During the recent blackout, millions of New Yorkers became reacquainted with the sky. Not so much during the day, when the sun was out, but at night, when the complete absence of electric lights meant that, perhaps for the first time in their lives, the city folk could clearly see the stars, the millions and billions of stars that are normally overshadowed by the bright lights of the big city. Perhaps these star-struck people also saw a few of the many police helicopters, FBI spy planes, Air Force fighter jets and GPS satellites that were also in the air that night. Perhaps they did see them -- how could you miss 'em? -- but didn't know what they'd seen.
But one thing is certain: despite the absence of electricity, those aircraft certainly saw the wicked traffic jams and the large confused crowds of people milling around or trying to get home. Even in a blackout, people do various tell-tale things -- move their bodies, emit heat, make noise, drive cars, and use their battery-powered "pirate," "ham" and CB radio transmitters -- all of which can easily be detected and tracked by air-borne radar sensors, infrared cameras, high-powered microphones, and electromagnetic interceptors.
Napoleon started it. Before him, Kinglake says, the battlefield could only be seen from the ground and so "had no entirety, no length, no breadth, no depth, no size, no shape and was made up of nothing. In such conditions, each separate gathering went on fighting its own little battle in happy and advantageous ignorance of the general state of action; nay, even very often in ignorance of the fact that any great conflict was raging." Two hundred years before the US military announced that it might deploy blimps over America to ensure "homeland security," Napoleon sent spies up in hot-air balloons to overlook ("surveill") the battlefield and report back on the troop-strengths and dispositions of the enemy's forces. These pioneering surveillance and intelligence-gathering operations were so successful that, during World War I, the French poet Apollinaire declared, "Victory above all will be/To see clearly at a distance." These lines form a veritable pyramid of inter-related meanings. In the wars of the future, the key to victory will be the ability to see clearly at or "over" a distance; to see clearly at a distance you must be above (physically, spiritually or morally); the victory that comes from above all is a victory over all.
Unlike Napoleon's air-borne spies, the aircraft that regularly patrol the skies of New York don't have to return home before they can make their reports. Today's aerial spies can stay above the enemy and use on-board computers and transmitters to send their reports back home as electronic messages, which arrive seconds after being sent and, if desired, can already be analyzed and coordinated with other data. The modern military blimp can use on-board radios to receive new orders from its continuously updated and thus ever-more "intelligent" commanders. But the real difference is that today's blimp can carry and discharge truly fearsome weapons. As the attack on Hiroshima showed, a single plane (a blimp with engines) can use a single bomb to destroy an entire city.
Perhaps the blackout reminded some of the power outages in occupied Iraq and, by way of that, to the riddle of George W. Bush's Empire. Why has it attacked, destroyed and occupied Afghanistan and Iraq, but stayed clear of North Korea? The answer isn't just oil. Unlike the others, North Korea has an advanced nuclear weapons program and the means to deliver a bomb (a long-distance bomber or missile). Unlike the others, North Korea can "defend" itself against the Bush Empire, that is, launch pre-emptive strikes. So can France, England, Canada, Israel, India, Pakistan, Russia and China. This is precisely why Iran (a part of Bush's infamous "Axis of Evil") is working hard to develop a bomb of its own and why Japan (an ally of the US but not a nuclear power in its own right) just launched its first spy satellite. A new arms race has begun.
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