International Journal on Criminology Volume 4, Number 2, Winter 2016 | Page 61

Know What You Are Fighting
systems appear, demonstrating to people that life has no meaning. In reality, Durkheim
states, these systems “merely symbolize in abstract language and systematic form the
physiological distress of the body social.”
Under these circumstances, suicide is a position taken in relation to the group
and to society. It denounces the disorganization connected to individual suffering and
collective distress, as already seen. The candidate feels psychologically surrounded:
he or she is told that salvation of the soul will only come from the unavoidable
explosion which will serve the good cause. An indoctrination equivalent to deifying
the diabolical, by beatification of suffering.
Success in a suicide operation is a threefold accomplishment for the group
because at the same time
• it impresses its own “soldiers;”
• it leaves a mark on public opinion;
• while at the same time loosening the psychological encirclement that it suffers.
Using a human bomb to loosen the vice that paralyzes the group, both
psychologically and spatially, is a feat of the psychology of terror carried out by
sponsors who are experts in manipulation. Here the word vice refers both to the
real situation of the group and the psychological state of the candidate for suicide.
Loosening the vice is the first goal of the group to escape pressure, encirclement, and
destruction.
Psychology of the Candidate for Suicide
A candidate for suicide can be identified by a visible fascination with the
preachers of terror. He or she is then indoctrinated using a hodge-podge of verbiage
that nevertheless seems homogeneous since the subject is there the whole time as one
chosen by heaven for a divine mission. A mass forms around the feeling of injustice
that he or she feels, one with ingredients that combine and are orchestrated to transform
the subject into a human bomb. But what is meant here by “mass” and “ingredients”?
The “mass” is all of the material and psychological elements accumulated by the
subject into his or her mind, throughout life, up to the decision to join the group—an
act that is not a break with his or her former life but an extension of it. A variety of
discourses and practices (the “ingredients”) place the subject, unknowingly, at the
mercy of the sponsors. In the subject’s mind, the sponsors psychologically become the
real authority: the subject is in the service of the criminal horde.
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Article published in the newspaper Le Monde, Tuesday, March 24, 2015.
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