Drones: Am I Responsible?

His slowly scanning magnifying lens,
A blurry, glistening circle he suspends
Above the word 'Carnation'. Then he bends

So near his eyes are magnified and blurred,
One finger on the miniature word,
As if he touched a single key and heard

A distant, plucked, infinitesimal string,
"The obligation due to every thing
That' s smaller than the universe." ...

- from "Supernatural Love" by Gjertrud Schnackenberg

I think that the most important question in any conversation about drones is, "What is my responsibility to think and care about this?" Until we address the question of responsibility, we haven't begun to establish a frame for the conversation. Are we talking about drones out of passing curiosity? Or because it's in the newspaper, so we're "supposed to" talk about it? Or out of some of true sense of obligation and responsibility?

In the past, I have found it appropriate to feel responsibility for U.S. warmaking on the grounds that the killing and injury are being done "in my name." In other words, I am required to act as a matter of "citizen responsibility."

As I have reflected on the words of the Apostle's Creed, it has become clear to me that the real response-ability that we should be talking about is that which comes in response to God's affirming relationship toward us. If, indeed, I believe that "my Lord ... has redeemed me, a lost and condemned creature, purchased and won [delivered] me from all sins, from death, and from the power of the devil, not with gold or silver, but with His holy, precious blood and with His innocent suffering and death ...." then the parameters of what I am responsive to -- and responsible for -- must transcend a legalistic notion of what accrues to me as a U.S. citizen.

If one doesn't believe God's entry into the world is literal and in-the-flesh -- but rather some kind of abstract relationship -- much less if one has no conception of any kind to tie one to the the rest of humanity -- it becomes very hard to get beyond a concept of responsibility that is narrow and legalistic: "Well, how much, REALLY, did anything I did contribute to this situation? Isn't my responsibility, if any, infinitesimal?"

On the other hand, however, to say that we are responsible for EVERYTHING is not terribly helpful, either -- in effect, it conveys no information.

I would suggest, therefore that effective criteria of what I am to be responsive to and responsible for might include:

* Does something need to be done?

* CAN I do something?

* Am I uniquely situated to do something?

With respect to the last of these, Rabbi Alissa Wise points to an important concept in helping us think about when it is that we are well-situated to make a difference. "Tochecha [sacred rebuke] is about our obligation to tell someone when they have done or are currently straying and behaving wrongly – whether to us, or to another. What’s more, tochecha requires us also to engage with those we are rebuking and assist them and support them in the repair of the wrong you are calling out." (See Israel Palestine Mission Network, God Is In This Place.)

In a pre-modern world, the answers to these questions could be expected to be quite close at hand. (It had to do with physical proximity and a relatively limited set of possible social relationships.)

Corpus of Christ, Spanish, Catalonia (Banyoles),
13th century Art Institute of Chicago.

Today, the field of action is much larger: it is global. Let's face it: "today" can be thought of as having started once we began having empires, i.e. from Rome onward. The question, in effect, becomes "Where are they crucifying people?" and then, "Mustn't I be there?"

It was in the imperial context that, as Pastor Erik Christensen has pointed out, we can see "the early Church’s emerging understanding of who Jesus was in relation to God." Thus, Paul wrote to the church in Philippi, "Jesus Christ ... though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death -- even death on a cross" (Philippians 2:6-8). We see this crystallized in places such as Mark's gospel: "For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many" (Mark 10:45).

(I found echoes of this in Rabbi Wise's statement of faith in "God Is In This Place": "God is the impulse in me to serve the Other out of a sense of responsibility that stems from the Source of redemption.")

Does theology (e.g. the Creed) help make choices about responsibility? Does it move us effectively from the "something oughta be done" stage ... through the "I can do something" stage ... up to and including the "I am doing something" stage?

A possible way to test whether this particular theological way of thinking is helpful is to consider some other situations of killing and injury, not just the killing and injury being done with drones. For instance, what if one were to consider suicide attacks, such as those reported September 2 in the New York Times?

For both drone attacks and suicide attacks, one might ask:

* Does something need to be done?

* CAN I do something?

* Am I uniquely situated to do something?

As we think about and discuss issues such as distancing ... authority, collateral damage, and pre-emptive violence ... surveillance ... and technology in the days and weeks ahead, perhaps we can compare and contrast these two distinct types of killing and injury to help us clarify our thinking.

Read all the posts in this series:

Drones: Am I Responsible? (this post)
Drones vs. Up-Close-and-Personal Reality
Confronting Drone Killing: Is God Urging Us to "Risk It"?
Ending Drone Killing: The Spirit Is Moving
Series intro: Do You Know What You Believe? (The Apostle's Creed as a Focus for Thinking About Drones)

(Originally published in September, 2012, as "Drones: Am I Responsible?" on the Awake to Drones blog.


Related post

"Because of the intensified division of labor," the narrator explains, "many technicians and scientists can no longer recognize the contribution the have made to weapons of destruction." "Our department extracts lareic, oleic, and naptha acids . . . . "  "I'm a chemist. What should I do? If I develop a substance, it can be good for humanity . . . ."  "Besides napalm, Dow Chemical produces 800 other products . . . ." Does this familiar to you?

(See American Fire: Still Spreading, Still Inextinguishable)

Drones vs. Up-Close-and-Personal Reality

My sewing needle close enough that I
Can watch my father through the needle's eye,
As through a lens ground for a butterfly

- from "Supernatural Love" by Gjertrud Schnackenberg

Obtaining "distance" from where war and injury is happening seems like a desirable objective, and drones have been championed precisely because they put members of the U.S. military (and, all the moreso, the rest of us) at the greatest possible distance from where the actually injury is taking place. What does a confession of faith suggest about this view?

Having gained some clarity on responsibility ... and knowing the right question to ask ("Where are they crucifying people?") ... it becomes very important to ask "What obstructs our understanding?"

As Jack Lawlor has written, "Drone warfare is the apex of misperception," and overcoming misperception is central to a Buddhist approach to the question of how to live.

I see tremendous resonance with this view within Christianity, particularly with the idea that, yes, there are aspects of our world that are "out of joint" -- we call this phenomenon sin -- but that our response to this out-of-jointness is not to flee, but instead to get up close and personal, and see what's really going on there.

Sadao Watanabe, "Jesus Washing St. Peters Feet"

 

It has always been somewhat perplexing to me what Luther meant when he said, "my Lord ... has redeemed me, a lost and condemned creature, purchased and won [delivered] me from all sins, from death, and from the power of the devil, not with gold or silver, but with His holy, precious blood and with His innocent suffering and death ...." What exactly does "redeeming" mean here? I can (sort of) understand a kind of exchange -- symbolically -- but what exchange, what transaction is really understood to have taken place?

For me, this discussion gives clarity to the notion that "getting up close and personal" is necessary if there is to be any hope of getting a right understanding of others -- of not just abandoning ourselves to an acceptance of the sinfulness and unknowableness of others. And, of course, that "getting up close and personal" carries risk at all times, and, ultimately, results in in-this-world death.

Redemption. At a price.

Lest anyone think that I have become too detached from the here-and-now of the conflicts in which drones are used, consider two recent articles from the New York Times.

In an op-ed entitled, "A Pointless Blacklisting," Alex Strick van Linschoten discusses the recent designation of the Haqqani network as a "terrorist" organization, pointing out that this prevents us from talking to them -- the one thing that would offer any hope of moving away from a relationship based on nothing but conflict and death. In fact, "[t]he head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Michael T. Flynn, said in 2010 that the group’s leader, Jalaluddin Haqqani, was “absolutely salvageable” and open to reconciliation." But defining him as a "terrorist" makes dialog off limits. Thus "[t]he current war effort relies heavily on drones and night raids in Afghanistan and Pakistan." The result? "[T]hese tactics often increase radicalization and enmity."

Carl Dix, "Ecce Homo"

I see these ideas being explicitly adopted by at least some thinkers in the government and military. As discussed in "How Resilient Is Post-9/11 America?", there is growing interest in the idea that real-world effectiveness -- especially including in military conflict -- depends on a characteristic called "resilience" in the face of hard-to-understand behavior and phenomena. "The best weapon against terror is refusing to be terrorized." When we encounter sin, do we retreat and become "brittle and clumsy and counterproductive"? Or do we find the inner resources to move closer and find hope in humanity?

I disagree with the notion that the military framework can be made a resounding success through greater "resiliency," but I do agree that we need to recognize and work against our natural, sinful tendency to turn everyone into the enemy. For instance: "The Homeland Security Department is trying to enlist the public’s help with a program called 'If You See Something, Say Something,' which urges citizens to report unusual behavior to authorities. Well-meaning, perhaps, but officials must offer more practical guidance to avoid creating “a climate of spying,” homeland security specialists say."

By now, we have all been exposed to stories of how military pilots and drone operators begin to see people as less than human. (I talked about this in a blog post called Drone Victims: Just Dots? Just Dirt?) But isn't drone use having the same effect on all of us? Nick Mottern, director of Know Drones, a program of public education about drone surveillance and drone killing, has said that drone use is the linchpin of an effort by our government to "systematically deprive us of empathy." I can think of no better way to sum up why the distancing that is brought about by drones is unacceptable - to a confessing Christian, or to anybody else.


Read all the posts in this series:

Drones: Am I Responsible?
Drones vs. Up-Close-and-Personal Reality (this post)
Confronting Drone Killing: Is God Urging Us to "Risk It"?
Ending Drone Killing: The Spirit Is MovingSeries intro: Do You Know What You Believe? (The Apostle's Creed as a Focus for Thinking About Drones)

(Originally published in September, 2012, as "Drones vs. Up-Close-and-Personal Reality" on the Awake to Drones blog.


Note on Ecce Homo by Carl Dix: Dix’s works were based on religious allegories or depictions of post-war suffering. A veteran himself of WWI, Dix was latter drafted into Hitler’s Volkssturm during WWII and was eventually captured by the French and later released. Most of his latter works had a religious basis. Ecce Homo is one of thirty-three images Dix created in a suite called Matthaüs Evangelium, which accompanied the Martin Luther New Testament. Ecce Homo are the Latin words used by Pontius Pilate in the Vulgate translation of the John 19:5, when he presents a scourged Jesus Christ, bound and crowned with thorns, to a hostile crowd shortly before his Crucifixion. The King James Version of the Bible translates the phrase into English as “behold the man.”

Confronting Drone Killing: Is God Urging Us to "Risk It"?

To read what's buried there, he bends to pore
Over the Latin blossom. I am four,
I spill my pins and needles on the floor

Trying to stitch "Beloved" X by X.
My dangerous, bright needle's point connects
Myself illiterate to this perfect text

- from "Supernatural Love" by Gjertrud Schnackenberg

Before she left for Pakistan to participate in the Code Pink delegation, my friend JoAnne Lingle, from Indianapolis, told me, "We want to reach out to the people there to show that we care about their lives; we want to show the American public how civilians are being targeted by drones; we want to come back to the US and tell the stories of drone victims. Our larger goal is to stop the drone strikes." (Read more at My visits to Pakistan and Kurdistan.)

Map of U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan

I find this in stark contrast to the attitude implicit in the official U.S. approach to much of the Mideast and South Asia: "We're going to go over there and get them before they come here and get us."

And, in fact, in the last week the newspaper has seemed to be especially filled with stories about people "getting" each other - "getting" people who were too liberal, "getting" people who were suppressing liberation, "getting" people who were acting suspicious . . . and on and on . . . .

Each of these accounts or characterizations is steeped in violence, and corresponding to each of these accounts or characterizations, there is a worldview that explains the utility, justification, and/or desirability -- indeed, the extreme praiseworthiness -- of that violence.

I believe the significant feature of the faith that Christians confess when they recite the Apostle's Creed is that it forces us to confront the question: why doesn't God deal with us violently? If ever there was a utility or justification for destroying someone or something, it is the implacable, stubborn imperfection present in people. Why doesn't God just get rid of the lot of us? Why, instead, does God choose to get "up close and personal" with us, meeting us where we are, in our own sinful, mortal bodies?

In other words, I believe that God sees another way forward for us, even when all we can imagine is "going over there and getting them before they come here and get us." Even when, in our desperation, all we can imagine is throwing our own life away in order to offer a glint of hope to comrades combating a brutal regime. Even when all we can imagine is venting our rage on people who threaten us with painful social change: them, their families, and anyone who helps them. Even when we build a towering military establishment dedicated to destroying entire other cultures, as long as it keeps "them" over "there" where they can't possibly ever bring harm "here" to "us."

God shows us that other way, and it involves trying to walk together, and eschewing violence.

During the Code Pink peace delegation to Pakistan:
A sunset march through Jinnah Market with the student
group of PTI in Islamabad followed by a candlelight vigil.

What God is strangely silent about, by the way, is death! Often, we make an idol of life itself. We become trapped in the worship of our own guaranteed well-being. Think about it: extreme aversion to being harmed inherently translates into measures to pre-empt harm, at any cost, and no matter if they are marginally effective (or even counterproductive!).

Conversely, if you believe in a God who accepts the reality of the human experience, even death, then it suddenly seems ridiculous to hold as a value the prevention of harm at any cost. It's immediately apparent that God wants us to take the risk to get near our fellow humans and interact with them, hear them, negotiate with them, engage in diplomacy with them .... even if we're not 100% guaranteed of success!


Read all the posts in this series:

Drones: Am I Responsible?
Drones vs. Up-Close-and-Personal RealityConfronting Drone Killing: Is God Urging Us to "Risk It"? (this post)
Ending Drone Killing: The Spirit Is Moving
Series intro: Do You Know What You Believe? (The Apostle's Creed as a Focus for Thinking About Drones)

(Originally published in October, 2012, as "Ending Drone Killing: The Spirit Is Moving" on the Awake to Drones blog.)


For more photos from Pakistan, see the Code Pink delegation photo site. And be sure to read JoAnne Lingle's full account of her trip!

Ending Drone Killing: The Spirit Is Moving

Carnatio, the Latin, meaning flesh."
As if the bud's essential oils brush
Christ's fragrance through the room, the iron-fresh

Odor carnations have floats up to me,
A drifted, secret, bitter ecstasy,
The stems squeak in my scissors, Child, it's me,

- from "Supernatural Love" by Gjertrud Schnackenberg

We are inevitably asked to accept injury to innocents as an unavoidable consequence of a goal that is considered very important. Assuming for the moment that we accept the "very important goal" ... what does a confession of faith clarify about such "collateral damage"?

People who absolutely reject violence, in general, and/or reject drone killing, specifically, find the problem of collateral damage to have an obvious solution: it's wrong and the actions leading to it should be stopped.

The solution to the problem is much less obvious to those who think there are ends that can and should be attained using violence. A recent exchange on the "Morning Joe" about drone strikes between Joe Scarborough and Time columnist Joe Klein put a fine point on this difficulty:

"This is offensive to me, though," Scarborough said. "It seems so antiseptic. It seems so clean. And yet you have four-year-old girls being blown to bits ... this is going to cause the U.S. problems in the future."

"The bottom line in the end is whose four-year-old gets killed?" Klein responded.

"Does that matter?" Scarborough said.

"What we're doing is limiting the possibility that four-year-olds here will get killed by indiscriminate acts of terror," Klein concluded.

Note: "limiting the possibility that four-year-olds here will get killed"!

Though the assertion that "the bottom line in the end is whose four-year-old gets killed" is abhorrent to me, I must recognize that it neatly sums up the point on which a great many people experience a failure of understanding. To some people -- Joe Klein, for instance, in the example above -- it is as obvious that some four-year-olds matter as it is that some others do not.

I came back from a conference on drones in April, 2012, determined to increase people's understanding of drone killing. I believed that they didn't know that young children were being killed, and I assumed that I could arouse their awareness by providing visceral images. As I worked at this, I came to recognize that there are many possible pathways to understanding, and many different obstacles, and that different kinds of information and different levels of stimulus are required for different people.

Do Christian beliefs help us to find a way to address this?

When I think about the difficulties that people experience in understanding -- in understanding the world around them, and notions like justice, and ultimately in discerning God's will -- and the hope of surmounting those difficulties, I think about the meaning of the expression "the Holy Spirit." The Apostles' Creed includes the words, "I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy Christian church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting." My understanding of the Apostle's Creed is that the Holy Spirit includes all those ways that God becomes known to us -- through the Bible, for instance, and but also through people - including Christian people ("the holy Christian church," which I understand to be cognate with "the communion of saints") but, perhaps more importantly, simply through people in general.

Consider, for instance, the witness provided by Nick Mottern, director of the Know Drones project, describing an encounter during one of his presentations during a tour of Ohio and Pennyslvania.

In the late afternoon of September 20, 2012, in Room 101 of Maginnes Hall at Leigh University, in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, a young woman student from Yemen touched off a blast of reality that startled and sobered 50 or so of her fellow students and townspeople attending a talk I was giving about US drone attacks and surveillance. Paraphrased, she said:

“I get the feeling that there are those in this room who value American lives much more than the lives of other people in the world. I am from Yemen. I am a city girl, but I live not far from a village where I have family members and where US drones killed 40 people who were doing nothing but minding their daily business. The people in the village have no idea why this happened, they know nothing of al-Qaeda; they are trying to sue the United States.”

After she spoke, there were other comments and questions, but her words hung in the air, a stark personal, undeniable witness to the fact that yes, US drone attacks are killing people and creating great suffering. For all of us there, drone killing now had a face, and the United States stood convicted. At the end of the Q & A, people went up to her to talk and to say they were sorry for what is happening; several, including me, gave her a hug and more thanked her for speaking out.

The woman, with a sweet, friendly disposition, speaking in a soft, direct but extremely firm way, crystallized what appears to be the main reason that the American public is so accepting of drone wars – that is, the widely-held feeling that Americans are exceptional.

(Excerpted from Challenging Dronotopia, available soon on the Know Drones website.)

Why does it take someone from the country affected in order for these killings to become understandable. Why do we only begin to understand when the killings "have a face"?

""Absence" by Jane Norling

This helps remind me of one of the meanings of "sin" -- of human frailty: that, for all our pretensions, we are beings who are capable of only very limited amounts of abstraction. To relate this to the Apostles' Creed: we are not capable of clearly discerning God's will through our belief in God the Father alone. The meaning of Jesus Christ is that humans needed something more "up close and personal" to shake their consciousness'. And -- dare I say it? -- Jesus Christ (narrowly defined as that man who lived in Palestine 2000 years ago) isn't enough unless we open ourselves to the continual and every-present impact of God and Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit, acting to continuously break through the human fog.

"At a local school"
(from the Code Pink Pakistan delegation)

The Holy Spirit is moving in the testimony of people like Nick Mottern and the woman from Yemen at Lehigh.

The Holy Spirit is moving in the testimony of people like JoAnne Lingle and her colleagues in the Code Pink peace delegation that went to Pakistan, and the stories of the people they met there.

The Holy Spirit is moving in the work of the many artists who contributed to the exhibit Windows and Mirrors: Reflections on the War in Afghanistan.

And our awareness of the movement of the Holy Spirit is only just beginning.

I predict that when we finally extract ourselves from the hell that we have waded into with drones, we will look back and realize that we didn't "think" our way out of this problem, but that we "opened" our way out of it -- and that God met us in our opening up.


Read all the posts in this series:

Drones: Am I Responsible?
Drones vs. Up-Close-and-Personal Reality
Confronting Drone Killing: Is God Urging Us to "Risk It"?Ending Drone Killing: The Spirit Is Moving (this post)
Series intro: Do You Know What You Believe? (The Apostle's Creed as a Focus for Thinking About Drones)

(Originally published in October, 2012, as "Ending Drone Killing: The Spirit Is Moving" on the Awake to Drones blog.)

The DC Drones Conference: What I'll Be Thinking About

As I join people from around the world gathering in Washington, DC, for the  2013 CODEPINK Drone Summit "Drones Around the Globe: Proliferation and Resistance" (Nov 16/17) this weekend, here are some of the questions I'll be thinking about.

(UPDATE: To learn what I'm thinking about now that the summit has concluded, see The 2013 DC Drones Conference: 5 Big Takeaways )


Who decides?

If the public will join us in asking the question "Who decides?" about drone executions, I believe they will rapidly come to realize that they are utterly dissatisfied with what the government is saying.

(See Who Decides? (When Drones are Judge, Jury, and Executioner) )
 

When will we learn the truth? 

Until we have the facts, the U.S. government will continue to dance around the issue.

A new U.N. report makes it clear that the U.S. has to report fully on all its drone attacks.

(See 2014: The Year of Transparency (for U.S. Drone Use)?)








Where is the faith community?

 In particular, when will American Christians begin to see the problem of drones as the threat that it is to everything that they believe in?

After all, wasn't Jesus, himself, a victim of a wrong way of "seeing" by the agents of Empire?

(See Was the Crucifixion a "signature strike"?)

Will U.S. politics in 2014 address the drone problem?

Isn't now a moment when, instead of falling back into our existing habits of trying to change America's war-making ways, we should put our recent experience under a microscope? And ask what we can learn from this experience? Can we make 2014 the year that we sort the wheat from the chaff in Congress? And get the control over war and peace back into our own hands?

(See Election 2014: The Moment of Truth for the US Antiwar Movement?)

Will the opponents of drone surveillance make a difference?

One issue that has a key place in the midterm elections in 2014, I believe, is surveillance.  With each passing day, I am hearing more and more people say that the surveillance issue is something that a wide spectrum of people are deeply upset about. That includes people on the right as well as people on the left -- people who don't usually talk with each other, much less work together for positive change!

(See The Surveillance Issue: The Fulcrum of the 2014 Election?)


POSTSCRIPT: I guess I was still thinking about this question as the conference concluded. Drone Free Zone: At the second annual Drone Summit, Code Pink and Cornel West argue that all lives are equal. in In These Times quoted me the day after: "There is a wing of this movement that is concerned about surveillance; there is a wing of this movement that’s concerned about physical injury to people. If there is one area where there is not always full communication, coordination or agreement, that’s it. . . . If the people who feel most concerned about surveillance are actually successful at sitting together with the people concerned about physical injury, this is going to be an incredibly powerful movement."


Related posts

What I Learned: Five big realizations I'm taking away from the 2013 CODEPINK Drone Summit "Drones Around the Globe: Proliferation and Resistance" in Washington, DC.

(See The 2013 DC Drones Conference: 5 Big Takeaways )

The biggest idea coming out of the 2013 Drone Summit? We will only deal successfully with the crimes being committed using drones when we understand them as part of the much larger war against communities of color . . . .

(See Drone Gaze, Drone Injury: The War on Communities of Color )

Many of us who weren't in Pakistan to participate in the massive rally against U.S. drone strikes participated in this protest by holding rallies where we were (for instance, in London), or by participating virtually via the #PakistanAgainstDrones campaign on Twitter.

(See What Would a Global Movement to Ground the Drones Look Like?)

Does America Need a Spiritual Awakening?

I was at a book event at the Chicago Public Library several weeks ago, in which Pankaj Mishra discussed his new work, From the Ruins of Empire. The book profiles thinkers in several Asian countries at the turn of the last century -- Liang Qichao in China, among others -- who turned their intellects to the problem of the West, its material superiority, and how to respond to it.

Lu Xun

The discussion of Mishra's book brought to mind my undergraduate years, focused on the study of Chinese and Japanese history, and I remembered how difficult it had been as a student to begin to even understand the challenge faced by people like Liang. It is not easy -- even with 20-20 hindsight -- to characterize the "West" as it confronted China (and other countries), and the difficulty of doing so in context is nearly inconceivable.

I was amused at the book event to see poor Pankaj field the inevitable questions from the audience: "Why did you choose certain thinkers and not others? Why Tagore and not Gandhi?" And, "Why not Mao?" And I smiled inwardly and asked, "Yes, why not Mao? Why Liang and not Mao? Or, for that matter, why Liang and not Zeng Guofan? or Kang Youwei? or Yen Fu? or Lu Xun? or Sun Yatsen?"

Yes: "Why not Lu Xun?" Most of all, I wondered, "Why not Lu Xun?"

Lu Xun was an author who is said to have defined the spirit of ferment and revolution after 1919 in China, generally referred to as the May 4th Movement. For me, Lu Xun's entire body of work can be boiled down to two elements: his epiphany about the challenge China faced, and his location of the heart of that challenge in his story, "The True Story of Ah Q."

Lu Xun's epiphany about the challenge China faced came when he was a medical student in Japan. Following the logic of several waves of thinkers before him, Lu Xun was intent on gaining expert, material, scientific knowledge in order to be of service to his country. His turning point came when he sat in an audience together with other patriotic Chinese students to view a news slide, which depicted Japanese troops beheading Chinese captives during hostilities in North China. Lu Xun came to the conclusion that China would never respond effectively to the challenges it faced until Chinese people were able to search their hearts and find the spiritual bases of their subjugation, and to overcome them. Until that happened, he concluded, scientific, material "solutions" would be moot. He abandoned his medical studies and became a writer.


Lu Xun's seminal work, "The True Story of Ah Q", is a portrait of a woebegone member of China's lumpenproletariat. Ah Q has many strikes against him. But the most important one, laid bare by Lu Xun, is a self-deceiving habit of mind, as epitomized in several fragments of internal monologue which occurs after Ah Q is beaten up:

Then only after Ah Q had, to all appearances, been defeated, had his brownish pigtail pulled and his head bumped against the wall four or five times, would the idlers walk away, satisfied at having won. Ah Q would stand there for a second, thinking to himself, "It is as if I were beaten by my son. What is the world coming to nowadays. . . ." Thereupon he too would walk away, satisfied at having won.

Whatever Ah Q thought he was sure to tell people later; thus almost all who made fun of Ah Q knew that he had this means of winning a psychological victory. So after this anyone who pulled or twisted his brown pigtail would forestall him by saying: "Ah Q, this is not a son beating his father, it is a man beating a beast. Let's hear you say it: A man bearing a beast!"

Illustration: Ah Q
Zhao Yannian (born 1924)

Then Ah Q, clutching at the root of his pigtail, his head on one side, would say: "Beating an insect—how about that? I am an insect—now will you let me go?"

But although he was an insect the idlers would not let him go until they had knocked his head five or six times against something nearby, according to their custom, after which they would walk away satisfied that they had won, confident that this time Ah Q was done for. In less than ten seconds, however, Ah Q would walk away also satisfied that he had won, thinking that he was the "foremost self-belittler," and that after subtracting "self-belittler" what remained was "foremost." Was not the highest successful candidate in the official examination also the "foremost"? "And who do you think you are anyway?"

After employing such cunning devices to get even with his enemies, Ah Q would make his way cheerfully to the wine shop to drink a few bowls of wine, joke with the others again, quarrel with them again, come off victorious again, and return cheerfully to the Tutelary God's Temple, there to fall asleep as soon as his head touched the pillow . . . . (See "The True Story of Ah-Q -- Chapter Two: A Brief Account of Ah-Q's Victories")

For me, the lesson of Lu Xun is that it is so easy to be dazzled by affairs of state and military technology, and fail to address the need for a spiritual awakening, and the adoption of new habits of mind. This, it seems to me, is the secret to China's ability to revolutionary change during the 20th century, and radically alter its place in the world -- a monumental accomplishment and one that is far from over. And it provides a valuable insight on why people in the Muslim world place such a high value on the spiritual guidance they gain from their faith, from a deep, deep submission to spiritual discipline.

I was reminded of this again while reading a recent exchange about drones and drone warfare. Chicago syndicated columnist Bob Koehler wrote a review of the recently released study, "Living Under Drones.". The suffering in America's "video game war," Koehler says, "is widespread and profound." Longtime antiwar and anti-nuclear activist Penny Kome supplied a counterpoint, expressing the sanguine hope that this new technology can be thought of "as a nicotine patch – a way to kick the US addiction to war.". Koehler responded, saying, "It’s more likely that drone technology is just the beginning of a new and different — and still hideous — type of warfare, with more devastating robo-technology to come.".

I'm glad that we're starting to debate drone warfare, but I'm concerned that Americans are stuck at the surface of the problem -- the technology, the politics -- and not getting deep enough into the psychology that allows us to tolerate the injury being done to others. Are we being lured into the same old debates about command chains and throw-weights, and failing to own up to the spiritual bankruptcy that enables us to continue to operate these killing machines? Is this a question for a small number of liberal antiwar activists? Or for every member of the society that considers themselves a person of conscience and/or faith?

This need to get at the spiritual basis of our drone "addiction" is the impetus behind the Awake to Drones project.

* * * * *

Image by Alfonso Munoz, from Windows and Mirrors: Reflections on the War in Afghanistan: The aftermath of war is rarely envisioned by the powers that trigger such events. Such views are usually blinded by greed and massive egos. Those who survive will continue to live with a lifetime's worth of emotional damage beyond the healing of physical wounds. Photography has captured more images than I can mentally handle (and I am the lucky one living removed from such places). I wanted to convey the atrocities like an investigator who outlines the bodies on the scene of a crime, leaving behind a silhouette on the ground where the horrific events have taken place.


Related posts


I'm grateful to my friend, Jim Barton, for framing the problem in a way that is adequately broad, and yet contains a measure of hope.  It's about the future, and whether we have one -- or can construct one -- he said.  Young people today are asking: Do I have an economic future? Does the planet have a future? Will (nuclear) war extinguish everybody's future?

(See A FUTURE: Can we construct one? )

Leveling Up is the creative work that demonstrates just how thoroughly America's new ways of warfare have become intertwined with the other dominant strands in our culture.

(See Level Up, Step Up, Grow Up, Man Up . . . Wake Up)












I wonder if, years from now, we will be thinking back to today and feeling surprise at how little we thought about some of the developments in our world, and in our country, and how we talked about them even less. Someday will I have to explain to my kids, or to my kids' kids, why it was that "people just weren't talking about it" . . . ?

(See Why Weren't People Talking About It? )

Drone Victims: Just Dots? Just Dirt?

More at: Can we stop the DRONES?

People all over the country and all over the world are waking up to the drone menace. There is something about this weapon and the way it is used that is wrong - you can feel it in your gut.

I've been talking with people in the faith community in Chicago, trying to put into words just what is so wrong with drones. What is it about drones killing and drones surveillance that is qualitatively different? What makes it even worse than all the violence and war that we've seen carried out in our name to date?

SIGNATURE STRIKES

For me, it started to become clear when I learned about signature strikes. Up until then, I had been hearing a lot about how drones could "see" people, and how what they "saw" was evaluated in some way, and some part of me had accepted the idea that there was something similar in the way a drone "sees" people and the way a person "sees" another person.

But signature strikes -- in which a drone detects some kind of human activity, and on the strength of a vague characterization of that activity unleashes a Hellfire missile -- make it clear just how people are "seen" when drones are being used.

There is a famous scene in the movie, "The Third Man," which characterizes this problem perfectly. In the film, the villain's childhood friend, Holly Martins (played by Joseph Cotton), meets the villain, Harry Lime (played by Orson Welles). They climb aboard a Ferris wheel that carries them high above Vienna. In response to the demand, "Have you ever seen one of your victims?" the villain yanks open the door of the Ferris wheel cabin menacingly and says:

"Look down there. Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I offered you twenty thousand pounds for every dot that stopped moving, would you really -- old man? -- tell me to keep my money? Or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare?"

(You can watch the Ferris wheel scene from "The Third Man" here. Then watch the infamous "collateral murder" footage - included two minutes into Kyle Broom's powerful short film, "Prevention of Injury (POI).")

With drones, people have become just that: dots. Bugs. In fact, the military uses the term "bug splat" for what's left after a drone strike. Of course, there are real people involved in operating drones -- "in the loop" is the Computer Science term for that "involvement" -- but we should be very, very clear that the role those people play is nothing like the role they play in any other kind of human interaction -- including other warfare and violence.

PEOPLE WHO DON'T COUNT AS PEOPLE

In a sermon about a year ago at the church I attend in Chicago -- St. Luke's Logan Square -- the Rev. Pieter Oberholzer of Inclusive and Affirming Ministries in South Africa spoke of the human impulse to dismiss other human beings as bugs and worse. He spoke of the Aramaic term raca -- literally, "spit"; essentially "trash" or "dirt". The "raca spirit," he said, is a worldview that allows us to pigeonhole some people as "dirt." And then he told us that the Good News of the New Testament can effectively be summed up as: we used to live in a worldview that allowed some people to be relegated to "dirt" -- unworthy of consideration -- but we now know that God values us all as people, and wants us to value all other people as people. Pastor Oberholzer commended to us the words of Desmond Tutu: "We are of ultimate worth" in the eyes of God. This translates, he told us, in African society, into the concept of ubuntu -- which he translated as, "I live because you live; you live because I live."

When I was a child, there was a public service announcement (perhaps for the National Council of Churches?) that ran on television. It was a parable of a rancher in the Old West, who was a pillar of his community and a stalwart of his church. This rancher had a very Old Testament view of the world, and when someone was caught stealing one of his cattle, he considered the person beneath consideration as a person. Here's a summary I found of that old PSA:

Once upon a time there was a wealthy rancher who had hundreds of cattle, and next door to his ranch was a poor farmer who could barely feed his family. One day the farmer decided he'd help himself to one of the rancher's cows, but (sounds of guns being cocked and the image of shotguns pointing at the farmer) he didn't get very far.
At the trial, the rancher told the judge, "String him up, it will teach him a lesson."
That night as the rancher slept he dreamed that he died, and was standing before God awaiting judgement.
And the Lord said, "Forgive him, it will teach him a lesson."

Those are words that I have never forgotten.

ARE WE AT A TURNING POINT? WHAT IS THIS AGE IN WHICH WE LIVE?

Graham Greene, who wrote "The Third Man" and set it in the ruins of war-ravaged Vienna, saw exactly where modern war was taking us. When we finally get around to understanding just how wrong drones are, that understanding is likely to crack wide open a recognition of the inhumanity of all the modern warfare we've been dragged into in the modern era. Like a frog that is in a pot of water whose temperature is gradually increasing until he is boiled alive, our society has stood still for advances in weaponry that allow victims to be dehumanized further and further and further. It's time to put a stop to it, and turn back the clock.

How far must we turn back the clock? I don't think we'll be done until we recognize that ever since weapons became the tools of Empire, people have been reduced to being the victims of signature strikes.


More at: Can we stop the DRONES?

* * * * *

The image "Collateral Damage" by Lillian Moats is from Windows and Mirrors: Reflections on the War in Afghanistan -- an art collection and traveling exhibition consisting of 45 murals created by artists from all over the world who have tried to capture the experience of the war in Afghanistan and to make it visible to people everywhere. Windows and Mirrors is a project of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC).

For further thought:

Genesis 18: 32 -- "Then [Abraham] said, “May the Lord not be angry, but let me speak just once more. What if only ten can be found there?” He answered, “For the sake of ten, I will not destroy it.”

Galatians 3:25 -- "But now that faith has come, we are no longer subject to a disciplinarian."

Matthew 6:22 -- "The eye is the lamp of the body. So if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light."


Related posts

We will only deal successfully with the crimes being committed using drones when we understand them as part of the much larger war against communities of color . . . .

(See Drone Gaze, Drone Injury: The War on Communities of Color )








Palestine 30 CE - were Jews a "community of color?" And what was Empire doing to keep the community within "normal" or "right" or "acceptable" bounds? And what happened to people who looked like the "wrong" type?

(See Was the Crucifixion a "signature strike"?)




If the American public knew the nature of the crimes that its government was committing in Afghanistan, could it possibly sit still and not force an end to the war, and the removal of U.S. military, intelligence, and contractors from Afghanistan?

(See VAU Afgh 101: Attacks Against Civilians)



More posts about the immorality of drones at: Can we stop the DRONES?

Was the Crucifixion a "signature strike"?

More on "how we see others": Drone Victims: Just Dots? Just Dirt?
VAU Afgh 101: Extrajudicial Executions

More at: Can we stop the DRONES?

[I'm grateful to the Rev. Loren McGrail for initiating the dialog on drones and theology in Chicago, and for getting me thinking about this question.]

It seems to me that the locus of the problem of drones and drone killing for Christians really lies in this notion of how we see others. What Christ said, I think, is that it is necessary to really see each individual -- up close -- and also see beyond the usual set of categories that we apply in putting people in boxes.

So much of Jesus' teaching was about being with people without regard to the usual rules and prejudices of tradition, custom ... and Jewish law. The ultimate teaching is Matthew 25, which says "be fully aware of who and what you are really seeing."


This ties, I think, to a related problem that concerns me a great deal: the way in which victims of U.S. drone strikes are charactertized in the press as "terrorists" without any of the finding of fact or the real ajudication that is called for. And then we, the readers, inwardly and outwardly parrot these characterizations. To me, this has given weight to the commandment against "false witness," in a way I can really understand for the first time.

All of this is what is taking place at the edge of current military practice. There is the myth of "precision," when in fact there is no real contact between the adversaries. There is less "seeing" than ever before in the history of armed conflict. And now "signature strikes" are carried out -- not against a specific person, but against some person or people whose characteristics seem to fit a profile. (Yes, ultimately these decisions will be fully "automated" -- made completely according to computer programs.)

I think this is very much what Jesus was teaching about; it is also what he went up against in giving up his own life. At Easter, I read the part of Pilate in the reading of the Passion (from Mark) at St. Luke's Logan Square, and I was struck by how Pilate seemed very aware of -- and very uncomfortable with -- the "box" that he was being asked to put Jesus in. And Jesus was very much struggling to deal with those boxes. ("You say that I am.") As such, the Crucifixion was a form of "signature strike."

Related posts

We will only deal successfully with the crimes being committed using drones when we understand them as part of the much larger war against communities of color . . . .

(See Drone Gaze, Drone Injury: The War on Communities of Color )








"Who's being left on the margins? Isn't that exactly who we should be working to be in relationship with?" A big part of this is creating a safe space for people who are most often marginalized to be present and be heard. 

(See Get Outside Your Comfort Zone and Have A Conversation Today (Welcome to the Ministry))

In the old order of things, power places itself on display, and hopes that the population sees fit to obey. In the new order of things, power compels every member of the population to display himself or herself . . .  In the new order of things, the courts are bypassed and the instruments of discipline -- observe, classify, examine -- run rampant.

(See "Surveiller et Punir" Indeed!)


More at: Can we stop the DRONES?

Image: Jesus before Pontius Pilate (Sant'Apollinare Nuovo, Ravenna) from Nick in exsilio on Flickr