Angry Planet - Why do people blow themselves up? Not for the reasons you think

Episode Date: June 29, 2016

Suicide attacks in Paris, Brussels, Orlando, Istanbul. And where to begin in Syria, Libya, Iraq, Nigeria, Israel? Further back, attacks in the United States, Mumbai. Nearly commonplace in Afghanistan and Yemen. Why? What are these young men and women thinking? Are their minds focused on a reward in a world beyond this one, or are the motives more earthly - human?This week on War College, we speak with Roger Griffin, an expert on the motivation behind militant attacks. He offers explanations for actions that seem inexplicable.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast? Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. The opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the participants, not of Reuters' News. The perpetrator of the terrorism is not a sociopaths, strangely enough. They actually want to take out a symbolic target as a protest about something to do with, with the society that you hate.

This week's podcast was recorded after the attack on an Orlando nightclub that killed 49 people. It was recorded before an attack on Istanbul's international airport that killed 41 others. Islamic militancy has been blamed in both cases, though it's too early to be sure in the case of Turkey. Suicide attacks aren't new, and unfortunately, they don't seem to be going away.

This week on War College, we ask whether these killers are crazy, evil, or something else. You're listening to War College, a weekly discussion of a world in conflict focusing on the stories behind the front lines. Here's your host, Jason Fields. Hello and welcome to War College. I'm Jason Fields with Reuters. And I'm Matthew Galt with War is Boring. Today, we're speaking with Roger Griffin. Griffin is an Oxford graduate and an Oxford Brooks University professor. He's an expert on fascism and the motivation behind terrorism, whose most recent book is Terrorist's Creed, Fanatical Violence, and the Human Need for Meaning.

Welcome, Dr. Griffin. My pleasure. I think what makes most sense is to start off with a definition of terrorism. Can you just sort of give us your operating? definition? Well, there are many books trying to do this. Every definition is what's called an ideal type. In other words, there's no such thing as an objective definition. They're only useful definitions. And the definition I would push is the idea that it's a form of violent action designed to further a political cause and what separates the violence from other uses of violence in conventional warfare is that the violence is directed towards a target which has symbolic value.

It represents an enemy in the form of a doctrine or an ideology or society or a type of person. And the destruction of this symbolic target is meant to spread terror. In other words, it's meant to undermine the sense of existential security of the people who, who hear about the act of violence. And therefore, in a way, the special feature of terrorism is that there is a triadic relationship between the perpetrator of the violence,

the victim of the violence, the direct object of the violence, and the indirect object of the violence, and the indirect object to the violence is the spectator or third party who survives to be frightened. Now, this day, definition applies both to state terrorism, where the state attacks small groups symbolically

in order to disarm, frightened, force into submission groups in society it disapproves of, or counter-state or anti-state violence, where people who hate the system but do not have an army. they're in what's called an asymmetrical situation of power, of force of arms, use symbolic violence against targets which are relatively cheap and require little manpower to destroy, but have a disproportionate effect on the status quo or the government. Terrorism is a act of violence in a triadic relationship between perpetrator, victim and spectator,

which is designed to use symbolic violence to disturb, undermine, de-legitimize, existentially threaten a target audience. In the case of state violence, it's used against elements which are meant to be subversive or hostile, and in the case of anti-state terrorists, It's used to make up for the absence of a full-scale army with which to take on the state. So there you are.

That is not a short definition. But if readers can play that over time after time, they will eventually understand what it says. All right. Taking that into consideration, then, what do you see is the difference between a mass shooter or a spree killer and a terrorist? Well, a spree killer who sits on top of a tower shooting people, if he's just a sociopath who has got some grudge against somebody and takes it out by shooting innocent bystanders but does not have any political or sociopolitical ideological religious agenda, in other words, he's not attacking Muslims or non-Muslims or communists or whatever, but it's just randomly killing people. that is not a terrorist act. It may cause terror, but that is not the purpose of the act.

To be a terrorist, you have to have some sort of agenda, and the perpetrator of the terrorism is not a sociopaths, strangely enough. It is somebody who has an ideological axe to grind, that they actually want to take out a symbolic target as a protest, if you're anti-state, about something to do with the society that you hate, Or if you're a state terrorist, you are using violence in order to force into submission an entire category of people.

But if you just pick up a gun because you're pissed off and you start machine gunning people, you are not a terrorist. And if you want, your recent event in Orlando is a very good example of this. You see, if that guy, to live a neighbor who just basically hated living near a loud, discotheque and just randomly went in and started killing people, he might have just lost it. But the fact that it was directed against gays and the fact that it was directed against gays within the framework, it seems, of a commitment to radical Islamic homophobia turns it into a symbolic act against gays and therefore a terrorist act. Well, so let me ask, are there cases where someone is already on

the edge or deranged in some way that they then just claim the mantle of a particular ideology. Or does that just count? Does that count as an ideological attack? Well, there you really need a lot of debriefing, and quite often these people are dead, so they're not very good at being debriefed. But if you're going to be pedantic... And I am. Yeah, and you had the ability to actually debrief somebody. and really get to the bottom of why they've done what they've done, then it would be, there will be a grey area.

There will be an area where somebody seems to have been pretty unhinged and lost and looking for some sort of purpose, but already with great deal of anger, in-coert, undirected anger inside them or violent tendencies, which may have earlier just come out in common criminality or vandalism, But what gives them a focus and a cause and a cause to actually die for or at least seriously mess up their lives for? Because it's very bad for your CV for a job, you know, to have been a terrorist, is the idea of some sort of ideological mission. At a deep level, that may be a rationalization of some sort of pathological violence.

but I do think it is pretty clear that some people, for example, in many of your homegrown mass killings in schools, yeah, I think you could do quite a good piece of research on how many of the people who went to school with an assault rifle or something and shot fellow students were actually making a symbolic gesture against the school system or against Western education or secular education or capitalism or something and how many were just lost it and were motivated by something far less ideologically clarified and therefore if you like school killings

would be a good now it is possible that somebody who would carry out a school killing anyway now that Islamophobia or radical Islam is in the air may latch on to those to dress it up a bit And I'm not saying that that won't happen.

But generally speaking, from my knowledge of violence, it's relatively straightforward to distinguish between an act of terrorism which has an ideological, symbolic dimension to it, and something which is much closer to gratuitous or nihilistic violence. Well, so when there's a suicidal element to it, someone, let's say, let's take a suicide bomber somewhere in the Middle East, I mean, these are people who are not suicidal in the strictest sense. Am I right about that? Well, no, they're not at all suicidal. I mean, they're the opposite of suicidal.

Somebody who goes out taking out with him or a symbolic enemy, whether it's Muslims or homosexuals or whatever, has actually given his or her death a purpose. Now, that is the opposite of straight suicide. Somebody throwing himself off the Golden Bridge in San Francisco is that is an expression of profound despair, presumably, yeah? But there's a very big difference between doing that and actually taking out or taking with you, as it were, some group that or representatives of a group that gives your death an element of martyrdom and dying for a higher cause. And I do think that there really is a psychological difference between the two. Now, again, psychologists might come in and say, actually, suicidal missions really are probably more suicidal than they are missions.

And I'm not saying, again, there isn't a gray area. But if we're dealing with what's called taxonomies and you're asking me taxonomic questions, we have to start with the clear cut cases and then move towards the gray area. If you just stay with the gray area, then rational discourse breaks down. It sounds like as we're kind of moving into this discussion of the suicides that a lot of this is about people looking for meaning. Do you think that's accurate? Especially with the suicides, these are people that are trying to imbue their life with some sort of meaning before it ends. Well, for what it's worth, I'm one of a small group of people who some would consider scholars and other charlatans who have actually stuck their neck out and said what people are missing, or many people are missing when

trying to make sense of terrorism is the fact that from the point of view of the terrorist him or herself, what they're doing is not, as I say, not nihilistic. It's the opposite of nihilistic. They are doing something which gives their life meaning. And in fact, in my book called Terrorists' Creed fanatical violence and the human need for meaning, I actually go further than that, and I actually claim that the terrorist who has a clear-cut ideological sense of mission, actually through that mission, succeeds in sacralizing their existence. In other words, their existence, which was previously empty and anomic and profane and empty, suddenly becomes full and is experienced as sacred, but not in a religious,

way. I mean, it may be a religious sacred, but it could very easily be the sacrality that anybody gives anything, which is supremely important to them. So I think that terrorism is a deeply anti-nihabilistic act for the perpetrator. And it's to be therefore distinguished from, I would give an example, the German pilot who was treated for depression and who crashed the plane with all the passengers in the French Alps, I don't think there's any evidence at all that he was making a symbolic gesture against some perceived enemy.

I do think that in his state of suicidal depression, he'd got to a point where perversely, he not only didn't mind taking passengers out with him, but he almost took a perverse pleasure in it. But I see no evidence that he was sacralizing his own existence in his own mind as he crashed that plane into the mountainside. And this was a German wings flight. Yeah, the German wings flight.

Yeah, yeah. And he was actually examined for depression. He was pronounced depressed, dangerous suicidal thoughts. And I would say there, you know, you could do quite a lot in terms of case studies in contrasting that from the terrorist, the terrorist attack. where people get killed because it's a very, very different psychological case. So when you talk about sacralizing rather than necessarily having a direct religious belief, are you saying essentially that you don't even have to have a belief in some greater reward in an afterlife? It's actually, for people who commit acts like this, it's actually about their current life? Oh, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, look,

In my book, one of the great, great American films that I quote, because I think it says more than a thousand books by Roger Griffin is Taxi Driver by Scorsese with a magnificent De Niro. Now, I don't know if your listeners have seen the film recently, but if they have never seen it, they are thoroughly advised to see the film, and the commentary on the film on Google, if you look up taxi driver analysis

long before they read my book and what comes through very clearly in the analysis of the film is that the central character feels completely lost he's come back from Vietnamese war and his life is totally empty and he manages to

literally sacralise his life I mean one of the moments in the film which is really significant is where just before he actually goes off on this mission to kill the pimps who are exploiting a very young 13-year-old Jodie Foster. It sounds trivial, but he lights the shoe polish

that he's been using to oil his guns. And the analysis makes a point of the fact that this is a specific reference to a church candle. This is lighting a candle to the act which will kill him. But he will be dying in the name of a higher cause. it's made extremely explicit in the film that the higher cause in this case is to clean up New York symbolically by killing some pimps. Now, he can't clean up all New York, but he can give his own life meaning in the microcosm by killing these people. And his life acquires

a sacral significance, which it was completely lacking till he decides to become a vigilante. in that context then it sounds as if I think it's Travis Bickle is the name of the character it sounds like he is in that gray area then to me based on what we were saying earlier he's not he's not quite a terrorist but he's not quite a mass shooter either or am I completely off base he's a mass shooter but he it's very clear

it's actually laced into the film the fact when I mean it's it's very clever what Scorsese does or I forget the scriptwriter's name, but, I mean, he was very, very brilliant scriptwriter, very lucid about it. It's taken beyond the level of just sheer resentment or some just personal grievance, but being linked to the original attempt

to kill a candidate for the presidency, but he doesn't dare go through with it because he's spotted by security by CIA. So he doesn't go through with that. But why does he want to kill this candidate? Because it's made quite explicit, because he feels let down. He looks to the candidate, as he says in the taxi, to clean up the city. And when he's let down, feels let down by the candidate, he decides to kill him.

And at that level, it's sort of, if you like, personal resentment. But there is already a deeper political motive in it because he really resents the system that allows this cesspit of New York to survive. And when he's frustrated in killing the politician, he then thinks up this second plan, plan B, which is to kill the pimps. Now, I think it's very clear that it's not full terrorism because it's not ideologically elaborated, but certainly the psychological mechanism of carrying out a mass shooting with actually a fundamentally moral point in mind. Just like I think, unfortunately, we have to accept that for some radical homophobic, to kill gays is actually far more than a sort of petty hatred.

It is a sort of act of moral cleansing. And we have to accept for the fact that at a psychological level, some of the most awful acts in history, like the Holocaust, for example, have been generated by a perverse aim to clean up society by wiping out entire categories of people who are regarded as subhuman or filthy or enemies to a higher level of being. So actually, boy, I don't want to go too far down a rabbit hole, but I could just ask,

how do you differentiate when you're living through it between true opinion and the passions of the moment? I mean, it seems like almost any ideology that you're in the middle of, you may not be able to see how it'll be viewed later on. And I don't mean this as a moral whitewash. This is an honest question. It just seems so, such a crazy thing for the people who are caught in the middle of it. Well, I'm not sure quite what you're getting at.

But what I would say is that obviously if you're a victim of terrorists, then it's almost obscene to ascribe any idealism to it whatsoever. In fact, the Holocaust cast of a long shadow, and it was only in the last 20 years, that anybody's been able to see through the fog to actually realize that Nazis, were idealists and revolutionaries and in their own models. They were cleaning up on a big scale.

They were ridding the world of a whole group of evils. Now, to the extent that the Gestapo and the death camps were forms of state terror, I think there you see state terrorism

at its most pure. It's an ideologically driven attempt to clean up. But what makes it not terrorism in the way I'm using the term is that it's not symbolic violence, To try and wipe out every Jew is very different from having a few targeted, carefully selected

acts of violence against a few high-ranking Jews, for example. So these words do align and get all complicated. But I would say that the more you look at it, the more violence turns out not to be random or mad and does have a sort of rationale within it. to the extent that you can find a rationale, which is more than just personal resentment or vengeance, then you're probably moving towards the area of terrorism. So maybe the answer is simply if your belief system involves killing a lot of other people, it's probably not going to historically be a useful belief system.

I don't know what a useful belief system is. All belief systems are useful because they stop us falling into the black swimming pool of nihilism. So to that extent, all belief systems are just belief systems. That's called moral relativism. But the point is, what I'm trying to get at, let's not lose the thread. You've asked me about terrorism. We are obsessed in this world now with acts of violence against states or against groups within civil society.

So we're obsessed with ISIS and Islamophobia, etc., etc. First point I'd like to make out is that far, far, far more thousands of people have been killed by state terror than by counter-state terrorism. Now, why do I make the distinction between terror and terrorism? Because I think you can have a terror

state, which is not using violence symbolically, it's just creates terror because of its but almost as a side effect. I mean, if you try to wipe out all the Jews, you're not trying to terrorise them, you're trying to wipe them out. But if a state has limited genocidal

resources, then it may just do some high-profile acts of savagery against a few individuals. Yeah? And at that point, it's using terrorism as a weapon in order to have a ripple effect of fear on the people who hear about it, so that, for example, they leave. I mean, Idi Amin, for example, use terror against Ugandan Asians to actually make sure that Ugandan Asians all left. you see now we should a therefore not forget that terror is far more used by the states than than by individuals who are against the state we mustn't forget that the actual word terrorism was invented by the jacobin the french revolution if we look at acts within civil society i would say that pure terrorism if there is such a thing is always motivated by a sense

of a higher cause for which it is worth breaking the taboo of both killing and dying. And that without that higher cause, then we're not dealing with terrorism. So it is for psychologists and investigators and criminal lawyers to actually take a particular case of violence and work out whether there's a terroristic dimension or not. But what it does mean is that to understand terrorism,

it is no use looking at criminality or pathology. We have to look at the history of ideal. and radical fanatical belief and see all the crimes committed against fellow human beings in the name of fanatical belief because I think we're dealing with fanatical belief. And if there isn't some sort of fanatical belief there, we're not really dealing with terrorism.

We may be dealing with contract killers or henchmen or whatever or sad people with problems who want to somehow feel better within a cause. It's not straightforward pathosures. or criminality. We're dealing with a perverse effect that a certain fundamentalist belief system has on people's behavior. As Christianity has gloriously proved in its very long history, fanatical forms of Christianity, breed genocide, religious wars, torture, a systematic persecution of the other, whether it's women or homosexuals or Jews or whatever. So basically, people who try to look for some sort of evil within Islam are really screwed up because they have to look at the capacity of any belief system, including communism and patriotism,

etc., to actually breed dehumanizing violence against fellow human beings. So I think people are looking in the wrong place. Once you link terrorism to fanatical belief, you get out of a whole load of rather dubious debates, which actually paradoxically demonized terrorists, in other words, dehumanize them, and we can actually start looking at it under the microscope of reasoned social and human sciences and take it out of the sort of hysterical mass media coverage that we tend to get in the Western world. Speaking of hysterical mass media coverage that we get in the Western world, just in the past 24 hours or so, there's been a lot of,

coverage of the Department of Justice's decision, they released the Orlando Shooters' 9-1-1 transcripts and initially had redacted any references to Islamic State and Islam in it. They've since changed course and not done that. I was wondering what your thoughts on that initial decision are. Is that a good thing for a state to do in response to these kinds of shootings? Well, I really, I mean, I think that they're between a rock and a hard place. you see. I mean, you know, people like Obama are bending over backwards to not equate Islam with Islamism and radicalism and terrorism. Okay? Every time a radical Muslim commits acts of terrorism,

it really spoils the narrative that there's no link between Islam and ISIS, for example. And the fact is that ISIS is a form of Islam. I mean, no doubt about it. It's a form of apocalyptic Sunni Islam and it's been it's just incredibly I mean there is a very high dose of political correctness which means that people are terrified of insulting Islam and of course there's a very strong fanatical Muslim movement endorsing that

by saying that any mention of a link between Islam and Islamic terrorism is somehow a form of Islamophobia and so especially in America I can understand the fact that any state department statements have they are on the side of caution but I think it's massively misplaced I mean what what is

needed is far greater understanding of but of course it's impossible I mean by definition mass media is superficial and cannot deal with complex issues you know if you started actually

pointing out the fact that there are forms of Christian fanaticism in America with some really scary views about all sorts of things and that historically Christianity has been one of the most lethal religions in the world in terms of body count then you'd probably

have an entire establishment backed down on you so in a way all you can do is be superficial I respect the fact that you're interviewing me presumably to move away from cliches yeah but I mean I do think that the more it is acknowledged

that IS is a form of Islam is rooted in Islam is rooted in Islam is rooted in a certain reading of theological texts. It's backed up by certain types of imam and priests and readings of hadith. And I think the American mass media really should do more, but they're frightened, of course, to talk about Sunni apocalypticism.

Well, of course, if you say this word like apocalypticism, you've lost over half your audience anyway. But I do think there's a chance every time something like this happens to actually explain a bit more about, for example, what's happening in Pakistan and Bangladesh and the way Islamic countries tend to be even at a state level, incredibly homophobic,

that liberals are being hacked to death in Bangladesh for being liberal bloggers. When I say liberal, I don't mean secular liberal, I mean moderate Muslims. And we really should actually take the bull by the horn and realize that there isn't a world clash between liberalism and the free world and Islam, like Huntington's set, but there is a clash between basically moderate humanistic forms of

religion and non-religion and fanatical forms of secularism and non-religion. I regard, sorry to, if I offend some of your listeners, I regard Trumpites on the fanatical end of the liberal spectrum and in their own way just as dangerous as religious fanatics. So I do think the media, intellectual scholars, etc., have a duty to reintroduce, ambivalence, complexity, tricky bits of history, debate into the way we deal with these things. Otherwise, we just end up with a sort of paranoia about ever linking Islam with anything nasty. And of course, what we have to do is link fanatical, homophobic Islam with an aspect of Islam, which has its equivalent in other religions throughout history, and bring out of the woodwork all the moderate anti-homophobic Muslims,

of which there are many more, and so we have a proper debate. But of course, that's too sophisticated for a news system that is absolutely living in the moment all the time. We've got to deal with these things in a grown-up way. It's a very violent world. A lot of people are having terrible lives. It's full of ideological religious tension,

driven by some very, really nasty political events in the Middle East, for which the West is partly responsible, including Britain. And we just had to stop protecting our public and cotton-willing them by actually trying to use events to inform the public better. To see them as a load of psychos without an ideology or a worldview or mission is extremely dangerous because we underestimated Nazism, and we should not do the same with IS. It may be inconvenient for Muslims to feel constantly attacked just because people go on about Islamic State. Well, they should grow up as well.

If there was a radical British patriotic group, a la Nazism, went around wanting to kill all Jews, I wouldn't feel offended in my Britishness if it was talked about as an offshoot of British patriotism. I mean, we really should just sort of all grow up a bit and talk about things, what we say in English, call a spade a spade. But of course, this is all nonsense. Me sitting here in Oxford sort of slagging off the media, etc. It's very, very difficult to be a journalist in the modern world because you're nearly always going to offend somebody. But you should always err on the side of the truth. and where you can smuggle in some complexity

and a little bit of historical record and truth, it should be done. And we really should not start trying to sort of redact history because we might offend somebody or create links in people's minds. Well, I hope we actually succeeded in doing a little bit of that in this episode. I thank you very much for being so patient.

I'm sure I sound just, like yet another blah-blah-blaher from the other side of the pond. But I would beg that people look beyond the fear factor and the media hype and the horrible sense of shock and really start getting curious about what's going on under the surface, what generates hatred, what allows people to break taboos and do things. And also look, it says in the Bible, to take the moat out of your own eye. I mean, just look at American or British or European history.

It's not so long ago. We were killing and burning and torturing in the name of a higher truth. It shouldn't be so mysterious that there are some Muslims keen to do that in a situation where Islam is being eroded by globalization and satellite dishes and iPhones and pornography. Roger Griffin, thank you so much. Thank you so much for talking to us. It's been a great pleasure. Thank you for listening to this week's show. You can reach us through our Twitter handle.

at War underscore College. We appreciate your comments on SoundCloud and in the iTunes store as well. War College is hosted by myself, Jason Fields, and Matthew Galt. It was created by me and Craig Hecht, and this week's episode was produced by Bethel Hapti, whose hearing is so sharp,

only she can hear what I'm about to say next.