He writes, "Terrorists imagine the world in black and white, as full of demons and angels, and place themselves on the side of the angels." Although he's actually referring to religious cult groups that turn to terrorism. French resistence fighters against German occupation in the Second World War who committed terrorist acts like sabotaging bridges may have hated the occupiers of their country. But they didn't necessarily have such an extreme Manichean view of the world generally.
Identification of an enemy is a key element in the process, though as he notes, a cult can make such an identification of an enemy without becoming terrorist:
The second is the naming of the malevolent force that is harming these pure ones. The so-called Christian Identity Movement in Oklahoma, to which terrorists Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols had links, posits that the U.S. government is persecuting the vanishing band of Anglo-Saxon Christians, the pure lost tribe of Israel, on behalf of polyglot minorities. This belief appears to have been among the motivations for the two to bomb the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995, killing 168 people.And the apocalyptic element is a key one in this cult process that leads to violence against the Outsiders:
The question for true believers thus becomes how to safeguard the righteous innocents from being wiped out by the forces of darkness. Some choose peaceful paths to that goal. If they simply organize protests or join political parties, they become social activists.
But a key motivation for the turn to terror is a sense of extreme urgency. If the true believers are convinced that an occupying force or government is committing daily mass murder, and simply cannot bear for it to continue, they may feel an impulse to do something immediate and dramatic. ...Robert Jay Lifton in his 2000 book on the Japanese Aum Sinrikyō cult, Destroying the World to Save It, discusses how the Christian Book of Revelation has exerted a particular influence on apocalyptic cult groups, even ones far outside the Christian tradition:
Activists who become terrorists often view themselves as soldiers in God's army. Seeing all British citizens unsympathetic to the Salafi Jihadi cause as soldiers in an opposing army authorized the terrorists, in their own minds, to target civilians in the Tiger Tiger nightclub near Piccadilly Circus. Their intended victims were not simply late-night revelers in the mind of the would-be attackers, but rather enemy troops on rest and recreation.
Such perpetrators can also be impelled to act by a fear of imminent capture, since in their view this would spell the final victory of the forces of evil over the elect few. After the People's Temple group killed California Rep. Leo Ryan in Guyana in 1978 they were forced by their leader, Jim Jones, to commit mass suicide because Jones realized that this murder would lead to the destruction of their group, which he felt was alone in carrying the truth. Jones began as a pastor in a mainstream church and had at one point been a civil rights leader in Indiana - a dramatic example of how caring individuals can go wrong. (my emphasis)
It turns out that Aum was not alone in its fervor to force the end, to try to bathe the world in its own blood for its own good. For the most striking historical examples of forcing the end, it is necessary to turn back nearly a millennium and not to Asia but to medieval Europe. The connecting text spanning contintents and centuries is the Book of Revelation.The Aum cult made the Book of Revelation one of its favorite text. (Aum is the one terrorist group who has carried out a successful terrorist attack using one of the so-called "weapons of mass destruction", unleashing nerve gas in the Tokyo subway.) Lifton also reminds us that Charles Manson also considered the Book of Revelation one of his key texts (not just the Beatles whimsical, nonsensical song "Helter Skelter"). So did Marshall Herff Applewhite, leader of the Heaven's Gate cult. Lifton also writes:
For as the historian of religion Elaine Pagels point out, it was early Jewish and Christian apocalyptic thinking that gave rise to the idea of a cosmic struggle between good and evil for the fate of the world, of a "split cosmology with the 'sons of light' allied with the angels and 'sons of darkness' in league with the power of evil." [Aum cult leader] Asahara's reliance on imagery from the Hebrew and Christian Bible, especially the Book of Revelation, is therefore hardly surprising. That polarization, that "split cosmology," tapped fundamental, death-linked, often amorphous existential fears, which could be readily manipulated by promises of collective spiritual perfection and immortality.I assume that Pagels wasn't meaning to say that Jewish and Christian thinkers invented the notion out of thin air. Persian Zoroastrianism had a major effect on the origins of Jewish apocalyptic thought.
Lifton is not suggesting that taking the Book of Revelation seriously inevitably leads to such results. Obviously, Christians all over the world consider that book part of their Holy Scripture, and most of them don't become violent cultists. Lifton writes, "Like Asahara, Manson invoked the Book of Revelation and incorporated its details into his paranoid-megalomanic reading of history and the future."
But he does emphasize that with all the myriad sources of material for apocalyptic cult thinking:
Yet, significantly, from medieval times to our own, the Book of Revelation has consistently been a powerful organizing text for apocalyptic dreaming and for the efforts of all varieties of violent cults to "murder death."Not all Muslim terrorism can be called cultish. But for groups like Al Qaida and its various copycat groups, understanding cult dynamics is important to understanding how they think and operate. Juan Cole has also written about cult-like aspects of the 9/11 group headed by Muhammed Atta in Al-Qaeda’s Doomsday Document and Psychological Manipulation 04/09/2003.
Tags: cults, robert jay lifton, terrorism
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