Hope’s Glimmer Dies Again
One tries to be understanding, patient, tries to embrace the tolerance so thoroughly rejected by those who condemn out of hand, with no chance for counterargument, the possibility of dialogue. Comes a point where one has to simply acknowledge that some people, in some places, just don’t share anything in common with us.
We have tried to explain the Jihadists by looking at history, pointing out where they have just cause to be angry with the West, outraged at what has been done to their people, and that the response can be understood from some exterior position that refrains from taking sides. Suicide bombing as a cultural aberration can nonetheless be comprehended from the perspective of the political outsider who sees that the only weapon available to those with no voice is sometimes the loudest, most irrational shout imaginable. We see the situation in the Middle East and shake our heads at the repeated injustices committed over and over again in the name of oil or power or faith, which may in the end all be one and the same.
But the simple truth now seems to be that any political or moral validity these movements may at one time have possessed has been squandered in a mindless lemming-like inability to allow for anything other than the preprocessed, spoonfed insanity of their religious convictions. The act of destroying those who are not One Of Them has become a self-perpetuating series of negations, a denial that anyone can have any authority to negotiate, to make policy, to attempt reconciliation, to render the situation rational. Only Allah may be “in charge” and anyone else who attempts to command a plebiscite to accomplish anything that in the least way deviates from the perceived path of the righteous must simply die.
Which in the end will be everyone. Under such a program, no one may be in charge.
And since Allah chooses to be silent in the present day, the natural condition of such a polity will be subsistence and terror. All progress must cease by this program. Everything must be rendered down into a basic mortal pabulum that has no definable shape, no direction, no possibility of Becoming.
These people are insane. Perhaps not clinically–there may be no organic component to their madness–which makes it all the more terrifying. They value nothing by which common ground can be found or common cause be made. Even their leaders probably cannot control them, once the zeal and the arrogance that has no Self at its center takes hold and they believe they are acting according to divine will.
There is no political future in that path and it is abhorrent to all we hold dear. One may deride the West for many failures to live up to its own promises, criticize us for our lapses in conscience, but in the face of such utter nihilistic perversity one has to admire the things we cling to as noble and true and precious, at the base of which is the assumed freedom to simply have a different opinion.
The genius of the United States and modern Europe lies in the fact that when we have an election, regardless the outcome, we Go Home. We do not riot. We do not overturn the Constitution. We do not have coups. (One can argue these points, but in the end they are largely true.) How does one teach that to a nation that seems incapable of accepting differences of opinion? We see it time and again, when elections here or there or some other place are declared, by someone, to be not the will of the people, the cities burn, the leaders are shot, the military is called out, and democracy is kicked in the balls again.
Bhutto may not have been able to save Pakistan from itself. But now we’ll never know. A plebiscite of one decided for the whole country.
And people wonder why religion in politics is such a Big Deal.
projektleiterin,
Oh, I see it now. It isn’t gentle Jesus meek and mild and an ever-loving god after all. Instead of being the final word in world-wide morality in which just thinking about masturbation is a sin, what we actually have is that religious bigots can be just as bad as the four worst genocidal maniacs in human history.
Please remind me, how exactly is that supposed to put religion in a good light?
We were actually talking about suicide bombers; apologies if I did not make that clear. But if you want to talk about genocide we can always do Rwanda, if that’s more to your taste. You remember Rwanda, the African country in which 65% of the population are Roman Catholic and a further 15% are various protestant sects. This was the country where in response to a series of visions of the virgin Mary a million or so Tutsi were put to the sword in 1994 with the help and collusion of a number of ministers of the church, including Father Wenceslas Munyeshyaka and the Bishop of Gikongoro otherwise known as Monsignor Augustin Misago. There were also some nuns in the dock at the subsequent trials.
Maybe you also remember the denunciation of this atrocity and the church’s part in it offered by the pope in the vatican? No, thought not, because they never did denounce it.
The Aum sect Sarin gas attacks on the Tokyo subway were horrible terrorist atroticites, accepted. But they weren’t bombs, were they, and the five people who released the gas all had getaway drivers ready and waiting. So they weren’t intending to kill themselves, were they?
So I stick by what I said; there are no Buddhist suicide bombers, and any attempt to explain the motivation of the islamist suicide bombers has to account for that fact. I have done that. Your, “have you forgotten Stalin…” is a weak attempt to sidestep the issue under discussion.
Don’t cheat Martin, you were the one who mentioned Joseph Kony and claimed that such atrocities were only possible because of religious fanaticism - “but to be Joseph Kony one has to have faith” - I showed you that it’s not always religious faith that makes people command mass killings.
If I understand you right (it seems that with you we really have to be careful with laying out the facts clearly :D), you think that the fact a terrorist bomber commits suicide can only be explained with his expectations that he will go to heaven. So, you’re implying that men treasure life that much that they would not be willing to sacrifice it for a greater goal that transcends their own existence on earth?
Malcolm Gladwell in his book The Tipping Point mentions a surge of suicide among young men in Micronesia.
http://www.micsem.org/pubs/articles/suicide/frames/microhangspreefr.htm
It seems to me that the right settings can lead people to believe that suicide is the solution and they do not even have to have a really good reason.
Oh, and what about the Japanese Kamikaze pilots? Where’s the religious background?
If there are no Buddhist suicide bombers it might be because the necessary circumstances have not come up yet.
projektleiterin,
I will, on reflection, agree that Joseph Kony will read as me cheating.
My intention was to show that in order to achieve a level of conviction that exceeds the value placed on ones own life requires faith. Joseph Kony does not (as far as we know) intend to commit suicide to prove his point, and is therefore a very poor choice of example. But it is for exactly this reason that I also dismiss Stalin, Pol Pot, Hitler and Mao Zedong; they were quite keen on killing others but not so keen to speed their own demise. Their cause was more important to them than the life of millions of others, but not more important than their own life.
But I can’t help thinking in this context that religions are very like totalitarian regimes. Everything you say, think and do is controlled by some set of rules that are open to an infinite level of interpretation, so that at no time can you be completely certain that you are within the rules that exist at that point. (Mark asked the question earlier: what use is a holy book that is not open to interpretation? So if each individual can interpret the book their own way, where is their guarantee that their interpretation will achieve the salvation (or whatever) they seek?).
In most parts of the world suicide has a stigma attached to it; it is considered wrong of people to commit suicide and those left behind feel as though they have failed the suicide in some way when it happens. Japan is an exception to this where seppuku is seen as an honourable way to die. I suspect that the situation in micronesia you mention is a social phenomena whereby the sheer number of suicides is making it seem as though there is no stigma which “permits” more suicides to occur so that it becomes a kind of self-perpetuating anomaly; perhaps not actually accepted but no longer actively condemned.
Earlier in the discussion it was mentioned that a high proportion (70 - 80%) of Palestinians support martyr operations, so maybe a similar thing is happening here? Just a suggestion and I am neither a psychologist nor a social scientist so I am more than happy for someone to point out where I am in error, but if the local populace don’t see it as being a bad thing per se will that not tend to perpetuate the practice and make it more common?
Kamikaze - Divine Wind - fanatics in Japan were recruited and trained by Buddhist and Shinto priests who taught their adepts that the Emperor was a Golden Wheel-Turning Sacred King, one of the four manifestations of the ideal Buddhist monarch and a Tathagata, or “fully enlightened being” of the material world. And since Zen treats life and death indifferently, why not abandon the cares of this world and adopt a policy of prostration at the feet of a homicidal dictator?
According to Hitchens, “Although many Buddhists now regret that deplorable attempt to prove their own superiority, no Buddhist since then has been able to demonstrate that Buddhism was wrong in its own terms.” A conclusion which, if correct, would seem to indicate that at least some of the “necessary circumstances” you refer to are still there, lying in wait for some temporal cause to spark them into action. Maybe what is required is a particular combination of political or social “cause” to serve and the extreme faith of a religious fanatic who values the cause more than his own life. That would make religion a vital (though admittedly not sole) motivator for suicide bombing. But it still does not explain why there have not been any Buddhist suicide bombers, any Jesuit suicide bombers or indeed any catholic suicide bombers. Do these religions not exist in societies that have social “causes” worth dying for?
This, I believe, brings us back to your guy Sayyid Qutb [pronounced kuh-tub]. I read about him in Lawrence Wright’s excellent (and Pulitzer prize winning) book, “The Looming Tower” which has the sub-title “Al-Qaeda’s road to 9/11″ and opens with Qutb sailing to New York from Alexandria in 1948. Qutb is the point from which the ideology that led to al-Qaeda started. From him we derive the Muslim Brotherhood, al-Jihad, Saudi Arabian moslems fighting in the Afghan war against the Soviet army, and ultimately al-Qaeda.
All societies have rich and poor - in relative terms, homeless, unemployed, the downtrodden and the oppressed. What Qutb gave moslems was something else. He taught them that whereas the prophet had told them they were the chosen people and that everyone else was an infidel, it was not obvious in the 1940’s what benefits being chosen had brought them. In America Qutb saw the dawn of rampant consumerism where virtually everyone had a job (unemployment in the USA in 1948 was less than 4%) and half the world’s total wealth was in American hands. Qutb, however, came from a country where half the population lived in conditions that by comparison were not far short of squalor.
What Qutb did was he opened the eyes of moslems to the dichotomy between what they might have expected from being the chosen people and where they actually stood in relation to how your average infidel lives. In 2000 years of scientific and cultural change the infidel West had come a long way, but the majority of moslems still lived the life of a dirt-poor desert nomad with virtually no prospect of ever being anything else. If that isn’t enough to make the “chosen people” jealous then I don’t know what is.
The oil changed that for only a very small minority.
I am not, incidentally, claiming that they were or are jealous of our consumer goods and lax views on sexuality, or even our limited dress code. They are jealous that we can be so perverted and yet prosper, that we can essentially win by cheating in the great game of life. The resentment (some of them) feel at this is the “cause” they need to add to their faith to make the mix potent enough to spawn suicide bombers.
This also might help to explain why the majority of suicide bombers are reasonably well educated and middle class. A goatherder might look at America and know that even if he moved there his prospects of being anything other than a goatherder are pretty slim. But an educated person can see prospects, he can see numerous possibilities for employment, investment and business. So in that sense he is able to envisage how he has lost out in the lottery of the religion into which you are born.
The one element that Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, Gregory the Great, Urban the II, John Brown, Loyola, Torquemada, and Tojo all had in common, despite religious differences including atheism is the conviction of Evangelism. This is merely one aspect of a religious psychology, but it is the one in which presence all great oppressors and their minions have excelled.