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I'm going to have to disagree with you again, Qalyn.
I don't mind, Tango.
Many Fundamentalist Islamic suicide bombers are highly educated and very much into the theoretical side. Also, the psychological training is given after the person has already volunteered for a suicide mission. They know what they are getting themselves into.
I'm sure there are as many stories as there are suicide bombers. Everyone's life is different. What I'm going to describe is how you'd go about convincing someone to kill themselves and lots of strangers for no good reason.
First, you find someone, usually a young someone, who is very insecure. They could be from an affluent background, believing they are defined by their money or whatever, or they could have a horribly chaotic personal history -- orphaned, starved, molested, etc. Remove every familiar circumstance from their environment. Take away their friends, their clothes, their hair, even their name. Put them under stress, fatigue, hunger, and tell them repeatedly that they are worthless, stupid, weak, shameful. Give them an unpleasable authority figure, a symbol of the perfection they will never attain.
Then start to let them succeed. Give them tasks that are not necessarily easy, but certainly doable, given enough practice. As they begin to adjust and succeed more and more, tell them that it is only through devotion to authority that they have succeeded -- it was authority that lent them the strength to change. In order to keep this new sense of worth, they must do whatever that authority requires of them.
These tasks could be physical or they could be intellectual. I modeled the above description on US Marines boot camp, where they have these silly obstacle courses, but in Cambodia in the 1970's they had political dialectic classes. The "theoretical side" you mentioned is part of the brainwashing. Ideology is a complex task that most people can master with a little work, but it has little or no effect on action. It's authority that decides action, and it acts in its own interest.
I don't pretend to know anything about al Quaeda's (or whoever's) recruiting and training methods, but I imagine it's a combination of both (especially since it was the CIA that taught them how to do this). The point is, you've torn down the person's sense of self and convinced them that they only way they can succeed at anything is through obedience to authority. It needn't be as extreme as the above. It doesn't necessarily happen at some camp in the wilderness. Catholics spend so much time convincing their children that they are sinful and disgusting in the eyes of a loving (but vengeful) God, and Catholics have been so willing to burn innocent strangers alive at the Pope's behest, because this indoctrination is at the heart of Catholic thought.
Once you've indoctrinated your subject, you find a task that suits him. If you want to attack "the West", and your subject is smart and charming, you might send him to school in the US. If not, you might send him to the PLO. Or, if you ARE "the West", you might put him in uniform and send him out to kill people. I want to stress that I'm describing a fairly generic process, not maligning any particular group. Personally, I think they're all malignable.
Can you expand on your other options. I live under a 'pragmatic' government (in Malaysia) which means it does whatever the hell it likes.
Well, I don't know much about Malaysia, it's true. Your pragmatic options are: become a policy maker, so that your decisions directly affect the course of political action (note that policy-makers get to use the indoctrination process described above on other people -- you needn't be an elected official, you just need to be in a position to make decisions for other people); become an opinion-shaper of some sort, maybe a film-maker or professor, so that you can slowly change the way people think; or make peace with the fact that human beings are warmakers by nature but you only have your own life to lead and you must do what makes you feel complete -- not what pleases some abstract figure of authority, unless it's an authority you invent and acknowledge of your own volition. But taking a baseball bat to people you don't like is childish, vicious, and evil, no matter what the circumstances. It speaks of a horrid lack of imagination or decency. Ganging up in the streets to throw a big tantrum only works in the most extreme circumstances, and even then not very well. Civil disobedience will only work when the populace is fully committed to it, ie things are so bad they are willing to suffer the punishment such disobedience brings on.
Have I been clear? I'm banging this out as quickly I can, because I have to move on to other things, but I hope I've made a little sense. |
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