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George R.R. Martin, Conscientious Objector, Thinks Killing People With Drones Isn’t Bloody Enough

Posted By Daniel Greenfield On April 29, 2014 @ 10:16 am In The Point | 13 Comments

One of the funnier liberal arguments comes from people who have never served in the military delivering lectures about how war today is too mechanical and detached. Too… impersonal.

Today’s idiotic call for bloodier combat comes from author George R.R. Martin, a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War, who thinks that drones are too impersonal a method of killing people.

Martin didn’t want to serve in combat, but he objects to anything that prevents American soldiers from dying.

Taking human life should always be a very serious thing. There’s something very close up about the Middle Ages. You’re taking a sharp piece of steel and hacking at someone’s head, and you’re getting spattered with his blood, and you’re hearing his screams. In some ways maybe it’s more brutal that we’ve insulated ourselves from that. We’re setting up mechanisms where we can kill human beings with drones and missiles where you’re sitting at a console and pressing the button. We never have to hear their whimpering, or hear them begging for their mother, or dying in horrible realities around us.

We had these same complaints about bombers in WW2 and we probably also had them about the longbow.

At the Battle of Agincourt, Henry V’s men killed their enemies at hundreds of yards which was really unfair of them because their enemies were noble knights. They probably didn’t even hear them beg.

Or they might have when they stuck sharpened knives through their visors. Open question.

But the funny thing is that Martin and other liberals seem to think that killing people at close range would sensitize us to the horrors of war… while killing people at a distance desensitizes us.

And yet the modern soldier is far more sensitive to the life of the enemy than the medieval soldier was. What would have been met with a shrug in medieval times, including the killing of prisoners of war, is met with horror today.

Medieval warfare of the kind that Martin seems enthused about, “taking a sharp piece of steel and hacking at someone’s head”, desensitizes the participants far more than drone warfare does.

Exposure to warfare desensitizes far more than lack of exposure. We are part of a society where the civilian population has limited exposure to violent warfare. That was not the case in the medieval period. We’re sensitized to casual violent cruelty in a way that they were not.

There might be a debate about whether we are too sensitized, but the one thing that is certain is that we are far more sensitized to even the suffering of our enemies, with our drones and strategic bombers and ICBMs, than the head hackers were.


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