Dictionary of Revolutionary Marxism

—   Dr - Dt   —


DRAFT [Military]
The forced enlistment of youth into an army.
        See also:
“VIETNAM SYNDROME”

DREYFUS CASE

“The Dreyfus case—a provocative trial organized in 1894 by the reactionary-monarchist circles of the French militarists. On trial was Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer of the French General Staff, falsely accused of espionage and high treason. Dreyfus’s conviction—he was condemned to life imprisonment—was used by the French reactionaries to rouse anti-Semitism and to attack the republican regime and democratic liberties. When, in 1898, socialists and progressive bourgeois democrats such as Emile Zola, Jean Jaurès, and Anatole France launched a campaign for Dreyfus’s re-trial, the case became a major political issue and split the country into two camps—the republicans and democrats on the one hand, and a bloc of monarchists, clericals, anti-Semites and nationalists, on the other. Under the pressure of public opinion, Dreyfus was released in 1899, and in 1906 was acquitted by the Court of Cassation and reinstated in the Army.” —Note 39, LCW 31.

“DRIP-PRICING”
The initial hiding of the full price of some commodity by originally referring only to a part of the full price, and then adding to that amount later with additional fees and costs. In effect the full price is only made known by separate “drips” or steps. This is a way of lying to the customer, trying to hook them with a falsely stated low price, and after they agree to the purchase, adding to the actual price demanded later on. This technique has become more and more common recently, as capitalism further reveals more aspects of its inherently fraudulent and dishonest nature.

‘Drip-Pricing’
        “A widespread practice in which consumers are presented with an initial price on a product or service that does not disclose mandatory fees.
        “It can happen when you book airline tickets, rent a car or order a taco dinner: The great deal you thought you clinched turns out to be not so great because of fees that weren’t disclosed upfront....
        “The term drip pricing has been around since at least 2009... But drip pricing itself has been going on for decades—probably because it works....
        “A big reason drip pricing works, research has shown, is that our brains tend to stay fixed on the price we first encountered even after we learn the total cost. And once we learn about the hidden fees, we often still pay up rather than shop around... ‘We implicitly calculate that investing more time into searching for [a better price] will not be worthwhile.’
        “The rise of e-commerce in the past decades has made drip pricing ubiquitous.”   —Santul Nerkar, “Shop Talk”, New York Times, February 25, 2024.

DRONE [Pilotless Aircraft]
An aircraft which flies itself, or much more commonly at present, an aircraft remotely controlled by a pilot who is not onboard it. The U.S. military has in recent years utilized rapidly increasing numbers of drone warplanes as a major part of its endless imperialist wars, especially in Afghanistan. These drones are most often controlled by U.S. pilots sitting in comfortable air-conditioned buildings at Air Force bases in the United States, including in Nevada, New Mexico and near Syracuse, New York. When these remote killers spot a group of possible “enemies”, they shoot missiles from the drone aircraft down on them. Although they claim to be trying to avoid women and children, this often results in the murder of large numbers of civilians, including women and children. In any case, it is an extremely dehumanized method of mass murder. After their days of slaughter of often a dozen or more people at a time, the U.S. pilots head home for a comfortable evening with their own families.
        See also:
YEMEN — U.S. Imperialist Drone Warfare In, TORTURE — By U.S. Government

“HANCOCK FIELD AIR NATIONAL GUARD BASE, N.Y. — From his computer console here in the Syracuse suburbs, Col. D. Scott Brenton remotely flies a Reaper drone that beams back hundreds of hours of live video of insurgents, his intended targets, going about their daily lives 7,000 miles away in Afghanistan. Sometimes he and his team watch the same family compound for weeks.
        “‘I see mothers with children, I see fathers with children, I see fathers with mothers, I see kids playing soccer,’ Colonel Brenton said.
        “When the call comes for him to fire a missile and kill a militant—and only, Colonel Brenton said, when the women and children are not around—the hair on the back of his neck stands up, just as it did when he used to line up targets in his F-16 fighter jet.
        “Afterward, just like the old days, he compartmentalizes. ‘I feel no emotional attachment to the enemy,’ he said. ‘I have a duty, and I execute the duty.’ ...
        “The Air Force now has more than 1,300 drone pilots, about 300 less than it needs, stationed at 13 or more bases across the United States. They fly the unmanned aircraft mostly in Afghanistan. (The numbers do not include the classified program of the C.I.A., which conducts drone strikes in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen.) Although the Afghan war is [supposedly!] winding down, the military expects drones to help compensate for fewer troops on the ground.
        “By 2015, the Pentagon projects that the Air Force will need more than 2,000 drone pilots for combat air patrols operating 24 hours a day worldwide. The Air Force is already training more drone pilots—350 last year—than fighter and bomber pilots combined.” —Elisabeth Bumiller, “A Day Job Waiting for a Kill Shot a World Away”, New York Times, July 29, 2012.

“Now I prefer cloudy days when the drones don’t fly. When the sky brightens and becomes blue, the drones return and so does the fear. Children don’t play so often now, and have stopped going to school. Education isn’t possible as long as the drones circle overhead.” —Zubair Rehman, 13-year old Pakistani student, October 29, 2013. Quoted in the London Review of Books, Vol. 43, #17, Sept. 9, 2021, p. 3.
         [U.S. drone attacks occur frequently in growing numbers of countries, including Afghanistan, Pakistan, and multiple countries in the Middle East and northeast Africa. They will undoubtedly continue in Afghanistan even after the supposed “end” to the 20-year war there in 2021. In fact, even as the last withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan occurred in late August 2021, a U.S. drone attack recklessly killed 10 members of a civilian family, including 7 children, even though the father of that family was actually an aid worker in support of U.S. imperialist occupation efforts. (See the next quotation.) —Ed.]

“The Pentagon acknowledged on Friday that the last U.S. drone strike before American troops withdrew from Afghanistan was a tragic mistake that killed 10 civilians, including seven children, after initially saying it had been necessary to prevent an attack on troops. The extraordinary admission provided a horrific punctuation to the chaotic ending of the 20-year war in Afghanistan ...
        “Almost everything senior defense officials asserted in the hours, and then days, and then weeks after the Aug. 29 drone strike turned out to be false. The explosives the military claimed were loaded in the trunk of a white Toyota sedan struck by the drone’s Hellfire missile were probably water bottles, and a secondary explosion in the courtyard in a densely populated Kabul neighborhood where the attack took place was probably a propane or gas tank, officials said.
        “In short, the car posed no threat at all, investigators concluded.
        “The acknowledgement of the mistake came a week after a New York Times investigation of video evidence challenged assertions by the military that it had struck a vehicle carrying explosives meant for Hamid Karzai International Airport.” —“Drone Attack Was a Mistake, Pentagon Says; Admits Afghans Killed Had No Ties to ISIS”, New York Times, National Edition, Sept. 18, 2021.
         [Since these sorts of “mistakes” in U.S. drone attacks are so very common, they really should not be called “mistakes” at all. Reckless indifference to the lives of ordinary people is much closer to the truth. And this so-called “mistake”, in particular, was obviously only even acknowledged at all because a New York Times investigation was able to expose the long string of Pentagon lies about what happened. —Ed.]

DRUG INDUSTRY
See:
PHARMACEUTICAL INDUSTRY

DRUGS — Illegal
See:
OPIOID ADDICTION CRISIS [U.S.],   OPIUM WAR,   WAR ON DRUGS

DSM
See: DIAGNOSTIC AND STATISTICAL MANUAL




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