The Terrorist mind: Part two

...continued from Part one ...

2. LIFE IN THE GROUP

 

The collective, not the individual, identity has drawn the most attention in recent years. Only in rare cases, like those of the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, and the Washington sniper, John Allen Muhammad, have individuals acted on their own, with no connection to a group. (The Unabomber was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, while most terrorist groups weed out the mentally unstable, experts say; they even prefer to select those with higher status for the suicide missions in the belief that sending those with the most to lose will raise the credibility of their cause.) 

Most researchers agree that justification for extremist action, whether through religious or secular doctrine, is either developed or greatly intensified by group dynamics.

The Internet has come to play a huge role in increasing the number of jihadi groups, many of them offshoots of larger networks or inspired by Al Qaeda. Dr. Post said the Internet has given rise to what he calls a “virtual community of hatred.”

Marc Sageman, a psychiatrist, former C.I.A. operations officer and Al Qaeda scholar, and others say personality theory does no good in explaining terrorism — and that only an understanding of the group’s impact on the individual illuminates the causes of the phenomenon.

One theory holds that when people are in groups they are more likely to make risky decisions because the risk is perceived as shared and therefore is less frightening. As the group becomes more radical, so does the individual, who is also likely to feel enormous social pressure to agree with the group consensus.

At the same time, the group may provide camaraderie and a sense of significance. The group can become extremely cohesive under isolation and threat. Counterterrorism rhetoric like former President George W. Bush’s description of a planned tactic against Al Qaeda — “to smoke them out and get them running and bring them to justice” — often serves to unify the group. So do invasions and escalations of campaigns against them, which can draw more sympathizers to the group. Most terrorist groups crumble quickly because of internal strife, many experts say. But groups that go underground and are cut off from competing groups and outside opinions develop the most intense bond. With a charismatic leader, an individual’s identity and morality will be subordinated to that of the group.

3. MORAL QUESTIONS 

A play by Albert Camus, “The Just,” is sometimes cited in explanations of the moral complexities of terrorism. It tells the true story of the assassination by a revolutionary group in 1905 of a grand duke in Russia. The assassin planned to kill the duke while he was riding alone in a carriage but the duke’s niece and nephew accompanied him. So the assassin went back and killed him when he was alone, having drawn from what John Horgan, director of International Center for the Study of Terrorism at Pennsylvania State University, calls the “internal limits” of terrorists.

For a book published last year, Dr. Horgan collected the accounts of 29 former terrorists, many of them defectors from groups like the Irish Republican Army and Al Qaeda. He found that terrorists must inherently believe that violence against the enemy is not immoral, but that they also have internal limits, which they often do not learn until they are deeply embedded in a group.

Some terrorists who accepted killing off-duty soldiers abhorred the killing of animals. Some are comfortable with only a limited number of casualties. When a key I.R.A. bombing instructor was ordered to shoot a police officer whose mother was a widow, he said he felt he “would have to pay for it.” He went into hiding when the I.R.A. killed a pregnant officer and he overheard his mentor say, “We might get two for the price of one.”

Some interviewed by Dr. Horgan told of becoming disillusioned when other group members stole or robbed banks. It was the stealing that bothered them, not the killing.

David C. Rapoport, professor emeritus of political science at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a longtime expert on terrorism and morality, said that the final common pathway is a moral calculus, driven by the conclusion that the terrorists’ enemies have “done something so bad, so terrible that they can’t get away with it.” Moral quandaries have often splintered groups, or caused them to disband.

If your objective is to create a world in which innocents (the members of your persecuted group) prevail, but you have to kill innocents to get there, you are in essence destroying your own dream, Dr. Rapoport said. Nevertheless, he said, many terrorists believe “the pathway to paradise is straight through hell." And to kill or in any way violate their own personal moral codes, many terrorists must believe they will achieve a higher moral condition for the group or society as a whole.

...to be continued

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