ANALYSIS: The terrorist archetype —Salman Tarik Kureshi

These orgies of violence have little to do with ‘causes’ and everything to do with the psychotic aberrations bred into the terrorists. This is a psychosis that is primarily driven by the desire to achieve an enormous degree of notoriety, posthumously or otherwise, through committing violence

For most of us, it would have been beyond belief that the atrocity perpetrated at Data Darbar could even have been contemplated. But it was and such acts are being contemplated, planned, organised and executed, even as I write. Nor was this perpetration different to the attack on the Ahmediyya places of worship (as we are obliged to call them) or on the Karachi Ashura procession or on the Sri Lankan cricketers or the Islamabad Marriott or the countless other instances of senseless, extreme violence to which we have become habituated. Officials, pundits and commentators proffer multiple explanations for the waves of terrorism in which we are embroiled. It is assumed that social conditions or political causes are the wellsprings of this violence. These terrorists are the products of poverty, of brainwashing, 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 attracted to such conceptual nostrums, it is necessary to make two observations. The first is that terrorist violence against non-combatants is not and has never been a legitimate, or even an effective, strategy in furthering political causes. Even during the course of armed revolutions or wars of national liberation, terrorist violence has been relatively marginal, frequently denounced by the revolutionary leadership itself. The second observation is that, therefore, even if everything were to be happily resolved and all grievances removed and utopias of prosperity 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.

Theirs is a bizarre kind of inverted egoism. In 365 BC, Erostratus, an inhabitant of Ephesus (located in present-day Turkey), grew tired of his own obscurity. He sought and achieved historic fame by burning down the sacred temple. The howls of horror of the people at this act of his, and their palpable fear of the anger of the 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, this person engages an advertising agency to produce a media campaign that will bring crowds to watch him accomplish his own annihilation.

Does my reader see what I am suggesting? This is a psychosis that is primarily driven by the desire to achieve an enormous degree of notoriety, posthumously or otherwise, through committing violence. 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, adds to the sweetness of the deed. The terrorist has struck with the impersonality of a force of nature, descending upon his victims as a cyclone or tsunami or earthquake might have. And, this being the age of the media, everyone will hear about it, and, upon hearing, 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.

In an earlier article in these pages, I had suggested to my readers that terrorism is not the weapon of the weak, but of the vicious. The Algerian-born philosopher Albert Camus understood the archetype well. He refers to them as “sons of Cain”, thereby suggesting that the seed perhaps exists in all of us, but that is a point to which I will return. Camus characterises such rebels as nihilists, ideational twins of Herzen, Pisarev and the Russian nihilists of the 19th century, whose literary archetype was the character of the young Bazarov in Turgenev’s novel Fathers and Sons. [As an aside, I would invite my readers to enrich or revive their literary memories with Turgenev’s masterpiece; or, should they wish to appreciate the irresistible attraction of impersonal acts of violence, read Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment or Manto’s Siyah Hashiya.] Camus quotes Count Bakunin: “The passion for destruction is a creative passion” and suggests that these words “vehemently proclaim pleasure in destruction”. To the nihilists, political disorder is “a feast without beginning and without end”.

Camus sees that this kind of egoistic self-actualisation through violence paradoxically carries self-destruction, a suicidal drive, on the other side of its coin. He sees Adolph 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 acts of violence, the emotional coldness and annulled conscience of a rapist or a child-killer, and, finally, a kind of self-annihilating suicidal drive.

Yes, it is a bizarre kind of psychopathy. But — and this is the frightening thought Camus proposes in calling terrorists ‘sons of Cain’ — the seed of nihilism exists in all of us. It needs only to be nurtured, given a ‘cause’ as some kind of spurious motivation and provided with the resources and means to kill. The establishment that runs this country chose to do precisely that, taking advantage of the Afghanistan situation in 1979 to send in the so-called mujahideen and again in 1994 to unleash the Taliban. The pretexts of fighting communism and promoting Islam were used to attract funding from the US and the Arabs for this project of achieving ‘strategic depth’ through manufacturing and mobilising human death-machines.

It is not enough to now fight set-piece battles in the mountains. The killer-zombies in our cities and villages must be forcibly disarmed and either deprogrammed or eliminated. We need the will to sustain this process.

The writer is a marketing consultant based in Karachi. He is also a poet