Genocidal Terrorism Coming
Lloyd DeMause
Psychohistory. If you would like lots of scholarly articles
and reviews of books crucial to your understanding of psycho-
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Lloyd deMause, Editor
The Journal of Psychohistory
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LLOYD DEMAUSE
The Coming Reality of Genocidal Terrorism
Philip Bobbitt, Terror and Consent: The Wars for the Twenty-First
Century. New York: Anchor Books, 2009.
Columbia University Professor Philip Bobbitt is author of
the splendid 2003 book The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace and the
Course of History, perhaps the most complete book that exists on how
states have started wars in the past two thousand years. His work is
essential to psychohistorians — not because he examines motivations
for getting into wars, since like most other academics he assumes
humans are born with the need for violence and only the shifting of
social conditions
switches them into wars. If Dick Cheney expresses a "one percent
theory" (p. 476) where he states openly that a "preemptive war" must
be launched "if there is a one percent chance that a state might attack
us," Bobbitt, like other war theorists, never wonders how Cheney's
developmental history might cause him to believe such a
pathologically violent view of his task in the world. Anyone who
repeats such a statement without wondering about its childhood
origins can use it as
an excuse for the U.S. attacking at least fifty nations around the
globe today, surely a pathological task for any national leader.
A similar theory of the violence of schoolyard bullies or
homicidal adults would also neglect to ask what made them so
provocative and refuse to examine how their developmental history
produced their obviously powerful need for violence. But Bobbitt's
books are so full of revealing specific details of historical
violence that the psychohistorian is able to discover in them myriad
aspects of historical motivations that are the central focus of our
field.
In this volume on terrorists, Bobbitt provides us with 688
pages of the pathological slaughters of innocent civilians, none for
any political goal or for any state ends, all solely because the
terrorists are obeying inner voices demanding they kill others and
themselves.
When Bin Laden vows to "kill 10 million American children" he has no
benefit to himself or his fellow jihadists in mind. Although Bobbitt
carefully documents hundreds of terrorist groups all around the globe
acting out pathological violence, he never questions their
motivations, instead insisting that "terrorists are neither insane
nor irrational." (p. 399)
Yet Bobbitt must be read, since he convincingly shows why
the number of people killed in the usual wars between nations have
been steadily decreasing in the 21st century and are now about to be
replaced by more and more instances of global terrorist violence,
"fought by networks of state and non-state actors, where battles are
rare and violence is directed mainly against civilians." (p. 147)
Some of these hundreds of jihadist groups, educated by their thousand
of Web sites
and not under the control of Al Qaeda, will in the not too distant
future obtain Weapons of Mass Destruction, which they promise they
intend to use to inflict genocidal slaughter on the West. Nuclear
nations like Pakistan or North Korea are certain to soon sell their
bombs to some of the jihadist groups, and the nearly impossible task
of the West will be "to detact and capture weapons no larger than a
case of beer." (p. 209) To prevent the use of genocidal nuclear and
biological weapons, Bobbitt describes how "the reality of twenty-
first century warfare must include armed forces [plus] constabular
forces organized along military lines…hybrids of police and military"
like the French gendarmerie EGF recently established by the European
Union (p. 156), in order to stop "international nuclear weapons
trade, which is
at once lucrative and easily concealed." (p. 458) The costs of these
global military police added to the costs of enlarged national armies
will be soon be enormous, and again are likely to be financed mainly
by the U.S.
Since Bobbitt has no interest in knowing the etiology of
terrorist violence, he probably would not be interested in knowing
that the jihadists have been horribly beaten, tortured and raped
(both boys and girls) by their parents and neighbors and teachers,
and that their mothers openly fit them with explosive vests and tell
them to kill
others and themselves so they can die and be loved by Allah. The
solution to this pathological early embedding of violence in
jihadists will require more than armed forces. It will begin by
requiring
changing the horrible conditions of women in these areas of the
world, including much economic help to families, plus the
establishment of community parenting centers to teach them how to
bring up children without abusing them. While this is being
accomplished, the only way
to keep the jihadist groups from slaughtering millions will be to talk
to them, not attack them, with specially-trained Peace Counselors
whose goal will be to reveal to them the emotional basis for their
belief
that they must "kill the enemies of God" [i.e., the Parent.] These
tasks, based upon family therapy and psychohistorical theories, should
be established by the U.N. or some similar body. Although the
denuclearization of nation-states remains an important task, Bobbitt
makes a good case for the fact that the current stated task of the U.N.
— "to prevent violence between nations" (p. 453) — is far less
applicable to our new century of terrorist violence against civilians.
Non-state genocidal violence is a real possibility in the next
decade, and Bobbitt's scenarios on what it will look like are crucial
to understand if we are to continue to avoid the apocalyptic nuclear
scenario that we all hoped had ended with the termination of the Cold
War.