Guardian: A different way of death (Suicide Bombers)

[kskiska]

While insurgents have been blowing themselves apart in Israel and Iraq, a silence has prevailed about what suicide bombing actually involves. Like hunger strikers, suicide bombers are not necessarily in love with death. They kill themselves because they can see no other way of attaining justice; and the fact that they have to do so is part of the injustice. It is possible to act in a way that makes your death inevitable without actually desiring it. Those who leapt from the World Trade Centre to avoid being incinerated were not seeking death, even though there was no way they could have avoided it.

Ordinary, non-political suicides are those whose lives have come to feel worthless to them, and who accordingly need a quick way out. Martyrs are more or less the opposite. People like Rosa Luxemburg or Steve Biko give up what they see as precious (their lives) for an even more valuable cause. They die not because they see death as desirable in itself, but in the name of a more abundant life all round.

Suicide bombers also die in the name of a better life for others; it is just that, unlike martyrs, they take others with them in the process. The martyr bets his life on a future of justice and freedom; the suicide bomber bets your life on it. But both believe that a life is only worth living if it contains something worth dying for. On this theory, what makes existence meaningful is what you are prepared to relinquish it for. This used to be known as God; in modern times it is mostly known as the nation. For Islamic radicals it is both inseparably.

Blowing yourself up for political reasons is a complex symbolic act, one that mixes despair and defiance. It proclaims that even death is preferable to your wretched way of life. The act of self-dispossession writes dramatically large the self-dispossession that is your routine existence. Laying violent hands on yourself is a more graphic image of what your enemy does to you anyway. At the same time, the bomber forces a contrast between the extreme kind of self-determination involved in taking his own life and the lack of such self-determination in his everyday existence. If he could live in the way he dies, he would not need to die. At least his death can be his death, and thus a taste of freedom. The only form of sovereignty left to you is the power to dispose of your own death. Suicide, as Dostoevsky recognised, means the death of God, since you usurp his divine monopoly over life and death. What more breathtaking form of omnipotence than to do away with yourself for all eternity?

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1398445,00.html

[jarab]

1. Thanks, kskiska. Great article! n/t

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