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Monday, September 26, 2005
Cuizon: Low-cost murders, anyone?
By Erma Cuizon
Bird by Bird
THE Katrina disaster has given a respite to news about people bombed in Baghdad where suicide bombers abound. For a while, the news in Sun.Star World was always about people killed by explosions in the streets. But now, a respite, no matter how short it is. It’s Katrina they’re talking about. But not for long.
It was not in your vocabulary until the trouble in the Middle East. Suicide bombing or suicide terrorism wasn’t anything you could imagine.
It’s really hard to accept the reality of suicide bombers, and you can’t imagine a Filipino doing it. When a Filipino goes amuck, he’d simply run after a few people, usually with a knife (hardly with a gun, unless it’s premeditated or he’s a police asset), certainly not with as many victims as the suicide bomber can blast in one sweep.
Besides, who would want to die that way, in a stupid suicide? But I think it hasn’t been anything stupid in the choice of these men to die for their political belief. It’s probably because life has already been very difficult for them and without much meaning. Conditions may be such that compared to dying, life has never had one shining day.
The Japanese kamikaze pilots in WWII were somehow different; they died for a cause that was hugely for their country, and within their military discipline. I first heard about this from the conversations of Father and an uncle. It must have been scary to imagine that the plane hovering over your head would simply drop itself on you for the sake of the pilot’s country. But I understood later that the kamikazes were used by the Japanese on American battleships, especially. I read in the Internet that in four months’ record, 26 ships sunk in 1,400 suicide missions.
You can’t imagine how it was to be told in an assignment to die, actually to go and kill yourself, for the country. But I suppose there were volunteers, men to whom life already had no meaning except in a military mission.
But people are getting practical these days. Religious or political suicides, if you want to call it that, are really “low cost” with “high lethality,” they say. Someone militant, who already is a lonely being living in an unfair world, goes on a suicide drive killing hundreds of the enemy in the Middle East. The only input of the aggressor is an old car, a bomb and the bomber who already, anyway, is waiting for his spiritual salvation.
We will never fully understand suicide missions. It surely springs from the bombers’ loss of self-worth and in psychopathic self-sacrifice. It’s a lonely battle encouraged by militant groups who make use of religious rites to push these pitiful men to die for them.
(September 26, 2005 issue)
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