[lit-ideas] Who actually did invent the suicide bomber?
- From: Austin Meredith <Kouroo@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 19 Mar 2006 03:58:26 -0500
This is a Marxist group, a completely secular group
that draws from the Hindu families of the Tamil
regions of the country. They invented the famous
suicide vest for their suicide assassination of Rajiv
Ghandi in May 1991. The Palestinians got the idea of
the suicide vest from the Tamil Tigers.
This would amount to a claim that the Tamil Tigers invented the suicide
bomber in the late 20th Century. Such a claim would involve the assertion
that there was no such thing before the late 20th Century.
Let's get serious about this, and do some historical research. I can think
of an invention of suicide bombing, that precedes the late 20th Century. I
can think of at least one instance in which suicide bombing was being
thought, was being recommended, late in the 19th Century. The context of
this is as follows:
On May 3, 1886, at the M'Cormick Reaper factory in Chicago, police
attempted to intervene in a fight between employees who were striking for
an 8-hour workday and ?scab? strikebreakers, and two of the employees were
killed. On May 4, 1886, during a protest rally at Haymarket Square, about
the police killings of the previous day, someone lobbed a bomb and the
police opened fire. Many people were injured and there were at least 10
killed, including policemen. Eight of the activists would be singled out
for prosecution and convicted of inciting to riot through "inflammatory
speeches and publications." One of the accused men would comment
sarcastically to the trial judge that they ought to hang his wife and
children with him -- since in attending the Haymarket speeches these
innocents had been doing exactly as much as he had. Four of these thought
criminals would hang and another would commit suicide while awaiting
execution. After passions had cooled and it had come to be recognized that
no link had been established between them and the unknown person who had
thrown the bomb, the surviving three eventually would receive full pardons.
When the four men would be hanged, they would be hanged inside
all-enveloping white shrouds with hoods, and short ropes would be used so
that when they fell their necks would not snap, but they would hang there
jerking, swinging from side to side and dying slowly by strangulation.
Since we have suicide bombers today and most of them seem to be Moslem, and
since we are seeing claims, as above, that the Tamil Tigers "invented" the
suicide bomber during the late 20th Century, there is a detail of these
so-familiar 19th-Century circumstances to which we now should be paying
careful attention. It is that in that American labor situation in Chicago
in the late 19th Century is contained a far earlier origin of the idea of
the suicide bomber despite the fact that there were zero Moslems on the
scene. Nitroglycerine had been around since the 1840s, and Alfred Nobel had
figured out a way to make the substance stable enough to be carried and
handled by mixing it with an inert filler material. It was being speculated
there and then, that if every American worker had a few pounds of dynamite
in his pocket, every American worker would be being treated with respect by
every American employer: dynamite as the great equalizer. For it was right
here in America, in this Year of Our Lord 1886, that the wife of Albert
Parsons, an anarchist, suggested that *since there were always unfortunates
who were contemplating drowning themselves, there was a better course that
might be made available to them: they be rendered useful to society, and
make their deaths meaningful, by becoming suicide bombers.* By their death
as a sacrifice they could make themselves a force of protest on behalf of
justice in an otherwise out-of-all-control labor situation. Perhaps, if
enough workers could be persuaded to make themselves suicide bombers,
killing themselves in conjunction with the police and capitalists who were
oppressing them, she speculated, it would be possible to get the average
workweek down from 60 hours to, say, 48 ? so that laborers could have some
time to feel the sunshine and smell the flowers:
We want to feel the sunshine
We want to smell the flowers;
We?re sure God has willed it,
And we mean to have eight hours.
OK, here I've pushed the origins of the idea of suicide bombing back a full
century, and shown it as a homegrown product that had no involvement at all
with any sort of religion.
The historical ball is in your court now, so to speak. Can anyone come up
with an even earlier invention of the idea of the suicide bomber, than 1886
in Chicago? Put on your thinking caps, please. Who What Where When Why?
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