During one operation, we were shooting at an empty

in autoportret:
autoportret. pismo o dobrej przestrzeni
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“During one operation, we were shooting at an empty building on the hill. Suddenly I saw a small figure on the screen, so I asked the commander if this was not
a child. The response was, it was a dog. I am still not certain. I asked the chaplain.
He said it was our duty to fight the enemy. After work, we return to the airfield, I
get on the plane, and go back home. The same thing every day.” In this apocryphal
tale, inspired by true stories told by drone pilots, author of one of the texts featured
in the present issue of the Autoportret, Joanna Walewska, depicted two aspects of
the modernity of war: the use of sophisticated technologies and the actions of an
individual within the system that leads to the dissolution of responsibility for the
consequences of the deeds, which are part of a multistage decision process. Both
these dimensions – the social and the technological – have their uses in the reality
of war and in the peace that demands high efficiency. In the opening piece of the
issue, Harald Welzer poses a theory that it is the modern context of social activities
that makes them so easy to redirect towards the implementation of any objective.
Wartime tasks constitute work – one of the basic functional categories of modern
societies. So understood, the use of violence or killing within the framework of
the war machine does not befall some depraved individuals, but perfectly normal
representatives of the society, who believe that they are doing the “good work,”
“something meaningful, or at least something necessary and inescapable.” Besides,
the origins of modern technologies and many products of everyday use can often
be traced back to the military, and the systems based on these inventions – the
market, political, media, and communication systems we depend upon – become
the tools of conflicts which no longer fit the familiar definitions. “New names
of war derive from descriptions of technological instruments; they are spinoffs
from images projected on the screens of computers belonging to the contemporary
officials of war.” – writes Mateusz Curyło in his article. High probability that one or
another war shall bring real destruction and death is almost exactly superimposed
with the map of global injustices. We are among the societies, whose soldiers pilot
the drones. Protective shields of modernity facilitate our living in an illusion that
we have nothing to do with this.
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war 46 (3/2014)
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