The Body and Controlling the Means of Violence: The Impact of the October 1983 Beirut Suicide Attacks on France's Action directe

Abstract

This research on suicide terrorism and arms control focuses on use of the human body as a weapon and the intersection of the body with technology. Through the case of the French terrorist group Action directe (Direct Action) the article analyzes the impact of suicide terrorism on conventional terrorists, the possibility that conventional terrorists become more violent when another group with similar or identical goals turns to suicide terrorism, and asks whether conventional terrorists turn to suicide terrorism once an example is set by another group. The article concludes that contemporary suicide fosters a perception of strength and of the vulnerability of conventional forces. In this light, suicide terrorism and the role that the body plays with an exploding prosthetic, are a major new challenge to how arms control is analyzed and discussed.

Notes

Neil Cooper and David Mutimer, ‘Introduction: Arms Control for the 21st Century: Controlling the Means of Violence’ Contemporary Security Policy, Vol. 32, No. 1 (April 2011), pp.3–19.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Nikolas Rose, The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007): p.3.

Robert Pape, ‘The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism’, American Political Science Review, Vol. 97, No. 3 (August 2003), pp.1–19; and Robert Pape, Dying To Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism (New York: Random House 2006). Other works on suicide terrorism include: Mia Bloom, Dying to Kill: The Allure of Suicide Terror (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007); Jessica Stern, Terror in the Name of God: Why Religious Militants Kill (Harper Perennial, 2004); Nicholas Michelsen, ‘Suicide terrorism, (Bio)politics, and Death’, Paper presented at the annual meeting of ‘Theory vs. Policy? Connecting Scholars and Practitioners’, New Orleans Hilton Riverside Hotel, at: http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p415617_index.html; Stuart Murray, · ‘“Thanatopolitics: On the Use of Death for Mobilizing Political Life,” (on the politics of the suicide bomber)’, Polygraph: An International Journal of Politics and Culture, Vol. 18 (2006), pp.191–215; Talal Asad, On Suicide Bombing (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007); Ahmed M. Abdel-Khalek, ‘Neither Altruistic Suicide, nor Terrorism but Martyrdom: A Muslim Perspective’, Archives of Suicide Research, Vol. 8, No. 1 (2004); and Nicholas W. Bakken, The Anatomy of Suicide Terrorism: A Durkheimian Analysis, 2007, http://www.ifpo.org/articlebank/Bakken_Suicide_Terrorism.pdf

See, for example, Austra Reinis, Reforming the Art of Dying: The Ars Moriendi in the German Reformation (1519–1528) (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2007); and Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York: Knopf, 2008).

Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at Collège de France, 1975–1976 (New York: Picador, 1997): pp.243–5.

Michel Foucault, ‘The Birth of Biopolitics’, in Paul Rabinow (ed.), Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984, Vol. 1 (New York: The New Press, 1994): p.73.

Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), p.131.

Foucault, ‘The Birth of Biopolitics’ (note 9), p.67.

Michael Dartnell, ‘France's Action directe: Terrorists in Search of a Revolution’, Terrorism and Political Violence, Vol. 2, No. 4 (Winter 1990), pp.457–88.

‘Communiqué’, unpublished, 11 July 1984, p.1.

Schleicher letter, unpublished, 3 August, 1984, p.1.

‘Pour l'unité des révolutionnaires en Europe de l'ouest’, [For the Unity of Revolutionaries in Western Europe], unpublished p.2.

Ibid., p.3.

Ibid., p.4.

Ibid., p.5.

Ibid., p.2.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Untitled, unpublished, 14 July 1984, p.1.

In March 1983, President Ronald Reagan made his famous Evil Empire speech condemning the Soviet Union. In November 1983, NATO began its Able Archer military exercises, which heightened tension across the continent.

Untitled (note 22), p.1.

Untitled, unpublished, 25 January 1985, p.1.

Ibid. The French Interministerial Commission for the Study of Exports of War Materials (CIEEMG) examines applications for exports of war materials and related material with an eye to securing ministerial approval. The commission consists of representatives of French foreign affairs, defence, and economy, finance and industry ministries.

Ibid.

Ibid.

‘Révendication de l'opération contre le général Blandin’, [Responsibility for the Operation against General Blandin], unpublished, 26 June 1985.

‘Interview au journal révolutionnaire ‘Zusammen Kampfen' (‘Combattre ensemble’) ’ [Interview in the Revolutionary Journal ‘Fight Together’], February 1986, p.1.

Ibid., pp.2–3.

Ibid., p.3.

Ibid., p.4.

Ibid., p.7.

Ibid., p.8.

Untitled, unpublished, 11 February 1987, p.1.

Ibid.

Ibid., p.11.

Ibid., p.15.

In total, AD committed five murders during robberies between 1980 and 1984.

AD's politically-motivated murders are better known than its non-politically-motivated ones.

See David Held, Anthony McGrew, David Goldblatt and Jonathan Perraton, Global Transformations: Politics, Economics and Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999).

I wish to thank Xavier Rauffer for his insights and observations in this matter over breakfast in Cork, Ireland, in March 1999.

Communiqué nº 2, unpublished, 29 May 1986, p.1.

Ibid., p.9.

Ibid.

Ibid., p.10.

Augustine, City of God (Penguin, 1976), Book 1, Chap. 20, p.31.

Plato, ‘Phaedo’, in E. Hamilton and H. Cairns (eds), The Collected Dialogues (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), 62c, p.45.

Plato, ‘Laws’, in Hamilton and Cairns (eds), The Collected Dialogues 9.873c (note 49), p.1432.

Aristotle, Ethics (Penguin, 1974), Book 3, Chap. 7: 96.

See Michel de Montaigne, ‘Coustume de l'Isle de Cea’, in Essais (Version HTML d'après l'édition de 1595), Book 2, Chap. 3, at: http://www.bribes.org/trismegiste/es2ch03.htm; and John Donne, Biathanatos, A Declaration of that Paradoxe, or Thesis, that Selfe-homicide is not so Naturally Sinne, that it May Never be Otherwise (The University of Utah, originally published c.1607), at: //www.philosophy.utah.edu/onlinepublications/.

Montesquieu, ‘Letter LXXVI, The Persian Letters’, in Peter Gay (ed.), J. Robert Loy (trans.), The Enlightenment: A Comprehensive Anthology (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1973): p.129.

Voltaire, ‘On Suicide, and the Abbé St. Cyran's Book Legitimating Suicide’, in William F. Fleming (trans.), The Works of Voltaire. A Contemporary Version. A Critique and Biography by John Morley (Paris: E. R. DuMont, 1901), Vol. 4.

David Hume, Essays on Suicide and the Immortality of the Soul (1783), at: http://18th.server.org/hume-suicide.txt (accessed 14 March 2011).

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ‘The Right of Life and Death’, in The Social Contract (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1973),, Book 2, Chap.5, p.189.

Montesquieu, Thomas Nugent (trans.), The Spirit of the Laws (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1914), Vol. 1, p.249.

We might today ask if linking suicide terrorism to movements for national self-determination recapitulates these variations in contemporary terms. Is this view based in sufficient information or does it reflect similarly partial or precipitous conclusions?

Durkheim states that ‘the lower societies are the theatre par excellence of altruistic suicide’ , see Emile Durkheim, Suicide: A Study in Sociology, edited by George Simpson (London: Routledge, 1952), p.185.

Cooper and Mutimer, ‘Introduction: Arms Control for the 21st Century’ (note 1).

Ibid.

Eggo Müller, ‘From “Ideology” to “Knowledge” and “Power”: Interview with John Fiske’, Madison 09/17/1991”, Montage/AV, Vol. 2, No.1 1993, pp.52–66.

Precedents for today's political self-murders range from the prisoner hunger strikes in Northern Ireland in the 1980s and the self-immolation of Buddhist monks during the Vietnam War. In the latter case, a precedent was set in June 1963, when a Buddhist monk, Thich Quang Duc, doused himself with gasoline and set himself ablaze to protest the repression under South Vietnam's pro-American dictator, Ngo Dinh Diem. Sensational photos of the event appeared on the front pages of major US newspapers the following morning.