Murderous Cool
David Aaronovitch gets to the heart of what makes modern day Jihadis tick: a kind of detached 'murderous cool' that is similar in somevways to the absurd Helter Skelter philosophy of Charles Manson.
Now the Manson Family operated in different times, but they followed their own invented 'moral' code which meant that the deliberate butchering of a young woman Sharon Tate, who was 8 and a half months pregnant at the time, was all in a day's work.
The Islamic State follows a religious code rather than a moral one, but the end result is no different in the sense that the lives of non-believers (including fellow Muslims, of course) are of no account, being worth less than that of a dog.
So there is no reasoning or arguing with them - whether crazy people or religious zealots - they just need to be stopped.
There’s only one answer to ‘deathstyle’ jihadists
By David Aaronovitch - The Times
They are not isolated or aggrieved, just attracted to a murderous ‘cool’. So we must destroy their means of living it out
It’s 2014. And this week that part of the world that could bear to look at such a thing watched on video as 18 men were decapitated by 18 others, using only small knives. I have read descriptions of the mass execution outside the Syrian town of Dabiq, but as I won’t watch I can only imagine the last seconds of the victims as I can the mental states of their murderers.
Such intimate barbarity towards other human beings is beyond the comprehension of most of us. So all I want to do is to note that it showed a level of cruelty that would be remarkable in the most hardened sadist or the most disconnected sociopath. Yet the men who committed it were probably neither.
One of the 18 killers was Maxime Hauchard, a 22-year-old from the village of Le Bosc-Roger-en-Roumois, in Upper Normandy. According to Le Monde, Hauchard came from a white-collar family, studied locally, enjoyed mending mopeds, had a holiday job at Pizza Delight and liked to go out for a drink with his friends. The mayor, Philippe Vanheule, knew him, remarking on Hauchard’s enthusiasm for cinema.
At the age of 17, seemingly out of the blue, Hauchard converted to Islam. As far as we can tell, this was a conversion sparked by what he had seen and read online.
And although he attended a local mosque he doesn’t seem to have been “radicalised” there or to have been part of any radical group. In 2013, after two trips to Mauretania, he travelled to Syria via Turkey. He must have arrived a few months before the idealistic American aid worker Peter Kassig, whose death was shown in the same video last week, was kidnapped. Brought together in this place, one young westerner ended up being murdered, the other by being a murderer.
“I can’t believe it was him who cut anyone’s head off,” Hauchard’s uncle said this week, after his fresh-faced, bearded, uniformed nephew was seen on the murder video. “It’s not possible. He wouldn’t hurt a fly. He was a calm and happy little boy.”
Mayor Vanheule, speaking of Hauchard’s parents, observed sympathetically that “What happened to them could happen to any family”.
This is the kind of thing that we are used to hearing about young suicides, anorexics or addicts. That could be us. There but for the grace of God. And it’s true. But holding a bound man who knows you are about to kill him, sawing through his neck, seeing the blood and feeling him die and feeling good about it — doesn’t it take a special series of qualities and experiences to have led you to that point?
If the answer is “no”, then all bets are off and none of the theories work. Hauchard was not in any way “disenfranchised” or “disaffected” from society. He wasn’t a second-generation immigrant bedevilled by a conflicting sense of belonging. He wasn’t brought up as part of the Muslim “ummah”, feeling pain on behalf of fellow believers suffering at the hand of the infidel. He hadn’t experienced foreign occupation. He hadn’t been humiliated in any way. He was as likely to be a killer for Islamic State as the boy next door.
In 2010 I interviewed the anthropologist Scott Atran, who had published an important book, Talking to the Enemy, for which he had met and surveyed jihadists in Indonesia and Morocco.
Atran’s explanation for the jihadist mentality revolved, in the end, around an idea of a group dynamic. It was as much out of loyalty to a group as out of any religious sense that these men acted as they did. In a way they had become like members of a religious or political sect, sequestered from reality. Atran pointed out that, unlike their predecessors, mobile technology had put such people in touch with events in the rest of the world. They were both isolated and connected.
This seemed the most sophisticated explanation that I had seen so far for the foreign jihadist phenomenon. But the case of Hauchard and what we know of some other jihadists begins to suggest something even more appalling.
It is that all you need is wifi and a desire to impress. Nothing else. Just the characteristics of almost all young males. You go online and there are the pictures, selfies, YouTube videos and news reports of other young men (not women) strutting around with guns and a cold sense of certainty.
There doesn’t even appear to be the noisome hierarchy of bullying sergeants and absurd regulations. A few tweets, get on the right pages, make some contacts, get a plane ticket, meet a man in Istanbul, and you too can be Islam’s D’Artagnan. You can act in your own movie, blow things up, terrify people, take women into sexual slavery and it’s all ideologically legitimate. You can be one of “Caliph” al-Baghdadi’s “army of young lions whose drink is blood and play is carnage”.
A young lion! The association of violence with “coolness” is not new. When the Vikings were ravaging England one bishop had to admonish the Anglo-Saxon youth for imitating the dress sense of the murderous Norsemen. Thousands of young Dutchmen, Danes and Spaniards signed up for the Waffen SS, lured perhaps by the uniforms, the discipline, the aesthetic of mayhem.
This is our 21st-century nightmare — the lifestyle jihadist. The idea of “see it, do it” in a world of uncontrollable communication is terrifying. Or should I have said “deathstyle”? Because how do you punish such behaviour? What disincentive can you devise for a wannabe Islamic State executioner? Last July Hauchard was interviewed by Skype from Syria (it is so easy) by a French television station. All the comrades, he said, wanted to die and expected to. This provides a horrible wrinkle on the old question “what do you buy for the man who has everything?” What can you do to the man who doesn’t care about dying?
If Hauchard is in anyway representative of the reason for westerners becoming jihadists, then trying to prevent travel or threatening statelessness or prosecution on return is of limited use. They’ll get there and they don’t care if they don’t come back.
In that sense defeating jihadism is a bit like gun control. You’re inevitably going to get these young men harbouring fantasies of being cold-eyed killers; you just have to make sure there is no gun for them to kill with. In this case it means — right from the soonest possible moment — not allowing there to be an Islamic State for them to join. Destroying it early. It’s what we have armed forces for.
They are not isolated or aggrieved, just attracted to a murderous ‘cool’. So we must destroy their means of living it out
It’s 2014. And this week that part of the world that could bear to look at such a thing watched on video as 18 men were decapitated by 18 others, using only small knives. I have read descriptions of the mass execution outside the Syrian town of Dabiq, but as I won’t watch I can only imagine the last seconds of the victims as I can the mental states of their murderers.
Such intimate barbarity towards other human beings is beyond the comprehension of most of us. So all I want to do is to note that it showed a level of cruelty that would be remarkable in the most hardened sadist or the most disconnected sociopath. Yet the men who committed it were probably neither.
One of the 18 killers was Maxime Hauchard, a 22-year-old from the village of Le Bosc-Roger-en-Roumois, in Upper Normandy. According to Le Monde, Hauchard came from a white-collar family, studied locally, enjoyed mending mopeds, had a holiday job at Pizza Delight and liked to go out for a drink with his friends. The mayor, Philippe Vanheule, knew him, remarking on Hauchard’s enthusiasm for cinema.
At the age of 17, seemingly out of the blue, Hauchard converted to Islam. As far as we can tell, this was a conversion sparked by what he had seen and read online.
And although he attended a local mosque he doesn’t seem to have been “radicalised” there or to have been part of any radical group. In 2013, after two trips to Mauretania, he travelled to Syria via Turkey. He must have arrived a few months before the idealistic American aid worker Peter Kassig, whose death was shown in the same video last week, was kidnapped. Brought together in this place, one young westerner ended up being murdered, the other by being a murderer.
“I can’t believe it was him who cut anyone’s head off,” Hauchard’s uncle said this week, after his fresh-faced, bearded, uniformed nephew was seen on the murder video. “It’s not possible. He wouldn’t hurt a fly. He was a calm and happy little boy.”
Mayor Vanheule, speaking of Hauchard’s parents, observed sympathetically that “What happened to them could happen to any family”.
This is the kind of thing that we are used to hearing about young suicides, anorexics or addicts. That could be us. There but for the grace of God. And it’s true. But holding a bound man who knows you are about to kill him, sawing through his neck, seeing the blood and feeling him die and feeling good about it — doesn’t it take a special series of qualities and experiences to have led you to that point?
If the answer is “no”, then all bets are off and none of the theories work. Hauchard was not in any way “disenfranchised” or “disaffected” from society. He wasn’t a second-generation immigrant bedevilled by a conflicting sense of belonging. He wasn’t brought up as part of the Muslim “ummah”, feeling pain on behalf of fellow believers suffering at the hand of the infidel. He hadn’t experienced foreign occupation. He hadn’t been humiliated in any way. He was as likely to be a killer for Islamic State as the boy next door.
In 2010 I interviewed the anthropologist Scott Atran, who had published an important book, Talking to the Enemy, for which he had met and surveyed jihadists in Indonesia and Morocco.
Atran’s explanation for the jihadist mentality revolved, in the end, around an idea of a group dynamic. It was as much out of loyalty to a group as out of any religious sense that these men acted as they did. In a way they had become like members of a religious or political sect, sequestered from reality. Atran pointed out that, unlike their predecessors, mobile technology had put such people in touch with events in the rest of the world. They were both isolated and connected.
This seemed the most sophisticated explanation that I had seen so far for the foreign jihadist phenomenon. But the case of Hauchard and what we know of some other jihadists begins to suggest something even more appalling.
It is that all you need is wifi and a desire to impress. Nothing else. Just the characteristics of almost all young males. You go online and there are the pictures, selfies, YouTube videos and news reports of other young men (not women) strutting around with guns and a cold sense of certainty.
There doesn’t even appear to be the noisome hierarchy of bullying sergeants and absurd regulations. A few tweets, get on the right pages, make some contacts, get a plane ticket, meet a man in Istanbul, and you too can be Islam’s D’Artagnan. You can act in your own movie, blow things up, terrify people, take women into sexual slavery and it’s all ideologically legitimate. You can be one of “Caliph” al-Baghdadi’s “army of young lions whose drink is blood and play is carnage”.
A young lion! The association of violence with “coolness” is not new. When the Vikings were ravaging England one bishop had to admonish the Anglo-Saxon youth for imitating the dress sense of the murderous Norsemen. Thousands of young Dutchmen, Danes and Spaniards signed up for the Waffen SS, lured perhaps by the uniforms, the discipline, the aesthetic of mayhem.
This is our 21st-century nightmare — the lifestyle jihadist. The idea of “see it, do it” in a world of uncontrollable communication is terrifying. Or should I have said “deathstyle”? Because how do you punish such behaviour? What disincentive can you devise for a wannabe Islamic State executioner? Last July Hauchard was interviewed by Skype from Syria (it is so easy) by a French television station. All the comrades, he said, wanted to die and expected to. This provides a horrible wrinkle on the old question “what do you buy for the man who has everything?” What can you do to the man who doesn’t care about dying?
If Hauchard is in anyway representative of the reason for westerners becoming jihadists, then trying to prevent travel or threatening statelessness or prosecution on return is of limited use. They’ll get there and they don’t care if they don’t come back.
In that sense defeating jihadism is a bit like gun control. You’re inevitably going to get these young men harbouring fantasies of being cold-eyed killers; you just have to make sure there is no gun for them to kill with. In this case it means — right from the soonest possible moment — not allowing there to be an Islamic State for them to join. Destroying it early. It’s what we have armed forces for.
