Drone Warriors, or: The war in Ukraine is not taking place

On the most excellent, beautiful, truly double-plus-good escalation

Jun 06, 2025

Frederick the Great, King of Prussia, supposedly once remarked how “artillery adds dignity to what would otherwise be an ugly brawl”.

I guess what he meant to say was that it sanitizes the military conflict, and creates a cognitive distance between the spectators and the carnage.

The increasing dominance of drone warfare further increases this distance. It’s an additional step in the same direction, synergizing perfectly with the almost complete power the mass media now has to frame and define both the parameters and the trajectory of a conflict. The violence is now almost entirely out of sight, almost entirely virtual in relation to us spectators and vicarious participants in the moral theatre of imperial propaganda.

The war in Ukraine is not taking place, as Baudrillard would say.

The nature of the conflict now being almost entirely reduced to a spectacle, to entertainment produced for mass consumption, implies that all of it could just as well be nothing but theatre. It makes no difference to the audience. It’s not real.

(Of course it’s real. Don’t be an idiot. That’s not the point.)

It occupies the same cognitive space as any other mass-produced form of spectacular entertainment. And since everything else is artificial now, everything potentially fake, porous and permeated by the ubiquitous big lie of AI — there’s no way to recover that trust in the distant and the hyper-mediated.

And this is probably key to understanding the totally unhinged response to this week’s moves toward further escalation that we see among Western media pundits, politicians and academics alike.

It’s not a rational response to something that’s actually taking place in the world. It’s a response to dramatic entertainment.

Arms industry and escalation propaganda is all over the editorial pages of the major papers. “How can we be creative like the drone warriors of Ukraine”, reads one title in Aftonbladet, a paper proudly “independent social democratic”.

Creative like drone warriors.

Yeah, that fits. How does a literate person unironically craft a headline like that?

I fondly recall how the current Swedish Chief of Defense, newly appointed, was interviewed in another paper, which reported how he showcased in his office, like an abject moron, a roll of toilet paper printed with “Putin, go fuck yourself” in Ukrainian.

You can just see Carl von Clausewitz sporting a t-shirt with “Napoleon, leck mich im Arsch”, to really communicate just what a scholar and gentleman he was. No?

They’re like a gaggle of neighbourhood children trying to goad and bully the weird kid down the street until he finally goes back inside to get daddy’s pistol and something spectacular happens. Some unimaginable grand finale they’ve all been waiting for. Something real.

Sweden’s former prime minister, Bildt, celebrates the “amazing attack” on Russia’s assets, exploiting the vulnerabilities exposed in mutual New START treaty and makes infantile comparisons to James Bond. He’s especially enthusiastic over Ukraine (and NATO) attacking key long-range assets that are no longer in production.

Why, pray tell, do you think that’s the case? Perhaps because of the mutual agreements on exposing and limiting the production of strategic long-range weaponry that were just exploited and violated.

A few pundits even favorably compared this week’s attacks to the Israeli pager bombs. They seem to want to turn everything into a Trojan horse, I guess.

And a prominent professor of East European studies, Stefan Hedlund, argues that the “cowardly West” now ought to follow suit and likewise mount violent attacks on Russian territory, toss aside any fears of escalation, and root out any fifth columnists (like myself) from within the democratic West. He even makes the completely unhinged statement that unless Russia now escalates to nuclear retaliation, we must certainly push forward and strike its strategic assets deep within the heartland.

Like, what the fuck am I actually reading here? Is it possible to communicate in any less uncertain terms how you really, really want to push this towards the brink of nuclear war? You cowards. How dare you not court the apocalypse so we can sell more democratic weapons of liberty to starving children, and so decrepit old professors can end their careers pretending they’re starring in some cold war propaganda movie of their formative years. Mind you, Hedlund’s (brief) future is on the line, as he states.

I always found Communists on the Moon to be a sadly unused title for a feature film.

But then again, these kinds of outbursts are not the serious, considered responses to actual events that we take them to be. It’s theatre. They are affected reactions to immersive, dramatic entertainment, which has always been the predominant mode of communication in the society of the spectacle.

The mounting Great War is going to be the first pervasive and total conflict that occurs without really taking place. Always on the cusp of “escalating” and becoming real (until it finally does).

It will be an almost entirely virtual, entirely spectacular phenomenon geared towards harnessing, without the associated costs, all of those beautiful windfalls of actual military conflict in terms of legitimate repression, manufactured social cohesion and enforced economic austerity and expropriation in the purest Orwellian fashion.

We’re going to be dealing with low-intensity, small scale conflicts simmering all across the globe, televised, AI-enhanced and digitally commodified to no end, gouding us to accept rearmament, mass surveillance, austerity, and a comprehensive erosion of civil liberties until every last one of us is reduced to an obedient drone warrior.

An idiot, devoid of agency, who produces nothing but continuous noise.