I met someone who works in the arms trade last night

I meet the strangest people in pubs. This guy was a Northern lad and he
explained he was down in London to sign a deal on some new Unmanned
Aerial Vehicle technology. UAV's and UCAV's (Unmanned Combat Aerial
Vehicles) are the future of warfare. It'll soon be like playing a
computer game. Since the first Predator aerial drone broke international
convention and launched a Hellfire missile the dawn of a new era in
killing has begun.

UCAV's offer huge advantages over manned vehicles. The primary value is
risk. They can send them into the worst situations and the only fear is
loss of the materials (and the chance the technology could be
reverse-engineered by the enemy if enough survives an attack or a
crash). The reduction in need for the systems to support an organic
being means they can be far lighter. They can stay in the air for days
- much longer than U2 spy plane pilots would do. They can handle higher
acceleration and turning G-force so can jink away from a missile better
than planes like the Eurofighter with it's advanced systems to reduce
the impact of G-force on the pilot.

The man I met was designing systems that would ultimately kill people. I
admit a hypocritical interest in these systems too. I like warfare. But
I don't like what it is in practice. Thankfully I'm not part of the
industry but he was. But he didn't see what he was doing nor what he was
part of. He was just doing his job, a job that he'd done for years and
only did because it was a job. He never thought about his place in the
deaths that UAVs and UCAVs cause.

Collective fetishisation is a word I heard ages ago at a socialist
conference. It's about how people forget what goes into the products
that we buy. Take a can of beans. We never think about the person who
planted them, the one who harvested them, who designed the machiines
that canned them, the people who transport them, design the packaging,
put them on the shelves and all the rest in the chain.

People don't think about their part in the grand scheme of things
either. The bankers never thought their gambles would risk the world
economy as did the people who took mortgages they couldn't afford. This
gent who I met had signed a deal to bring ever more advanced technology
to the battlefield, but he never thought he was making the killing of a
fellow human being easier. Perhaps until he met me.