Holocaust 2.0

The twilight of the American Empire, it thus appears, will be remembered for its endless kill lists and its codification of murder. -Ben Schreiner 

It is high time we learned to read the signs of the times. The epitaph above is taken from the recent Counterpunch article "Obama's Endless Kill List." In that article Schreiner briefly illuminates some of the key facts about Obama's drone program, including the administrative policy defining any military age male in so-called combative area as combatants, and the assumption of guilt unless proven innocent. Schreiner goes on to call our attention to the total credulity of those in government, and the absolute lack of challenge from the Republican quarter. Whatever the differences Obama and Romney both agree that killing poverty-stricken people in Pakistan is a good thing. And that is all that was said in the presidential debates, maybe not in those words.

The mainstream American media is onboard too, perpetuating an incredibly callous attitude human life, which, as an aside, I remember all too well from the attitudes of people around me at the onset of the Iraq war. Because the people being killed are so far away it is easy to lump them into some indiscriminate category of "the enemy" as though the people in question were simply elements in a video game. (This in fact was the exact attitude of some of the people who attended my high school.) Schreiner has this to say:

The callous absence of doubt is just apparently just as prevalent among elite U.S. media. For instance, in an appearance on MSNBC's Morning Joe Tuesday, Time columnist Joe Klein chillingly sought to justify the gravest horror's of Obama's drone program. 

In a debate over drones with right-wing host Joe Scarborough Klein went on to aver: "The bottom line, in the end, is this: whose four-year old gets killed. What we're doing is limiting the possibility that four year olds here are going to get killed by indiscriminate acts of terror." 

The very fact that rationalizing the killing of children can freely emanate from amongst "respectable" circles in Washington is indicative of the severe moral deterioration from which the  Obama administration's drone program was born. (Obama's Endless Kill List)  

This is disgusting. The subtext of Klein's statement is perfectly clear; it is okay to kill the poor Arab Muslim child. But of course it isn't okay. When anyone, even a liberal American, starts to justify the murder of children then it is time to stop listening to that person. It is time to denounce them as cold-hearted killers and face the facts of what is going on. Murder is murder. Obama's drone program is not a foreign policy it is a brutally vicious extermination program. There are lists, lists of people who are condemned to die at the say-so of the American president without evidence, without trial, without justice. Anyone who gets in the way is "collateral damage."

The technology may have changed, but the game is the same. Welcome to Holocaust 2.0.