But every time such situations arose, certain contemporaries were troubled. Faced with a spectacle of armed violence that so manifestly contravened “the conventional understanding of war as an activity in which human dying and killing are exchanged,” it was not long before they expressed their indignation. But when these people began to express their objections too openly, they were often faced with a very ancient discursive strategy used to calm uneasy consciences and silence the most vociferous: the reassuring discourse of historical permanence. It is a matter of showing, with the backing of many historical examples, that there is nothing fundamentally new about this kind of situation, so it is perfectly acceptable.

Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, loc. 336