Death As a Statement

Richard Ostrofsky
(November, 2002)
No one likes to feel helpless. No one likes to feel unimportant. At the end of
the day, everyone wants to feel that his life has counted for something.
These days, an alarming number of people, many very young, are coming to
feel that the best way to make their lives count is to kill themselves in
spectacular fashion, taking as many others as possible with them. This
should not be so hard to understand: Everybody dies eventually; but not
everyone gets to make a statement in the act of dying, and the attractions of
doing so are obvious – especially when life is bleak, precarious and painful,
and no very splendid options are in sight.
A still more dangerous trend is that political leaders have taken to
encouraging such statements by recruiting volunteers, training and
equipping them, paying pensions to their families, and covering these
human torpedoes with posthumous glory. Nor is this merely gratuitous
nastiness but, under certain circumstances, a perfectly rational policy. Our
rage testifies to its effectiveness. Sophisticated people laughed at the
“barbecued Buddhists” who burned themselves in protest against the
American intervention in Viet Nam. No one is laughing now.
Whether the terrorist is sponsored or freelance, we must now consider
death as a bystander in another’s suicide as just one more of life’s rich
possibilities. The strange thing is that the fashion for taking a few of Them
with you can mean almost nothing at all for people's daily lives and plans,
because there is nothing much that anyone can do about it. Any one of us,
or someone we love, might get blown to bits on a crowded bus, or find
himself in the cross-hairs of a sniper’s sight. Nothing personal at all, and
only marginally a meaningful political act. From the victim’s perspective,
it’s just a question of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Of course, we expect our governments to “do something”; and the
phrase “war on terrorism” sounds good, until we stop to think that such a
war is likely to be about as successful as the wars on poverty, drugs, crime,
environmental pollution and corporate malfeasance. And for the same
reasons: All these evils are secondary effects, by-products, of a system,
lifestyle and mentality that we prefer to any other, and are by no means
ready to abandon or change significantly. Nor is it even clear what changes
are needed or feasible. Certainly the terrorists and their political backers
have nothing positive to offer – not even positive demands.
But it would be much easier to support George W. against the evil
terrorists if we could overlook the history of colonialism and less direct
forms of exploitation in the Middle East and elsewhere. Forgetting history,
it’s easy to persuade ourselves that we (meaning Europeans and European
émigrés) are the good guys in this situation. In fact, it’s more like a taste of
our own medicine, with the difference that our crimes were always called
by some other name. We have often used terror as an instrument of policy;
it’s just that we never thought of ourselves in those terms. Thus, it would be
easier to support the forthcoming invasion of Iraq if we did not realize that
it has at least as much to do with oil and U.S. domestic politics as with
Saddam Hussein’s military ambitions or his alleged link to Al Qaeda. Here
again, just as with those other terrorists, we will be witnessing death as
theater, death as a statement for the evening news.
The sad thing is that all these terrible statements are so terribly
meaningless. None of the “martyrs” on either side will make the world a
better place, or improve the human prospects any. It’s hard to see how all
these deaths could be more completely in vain.