A pacifist protest against the peaceful drone.

• Author: Berry, Wendell
• Position: Essay

For some years, I thought I was, or hoped I was, a Christian pacifist, for I wished to honor Christ's peace-enabling instruction to love our enemies, returning good for evil, and His unquestioning generosity to the poor. But finally, in a fit of realism, I was compelled to recognize how deeply in disfavor among Christians were the actual teachings of the Gospels as well as the undiscriminating social behavior of Jesus of Nazareth, who dealt out his kindnesses to God knows whom.

I was having enough trouble at the time with sheep-killing dogs, without inviting the animosity of fiscally costive and violent Christians. I therefore became merely a moral pacifist, for even the immoral normally are not offended by morals. I declared myself opposed, not to killing per se, but to mass killing, killing in cold blood, and killing for profit--in short, to industrial warfare.

In my heart, in fact, I could find no deep repugnance against killing people who deserve to be killed. And I understood perfectly the impulse and the satisfaction of killing some objectionable person in the heat of anger. I did object to wiping out the entire population of a city in order to kill a mere few who were despicable or dangerous, and also to indiscriminate attacks against large numbers of offenders at the risk of killing even a few who were innocent. That such epical destructions were imposed coldly or coolly as technological feats, from a distance, as "part of the job," and greatly to the enrichment of war industrialists, seemed to me to compound their evil.

But then I was trumped by military technology. Just as I was settling fairly comfortably into my moral pacifism, along came precision weapons, sometimes known as smart weapons. Smart bombs gave me not too much trouble. A smart bomb, after all, despite its name is still a bomb. I found that I, at least, was too moral a man to wish to observe closely or tolerate pacifically the work of a smart bomb.

It was the advent of the drone that shook me, for it seemed actually to present the possibility of the selective killing of individual offenders, which offered the further attractions of being an act of passion and far cheaper than killing hundreds or thousands in order to kill one. I am very sure, contrary to the doctrine of progress, that the smartest, most precise weapons so far invented are swords and daggers, for each of them had its employer attached to its handle, which tended to eliminate the possibility of mistaken identity or collateral damage. But I thought the drone might be a pretty tolerable substitute.

Like most would-be pacifists, I...