Contemporary Ritual Suicide and Mass Murder: Speculations on the Nature of Terrorism

Open a newspaper on any ordinary day in the 21^st century and what do you find? A pilot flies his fully-laden commercial airliner into the sheer rock face of a mountain. A driver plows her

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school bus directly into a power pole. A teenage girl detonates her belt of explosives while standing in a marketplace, and a few moments later, as the emergency services arrive, a friend explodes herself in the same way. Then a young man enters a church, sits in a Bible studies class for an hour, pulls out a revolver and shoots nine of the participants. A reporter later says, “He meant to commit suicide by this action.”

The media are filled with other incidents, new variations on the themes of mass murder, multiple suicides, actively sought martyrdom in the cause of ideologies and fanatical cults. A beach resort in Tunisia. A mosque in Yemen. An art exhibit in Texas. A gas station in France. A museum in Belgium. The parliament building in Canada. Sometimes it seems there are people waiting for any excuse to kill themselves and others, just as there are relatively neutral individuals who are ready to be seduced, brain-washed, or lured into the madness of death by cult.

Every time one of these events take place, the experts offer their set-piece explanation. One, a lone wolf, some disaffected youth, like so many others unable to accept his own failures in life, blames another traditional scapegoated group, and kills them in order to purge himself of inner demons. Two, a cycle of violence perpetrated by a gun-worshipping public, who are desensitized by violent video games, movies and various online games; the cycle manifests itself inevitably when susceptible individuals seek excitement. Three, drugs and alcohol are to blame. Four, ignorance, bigotry and centuries of racism periodically boil over. Five, uncensored social media sites online brainwash the vulnerable, the lonely, and the weak-willed. Six, poor parenting skills combine with underfunded schools and overworked social workers. Seven, sexual abuse in infants exacerbated by continued neglect. Eight, the breakdown of Judeo-Christian morality and Western Civilization no longer believing in itself due to political correctness and post-modernist ideologies. Nine, too much sugar in our food. Ten, the work of the devil.

In the old days, the family doctor faced with the sick mind would have recommended blood-letting, aspirin, or a run around the park. Or, a little later, the health professional proffered a full frontal lobotomy, six sessions of electro-shock each week, or a steady diet of Prozac. And rather recently the treatment consisted of love, tolerance, understanding, and more welfare payments.

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Today, well, everything is more complicated because our values are so variable. There seem to be so many complications and variables in the question to be addressed in this special issue of Clio’s Psyche that it is difficult for me to know what the goal of the discussion is. Even before a psychohistorian can get down to the description of birthing details, mother-infant bonding, or early discipline in the home–that is, the things that are needed to understand before one can get close to the individual case histories and that certainly precede any attempt at social generalization–we need to know what we are investigating. At what point does an individual act of suicide (one hesitates to say a simple suicide, for none are without complications and extenuating circumstances) become socially ritualized and gain historical or religious meaning? When, too, does it become inappropriate to call the criminal murderer who kills himself as well as others a suicide bomber? In other words, at what point does a series of murders cease being a list of random criminal homicides prompted by greed, revenge, or gang rivalry and turn into a political or faith-based statement?

If we can determine how the slaying of one or more human beings functions in society, then we can look at the specifics of the personalities involved to see if these characteristics have anything psychological in common and in their ontological development over an extended period of time—within a single lifetime or several generations. Finally, no less significant, and perhaps most significant of all, do the same terms, concepts, and paradigms of behavior cross ethnic and geographical distances, so that there is a human dimension rather than a national or cultural specificity? Can we really and honestly say, when we watch the news broadcast of a bus exploding, a young girl strapped with explosives standing in the middle of a crowded marketplace and self-detonating, or two young men leaving pressure-cooker bombs at a sporting event, “There, but by the grace of God, go I”? Is it more than a denial or a rationalization to say, instead, “They are a different kind of people than I am”?

Eventually, we have to ask: Is there an ethical or scientific distinction between a paid murderer, a despondent suicide, and an idealistic martyr? Certainly, there seems no connection between a modern serial killer stalking the streets and in a fit of rage or a cold-blooded determination to avenge some deep unbearable injury done to him in childhood and a classical heroic warrior in the cause of something higher than oneself ready to accept an almost inevitable

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death? Homer and then Virgil knew there were times in the midst of combat—whether it involved armies confronting one another or a single combat between world-historical leaders—when a cloud of blind rage would come over the combatants, the so-called battle fury (furor poeticus, divine madness), and they would kill indiscriminately all those around them, foe and friend, with no attempt to survive the moment of madness. Achilles, when avenging the death of Patrocles, his lover-companion, wished to do more than slay those responsible; he wanted to kill all the Trojans on the battlefield, and even all the other Greeks so there would be no one left alive in the world.

Other heroes, however, like Odysseus (Ulysses) used patience, cunning and disguise; they kept their cool, waited until the time was ripe, then struck when it would be most effective. They calculated, so as to gain the best results of their efforts and keep the violence from spreading in a mad, mimetic surge in the way that panic could happen. These cautious heroes knew what they did was dangerous and that they more likely than not would die, but self-destruction was not the point. They were not kamikaze pilots turning themselves into weapons of mass destruction for the honor of the emperor. There were epic warriors from Troy like Hector, who sought to keep out of harm’s way if possible, for they longed to return to their wives and children, but when duty and honor required, and the circumstances offered no other way, they stepped forward, did their mighty best, and accepted what consequences there were. Still another type of hero-martyr appears in the Book of Judges: Samson, a big, blundering, disobedient fool, finally entrapped by Delilah and caught without his strength-giving hair, realizes only in the last moments of his life what his destiny requires. Drawing into himself, pretending still to be as weak as he is blind, he lets himself be taken into the Temple of Dagon, waits until the jeering and mocking Philistines have all entered the building and filled it to bursting for the celebration of his defeat. Then, with a mighty exertion of force, he brings the gigantic walls, the enormous roof, and all the great weight of the structure down on top of himself as well as his people’s enemy, obliterating their power over Israel for a generation.

How does one conceive of multiple killings in a continuous series leading to genocide? One of the horrible instances was that which occurred on the Killing Fields of Cambodia, when victims were made to lie in a long row, then one by one, an individual was

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made to stand up, given a sledgehammer, and told to crush the head of the next person along the line, before lying down again to wait his turn. If they were in some sort of conscious and rational state, perhaps they thought that the harder the blow, the less suffering that would be inflicted; but hopefully by that time they were all but numbed, unconscious of anything other than the merest senescence. Or the line of Coptic Christians kneeling in front of ISIS fanatics waiting to be beheaded, staring blankly, waiting without apparent emotion for the cut; they may have been in a trance waiting to pass into paradise. But what about their mute and zombie-like murderers? They too cannot be classified as responsible criminals—or can they? Is there some kind of insane collusion here between victim and victimizer, so that if the person to be beheaded does not resist or cry out, the killer is justified in his action? Who made the video and who decided to show it on international television? The world will certainly have descended into the worst hell of immorality if this collusion were true.

It was said that during the Holocaust there were not six million Jews killed, but one person and then another and then another—each victim an individual with his or her own history and private identity. At the same time, in the so-called banality of evil, murder was committed by an individual killer, whether directly or at several removes, including those who profited by the genocide in terms of cheap apartments suddenly made available, jobs opened up, luxury goods put on sale, ordinary items that had been in short supply by the war transported from one occupied territory or another collaborating state into the heart of the Third Reich. If such people—the so-called “Good Germans” who “did not know” or who “were powerless to stop the madness”—then became vulnerable to fire bombings, artillery attacks, famine, and disease, then they colluded in their own deaths and were not innocent victims or collateral damage.

The young people who strap on their suicide belts filled with explosives, nails, and screws to scatter into whatever crowd some minder has designated on their behalf, can they be compared with young patriots volunteering to serve flag, country, and God? Whereas in the last century, during two world wars and innumerable local conflicts, soldiers or guerrillas supposedly went off on a great adventure or heeded the community’s call when king or other leader called to make the world safe for democracy, or to inaugurate the new world order, or to remove the scourge of this or that

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ideological evil; when actually most wanted to get away from home, domestic responsibilities, unhappy and boring lives, or to show off for their mates, girlfriends, or parents who would otherwise view them as useless cowards. As they sailed off into the sunset, they probably did not conceive of dying or being wounded. Later, to be sure, once the fighting started, each one killed the enemy to protect himself and the fellow down the line, or in some noble deed threw himself down on a hand grenade to cushion the blow for his mate. A few heroes then accepted great risks, even the likelihood of being killed in action for the success of an immediate mission, not of the Grand Strategy. Most of the troops slogged through and hoped to survive.

The true suicide-murderer kills him/herself on purpose, and anyone else by inadvertency, usually because he or she cannot perceive, imagine, or feel anything for any person outside of his or her own life. This is a form of euthanasia, instances where someone finds him- or herself so ill, incapacitated, and unable to conceive of continuing to be a horrible burden to those all around, that only death can provide relief. Unable, however, to perform the act in solitude, he or she sets up a situation where other people have to be involved but they are not understood to be other than instruments in the suicide; this is assisted suicide. When for a suicide the only meaning in the self-killing or the inadvertent slaying of others has become release from the pain, humiliations, or a sense of guilt for past decisions of one sort or another, then a moral blindness, an egotistical cloud of unknowing, descends over consciousness. For instance, someone suicidal drives a car into traffic and hits one or more other cars, but this was not the intention, and never entered the mind of the perpetrator. This is more than an acute embarrassment (shame) or a case of clinical depression or melancholia: it can be a rational, moral choice, though illegal.

On the other hand, the traditional martyr (not the fanatical mass suicide murderer) seeks to serve a higher cause, usually by accepting death passively, as a proof of faith, nationalistic patriotism or even social compassion; he or she does this because the physical and historical self (as distinct from the eternal soul) means nothing in itself and can reach spiritual fulfilment through enduring great pain and allowing it to be destroyed.

The kamikaze (who flies his plane into a battleship or aircraft carrier), the shahid (who straps on an explosive belt and walks into a crowded marketplace or movie theater), and others who turn

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themselves into weapons of mass destruction are not the same as the traditional heroic soldier who takes great risks in combat and often accepts the high probability of his own death for the successful outcome of some strategic action, usually for the sake of protecting the homeland and saving many lives. The distinctions between those who accept death for a higher cause—usually the life of another—and those who seek only to destroy the other while killing him- or herself, are so manifest as to hardly need discussion.

While cultural historians may debate the meaning at different times of concepts such as honor (one’s own good name), glory (the reputation and integrity of the group), cowardice (fearfulness and weakness of spirit), and nihilism (destruction and death as ends in themselves), the psychohistorian tries to find out what motors in the personal history of an individual and the dynamics of a group lead towards these delusions, trance-like states, and self-blinded rages. From this perspective, which can be adopted for cynical reasons—to deny the possibility of any ideals or selfless acts whatsoever—the conscious and ideological rationalizations are part of mere epiphenomenon, not an essential component of the personality or national identity.

Often, too, the objective-thinking scientist may decide beforehand that the martyrs and saintly-murderers are pawns in the hands of cynical political ideologues. Children too young to know better, women threatened otherwise with social ostracism (or “honor killing”), disturbed adolescents and insane adults beyond rational thought—these can be convinced of the need to perform mass killings with themselves as the weapon of choice, of the great rewards to be won in the next life by these usually perceived crimes, and of the ecstatic state of being for all that will be created. Sometimes peer pressure or drugs induce states of susceptibility to such vile deeds. Or perhaps more simply, as in the case of a pilot who flies his plane into the side of a mountain at top speed, with 150 passengers and crew aboard, there is no consideration of others at all. A great cloud of egotistical unknowing envelops the ego, or, when people die together—no one is innocent in the darkness of humiliation and pain to be assuaged—the collective group confirms legitimacy and joy to the act. Still, on the one side, there is a notion of what is right and what is wrong, and what is right may require doing a lesser evil; and on the other, a notion that right and wrong no longer exist but such values may be brought into existence through a cleansing explosion of fury and rage, creating a new

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world order.

However, it is not just a matter of providing a moral rationalization to an enormous crime (or series of crimes) but of finding out why some people have the personality to accept such a performance where most of us would back away out of fear or disgust. In some instances, the perpetrator must be forced into a kind of ecstatic or soporific trance easing away all qualms, mesmerized by persuasive promises of a higher good and future rewards for the self or family, bribed by beautiful images of afterlife ecstasies surpassing all imaginings, and convinced that present unbearable pains and humiliations will cease. Though there are probably susceptibilities locked into genetic inheritances, generated by sustained acts of abuse and perhaps to later brain injuries, neural diseases, or sustained brainwashing, it does not explain why some societies provide supporting cultural contexts or ideologies to embrace the cult of martyrdom and painful punishment of transgressors.

Is there any one or any unique combination of factors that create a personality susceptible to the committing of mass killings, including suicide as a component part and not just as collateral damage? Neglect, abandonment, abuse, intrusive discipline, or spoiling the child with smothering love—are these necessary historical stages in the formation of self-destructive or murderous personalities? Can they be matched with or exacerbated by other extra-genetic and external factors, such as congenital diseases, debilitating injuries, interrupted education, forced movement and changes of school, lack of insecurity, deprivation, bigoted bullying, religious and political brainwashing, or a hundred other external rationalizations? If none of these are the sole facilitating factor and no pre-ordained combination of factors mark an individual or small cluster of individuals as most likely to fulfil the role of terrorist-suicide-killer, then are we dealing with completely random events which just happen to involve persons who might never commit a crime of such enormity or use their own private illness to destroy other people’s lives along with themselves?

These are not just modern questions, but the terms and interpretations probably are. The late 1890s and early 1900s were plagued by anarchist assassinations and terrorist acts that caused mayhem and fear, but the active agents, while they often knew there was a high probability of losing their own lives, did not consider that their primary goal. In earlier ages, a few individuals went berserk, on a rampage of maiming and killing, and in this rage

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probably did not have any specific end in mind other than relieving the powerful inner urge to violence. The end of sieges usually burst into destruction of buildings and monuments, rape of all or most women and killing on a large scale—to retaliate or avenge perceived injuries in the past, to celebrate as it were survival in an orgy of savagery, to reap rewards in lieu of other compensation for fighting—but this did not turn on self-destruction. The aristocratic leaders directing the war usually did not participate themselves in this orgy of destruction and brought it to an end after a day or two. Any longer, and the underlings might get the wrong idea and become too uppity about what they deserved. Today, of course, there would be nothing and nobody left to enjoy the spoils of war.

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