UAVs, small remote-controlled flying devices, made their appearance in the world of intelligence and counter-terrorism on September 7, 2000. Almost one year to the day before the tragic turn of the September 11, 2001 attacks, a Predator-type drone flew over a farm in southern Kandahar, where al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden was reportedly staying as part of a reconnaissance mission codenamed "Afghan Eyes".

The world is going through a turbulent period. One of these grey areas of history which Antonio Gramsci described, with the foresight for which he is known, as those moments of twilight from which monsters emerge, when the old world is dying and the new world is slow to be born. And one of the appalling symptoms of this gestation is the perversion of humanist values, to the benefit of hate speech that resurfaces under a new guise which does not in any way change its abject nature: racism, anti-Semitism, xenophobia, ethnic and religious extremism.