The Peshawar Attack: The Act And The Actor
Countercurrents.org
16th December, 2014; a school in Peshawar attacked by a wing of Taliban, opening fire on staff and children killing about 130 young ones ranging from 8 to 18 years of age. Cited to be deadlier than the Karachi bombing in 2007, the attack has left the world shell shocked. Reports surfaced that the pupils were forced to watch teasers trailers of their teachers being burned alive before themselves getting shot at. When some tried to escape the scene, they were preyed upon and gunned down in exit ways and garden paths. The idea was really, with no doubt, to kill as many young children as was possible.
Muhammad Omar Khorasani, TTP spokesman claimed responsibility for the attack citing it as retaliation to Operation Zarb-e-Azb, Pakistani military's offensive in North Waziristan in 2014 summer.
Social media forums were flooded with statuses spewing loathe at the group, lamenting upon the degeneracy of the Pakistani government, the ‘illegitimate', ‘failed' state that it was, inevitably. Painting in broad strokes, various hate messages splashed around political jargon citing bigotry, myopic political visions and one even went up a notch in associating a ‘fetish for terror backed political manoeuvrings' to the event. The message was clear – It was evil.
It brings me to mention a famous and much controversial work of moral inquiry through trial reportages by Hannah Arendt, “Eichmann in Jerusalem”, where she illustrated upon the banalisation of evil through discourses of professionalism rather than ideology. Eichmann was a SS officer in the Third Reich whose actions associated with the extermination of the Jews was ordinary, motivated by a stupidity as Arendt calls it. Even though the man himself was anti-Semitic but his actions weren't motivated by a force of his ideological underpinnings but rather his entrenchment into a system of law and values; he was after all simply “doing his job” thereby showing no guilt or hatred whatsoever. She created quite a political ruse on her analysis on the Holocaust; a result of being misinterpreted as normalising the event and undermining the fact of gratuitous cruelty.
Rollo Romig, on his analysis of the massacres in Aurora, Colorado had made references to Arendt, though tuning it to contemporary contexts. He believed that the status of ‘evil' is dangerous; it has become absolute, almost banal used to refer to perpetrators who were unable and unwilling to do repair or reprimand their actions and for whom mechanism of justice seemed unequal. The absolutism of the status ‘evil' illustrated our limits of tolerating malevolence, something that says more about the helplessness of the accuser rather than the transgressor. Perpetrators of violence were often motivated by clichés and rhetoric rather than critical self reflexive thinking about their course of action and precipitating consequences. Arendt also showed how a majority of similar creed of people were usually ‘joiners' and not ‘leaders'.
Another message that went viral on Twitter was depicting incredulity at the acts, “How could normal people kill such young children? What has become of humanity?” This was the pivotal question in the chaos that the shock created in the minds of mute spectators across the globe. It's almost like; this was all they could splutter out in horror and disbelief.
In Modernity and the Holocaust, Zygmunt Bauman characterises the mechanism of a modern organised system of functioning based on efficiency and rationality. It is imperative to understand the deeper roots of such systems of organised terror and the collective mood that drives them to act in certain ways, for better formulation of counter strategies. The erasure of a primordial classical animal pity in these men helps in socially producing a moral indifference towards their targets.
The subjectivity of a target is erased and the subject transforms into a mere object, a site, to play out certain motivated goals through tactics of violence. In this process, a moral distance is finely created between the perpetrator and the target. The natural moral abhorrence is eroded by essentially three conditions – Authority, Routinisation and Dehumanisation.
Eichmann considered moral decisions to be arbitrary and contextual, “The deeds committed by me would have been praised had the Germans won” he said in his defence. In any organised system, the inner rules of organisations provide the moral padding through orders from the authority which validate the substantive content of the order. The ‘moral choice' needn't be made by the doer of the act but is implicated within the order of the authority. The machination of the act of killing has provided with a medium which mediates the very act. We moralise the technology, the automaton guns, the AK 47s, artilleries, missiles, drones and the A-bomb and forget about the man behind the trigger. In this frenzied obsession with the machine, the visceral aspects of a murder are overlooked, and the victims become invisible. The humanity of the victims is further erased by political rhetoric, racial epithets and slurs where a Cambodian student often becomes just some ‘African' or a ‘nigga' and a Nagamese female worker becomes a ‘chinki' in the metropolitan hubs of the country.
A substitution of moral knowledge for technical knowledge and truth regimes which systematically separate violence from the moral realms are two prominent markers of the organised crime scenarios of modern day. The responsibility of carrying out an order within the organisation forgets that a given action is a means to an end and becomes an end in itself. The judgement of a successful act carried out are made on how well the operation was carried out, erasing the consequences of it.
We observe a clear disjunction from ethics and reason in this entire interplay of interests. Kant's notion of ‘categorical imperative' could aid us in further assimilating the theorisations in this essay. To simplistically define it, it is an act that one does for the sake of the act itself rather than to attain subjective goals and not contingent on one's internalisation of a situation's pros and cons. Kant defines morality established on this very notion, where moral imperatives are necessary and not contingent on subjective conditions. Now, there is a fallacy in the way many perpetrators of crime identity with their own volition to organise their lives according to their subjective desires. On a reformulation, albeit a distorted one of the Kantian percept; one having a personal sense of free will, wilfully eliminated by a higher force or a higher cause (as many believe ‘Jihad' to be) one build obedience to these authorial forces in certain ways of conceptualising them, where these forces take care of the morality attached to the acts. These forces are perceived to be self referential and possibly self justifying resulting in the perpetrator not believing that he is doing anything ‘wrong'. The higher cause justifies both the means and the ends of the act.
These characterisations are often cited as the peculiarities of a modern genocide. The nexus of science and religion in the age of modernity, with a rupture from the past often poses the present as an aberration. Ideologies which were once a means to attain certain ends create truth regimes where each obtains a face of an institution; be it science, politics or religion. Ideational policies of these institutions function by their own internal logic may lead to alter differentially the ways in which people understand absolute values of humanity (given that the values are absolute).
The hyper-disciplinisation of the modern day epistemological system has left many social problems unresolved due to each discipline being a self referential institution with its own rules and boundaries. The ‘caste question' bifurcating into the mythical and empirical notions bears evidence of the incommensurability of metaphysics, philosophy and social anthropology.
Judith Butler in a commentary on the moral inquiries regarding organised violence backs Arendt on her notion of law and standards of judgements being essentially retroactive, especially in the face of diverse and possibly conflicting norms that govern politics, violence and organised crime groups.
Crimes as such are often glossed under absolutisms like ‘unthinkable' which often short circuits' trials to deeply understand the man and his deeds, ending up legitimising their own authority and aspirations. She illustrates on how the dissection of the subject-hood through genocidal aims need to be studied for the relation of the ‘I' and ‘We', how these both are balanced in an organisation of crime, orchestrated by overarching truth regimes which are simply motivated ideological apparatuses. She invokes moral inquiry in understanding the nexus between the relation of the ‘I' and the ‘We' where often the former slips under the later, destroying plurality of human life and also the sense of self linked essentially to that plurality and conditions of thinking.
She cites the most alarming problem associated with modern genocide is the assault against thinking. Heidegger had called technology the driving vice behind the mindlessness of actions. “The consequences of non thinking is genocide itself” Butler states.
To surmise briefly on the broad arguments of the essay; the banality of moral indictments which become absolute through language discourses and practices of representation, popularly via media then tangentially problematise the doings of a modern genocide through a proliferation of automated instrumental reason of means-ends replacing retroactive thinking and excluding morality from social action, a bureaucratic culture where blind pursuits of a ‘higher cause' are driven by modernistic norms of rationality and efficiency. The instrumental reason driving the system takes on a greater jurisdiction on itself thus transforming the system into a fully fledged truth regime. Under this scenario we took a cursory look at the distorted reformulation of the Kantian percept in action determining those of the members within the system. To be fair in the propositions made, the last section entails persuasion on the eye of the judgment being retroactive where the ‘higher causes' as put forth by various groups are considered in a certain context of circulation and practices without a compelling urge to appropriate reasons from dominant paradigms to steadfastly determine conclusions. The need to locate the historicity of an event, surpassing the linear, totalitarian History that often seeps down for proliferation but looking for ruptures built into that history which often is invisible in the registers is imperative.
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Priyanka Dass Saharia is a final year Sociology student in Delhi School of Economics
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