“It’s like a videogame. It can get a little bloodthirsty. But it’s fucking cool…” “I mean, you kill somebody and it’s like all right, let’s go get some pizza”
(an anonymous drone pilot)
AND Welcome to the world of the living dead, where the cancerous terrorist must be wiped out, regardless of who else gets wiped out with it.
Tolani 16. Olivia Tolani (professor of gender studies at the University of London), April 2016, “‘So that ‘Others’ may die: Drone Warfare and the Dehumanization of Armed Conflict in the US ‘Global War on Terror’,” University of London, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/305496003 sean!
Mbembe concludes that the violence of imperialism and racism has led to the desire for the ‘…maximum destruction of persons and the creation of death-worlds, a new and unique form of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of the living dead.’ The drone therefore acts as the ultimate harbinger of death. The drones themselves are named as such – MQ-1 Predator, and the MQ-9 Reaper, as ‘death rained from above’. The enactment of violence and the management of death is not restricted, as in more traditional forms of armed conflict, to a particular time or designated space. The ‘Global War on Terror’ and the introduction of limitless machines have practically redefined the notion of war as a ‘mobile place’. In fact, combat and the command of death is attached to the very body of the enemy; war becomes a liminal concept, in which bodies intermittently occupy ‘kill boxes’. As Wilcox has remarked, the vantage point of the drone is one of ‘absolute power, and the administration of death is much like the ‘…disembodied vision of the medical gaze of the body’. Much in the same way as Foucault imagined the organic state, the US narrative of counter-terrorism borrows from a ‘medicalised’ notion of war. Insurgents come together in ‘cells’ much like a cancerous growth, and terrorism is constructed as a disease that threatens the health and well-being of other sovereign nations, and most importantly the security of the US. Drone operations are contrived as a form of medical intervention: ‘therapy’. They employ precision technology that acts as ‘surgical strikes’ against the enemy which only ever hit the infected targeted area. If they so happen, however, to come across innocent bodies, they are deemed to be ‘collateral damage’. The great achievement is the removal of the malignant and dangerous material, and civilian casualties are an unfortunate yet necessary result of this ‘therapy’.
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