[liberationtech] [drone-list] How Not to Think About Drones, or Goliath Died for Your Sins

[Christian Huldt]

Don't think that the story of David and Goliath had made the bible if
Goliath had had the slingshot.

Eugen Leitl skrev 2013-08-26 21:35:
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> Date: Mon, 26 Aug 2013 11:32:58 -0700
> From: Yosem Companys <companys at stanford.edu>
> To: Drones <drone-list at lists.stanford.edu>
> Subject: [drone-list] How Not to Think About Drones, or Goliath Died for Your Sins
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> 
> How Not to Think About Drones, or Goliath Died for Your Sins
> 
> By Brian Terrell
> 
> The latest defense of remote control killing by the U.S. appears in
> the September issue of The Atlantic, “The Killing Machines”
> (http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/09/the-killing-machines-how-to-think-about-drones/309434/)
> in which author Mark Bowden tells us “how to think about drones.”
> Known for his bestselling book, Black Hawk Down and for his curiously
> twisted justification of torture in the same magazine in October 2003
> (“The Bush Administration has adopted exactly the right posture on the
> matter. Candor and consistency are not always public virtues. Torture
> is a crime against humanity, but coercion is an issue that is rightly
> handled with a wink, or even a touch of hypocrisy; it should be banned
> but also quietly practiced.”) Bowden continues in this latest article
> to collect the facts that ought to lead to unequivocal condemnation of
> certain U.S. policies but cleverly presenting them in the end as
> ringing endorsements.
> 
> “The Killing Machines” opens by asking us to “consider David,” and so
> Bowden initiates his attack on history by misrepresenting its earliest
> written records. “The shepherd lad steps up to face in single combat
> the Philistine giant Goliath. Armed with only a slender staff and a
> slingshot, he confronts a fearsome warrior clad in a brass helmet and
> chain mail, wielding a spear with a head as heavy as a sledge and a
> staff ‘like a weaver’s beam.’ Goliath scorns the approaching youth:
> ‘Am I a dog, that thou comest to me with staves?’ (1 Samuel 17)
> 
> “Technology has been tilting the balance of battles since Goliath
> fell,” asserts Bowden, supporting this theory by misremembering that
> “David then famously slays the boastful giant with a single smooth
> stone from his slingshot.”
> 
> “What you have is a parable about technology,” says Bowden who
> describes David’s slingshot as “a small, lightweight weapon that
> employs simple physics to launch a missile with lethal force from a
> distance, was an innovation that rendered all the giant’s advantages
> moot.”
> 
> The story of David and Goliath is a “parable about technology,” but
> the problems with Bowden’s telling of it begin with the fact that
> there is no slingshot in 1 Samuel 17 nor, actually, was a slingshot to
> be found anywhere on the planet in David’s day. To place one in
> David’s hands when he met Goliath 10 centuries before the Common Era
> is a wild anachronism at best. The “small, lightweight weapon that
> employs simple physics to launch a missile with lethal force from a
> distance” cited as a biblical game changer did not exist before the
> invention of vulcanized rubber by Charles Goodyear, patented in 1884.
> The slingshot is an innovation of the 19th century and Bowden might
> just as well have had David slay Goliath with a Hellfire missile or
> with Luke Skywalker’s light-saber as give him a slingshot.
> 
> David’s weapon in 1 Samuel 17 was not a slingshot but a sling. Hardly
> an innovation, the sling had already been around for a long time and
> is thought to have been invented in the Upper Paleolithic, or Old
> Stone Age, about the same time as the bow and arrow. David’s sling was
> a primitive device for flinging stones. It was widely used by
> shepherds to ward off predators, a weapon of low prestige that
> justified Goliath’s disdain.
> 
> It was Goliath, not David, who with his bronze armor and iron tipped
> spear brought the latest technological innovations to his last and
> fatal conflict. David himself is recorded in 1 Samuel 17 as saying
> “All those who are gathered here shall see that the Lord saves neither
> by sword or spear,” and the message of this story is the reverse of
> the lesson Bowden offers.
> 
> The story of David’s victory over Goliath is one of many in the pre
> and early monarchial biblical history wherein the latest military
> innovations are defeated by simple men, women and children improvising
> crude household and agricultural implements for use as weapons. Judges
> 4 tells of Jael, a Hebrew woman who killed Sisera, commander of “nine
> hundred chariots of iron” with a tent peg and wooden mallet. Sampson
> slaughtered a thousand armed Philistine soldiers with the jaw bone of
> a donkey (Judges 15). “When war broke out (between the Hebrews and the
> Philistines) none of the followers of Saul and Jonathan had either
> sword or spear,” we read in 1 Samuel 13, yet these insurgents armed
> with hoes, axes and shovels routed the most technically advanced army
> of the day.
> 
> As drones are today, iron was literally the cutting-edge of weapons
> technology in David’s and Goliath’s time, an incalculable leap from
> the arms of wood, stone and bronze that preceded it and a decisive
> advantage to the first armies to attain it. The Philistines, as
> vassals of the Egyptian empire, had access to the latest Iron Age
> armaments, much as the U.S. and its allies today have the edge on
> drones. “No blacksmith was to be found in the whole of Israel, for the
> Philistines were determined to prevent the Hebrews from making swords
> and spears.” (1 Samuel 13)
> 
> From Genesis to Revelation there can be found calls to war that are
> horrifying in their violence, but there is also a resilient strain of
> antipathy toward armaments technology in the Bible. Long before Saul
> or David, the Hebrew people were liberated when the celebrated wheels
> of iron on the chariots of the Egyptian army were mired in the mud of
> the Red Sea. (Exodus 14) Tragically, after Israel’s victory over the
> Philistines and in the pride that comes before the fall, Solomon not
> only imported the hated chariots of iron from Egypt for his own army
> but also “obtained them for export” (1 Kings 10) and so contributed to
> the ruin of his kingdom.
> 
> Bowden’s presumption in “The Killing Machines” that technology is
> forever “tilting the balance of battles” in favor of the combatants
> who wield the newest lethal gadgets is disproved by the very Bible
> tale at the heart of his argument. It is also disproven by the
> succession of history from the death of Goliath to this very day.
> 
> The Catholic Agitator, published by the Los Angeles Catholic Worker,
> does not have the influence of The Atlantic, but its editor Jeff
> Dietrich is an astute student of scripture, history and current events
> whose analysis is better informed than Mark Bowden’s. Writing about a
> decade and more of U.S. war in Afghanistan, Dietrich says that “in the
> process we have learned that great wealth, military might and
> technological sophistication can be humiliated by impoverished men who
> live in caves, wear rags, fight with World War II assault rifles and
> improvised explosive devices fabricated out of stolen and surplus
> munitions, and who fund their operations with the national cash crop,
> opium, which is purchased largely by impoverished, unemployed U.S.
> citizens.”
> 
> The lessons for contemporary peoples in the clash of David and Goliath
> and that of Afghanistan and the United States are the same: that the
> side with the most fire-power and state-of-the-art weaponry will not
> always win. Any nation that depends on such killing machines or that
> holds them in awe, whether these weapons are drones or spearheads of
> iron, is courting its own destruction. All empires have their end and
> the perception that a nation can forestall its demise by keeping a
> technological edge or by shear violence merits the scorn of both God
> and of history. The theological word for this is idolatry. The secular
> term is stupidity.
> 
> The premise of “The Killing Machine” is a distortion of one of the
> foundational stories of our culture, one found in the Koran as well as
> in the Bible. What Bowden does with David and Goliath, he does also
> with the stories from present-day Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan and
> Afghanistan. The “tacit” approval of U.S. drone strikes by Pakistan’s
> government that Bowden cites is as chimerical as David’s slingshot.
> His article twists concepts of international and constitutional law
> just as it perverts the lessons of Goliath’s demise. Bowden does
> violence to ancient and contemporary narratives that people urgently
> need to hear, stories with truths that might serve to redeem our
> humanity and even give us a shot at survival. Bowden’s counterfeit
> versions of these stories are devoid of morals. They are base
> superstitions and instead of counseling wisdom, these lying stories
> incite torture, murder and all of the foulest crimes.
> 
> “Drones distill war to its essence,” says Mark Bowden. “War itself is
> terrorism,” said Howard Zinn. “War is organized crime,” said General
> Smedley Butler. Bowden’s skillfully crafted propaganda justifying
> drone warfare is no other than an attempt to give moral validation to
> the essence of terrorism and crime.
> 
> Brian Terrell farms with crude implements in Iowa and a co-coordinator
> of Voices for Creative Nonviolence. On May 24 he finished a six month
> sentence at the Federal Prison Camp in Yankton, South Dakota, for
> protesting the killing machines operated from Whiteman Air Force Base
> in Missouri.
> 
> Contact <brian at vcnv.org>
> 
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