June 6, 2012
reuters: The brother of al Qaeda’s second-in-command, who was killed in a U.S. drone strike, said Washington’s use of the remote-controlled weapons is inhumane and makes a nonsense of its claims to champion human rights. U.S. officials said on Tuesday that Libyan-born al Qaeda operative Abu Yahya al-Libi was killed by a drone strike in Pakistan, in what was described as a major blow to the militant group. The attack is likely to fuel an increasingly fierce debate about the legality and morality of the drones, which have become one of the chief U.S. weapons against al Qaeda but which opponents say stretch the definition of the legitimate use of lethal force. READ MORE: Drones ‘inhumane,’ dead al Qaeda man’s family says I wonder if there’s something roughly equivalent between the dehumanizing necessary for committing acts of close savagery, such as decapitation, and the cold impersonality of the drone operator’s videogame-like experience . Both are extremely inhumane if you ask me.

reuters:

The brother of al Qaeda’s second-in-command, who was killed in a U.S. drone strike, said Washington’s use of the remote-controlled weapons is inhumane and makes a nonsense of its claims to champion human rights.

U.S. officials said on Tuesday that Libyan-born al Qaeda operative Abu Yahya al-Libi was killed by a drone strike in Pakistan, in what was described as a major blow to the militant group.

The attack is likely to fuel an increasingly fierce debate about the legality and morality of the drones, which have become one of the chief U.S. weapons against al Qaeda but which opponents say stretch the definition of the legitimate use of lethal force.

READ MORE: Drones ‘inhumane,’ dead al Qaeda man’s family says

I wonder if there’s something roughly equivalent between the dehumanizing necessary for committing acts of close savagery, such as decapitation, and the cold impersonality of the drone operator’s videogame-like experience . Both are extremely inhumane if you ask me.

9:09pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZBXRbyMuwlXb
(Notes: 82)
  
Filed under: al Qaeda inhumane drone killing dehumanizing experience Abu Yahya al-Libi life human rights 
August 27, 2010
The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner

From Wikipedia:

The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner is a five-line poem by Randall Jarrell published in 1945. It is about the death of a gunner in a Sperry ball turret on a World War II American bomber aircraft.

From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

Jarrell, who served in the Army Air Force, provided the following explanatory note:

“A ball turret was a plexiglass sphere set into the belly of a B-17 or B-24, and inhabited by two .50 caliber machine guns and one man, a short small man. When this gunner tracked with his machine guns a fighter attacking his bomber from below, he revolved with the turret; hunched upsidedown in his little sphere. The fighters which attacked him were armed with cannon firing explosive shells. The hose was a steam hose.”

Reviewer, Leven M. Dawson, says that “The theme of Randall Jarrell’s ‘The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner’ is that institutionalized violence, or war, creates moral paradox, a condition in which acts repugnant to human nature become appropriate.”[1] Most commentators agree, calling the poem a condemnation of the dehumanizing powers of “the State”, which are most graphically exhibited by the violence of war.[2]

10:40am  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZBXRbyyotAu
Filed under: death gunner poem World War II state violence life war moral paradox human nature dehumanizing the State institutionalized