Talking to the Enemy: Faith, Brotherhood, and the (Un)Making of Terrorists (46 page)

Hitler promised a “social revolution” that would merge the all-for-one values of the combat soldier with the whole civilian population, thus creating the
Volksgemeinschaft.
The Hitler Youth was not a brainwashing factory but a place where children were encouraged to ignore social status and think about the group before the individual. The ideological movement was emotionally rewarding for children and for the soldiers the children would become. The German rank and file would readily quote philosophers and details of European history in their letters back home. These young men were well trained, deeply bonded to their peers, and highly motivated by the cause of National Socialism to take the fight to Germany’s enemies.

In
Kameradschaft,
Thomas Kühne
¹²
traces
Volksgemeinschaft
back to medieval notions of chivalry, and then on through the French Revolution and Napoleonic era, when the Romantic ideaof “general war” to save Humanity emerged, reinforced by training and military service in defense of the nation and national honor (allied to masculinity). In World War I, soldiers also saw themselves engaged in a general war for humanity’s soul, but they enlisted and organized on a strongly regional basis, as in the American Civil War, bonding on the front lines into “trench families—frontline groups united by regional affinity, proximity and shared experience.”

This ethos carried into World War II despite the high casualty rates on the Russian front that eviscerated fighting groups. Hitler’s social revolution turned longing for community, or
Gemeinschaft,
into a national passion. “Good” was anything that strengthened the community. The highest prestige accrued to those who rejected norms—doubts, scruples, inhibitions—that impeded the fight against so-called enemies and threats to the community. The emotions generated in mutual caring, commitment, and sacrifice for others made it possible for soldiers to come to terms with war’s inhuman face: destruction and killing. Even in the later stages of the war, there was a sense of group empowerment “strong enough in the group’s later stages to approximate group immortality and the will to fight on against desperate odds.” It explains how “never have men fought better for a worse cause” than the men who marched to the tune of “total war” under the swastika.
¹³

Nazi soldiers were mostly ordinary men whom an ideological brotherhood had made extraordinarily brave. And though American leaders have repeatedly claimed that suicide bombers are “cowardly,” from the 9/11 hijackers to the killers of former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto, in fact they are anything but that.

CAUSE VERSUS CALCULUS

American military historians and analysts tend to chalk up camaraderie to rational self-interest and to dismiss the notion of sacrifice for a cause as a critical factor in war:

[T]he intense primary-group ties so often reported in combat groups are best viewed as mandatory necessities arising from immediate life-and-death exigencies. Much like the Hobbesian description of primitive life, the combat situation can be nasty, brutish and short … one can view primary-group processes in the combat situation as a kind of rudimentary social contract which is entered into because of advantages to individual self-interest. Rather than viewing soldiers’ primary groups as some kind of semi-mystical bond of comradeship, they can better be understood as pragmatic and situational responses.
¹⁴

In Vietnam, falling morale, desertion, and fragging (killing officers) increased long after popular support for the war collapsed, and only after soldiers began feeling that “Vietnamization” (handing over security to South Vietnamese forces) was a lost cause that no soldier wanted to be the last to die for.

American soldiers said that the cause of democracy was “crap” and “a joke” in Vietnam. And yet they described the selfless bravery of the North Vietnamese “because they believed in something” and “knew what they were fighting for.”
¹⁵
So, maybe
others
would die for a cause and not only for comrades.

James McPherson in
For Cause and Comrades
notes that, unlike later American armies of mostly draftees and professional soldiers, Civil War armies on both sides were composed mainly of volunteers who often joined up and fought with family, friends, and neighbors from the same communities. Unlike World War II or Vietnam vets, they wrote letters back to the same affinity groups they had fought with.

A large number of the men in blue and gray were intensely aware of the issues at stake and passionately concerned about them. How could it be otherwise? This was, after all, a
civil war.
Its outcome would determine the fate of the nation … thefuture of American society and of every person in that society. Civil War soldiers lived in the world’s most politicized and democratic country in the mid-nineteenth century. A majority of them had voted in the election of 1860, the most heated and momentous election in American history. When they enlisted, many of them did so for patriotic and ideological reasons—to shoot as they had voted, so to speak. These convictions did not disappear after they signed up…. They needed no indoctrination lectures to explain what they were fighting for, no films like Frank Capra’s
Why We Fight
series in World War II.
¹⁶

During the Civil War, ideology was given a particularly religious cast: “Civil War armies were, arguably, the most religious in American history. Wars usually intensify religious convictions…. Many men who were at best nominal Christians before they enlisted experienced conversion to the genuine article by their baptism of fire.”
¹⁷

In
Fear in Battle,
John Dollard interviewed veterans from the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, Americans who fought in the Spanish Civil War against Franco and fascism. In response to the question: “What would you say are the most important things that help a man overcome fear in battle?” 77 percent cited belief in their ideology and “the aims of war” versus: leadership (49 percent), esprit de corps (28 percent), hatred of enemy (21 percent), distraction and keeping busy (17 percent).
¹⁸
The Lincoln Brigade was not religious, far from it; but it was motivated by a transcendental cause of socialism as a historical necessity opposed by the evil of fascism.

During the Battle of Britain, Reginald Jones, head of Britain’s World War II “scientific intelligence” effort, put the sentiment for comrades and cause this way:

I used to look at my wall map every morning and wonder how we could possibly survive. Anyone in his right sense would dothe best deal he could with Hitler—but we had no thought of it. Even though we were tired by the Blitz, there was that white glow overpowering, sublime that ran through our island from end to end. It can hardly be described to those who did not experience it; it must lie very deep down among human emotions, giving the individual a strange, subdued elation at facing dangers in which he may easily perish as an individual but also a subconscious knowledge that any society which has a high enough proportion of similar individuals is all the more likely to survive because of their sacrifice.
¹⁹

It appears, then, that, despite U.S. patriotic propaganda and the studies that discount it, American warfare from World War II to today may be the exception to the heartfelt sense of war as a noble cause. To die and kill for jihad more nearly follows the general rule, at least to judge from that “white glow overpowering” which seems to illuminate so many I talk to.

MATTERS OF PRINCIPLE

How do people decide whether or not to join violent movements, vote to support a war, or to say “yes” when asked if they support suicide attacks in public opinion surveys? A common assumption of policy makers and analysts
²⁰
and of researchers on war
²¹
and terrorism
²²
is that decisions to support or oppose warfare are made in an instrumentally rational manner, driven by cost-benefit calculations. But war, which arouses humans’ most noble sentiments and worst fears, is rarely, if ever, simply a product of reason and rational calculation.

Research with my colleague Jeremy Ginges, a social psychologist, challenges the notion that war, or at least commitment to terrorism and political violence as a moral call to war, is basically “policy by other means.” If decisions about politicalviolence are based more on moral than on instrumental calculations, then factors that are materially irrelevant should influence decision making. What follows is a brief summary of three studies carried out with Palestinians and Israelis that tested this prediction.
²³

STUDY 1: MORAL DUTY OVERRIDES RESPONSIBILITY TO FAMILY AND HOMETOWN

Seven hundred twenty Palestinian adults were recruited at fourteen university campuses across 120 locales in the West Bank and Gaza to participate in a survey. Half of these participants were women, and half were members of Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Participants were asked the extent to which the scenarios were “certainly acceptable,” “somewhat acceptable,” “somewhat unacceptable,” or “certainly unacceptable.” For example:

1. What is the position of Islam in your opinion regarding the bomber who carries out the bombing attack (which some call martyrdom attacks while others call suicide attacks), killing himself with the aim of killing his enemies as some Palestinians do. Does Islam allow or not allow such action?
   
2. What if a person wanted to carry out a bombing (which some … call suicide attacks) against the enemies of Palestine but his father becomes ill, and his family begs the chosen martyr to take care of his father, would it be acceptable to delay the attack indefinitely?
   
3. What if a person wanted to carry out a bombing (which some … call suicide attacks) against the enemies of Palestine but his family begs him to delay martyrdom indefinitely because there was a significantly high chance the chosen martyr’s family would be killed in retaliation, would it be acceptable to delay the attack indefinitely?
   
4. What if the bombing attack led to the destruction of olive trees and the bombing of his hometown and school and the death of the students, would it be acceptable to delay the attack indefinitely?
   

Eighty-one percent of Palestinian students believe that Islam allows the actions of the suicide bomber (+SB), including nearly 100 percent of supporters of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad; 19 percent of the students did not believe Islam supports suicide bombing (-SB).

There were no differences between participants who did and did not believe that Islam supports suicide bombing and willingness to delay a martyrdom operation to help a sick father. But those who did believe that Islam supports suicide attacks were inclined to believe that an indefinite delay of a suicide attack to save one’s hometown or the entire family from probable death was more unacceptable than an indefinite delay of a suicide attack to look after an ill father. Similarly, a one-month delay of a suicide attack to save the entire family from probable death was rated as more unacceptable than a one-month delay to look after an ill father. What these results show is that when people are reasoning between duty to war or to family, they aren’t always making instrumental decisions that make material sense, but also decisions based on perceptions of obligations that can change as a function of which moral frame the context brings into focus.

STUDY 2: MORAL DUTY REVERSES NORMAL SENSITIVITY TO QUANTITY

Our second study was integrated in a survey of a representative sample of 1,266 Palestinian Muslim adults, half men and half women. To measure whether it was permissible or taboo in Palestinian society to think about material gains of involvement in acts of violence against the Israeli occupation, we asked:

In your view, would it be acceptable for the family of a martyr to request compensation in the amount of JD (Jordanian dinars)

——after their son carried out a martyrdom operation?

Would it be certainly acceptable, acceptable, unacceptable, or certainly unacceptable?

We randomly varied between participants the amount of money requested in this scenario: JD1,000 (about $1,500), JD10,000 ($15,000), or JD1,000,000 ($1,500,000). More than 90 percent of the participants regarded any request for financial compensation in exchange for the sacrifice of a martyr’s life as unacceptable, taboo. Moreover, as the monetary amount requested increased, so did disapproval ratings.

STUDY 3: PAROCHIAL ALTRUISM

Although many Jewish residents of the Israeli-occupied West Bank moved there from Israel for reasons of finance or “quality of life,” the community as a whole, typically referred to as “settlers,” is politically active in supporting the Jewish state’s right to permanently rule occupied Palestinian territories.
²⁴
Our sample of 656 settlers was representative of the Jewish population of the West Bank in terms of religious and political identities. We tested willingness to violently attack Palestinians or other Israelis who were attempting to force evacuation of settlements.