Madeleine Bunting has written a moderately interesting article on how Western attitudes to suicide bombing differ from our attitudes to other forms of political violence. In response, Norman Geras has writen something amazingly silly.
His thesis is that Ms Bunting neglects the horror and carnage that some suicide bombers cause among civilian populations, and that she dwells too much on the fact that suicide bombers die. The article is summed up by his quote, "I would guess that for many the death of a suicide bomber doesn’t in fact make the atrocity, or the horror, of his or her act any worse than it otherwise would be."
This could be true. But Ms Bunting’s article is about why we perceive suicide bombers as different from other terrorist bombers – and the *only* difference here, obviously, is that they die.
Perhaps there really is no relevant difference between suicide bombing and other terrorist murdering. If so, then society is wrong to draw a distinction between the two acts, and Norm’s quibble really ought to be with The World At Large and perhaps The English Language, rather than with Ms Bunting.
Yes, it did seem that he had seen ‘suicide bombing’ and ‘The Guardian’ and decided to write a ranty post without actually bothering to read any more of the article.
Anyway welcome back John. Our attempts to turn this into a football blog were only half successful, but I’m sure next time you go away we’ll do better.
Madeleine Bunting’s article was mainly vague waffling, I thought. The stuff she always writes about the emptiness of modern western life annoys me greatly though, it’s a generalised, stereotypical view that misses the crucial details of people’s lives.
Oh my, I nearly wrote "spectacularly misses" in that last comment.
Norman Geras’s post shows close attention to what Ms Bunting said. He is specifically denying her premises. She says that "we" see suicide bombers as specially awful because they kill themselves. He responds, "who we?"
He says many people, including him, do not see the suicide of the bomber as morally important. That is indeed the view of many, including me. Like him I say that the selection of innocent targets is the morally important factor.
If the suicide is unimportant, why do we refer to them as suicide bombers rather than terrorists?
John – to be fair – even though I myself see suicide as; if not morally significant, then at least an important part of the context of an act of terrorism; the mere fact that we distinguish it by name, doesn’t really mean much.
My childhood (Ireland in the 1970s) was filled with news stories describing bombings. For reasons that I still don’t fully understand, the media always made a point of distinguishing "car-bombs" from everything else.
The news would either start "A bomb exploded in a Belfast shopping district today". Or it would start "A car-bomb exploded…"
I see a world of difference between a suicide bomber and someone who plants a timed device and then goes to ground. But the mere fact that we choose to specify some acts of terrorism by name, and not others, is at least partly arbitrary.
I thought were he got silly was in saying it was basically an apologia for suicide bombing. It wasn’t.
Johann Hari wrote an article on exactly the same subject which I thought came closer to such a thing, but even then I don’t think it was.
http://www.themercury.co.za/index.php?fSectionId=285&fArticleId=158307
I thought were he got silly was in saying it was basically an apologia for suicide bombing. It wasn’t.
Johann Hari wrote an article on exactly the same subject which I thought came closer to such a thing, but even then I don’t think it was.
http://www.themercury.co.za/index.php?fSectionId=285&fArticleId=158307
No, I think Geras is missing the point.
We DO hold suicide bombing to be in a different moral category to other kinds of terrorst bombing. Now, the only actual difference between suicide and non-suicide bombings is the suicide (or not) of the bomber. Pointing out that the suicide (or not) of the bomber carries no moral weight for the majority of people who DO consider suicide bombing to be in a different moral category to other kinds of terrorist bombing does not demonstrate that these people do not hold suicide bombing to be in a different moral category to other kinds of terrorist bombing. It DOES point out that, unless we are able to find another way to morally differentiate these suicide bombings from other bombings, our greater moral distaste is wholly unreasonable, and we should consider the source of this unreason. This is not to say we should legitimate suicide bombing, but to ask that it be considered using the same moral judgement and analysis as other forms of bombing.
In actual fact, I think that the suicide of the bomber does play a significant part in our differentiation of suicide bombing from other types of bombing, and our belief that it is morally less acceptable. Dying (as opposed to risking death) for a cause IS pretty alien to Western culture. That is not to say that people within the Western tradition have not died for a cause, nor that they have not been made heroes as a result. Suicide bombers can this be instantly categorised as Muslim fanatics, though this analysis ignores the fact that there have been many non-Muslim Palestinian suicide bombers from secular organisations, and that the Tamil Tigers have used suicide bombing, and the Japanese famously turned themselves into human missiles. But that this analysis misses the history of suicide attacks/bombings is beside the point. The fact is that it is an extremely widely held view.
This, in combination with the presentation of suicide bombing being a tactic used against civilians, results in the suicide bomber being instantly delegitimated. This is extremely useful, as it allows the demonisation of say, America’s enemies in Iraq, even when they target the American military. The very idea that the attack was conducted by a suicide bomber is enough to cast the attack as being illegitimate, regardless of the target or the effects. Yet suicide bombing may be the only means to target a heavily armed and armoured force.
This is not an apologia for suicide bombing. But I do think that our view of suicide bombing is guided by a, shall we say discourse, that paints it to be in a wholly different category to other bombings. And Geras is being very silly, or very disingenous, if he thinks that saying that for most people the suicide of the bomber (the only dignificant physical difference) is (superficially) morally insignificant is the same as denying that people do not place suicide bombing in a different moral category. We do place them in a different moral category. We do this for reasons that are not adequate. And this serves the purpose of people who are able to conduct their bombing from remote locations.
Regarding suicide bombngs, the thing that interests me most is the role of the Islamic hierarchies (speaking broadly) in deciding who is eligible and who should be encouraged to commit suicide in this way. I assume that class plays a role, as could perceived intelligence.
Basically I think that Bunting is quite wrong in her analysis- all over the place historically and wrong to assume that Islam is not the main factor here. The comparison with Christian martyrs for instance is totally absurd, not to say deliberately dishonest. The army of martyrs, so-called, did not generally run about saying ‘kill me, kill me’- nor did they generally threaten anyone with military force. Or doesn’t she distinguish between the early church in the Roman Empire and the Crusades of the 12th century? As I said, all over the place. Uneducated. Wrong.
As Jim Bliss surmises (in his excellent example about car bombings) most people refer to them as suicide bombers because that seems to be the general practice. There are many phrases in common use that are inaccurate or contain assumptions that I don’t like, but life is short and I only have time to argue about a very few examples. There was a push a while back to call them "homocide bombers" but that term had its own definitional problems and it seems to have faded away.
The glorification of suicide is certainly culturally and psychologically worthy of note. Both Bunting and Hari are correct to say that the phenomenon is neither new nor confined to Arabs or Muslims. (Not that the Tamil Tigers, Imperial Rome or Imperial Japan are particularly appealing cultures.) But Bunting slips from "look how the Christian martyrs killing themselves shocked the Romans" to suggesting that our shock at Palestinian "martyrs" killing other people in pizza parlours is similar. No it isn’t, in any significant way
And her last paragraph is tosh. I was left wondering whether I ought to feel grateful to the dear suicide bombers for reminding my unworthy deracinated western self, prone to drop bombs out of planes with a merry laugh, of the true messiness of war.
Incidentally, Hari has no right to say that British men were "murdered" by the kamikaze. Imperial Japan committed many crimes but that wasn’t one of them. The kamikaze attacked ships of war in time of war.
Neither Ed nor Andrew Bartlett’s comments were visible to me when I just posted. In response to Andrew Bartlett, (1) I don’t know whether the majority view the suicide aspect of a suicide bombing as morally significant. All I know is that quite a lot of people don’t. I never did. (2) Yours is quite a good argument. But it isn’t the one that Bunting is putting forward. She is saying that the suicide aspect is not so alien after all i.e. assuming it is significant.
Emphasis on/denial of the suicide aspect as morally significant does not map neatly onto pro/anti Iraq war.
While I vigorously hope that suicide bombers against American soldiers are defeated I feel far less animus against them than against the deliberate killers of civilians.
I think the semantic discussion is missing the point. The reason that people regard suicide bombing as uniquely awful is, I think, that a person carrying a bomb which they then detonate is better able to deliver it to its target than other terrorist tactics. Suicide bombing is more frightening and despicable because it is more personal and seems more effective. So, basically, I think the reason people see suicide bombing as uniquely awful is because they find it more frightening than other types of violence.
This is also, I think, why the kamikaze were so hated during the Pacific War — in an age before guided missiles, of course they were terrifying.
(I don’t think, by the way, that suicide bombing is a particularly effective tactic, though it may be in the face of the constraints under which the Iraqi "resistance" are operating. Specifically, I believe that the command-wire detonated bombs used by the IRA in Northern Ireland in the 1970s were much more deadly, though it seems that the British Army managed to devise countermeasures for them eventually.)
Geras’s writing gets so wearisome at times.
His "more in sadness than in anger" shtick is tiresome.
It’s ironic that the Guardian is quite holier than thou anyway… so Geras doing his own holier than thou number on a Guardian piece is a rather turgid double whammy!
The world has now got the message, loud and clear, that this retired Manchester academic is the most pious man in the world of blogs.
Chris is right: it’s not the suicide that’s important, it’s the disguise. We can run from an unattended bag. But we can’t avoid other people.
I’m convinced by Chris and S2, on reflection.
This still means Norm is being a bit silly, though: the proper criticism of Bunting’s article is that she has come up with the wrong reasons for why suicide bombing is viewed as it is, not that she’s an terrible terror apologist.
In that light, Norm’s article does seem very much on the ball. To spend an entire article discussing an essentially bogus reason why suicide terrorism is bad is to imply that those who do think it is bad are wrong, or, worse, unsophisticated.
soru
Only if she’s doing so cynically despite sharing Chris and S2’s beliefs (and there’s no evidence in her column that she doesn’t think it’s bad, anyway).
Surely the suicide is important, in the sense that it makes you think, ‘if this person is willing to die to kill me then he really wants to kill me’.
If what an author wrote would be an apologia if they held certain beliefs not addressed in the text, it is hard to see it as entirely wrong to describe it as one.
Certainly, if it was written cynically, it would be a cynical apologia, but that’s not the charge.
soru