This story
was taken from Bulatlat, the Philippines's alternative weekly
newsmagazine (www.bulatlat.com, www.bulatlat.net, www.bulatlat.org).
Vol. V, No. 28, August 21-27, 2005
The Suicide Bombers:
The Sacred and the Profane
Reconciliation between the
Anglo-American and Islamic and Arab people can be achieved through a war crimes
tribunal, similar to the Nuremburg Trials after the Second World War. The
practitioners and proponents of crimes against humanity beginning with the
President of the United States and the Prime Minister of Great Britain should be
brought to trial and accorded exemplary punishment to prevent recidivism.
By James Petras
Introduction One of the least discussed
but most important aspect of the ‘suicide bombers’ (SB) attacks is the
Angle-American (AA) systematic and profound degradation of that which the
Islamic religion holds most sacred: its code of ethics, its mode of spiritual
practice, its religious rituals, its sacred texts and its respect for the
observant believer. The neo-conservative,
liberal and pro-Israel propagandists, both journalists and academics focus on
what they choose to call the “pathologies” of young Muslims, the fanaticism of
their beliefs, their gratuitous violence, the “generational anger”, the
“frustration” of living in “failed states” and a long litany of irrational
behaviors which exonerates the AA and Israeli violence and torture. A progressive school of
thought emphasizes the “reciprocal nature of violence” – Anglo-American wars,
invasions and occupations which engender Arab or Islamic terror as part of a
spiral of violence. In some versions – the religious element is subordinated to
the political concern for self-determination in explaining the behavior of SB. While the latter approach
has the advantage of advancing beyond the vitriolic psychobabble of the
neoconservative and Zionists “experts” of the “Arab Mind”, it fails to account
for the depth and scope of the suicide bomber phenomena, especially the
sharpening intensity during the occupation. Beyond the general mayhem
induced by Anglo-American wars, invasions and occupations, there are two forms
of violence derivative from the general conception of war, which stand out as
the direct determinants of suicide bombing. The AA have theorized and
put in practice the idea of “total war” - a war without legal, moral,
geographic, temporal or spatial boundaries. As Bush, Rumsfeld and the Pentagon
Zionists (Perle, Wolfowitz, Feith and Company) declared, this is a different war
in which the “enemy” is everywhere and attacking at all times. The final
solution is to search and destroy them, their sanctuaries, their accomplices,
their neighborhoods, families, religious institutions and any who might offer
material or spiritual support, protection or encouragement. The theory and
practice of “total war” obliterates the distinction between combatants and
civilians, between military installations and civilian facilities, between
military infrastructure and civilian transports systems, between the sacred and
the profane. The AA have imposed new
norms of warfare and new practices for engaging the enemy which have been
increasingly taken up by sectors of their adversaries. If AA imperialism can
act with unrestrained violence against all military and civilian targets, so can
the resistance – including the suicide bombers – whether they are Islamists or
secular, poor or middle class. What determine the reaction of the adversaries
of AA imperialism are their rules of warfare – the notion of “total war.” Total
war: Content and consequences There are different forms
of imperial conquest. In one variant the purpose is to work through local
elites who become the tribute collectors and gendarmes of the colonial powers,
which gain control of the agro-mineral wealth and finance their privileged
position via local taxes. In another variant, the
imperial powers destroy the pre-existing society and governing system,
frequently uprooting the population and in the process physically annihilate its
members and culture in the course of seizing its wealth. The degradation of the
sacred is a prelude to attempts to impose a new set of beliefs more conducive to
submission and exploitation. A third variant is a
combination or a sequential process of destruction, degradation and exploitation
followed by efforts to “reconstruct” a colonized military, police and political
structure willing and able to repress and contain anti-colonial resistance.
The U.S. invasions of Iraq
and Afghanistan follow the third variant. In the initial phase, the imperial
armies engage in total occupation, unrestrained pillage of historical sites,
utter degradation of the population, destruction of cultural institutions, and
the systematic assassination of leading members of the local political, civil
service and professional classes. Following the growth of massive resistance by
secular and religious forces, uprooted and divorced from their essential
everyday living, under constant physical and spiritual assaults, the AA
occupation regime moves toward the “reconstruction” of a colonial repressive
apparatus and governing bodies - beyond the walls, barbed wire enclosures and
watch towers of the colonial army. “Total war” doctrine
continues to wreck havoc with minor concessions to enclaves of collaborators,
most of whom are “dual citizens”, exiles whose loyalties are first and foremost
to the empire, whose homes, pensions and even families (not to mention bank
accounts and English rose gardens) are located in the cities of the imperial
countries. Total war
and the Resistance The practitioners of “total
war” borrow heavily form the practice and doctrine of the Israeli colonial
occupation of Palestine: practices of collective punishment, erasure of
historical sites, destruction of homes, eradication of orchards and productive
farms, bombing of small factories, building of ghetto enclosures (walls),
massive forcible evictions, and especially torture and interrogation techniques
designed especially to violate Islamic beliefs and the Arab identity. These
techniques have been transmitted via Israeli advisers and training sessions to
U.S. interrogators and incorporated into their manuals. It is precisely the
common methods of both Israeli and Anglo-U.S. interrogation-torture techniques
linked to the doctrine of “total war”, which has led to the common practice of
SB against them. Insofar as the
interrogation-terror techniques strip their victims of all that is essential to
their “spiritual self”, they also force upon the victims and their sympathizers
a “new morality”, one that no longer abides by the older moral-religious
precepts. In its place the “new morality” is the mirror image of the
practitioners of “total war”. The SB act without concern for civilians,
locations, time and circumstance. Like their interrogators, they seek to
inflict the maximum damage to the “Western mind” – exposing their weakness,
increasing their anxiety and fears, while undermining everyday routines. The
key to the conversion of Islamists and even the secular opposition to suicide
bombing and the practice of the “new morality” is not merely the
political-military colonial occupation and war, but the resort to the specific
practices of degradation inflicted on the colonial victim.
Degradation: The logic of total war The Israelis have practiced
torture by degradation for decades and have a powerful army of overseas
supporters - professors, neo-cons officials, liberals, bankers, professionals,
artists, journalists, and media moguls - providing justifications in the form of
“ameliorating circumstances” and “moral equivalences”. The Anglo-American
practitioners of total war, impressed by the power of Israel to sustain its
colonial occupation of Palestine and its impunity, overlooked the negative
effects: the SB phenomenon, and Israel’s repugnancy to the non-European world
(and even among many Europeans). Degradation is specifically
designed to “break” the “Arab” or “Islamic” Mind – as the Israeli psychological
war experts labeled it – and secure an army of informers, agents and docile,
terrorized released prisoners who would serve as exemplars to other would-be
resistance fighters. While a few prisoners were “turned” through torture and
blackmail and others were released as “broken” men and women incapacitated by
profound psychological disorders, millions react with indignation, anger, and
violence - and in some cases have taken the form of SB. The word from the
victim-survivors of Israeli brutality and visual images provides a terribly
graphic reality of systematic degradation of all that Arabs - Islamist or
secular - hold sacred. The perception of the
victims, their families, their people, their fellow believers, and their nation
is that degradation of Iraqi prisoners is the technique authorized and approved
by the highest levels of power and executed by the terror experts, from elite
psychologists down to the lowest jailers. Nobody can claim, “they didn’t
know”. Nobody, in a volunteer army, can claim they were just obeying orders.
Citizens in electoral systems who voted for the imperial executioners cannot
claim innocence. The
technique of degradation: The larger meaning The book of virtuous living
for the Islamist and even, to a lesser degree, the secularist is the Koran. It
is the “divine book”, which provides a moral guide and existential meaning to
life. The torturers defecated and urinated on the Koran. They stomped on the
Koran with muddy army boots. They flushed pages, held most sacred by the
victims, down the toilet. They violated the most sacred single source of moral
life. The torturers
systematically denied their victims water to clean themselves before prayer.
Instead they defiled them with filth, scantily clad female interrogators smeared
fake ‘menstrual’ blood on bound prisoners, forced them to defecate on themselves
and ridiculed their victims’ intense religious distress. They violated every
taboo, every norm, including the deepest held moral codes. They forced (and
photographed) deviant sex, prolonged nudity, raped men and women with cattle
prods and other torture devices. They wrapped prisoners in the Israeli flag.
Such humiliating techniques
have lifetime psychological consequences preventing the victims from ever
marrying and maintaining normal family relations. The torturers specifically
told their victims that the films and photos of their degradation would be shown
to their families and neighbors to intensify the anguish after their release.
The torture techniques specifically focused on Moslems and Arabs, but in general
defiling all normal men and women’s sense of modesty. They used gross sexual
humiliation designed to break all political bonds between the colonized people
and the degraded victims. Women prisoners in Abu Ghraib reportedly sent out
messages begging the resistance to kill them in their cells by mortar attacks.
Mosques were destroyed or turned into slaughterhouses; wounded men huddled in
the sacred halls were executed at point blank range. The AA political leaders
promoted Christian evangelical military chaplains who incited the executioners
to “fight Satan” as they encircled and destroyed the city of Fallujah. Jewish and Christian
“terror experts” (often in the behavioral sciences) provided the emotional
vitriol in pseudo-scientific jargon by transposing the psychopathic behavior of
the executioners to the victims. The political psychologists as war criminals
…as creators of the Suicide Bombers… Political
consequences of defiling the sacred The profound systematic
effects of “total war” and its derivative defilement of the sacred has
far-reaching effects on Muslims and Arabs, including secularists, in terms of
geography, political practice, intensity of reflection and feeling about the
practitioners, their government and their “civilization”. The impact of
defacing the sacred is strongest on those collectivities, which share the same
ethnic, religious and cultural values as those who are violated. The
degradation of the sacred texts and religious sanctuaries impinge on the
spiritual and physical existence of the groups and individuals whose lives have
been guided by the defiled texts. The message relayed to millions by the
torturers and their leaders is that ‘nothing is sacred’ – everything and
everybody is equally an acceptable instrument for conquest, domination and
control. The whole process of degradation from the indiscriminant bombing of
civilian communities, to the usurpation of public space, to the pillage of a
cultural heritage, to the arbitrary arrest and assassination of passersby,
culminates in utter depravity or literally turning the spiritual symbols and
texts and moral guides into trash. The denial of what is
sacred to the oppressed is inherent to the process of creating a hierarchical
chain – the greater the degradation of the “other” the greater the power and
self-esteem of the torturers. The lower the stature of the torturers – (those
who, outside the torture chambers, have no access to the real spoils of
conquest, the war profiteering, the “reconstruction” racket or the military
officers who can “cream” the contracts) – the greater the inducement to achieve
“superiority” (symbolic rewards) by debasing the shackled and manacled, the
naked and the humiliated, to please their superiors with tidbits of irrelevant
“intelligence”. Much of this is documented in General Antonio Taguba’s report.
The chain of command
dictates the license to torture; the word of the imperial executive informs the
practitioners of degradation. The celebrants of imperial “Judeo-Christian”
values flaunt their impunity in the security of their technological and military
might. The “special people”, the chosen nations, aggravate the experience of
degradation. Imagine Rumsfeld and other officials and senators reviewing
General Taguba’s report describing the young son of an Iraqi Army officer
stripped, smeared with filth and abused before his captive father (Seymour
Hersch describes the shrieks of young boys being raped) -- and projecting their
own perversities on to the victimized people. Suicide
bombers: A response to the desecraters Some of the more
intelligent of the generally benighted claimants of “expertise” in terrorism
have discovered that the SB are not necessarily poor, not necessarily “direct
victims” of imperial invasions, and are not necessarily Islamic fundamentalists.
Most of them resort to psychobabble, citing “alienation”, “generational
conflict”, and other behavioral pathologies. These Anglo-American and
pro-Israeli “experts”, who pathologically ignore the monstrous crimes committed
against the essential values and beliefs of the oppressed, see themselves, with
all solemnity, as fit to diagnose the ills of others. A handful of the
“experts” claim that the terrorists, the SB, are political people and that these
acts are “political” – a response to the Anglo-American war, invasion and
conquest. Closer to the truth, but still inadequate, some add the “humiliation
of a conquered people”. What drives the SB is an
effort to redeem the Sacred from the Desecraters. The “Sacred” includes, but
goes beyond, the material destruction inflicted by the Anglo-American invaders
and Israeli colonists. Degradation and defilement of the sacred texts, the deep
inner values and the disciplined customs produces a class of individuals who
sense the bonds of humanity have been irrevocably broken. The SB believes that
spiritual wrath can counter the desecraters of the sacred. For the future SB,
resistance, marches, protests, strikes, civil disobedience, even resistance in
the homeland does not restore the “Sacred”. The conflict rages in their
neighborhoods, their houses; markets and transport are destroyed. The SB
believes that only by reversing the violence, bringing it “home” to the invaders
will they redeem themselves, and respond in kind to the “total war” advocates,
apologists and innocent victims. Recognition of the licensed defilement of the
sacred is now out of the box – whether it continues in one form or another,
videoed or hidden in military archives, it is now embedded in the minds of tens
of millions – it is their very cultural – psychological – moral existence.
Everyday life has been put to the test.
Conclusion From the “Shock and Awe”
bombing of cities, to the killing, maiming and destruction of millions, to the
torture and profanation of the sacred, the orders have come from distant,
faceless Generals, Presidents, Secretaries of War and have been executed, face
to face, by average people, workers, employees, clerks…who “elected” these
leaders. The many faces of the enemy in the eyes of the SB are concentrated in
the faces and acts of those who degrade the sacred and attempt to destroy what
gives meaning to their everyday life. To the SB, “the face of the
enemy” is the face of “the people” – rich and poor, powerful and powerless,
General and foot soldier. Hence the suicide bomber, whose bonds with the sacred
and moral have been broken by systematic degradation, feels no compunction in
attacking ordinary people, going about their everyday tasks in office buildings
or subways. Our analysis suggests a
close relation between the Anglo-American practice of “total war” and its
derivative policies of systematic degradation and the emergence of “suicide
bombers” – one of the forms of rejection. If this analysis is correct, the
demise of suicide bombers is most likely to occur when the practice of “total
war” is ended. This can only come about through a defeat of the “colonial
revivalist” strand of imperialism in both its US, European and Israeli
variants. The question is how long it will take for domestic and external
political discontent to coalesce a political alternative capable of formulating
a strategy of military withdrawal and abiding by international law.
Reconciliation between the
Anglo-American and Islamic and Arab people can be achieved through a war crimes
tribunal, similar to the Nuremburg Trials after the Second World War. The
practitioners and proponents of crimes against humanity beginning with the
President of the United States and the Prime Minister of Great Britain should be
brought to trial and accorded exemplary punishment to prevent recidivism. Peace
and reconciliation is only possible if justice is meted to the architects and
practitioners of total war and human degradation. Posted by Bulatlat
August 15, 2005 © 2004 Bulatlat
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Posted by Bulatlat