human death into quarterly growth. I. Introduction: When Truth Becomes a Liability In an age when algorithms dictate belief and lobbyists author legislation, truth…
July 2025
Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
 << <   > >>
    1 2 3 4 5
6 7 8 9 10 11 12
13 14 15 16 17 18 19
20 21 22 23 24 25 26
27 28 29 30 31    

  XML Feeds

CMS + forums
FAIR USE NOTICE: This site contains copyrighted articles and information about environmental, political, human rights, economic, democratic, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. This news and information is displayed without profit for educational purposes, in accordance with, Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107 of the US Copyright Law. Thepeoplesvoice.org is a non-advocacy internet web site, edited by non-affiliated U.S. citizens. editor
ozlu Sozler GereksizGercek Hava Durumu Firma Rehberi Hava Durumu Firma Rehberi E-okul Veli Firma Rehberi