The phenomenon of suicide bombers and suicide pilots came up in a recent conversation. There are similarities between today’s Islamofascist suicide killers and the Kamikaze pilots of the second world war, but there are significant differences too. It thus seemed worth examining indoctrination, brainwashing and how the mind can be manipulated as well as reviewing suicide itself. There is also the vexed question of whether killing can ever be justified. One of the ten commandments is often stated in English as “thou shalt not kill” but in other translations it becomes “thou shalt not murder“. Many things are not black and white even when it involves causing death.
We are all indoctrinated from childhood – especially within the family and the culture we were raised in. There is no such thing as a Muslim or a Christian child but there are children who are the offspring of Muslim and Christian parents. It is strange that people can say, for example, “those are Muslim or Catholic or Jewish children” but people do not say “those are Socialist or Republican or Democratic children”. Faiths, Religions and Creeds are the primary indoctrinators of most people and the seeds that they sow are, too often, allowed to grow unquestioned. Some of those seeds will lie dormant in the unconscious and can be reactivated in the future depending on certain actions and by propaganda.
My own skepticism about faith began in one memorable moment. One day I suddenly realised that I was saying the creed for the umpteenth time without ever having considered what I was saying. How had that happened? How had words been simply put into my mouth? How dare they have induced me to say “I believe” no better than a parrot.
Religious indoctrination is one thing but there are other forms that are harder to define and these relate to tribalism, race and nationality. There are very many tribes. Some are nations (the English and the British and the Irish and the Japanese and the French); some are class-based (the proletariat and the bourgeois and the aristocracy); some are conflations of faith and inheritance (Hasidic Jewry and the descendants of Mohammed); some are simply racist (white or yellow or black supremacists); some are religious sects and organisations (Orange order protestants and Mormons and Scientologists) and some are, often bizarre, cults (formed under such people as The Rev. Jim Jones or Aum Shinrikyo or Charles Manson). You can make your own list, but the point is that if one comes from any “pure” tribe there is a tendency to identify with that tribe and to rebuke and repel outsiders. In Bernard Shaw’s “Saint Joan”, the maid of Orleans makes such a point when she says, about liberation from the English, “… for a France free and French”. One of the problems for a mongrel like me (a mélange of Anglo-Irish, Scottish & Polish ancestry and a mixed Catholic & Protestant upbringing) is where to find my tribe. Possibly my tribe is everyone who is outside a tribe, but let no one forget the parable of the Good Samaritan. To embrace the stranger, the dispossessed, the other and even the leper is a deep Christian message that, hypocritically, is neglected far too much by far too many.
We are all thus inherently indoctrinated even though we had no choice about being born in the first place, but becoming “brainwashed” involves deeper consideration. It involves wiping the blackboard clean and then rewriting it. It is surprising that the recent suicide bombers in Sri Lanka were mostly well-educated and well-off people and not the more common religious freaks. Richard Dawkins (whom I much admire but also dislike) believes that our religious upbringing predisposes or augments an ability to consent to the killing of non-believers in later life. He also sees close parallels between the intolerance of today’s islamofascists and the white supremacist evangelicals of the deep south of the USA. Not for the first time, a “radicalised evangelical” shot Jews in America last week, whilst quoting such well-worn stories of how the Jews killed Christ. Many within Islam agree that apostasy and blasphemy can or even should be punished by death. Such beliefs make my blood run cold and yet these punishments are not so different from those of the Roman Catholic Church in the not very distant past. Any faith that does not allow someone to change their belief is inherently hollow. Any faith that cannot withstand satire is similar. We are told that the God of Islam is merciful and compassionate. It is not without irony that many of its followers are not.
One of the problems with any form of fundamentalism is that it does not encourage changing one’s mind freely. It thus subverts science and harms the intellect. Kathleen Taylor has shown that, once brainwashed, those same neural pathways become resistant to change and although it is often credited to the Jesuits, it was Aristotle who originally said: “Give me a child until he is 7 and I will show you the man”.
Is brainwashing any different from indoctrination? I don’t know but they are not miles apart. Possibly brainwashing involves attempting to bend another to one’s own will in a more aggressive or systematic way. It very often starts with propaganda from media that is servile to a dictator, to a religious leader/idea and even to the great god, greed. Nowadays such propaganda much too freely permeates all our lives through television and the internet. It nearly always progresses with distortions of truth and the demonization of “those outside the tribe”. There may be promises of a reward after death or with the much simpler reward of just becoming notorious. Jacinda Ardern, the New Zealand Prime Minister, hit the mark when she refused to name the Christchurch mass murderer and concentrated her talk about the lives of those who were killed or were suffering thus denying the desired news-exposure of the killer.
Radicalisation in the UK is known to often start in prison with people who are dropouts with low self-esteem and who find themselves in an environment from where they cannot escape being prey to radicalising predators. The attackers in Sri Lanka had a different background. They came from a background of wealth and privilege just as did Osama Bin Laden and an easy-going professional man (a Palestinian that I once knew) who went away for a holiday to the Middle East and came back with his wife in a burka, cursing the USA and a very much changed man. Such radicalisation/brainwashing/indoctrination of people who are far from being fools is hard to grasp but it perhaps illustrates that immunity from indoctrination seems to be rare.
The study of psychology can be useful because it can awaken us to our own susceptibilities and abilities to think clearly. One of the most interesting experiments about group pressure is the use of a lift with one normal door. The subject enters a lift full of people but after it starts to move everyone else inside turns to face the back of the lift. Only very rarely does the subject remain facing the door.
The term brainwashing was first used in the context of the Korean war by the Chinese and it almost certainly continues to this day in North Korea. I have read an analysis of brainwashing techniques and it is fairly easy to understand why an isolated person with low self-worth is open to manipulation. However, also of importance is the emphasis of the difference between “us and them”. These differences are then magnified and distorted by smothering the novitiate within a group of like-minded people. The concept of “love bombing” is new to me but I can see how it could be an effective tool for a manipulator. “We all love you and the rest of the world is bad so you should join us” could be the refrain.
Radicalisation, for want of a better word, is one thing. Everything that deals with suicide is another. When both are combined – producing the deadly effects of pilots flying into the twin towers, the recent killing of hundreds in churches and hotels in Sri Lanka and Kamikaze pilots dive-bombing the US fleet – then some new thinking is needed. It is one thing to commit suicide out of depression or to abolish pain or even to make a political point (the monks who burned themselves in Vietnam or the Czech students, when the Soviets invaded their country). It is a different thing to want to harm others as part of the act. I can understand (but not get into) the mind of a miserable person (usually a man) who wants to kill both himself and his spouse and children (out of shame for example) and even a suicide whose real aim is to hurt another by hoping to make them believe they were the cause of the death (a final selfish act) but I find it much harder to grasp how anyone justifies and wants to indiscriminately murder huge numbers of people – whether it includes their own suicide or not.
One should never gloss over horrific events that are indiscriminate because this is often the hallmark of fascism. As the SS developed it did not only target Jews, Slavs & communists. It also targeted ordinary Germans in a completely arbitrary way. This terrorism created an environment of fear that helped the perpetrators achieve their ends. The silent majority in Ireland failed to speak out enough against the paramilitaries during “The Troubles” and it was eventually (in the aftermath of the Omagh bombing) the words of John Hume that sounded the truth in public. He gave the perpetrators of the appalling crime their proper name. They were not just murderers. They were, in the literal sense of the word, fascists, seeking to overthrow the wishes of the people through terror. And, as with all fascists, they were skilled at utilising violence to give themselves an influence and power which they were unable to secure at the ballot box.
The thoughts inside the mind of any intended suicide are complex. One must also raise the question whether there is any difference between killing soldiers or civilians. Which was worse? To kill the almost defenseless soldiers trying to escape at Dunkirk or to firebomb the militarily unimportant Dresden (and which included that day of love, St Valentine’s day, in 1945 in the last days of WWII in Europe). I spent last Christmas night in Dresden and, knowing its history, I couldn’t get rid of the same sort of thoughts and gloom that flood into my mind when visiting Auschwitz. Is there any difference in suicidal bombers massacring churchgoers and those dive-bombing naval vessels, when one’s country is at risk? I don’t think there are easy answers.
Leaving ISIS to one side as an anomaly, it is interesting to note that suicide rates in the Middle East tend to be low. Not as low as in most of the Caribbean, where it can be as low as 1 in 200,000 but not nearly as high as most of the countries of the former Soviet Union, where it is usually about 1 in 3,000 per year. Such great divergences are quite peculiar and hard to understand but it also shows that suicide statistics are very mixed and must therefore have many different causes.
So today’s Islamist bombers (from the Twin Towers to the recent massacres in Sri Lanka) have been spawned in a culture where suicide has long been condemned (by both the state and the majority of the faithful) whereas the Kamikazes came from a nation, where loss of honour and any defeat had traditionally been resolved by committing suicide. The former usually do not discriminate who they kill but the latter only targeted the military. So there are similarities, but these are two significant differences between the two.
When any mass murder or genocide is planned the targeted victims must first be dehumanised. This is almost beyond question when it comes to the genocide as was carried out by the Nazis in Europe and by the Hutus in Rwanda. It is also why the Irish Journalist Fintan O’Toole is perceptive when he says that “there is no safe dose of fascism” for any such demonization starts in small increments. He has also analysed Trump by pointing out that he makes deliberate outlandish comments just to see what the reaction is. He can then either expand them or retract and modify them until his base is even more encouraged. He refers to this real danger in this way: “Forget post-fascist – what we are living with is pre-fascism”. This pre-fascism in America is sadly being ignored by most of the Republican party and if things go very sour that legacy must not be forgotten. I have just enjoyed reading a “Dear GOP” article by Patti Davis, Ronald Reagan’s daughter.
Fintan O’Toole also recently made a point that we must learn (and indeed practice) the art of political dentistry: “For even in this age of social media, conversation is still a moral arena. People form their prejudices in all sorts of ways but they test them in ordinary talk, at work, in the cafe, on the bus, in the pub, over the dinner table, at the match, after Mass. It is in these unremarkable encounters that we establish what is and is not okay to say about others. It is here that prejudices either spread and become normal or are checked and exposed. It is here that political dentistry must be practised and the bad teeth of sweeping generalisations, paranoid conspiracy theories and mendacious “facts” pulled out. It requires a willingness to overcome embarrassment and break the uncomfortable silences that are taken for assent”. It appears that not enough bad teeth are pulled out in mosques nowadays.
So it could be argued that The Kamikazes did have a legitimate military target and that there was a tradition of death instead of defeat, capture and shame deeply entrenched in Japanese military culture. I think it is too simple to say that the suicidal Islamofascists killed the infidel so that they would be gifted with virgins in heaven. They must have been made to believe that their intended victims were less than human or at least so “lacking in the true faith” that they did not deserve to live. Such ideology is just as warped as that which must go on in the mind of a white supremacist mass murderer. The murderous zeal of ISIS is however very alarming and has parallels with the way the SS operated. It was not enough to kill as many as possible but also to do so in the most shocking way and with the most cynical methods.
Socrates was forced to commit suicide as a death penalty even though he had spoken against suicide in a parable that I paraphrase: “just like a farmer with his animals, the gods had put us in a field with a locked exit gate to which only the gods should hold the key”. Suicide is in fact so common that in the West it is the third most common form of death in people under the age of 45. Most “normal” suicides appear to result from despair or a lack of hope or a need to escape from pain, although some are also involved in the infliction of pain or death on others. The controlling partner who kills himself (nearly always a him) along with his wife and children is usually about to suffer some form of shame. What is probably more important from a pragmatic standpoint is how to prevent suicide and of how to prevent the radicalisation of mainstream Muslims (or anyone for that matter). Probably it can only be brought about from within Islam. Perhaps Islam is in need of its own “age of enlightenment” even though the European enlightenment of the 17th century was a forerunner of the French revolution and much else.
So suicide is interesting and very incompletely understood. Freud talked about a desire for death that later became called Thanatos. He noted, if I am right, that thoughts about past bad events can become very dominant and repetitive in both the conscious and the unconscious and that this tendency to keep reliving a horrible past can take precedence over the desire for life and happiness! Of course there can also be repression, which usually makes matters worse. I think that such observations make much sense but the reasoning behind them is not deeply understood. It is my observation that individuals (and animals such as dogs and cattle for sure) have innate personalities that don’t fundamentally change over time – that is unless an individual undergoes some significant trauma. Both Bruno Bettelheim and Primo Levi bore testament to this. Both were deeply affected and changed by their treatment by the Nazis, despite their knowledge of both science and the psyche.
Other paradoxes about suicide are that the rates commonly go down when there is war or revolution but that they also can go down in places that are peaceful. There is no constant. Suicide is also more common in men, but attempted suicide is more common in women.
I was going to write about the pointlessness of revenge, but this essay deals with different matters and is long enough. The effects of revenge are well laid out in Esther in the Old Testament. Writing helps to clarify my thoughts. They are not “written in stone” and I hope I am always open to change. I hope that my neural pathways are not fixed in time. We should never forget the past but not live there too much. We can always make progress by asking questions and by realising how little we know. Most children start out as experimenters with an open mind but too many of them are driven or sucked into the beliefs of their educators with an indoctrination that can quench that zeal for true knowledge. The other terrible thing that happens to children who suffer sexual abuse or violence is that, having been exposed to such behaviour, they then so often repeat it themselves in later life. This too is a form of indoctrination.
Back in the sixties, Mary Whitehouse was a prominent campaigner against the permissive society. Often portrayed as a prude, she campaigned about too much sex and violence being portrayed in the media. I am not going to defend her but things have gone too far. Too many people (especially children) are now indoctrinated in another malign way. Historically films were given age categories but the almost unlimited and uncensored exposure to the most lurid and extreme pornography on the internet and the profusion of video games with themes of sex and violence must be part of some of today’s problems. Is there much difference between children coming from a home where there is incest and violence, compared to very early exposure to uncensored access of the internet? Another growing phenomenon is the huge amount of bullying via social media. Probably the bullied are more likely to become bullies themselves.
Don’t forget, at difficult moments in life, that the past and the present can contain bright pearls that, without any nostalgia, can be brought into the open and enjoyed. I always hope for a sunny future even though, in these uncertain times, there are many dark clouds on the horizon. Be wary of trying to influence others too much. I say this because all examples of what I would call evil have resulted from the imposition of the will of one entity on another. The free will granted by the creator is thus, for me, the very opposite of evil. It is Lucifer, that brightest star, who would entice you down his path. Know false prophets by their fruits and be wary of idols. Not because it is commanded, but because a falling statue may crush you.