Not only are such acts horribly familiar, with almost predictable sequences of images. The point is that more, and perhaps worse, acts are being contemplated, planned, organised and executed, even as I write this. Nor was this perpetration any different to the attack on the Ahmaddiya ‘places of worship’ (as we are obligated to call them), the Karachi Ashura procession, the Sunni Tehrik bombing at Nishtar Park, the Islamabad Marriott bombing, the various attacks on the Hazara Shias in Quetta, the Peshawar church bombing, the Peshawar Army School attack, and the countless other instances of senseless, extreme violence to which we have become inured. Pundits, bureaucrats and media commentators offer multiple explanations for the waves of terrorism in which we are embroiled. There is an assumption that there are political objectives, or ‘causes’, involved. These violent youngsters are the products of poverty, of brain-washing, of fanatical religiosity, of the desire to go to Heaven, of hatred for the American presence in Afghanistan, of the injustices done to ‘the Muslim world’. And so on and so forth. And, therefore, if only this…or that…or the other…is done, all this will end.
For those grasping at such conceptual straws, it is necessary to suggest that, even if everything were to be happily resolved, from Palestine to Kashmir, and all grievances, real or imagined, removed so that utopias of prosperity can be ushered in, these butchers would still find reason to continue plying their gruesome trade. At bottom, these orgies of violence have little to do with ‘causes’ and everything to do with the psychotic aberrations bred into the terrorists.
It is a bizarre kind of inverse egoism that drives the terrorist. In 365 BC, in the city of Ephesus (located in present-day Turkey) a man called Erostratus grew tired of his own obscurity. He sought to achieve a moment of prominence by burning down a sacred temple in his city. The howls of horror of the people at this act of his, and their palpable fear of the anger of their gods, were his ‘rewards’. In Jean-Paul Sartre’s short story of the same name, an unknown individual, in a bid to become known, publicises the date and place he intends to commit suicide. In Don Levy’s film of this story, also in a modern setting, this person engages an advertising agency to produce a media campaign that will bring crowds to watch him accomplish his own annihilation.
This is a psychosis in which actions are primarily driven by the desire to achieve an enormous degree of notoriety — posthumously or otherwise — through perpetrating violence on others. If an individual is too ignorant or too unskilled or too helpless to create or build anything, he can at least establish his significance in an anonymous universe by committing a dramatic act of destruction. The fact that it is performed in cold blood, without any personal motive of acquisition or revenge, upon anonymous victims against whom he may harbour no specific rancour, adds to the sweetness of the deed. The perpetrator has struck his victims with the impersonality of a force of nature descending upon them as a cyclone or tsunami or earthquake might have. And, this being the Age of the Media, everyone will hear about it, and, hearing, tremble.
Everyone will hear about it and tremble
With such an immense sense of potency proffered by modern terrorism to persons psychologically castrated by history, no other motive — no coherent political doctrine or cause or crusade — is really needed as justification.
Let us understand that terrorism is not the weapon of the weak, but of the hopelessly vicious. The Algerian-born philosopher Albert Camus understood the archetype well. In his work The Rebel, he suggests that the seed perhaps exists in all of us… but that is a point to which I will return. Camus characterizes such rebels as nihilists, ideational twins of Herzen, Pisarev and the Russian nihilists of the nineteenth century, whose literary archetype was the character of the young Bazarov in Ivan Turgenev’s extraordinary novel Fathers and Sons. Camus quotes Count Bakunin’s words, “The passion for destruction is a creative passion,” and suggests that these words “vehemently proclaim pleasure in destruction”. For Bakunin and the anarchists, the violence of the trans-Europe upheavals of 1848 were “a feast without beginning and without end.”
Camus sees that this kind of egotistical self-actualisation through violence paradoxically carries self-destruction, a suicidal drive, on the other side of its coin. He sees Adolf Hitler as the ultimate nihilist, whose “insensate passion for nothingness…ended by turning against itself.” Hitler “could have stopped the war before the point of total disaster (but he) really wanted universal suicide and the material and political destruction of the German nation.” Hitler and the Nazi leaders “consecrate the bloodthirsty vanity of nihilism.”
These are then the ingredients in the psychological cauldron of the Terrorist’s mind: Perceived lack of self-worth, compensated by an internal before-the-mirror strutting in the living theatre of an act of violence, the emotional coldness and lack of feelings of a rapist or a child-killer, and, finally, a kind of self-annihilating suicidal drive.
Yes, it is bizarre kind of psychopathy. But – and this is the frightening point that Camus raises – the seed of this nihilism exists in all of us. It needs only to be nurtured, given a ‘cause’ as some kind of motivation and provided with the resources and means to kill. The establishment that ran this country chose to do precisely that, taking advantage of the Afghanistan situation in 1979 and again in 1996 to attract funding for their horrific project of manufacturing and mobilizing human death-machines.
Let me assert my continued and unconditional support for the military’s Zarb-e-Azb campaign. But let me also assert that it is not enough to fight set-piece battles in the mountains. These zombies in our cities and villages must be disarmed and deprogrammed and their destroyed humanity restored. Or else they must be eliminated.
Let me also assert that the members of the lynch mob that first bludgeoned and then burned alive two suspects have also lost their humanity. Under what inhuman provocation is not the point here. What is clear is the descent into hell of the whole of society, both terrorists and their victims.