gonna put people in this country in concentration camps. They’re gonna put them in gas ovens, just like they did the Jews.… They’re gonna put you in the concentration camps that’re already in Tule Lake, California, Allentown, Pennsylvania, near Birmingham, outside El Reno, Oklahoma. They’ve got them all ready.… They still have the concentration camps, they did it to the Japanese, and they’ll do it to us.2
“I tell you, we’re in danger from a corporate dictatorship,” Jones insisted, “a great fascist state, a great communist state.”3
The ultimate terror began in 1978, when members started to rehearse their mass suicide. On “white nights” they would be roused suddenly from sleep and informed that they were about to be killed by U.S. agents; suicide was said to be the only viable option. They were then given a drink that they believed to be poisoned and waited to die. On November 18, 1978, the community had been visited by U.S. congressman Leo Ryan, who had come to investigate reports of human rights abuses. After Ryan left, Jones dispatched Temple members to shoot him at the airstrip and then summoned the entire community to the Jonestown pavilion. There medical staff administered potassium cyanide in a batch of the soft drink Flavor-Aid, which parents fed to their children before taking it themselves. Most seem to have died willingly, though the two hundred children were certainly murdered and about a hundred of the elderly may have been injected involuntarily.
They recorded their last messages on audiotape. Jones had taken the concept of “revolutionary suicide” from Black Panther leader Huey Newton.4 “I made the decision to commit revolutionary suicide. My decision has been well thought out,” said one Jonestown resident. “And in my death, I hope that it would be used as an instrument to further liberation.” “It’s been my pleasure walking with all of you in this revolutionary struggle,” one woman stated. “No other way I would rather go [than] to give my life for socialism, communism.” People who were convinced that they had no voice in their own society had come to believe that they could be heard only in the shocking spectacle of their dying. Jones was the last to take the poison: “We said—one thousand people who said, we don’t like the way the world is. We didn’t commit suicide. We committed an act of revolutionary suicide, protesting the conditions of an inhumane world.”5
The community dynamics of Jonestown were, of course, complex and imponderable. Although religion was clearly not the cause of this tragedy, it has much in common with instances of “revolutionary suicide” that have been articulated in religious terms. The Temple was a protest against the structural violence of American society; it had developed a highly developed history of grievance and suffering that, its members claimed, mainstream society chose to ignore. Jonestown was an assault as well as a protest: Temple members were laying their deaths at the door of the United States, a demonstration that its systemic injustice had made their lives so intolerable that death was preferable. Jones clearly believed, however psychotically, that he was engaged in an asymmetrical struggle with a superpower that held all the cards. All these elements would also surface in the wave of religiously inspired terrorism that broke out in the 1980s.
One of the many reasons the drama of Jonestown is so disturbing is the germ of nihilism it reveals in modern culture. The Temple was clearly haunted by two of the dark icons of modernity: the concentration camp and the mushroom cloud. Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) had found that human beings were as strongly motivated by a death wish as by a desire for procreation. The French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80) spoke of a God-shaped hole in human consciousness, a void at the heart of modern culture. By the mid-twentieth century, that psychic void had been filled with a terrible reality. Between 1914 and 1945, seventy million people in Europe and the Soviet Union had died violent deaths.6 Some of the worst atrocities had been perpetrated by Germans who lived in one of the most cultivated societies in Europe. The Holocaust shook the Enlightenment optimism that education would eliminate barbarism, since it showed that a concentration camp could exist in the same vicinity as a great university. The sheer scale of the Nazi genocide reveals its debt to modernity; no previous society could have implemented such a grandiose scheme of extermination. The Nazis used many of the tools and achievements of the industrial age—the factory, the railways, and the advanced chemical industry—to deadly effect, relying on modern scientific and rational planning in which everything is subordinated to a single, limited, and defined objective.7 Born of modern scientific racism, the Holocaust was the ultimate step in social engineering and the most extreme demonstration of the inability of the nation to tolerate minorities. It showed what can happen once the sense of the sacredness of every single human being—a conviction at the heart of traditional religions that quasi-religious systems seem unable or disinclined to re-create—is lost.
On August 6, 1945, a 3,600-kilogram atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, killing approximately 140,000 people instantaneously. Three days later a plutonium-type bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, killing some 24,000 people.8 For centuries people had dreamed of a final apocalypse wrought by God; now, with weapons of mass destruction, it appeared that human beings no longer needed God to achieve apocalyptic effects. The nation had become a supreme value, and the international community acknowledged the legitimacy of a nuclear strike to protect it, despite the prospect of total annihilation that such means suggested. There could be no more potent evidence of the death wish Freud had described. But it also, perhaps, suggests a flaw in the purely secular ideal that eliminates “holiness” from its politics—the conviction that some things or people must be “set apart” from our personal interests. The cultivation of that transcendence—be it God, Dao, Brahman, or Nirvana—had, at its best, helped people to appreciate human finitude. But if the nation becomes the absolute value (in religious terms, an “idol”), there is no reason why we should not liquidate those who appear to threaten it.
This death wish was, however, not only present in the godless violence of secular nationalism but is also evident in the religiously articulated violence of the late twentieth century. Westerners were quite rightly horrified by the Iranian child-martyrs who died on the battlefields of the Iraq-Iran War. As soon as war was declared, adolescents from the slums and shantytowns had crowded into the mosques, begging to be sent to the front. Radicalized by the excitement of the revolution, they hoped to escape the tedium of their grim lives. And so, as in traditional societies of times past, the potential for ecstasy and intensity through warfare beckoned. The government issued an edict allowing male children as young as twelve to enlist at the front without their parents’ permission. They became wards of the imam and were promised a place in paradise. Tens of thousands of adolescents poured into the war zone, wearing the martyrs’ insignia of crimson headbands. Some, trying to clear minefields, ran ahead of the troops and were blown to pieces. Others attacked as suicide bombers, deploying a tactic that has been used in various contexts of asymmetrical warfare since the eleventh century. Scribes were sent to the front to write the martyrs’ wills, many of which took the form of letters to the Imam and spoke of their joy in fighting “alongside friends on the road to Paradise.”9 The child-martyrs restored Khomeini’s faith in the revolution; like Imam Husain, he claimed, they were dying to witness to the primacy of the Unseen. But they had also been exploited to serve the interests of the nation.
Religiously articulated militarism has not been restricted to cultures with a premodern religious outlook, though. In the secularized West it has surfaced in response to the terrors of modernity, particularly those of modern industrialized warfare. During the early 1980s, disaffected American Protestant groups fearing a Soviet nuclear attack during a particularly tense period of the Cold War established fortified strongholds in remote areas of the Northwest. These survivalists, who trained militarily and stockpiled ammunition and other supplies, felt threatened not only by the godless Soviet bloc but by the U.S. government as well. Loosely affiliated as Christian Identity, these groups had very little in co
mmon with orthodox Christian churches.10 Claiming direct descent from the Twelve Tribes of Israel (through a preposterous ethnography known as “British Israelism”), they espoused a brand of white supremacy that saw the federal government and its toxic pluralism as a mortal threat. It is difficult to estimate its numbers, because Identity was and remains merely a network of organizations, but it probably had no more than 100,000 members.11 And not all shared the same concerns: some were strictly secular survivalists who were simply fleeing the threat of nuclear catastrophe.12 Yet there is a religious patina to some of these extremist groups, who use the language of faith to express fears, anxieties, and enthusiasms that are widespread, though not openly expressed, in the mainstream.
The reach of the message can be dramatic. Christian Identity’s brand of ideology would inspire Timothy McVeigh’s bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995. McVeigh was a self-professed agnostic, however. Like several Identity leaders, he had served in the U.S. Army and had a pathological attraction to violence. During the 1991 Gulf War he had helped massacre a group of trapped Iraqi soldiers and taken photographs of their corpses for his personal collection. He was not officially a member of Christian Identity but read its newsletter, had telephone conversations with its officers, and had visited its compound on the Oklahoma-Arkansas border.13
How, then, can we try to understand terrorism as a particular species of violence?
Like religion, “terrorism” is notoriously difficult to define. There are so many competing and contradictory formulations that, according to one scholar, the word is now “shrouded in terminological confusion.”14 Part of the problem is that it is such an emotive word, one of the most powerful terms of abuse in the English language, and the most censorious way of characterizing any violent act.15 As such, it is never used of anything we do ourselves, except perhaps in some abjectly penitential confession. Connoting more than it denotes, the word stubbornly refuses to reveal much, especially when both sides in a conflict hurl the same charge at each other with equal passion. Its effect is to accuse an opponent much more than to clarify the nature of the underlying conflict.16
One attempt at definition describes the phenomenon as “the deliberate use of violence, or threat of its use, against innocent people, with the aim of intimidating them specifically or others into a course of action they would not otherwise take.” Yet this could also be said of some forms of conventional warfare.17 Indeed, there is a general scholarly agreement that some of the largest-scale acts of terrorizing violence against civilians have been carried out by states rather than by independent groups or individuals.18 In the national wars of the twentieth century, hundreds of thousands of civilians were firebombed, napalmed, or vaporized. During the Second World War, Allied scientists carefully calculated the mix of explosives and wind patterns to create devastating firestorms in densely populated residential areas in German and Japanese cities precisely to create terror in the population.19
There is, however, at least one point on which everybody is in agreement: terrorism is fundamentally and inherently political, even when other motives—religious, economic, or social—are involved.20 Terrorism is always about “power—acquiring it or keeping it.”21 And so, according to one of the pioneering experts in the field, “all terrorist organizations, whether their long-term political aim is revolution, national self-determination, preservation or restoration of the status quo, or reform, are engaged in a struggle for political power with a government they wish to influence and replace.”22 The claim that the primary motivation of a terrorist action is political may seem obvious—but not to those who seem determined to regard such atrocious acts of violence as merely “senseless.” Many of that view, not surprisingly, find religion, which they regard as a byword for irrationality, to be the ultimate cause. One of the most prominent is Richard Dawkins, who has argued that “only religious faith is a strong enough force to motivate such utter madness in otherwise sane and decent people.”23 This dangerous oversimplification springs from a misunderstanding of both religion and terrorism. It is, of course, a familiar enough expression of the secularist bias of modernity, which has cast “religion” as a violent, unreasonable force that must be excluded from the politics of civilized nations.24 Somehow it fails to consider that all the world’s great religious traditions share as one of their most essential tenets the imperative of treating others as one would wish to be treated oneself. This, of course, is not to deny that religion has often been implicated in terrorist atrocities, but it is far too easy to make it a scapegoat rather than trying to see what is really going on in the world.
The first act of Islamic terrorism to grab the world’s attention was the murder of President Anwar Sadat, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, hero of the Camp David Accords, and widely regarded in the West as a progressive Muslim leader. Western peoples were aghast at the ferocity of the attack. On October 6, 1981, during a parade celebrating Egypt’s victories in the October War of 1973, First Lieutenant Khaled Islambouli jumped out of his truck, ran toward the presidential stand, and opened fire with a machine gun, shooting round after round into Sadat and killing seven people besides the president and injuring twenty-eight others. His political motivation was clearly regime change, but revolutionary fervor was fused with Islamic sentiment. At his trial Islambouli gave three reasons for murdering Sadat: the suffering of Egyptian Muslims under his tyrannical rule; the Camp David Accords; and Sadat’s imprisonment of Islamists a month earlier.
A bevy of Western princes, politicians, and celebrities attended Sadat’s funeral, but no Arab leaders were present, and the streets of Cairo were eerily silent—a very different scene from the tumultuous lamentations at Nasser’s funeral. Western politicians had admired Sadat’s peace initiative, but many people in Egypt regarded it as opportunistic and self-serving, especially since, three years after Camp David, the plight of the Palestinians had not improved. Sadat had also won Western approval by switching to the “right” side of the Cold War, dismissing the fifteen hundred Soviet advisers installed by Nasser in 1972 and announcing an “Open Door” policy designed to bring Egypt into the capitalist free market.25 But, as in Iran, while a few entrepreneurs flourished, local businessmen were ruined when foreign imports flooded the markets. Only 4 percent of the young could find a decent job, and housing was so expensive that couples often had to wait years before they could marry. No longer able to afford living in their own country, thousands of Egyptians went to work in Saudi Arabia or the Gulf states, sending money home to their families.26 The social dislocation of the abrupt Westernization of Sadat’s Egypt was also disturbing. As one observer tried to explain, it was impossible for an Egyptian peasant to maintain his dignity as “a culture bearer in his own culture” when, after a day’s toiling in the hot sun, he had to stand in line for a frozen American chicken and spend the evening in front of the television set purchased with money sent by his son from Saudi Arabia, watching the antics of J. R. Ewing and Sue Ellen on Dallas. 27
The devout element of Egyptian society felt especially betrayed by Sadat. At first, anxious to create an identity for his regime that was distinct from Nasser’s, he had courted them, releasing the Muslim Brothers from prison, encouraging Muslim student associations to wrest the campuses away from the socialists and Nasserites, and styling himself the Pious President. There was much mosque building and plenty of airtime devoted to religion. But there was nothing Islamic about Open Door. This was blatant structural violence, which revealed the hollowness of Sadat’s devout stance, since he had created conditions of inequity explicitly condemned by the Quran. The president discovered that his economic and political assault on the Egyptian people had inadvertently spawned political Islamist movements that were dangerously hostile to his regime.
One of these was the Society of Muslims, founded in 1971 by Shukri Mustafa, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, after his release from prison.28 He would be one of the most misguided “free lances” that step
ped into the vacuum created by the ulema’s marginalization. By 1976 the Society had about two thousand members, men and women convinced that they were divinely commissioned to build a pure ummah on the ruins of Sadat’s jahiliyyah. Taking Qutb’s program in Milestones to the limit, Shukri declared not only the government but the entire Egyptian population to be apostate, and he and his followers withdrew from the mainstream, living in caves in the desert outside Cairo or in the city’s most deprived neighborhoods. Their experiment ended in violence and lethal immorality when members killed defectors from the group and Shukri murdered a respected judge who had condemned the Society. Yet deeply misguided as it was, Shukri’s society held up a mirror image that revealed the darker side Sadat’s regime. Shukri’s excommunication of Egypt was extreme, but in Quranic terms, Sadat’s systemic violence was indeed jahili. The hijrah to the most desperate quarters of Cairo reflected the plight of many young Egyptians who felt there was no place for them in their country; the society’s communes were supported by young men who, like so many others, were sent to work in the Gulf States. The Society condemned all secular learning as a waste of time, and there was a grain of truth in this since a lady’s maid in a foreign household could earn more than a junior lecturer.
Far more constructive than the Society of Muslims, however, were the jamaat al-islamiyyah, the student organizations that dominated the university campuses during Sadat’s presidency, which tried to help themselves in a society that ignored the needs of the young. By 1973 they had organized summer camps at nearly all the major universities, where students could immerse themselves in an Islamic milieu, studying the Quran, keeping night vigils, listening to sermons about the Prophet, and attending classes in sport and self-defense—creating an Islamic alternative to the inadequacies of the secular state.29 On the lamentably ill-equipped campuses, they segregated the sexes during lectures, where several students often had to share a single seat, in order to protect women from harassment and arranged study hours in the mosque, which was quieter than the overcrowded halls of residence. Those who came from rural backgrounds and were experiencing life in a modern city for the first time were now able to make their way to modernity in a familiar Islamic setting.
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