In his classic book On Killing, paratrooper psychologist, Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman. suggests that contrary to some of our cultural stereotypes ‘the vast majority of men are not born killers.’ At most only 2% of men could be considered psychopathic personalities with a predisposition towards killing. Brigadier S.L.A. Marshall’s study of soldiers’ in World War II, which Grossman quotes, suggests ‘that the average healthy individual has such a resistance towards killing a fellow man that he will not of his own volition take life if it is possible to turn away from that responsibility.’ Marshall makes the amazing observation that, ‘at the vital point’, (when a soldier has to decide to kill or not) the normal healthy human being ‘becomes a conscientious objector.’

The Military

The military know that they can’t change the vast majority of men’s natural aversion to killing, but they can put recruits under sustained systematic pressure to kill – by framing killing as saving lives, portraying the enemy as sub-human, increasing the distance between the trigger and the target so soldiers cannot see the humanity of the enemy, demanding every soldier’s immediate obedience to the commands of their leader and developing each unit’s capacity for collective violence.

1. Framing killing as saving lives

As it has become clear that most men are motivated to serve and to preserve life, the military has taken the desire to serve and preserve life and used it to make men killers by telling men that killing is the only way they can the save the lives of those they love. Soldiers in Iraq are told killing terrorists is the only way to save the lives of civilians.

2. Portraying the enemy as sub-human

In World War II it became clear that soldiers found it harder to kill people they could identify with, but easier to kill people they couldn’t identify with. Only 6% of Americans said they wanted to kill Germans; while 44% said they wanted to kill the Japanese. So the military has encouraged soldiers to see the enemy in Iraq as ‘ragheads’ rather than humans. As it has become clear it is harder for soldiers to kill people who are innocent; but easier to kill people who are guilty, ‘ragheads’ are deemed bloodthirsty baby killers in advance.

3. Demanding every soldier’s obedience to their leader

Sigmund Freud said ‘never underestimate the power of the need to obey’. Those with no combat experience presume that ‘being fired upon’ was the reason most soldiers fired. But veterans of combat say that being ‘ordered to fire’ was the reason most soldiers fired. Without an order to fire soldiers many soldiers would not fire, even when they came face to face with the enemy in combat.

Since Marshall’s report on surprisingly low firing rates, the military have tried to increase soldiers’ compliance with orders to fire through social learning, classical conditioning and operant conditioning. Through social learning men have been socialized to imitate role models like the ANZAC legends who obeyed orders to attack impregnable positions in Gallipoli – even when it was obvious to everyone that the orders were insane and to obey them was suicidal. Through the classical conditioning devised by Pavlov to make dogs salivate at the sound of a bell, soldiers have been conditioned to associate obeying the orders of drill sergeants with rewards (pleasure), and disobeying orders with punishment (pain) And through behavioural engineering devised by Skinner to make rats go through mazes soldiers have been engineered to increase their automatic quick shoot reflex by repeatedly shooting at targets which look like people in simulated battlefield conditions to such a degree that an average infantryman now has a 95% shot-per-soldier rate and a marksmen now has a 1.39 kill-per-shot ratio.

4. Developing each unit’s capacity for collective violence.

Research has shown that the greatest fear a man has in combat is not fear of death but of ‘letting others down’ ‘You can’t turn around and run the other way. Peer pressure, you know?’ So the military have used peer pressure – along with the intensification of power and the diffusion of responsibility that a group provides (‘there were so many guys firing, you can never be sure it was you’ who killed someone ) – to turn men into killers. Konrad Lorenz says: ‘Man is not a killer, but the group is.’

5. Increasing the distance between the trigger and the target,

Most soldiers find it difficult to kill up close and personal. ‘Where you hear ‘em scream and see ‘em die, it’s a bitch’ It has always been easier to kill from a distance and to pretend it’s not personal. Sailors shoot up ‘ships’. Aviators shoot down ‘planes’. The artillery attack enemy ‘lines’. ‘They can pretend they are not killing human beings.’ So the military is increasing the distance between the trigger and the target technologically as quickly as it can. Through night goggles for example when a soldiers shoots someone they say it’s just like shooting on a TV show ‘as if it’s happening on a TV screen’

The Militants

Militants, like Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) use many of the same approaches as the military to create terrorists. JI, which has been proscribed as a terrorist organization, is based in Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and the Philippines. Members of JI participated in the war in Afghanistan with the Mujahideen against the Russians in the 80s. Many members of JI met members of Al-Qaeda and were inspired by Osama bin Laden’s ‘fatwa made on 22 Feb 1998 that urged Muslims to kill Americans, its allies and destroy its interests’.Their ‘extreme violent ideology is carried out through the pro bombing faction of JI (that used to be) under the leadership of Nordin Mohd Top.’

An extremist organization like Jemaah Islamiyah is of particular interest to me as Australian, as JI organized the bombings in the district of Kuta on the Indonesian island of Bali, which killed 202 people, including 88 Australians, and wounded a further 240.

The Religious Rehabilitation Group (RRG) a local Singaporean group of ‘Ulama (religious scholars) and Asatizah (religious teachers) ‘who volunteer their services to counsel detainees to assist them in understanding their religion correctly’, have studied how JI use a distorted construct of Islam to socially condition their members as killers. They acknowledge ‘there are various factors that plunge one into terrorism, yet, for the JI, ideology, and not other factors, is the source and main motivation for the terrorists’.

RRG say ‘there are (five) steps towards becoming a terrorist or adopting a terrorist worldview’. The first step is Introduction to JI. The second step is Cultivation in the JI ideology ‘through (a) thought reforming process which will change a person’s way of looking at the world’. The third step is Initiation into the JI community, ‘to secure one’s commitment through rites and oaths as official process of recruitment (as “One of us”). The fourth step involves Integration into the JI agency, which includes ‘De-individuation’ (renunciation of individual identity) and ‘Diffusion of Responsibility’ (resignation of personal responsibility) so there is projection of moral responsibility of a particular plan onto the group. And the fifth step is Recruitment into the JI agenda of terrorist activity, which is operationalized by ‘obeying their legitimate (that is legitimate to JI) authority’.

Like the military, JI militants systematically socially condition recruits by:

1. Framing killing as saving lives

As it has become clear that most men are motivated to serve and to preserve life, JI have taken the desire to serve and preserve life and used it to make men killers, by telling men the only way they can the save the lives of those they love is by re-establishing an exclusive closed-set Daulah Islamiyah or Islamic State, and the only way to re-establish a Daulah Islamiyah or Islamic State is by killing all those ‘infidels’ who get in the way.

2. Portraying the enemy as sub-human

As it has became clear that people find it easier to kill people they don’t identify with, groups like JI have consistently labeled ‘all those who do not adhere to their agenda’ to establish a Daulah Islamiyah or Islamic State, as ‘takfir’. ‘Even though it is forbidden in Islam to pronounce anyone as an “infidel”,’ JI condemns all Muslims they disagree with as ‘not real Muslims’. Designating ‘not real Muslims’ as ‘apostates’ not only gives JI recruits ‘a legal loophole around the prohibition of killing another Muslim’, but also turns that prohibition into ‘a religious obligation to execute’ these apostates’.

3. Demanding every recruit’s obedience to their leader

As Gwynne Dyer said in his book on War, while ‘the vast majority of men are not born killers’; nonetheless ‘men will kill under … a strong social pressure to comply’. That pressure to comply in JI is based on their call for recruits to be committed above all else to Al-Wala’, or total loyalty, to God, His Prophet and Their Amirs (Their JI Leaders). Initiation into JI is ‘through rites and oaths’ to secure one’s commitment to obedience.

4. Developing each unit’s capacity for collective violence.

Research has shown that the greatest fear of a man in combat is not the fear of death but of ‘letting others down’ or ‘peer pressure. So JI have used ‘peer pressure’. Integration into JI includes ‘de-individuation’ (renunciation of individual identity) and ‘diffusion of responsibility’ (resignation of personal responsibility) so there is projection of moral responsibility of a particular plan onto the group. ‘Man is not a killer, but the group is.’

5. Decreasing the distance between the guts and the glory.

One of the biggest differences between terrorists and soldiers is this: most soldiers find it difficult to kill up close and personal, but terrorists can kill up close and personal with courage, conviction and determination. That is because JI indoctrinates its recruits with the ideology that for Muslims to be ‘true Muslims’ they need to destroy jahiliyyah – the ‘state of ignorance’ – through a jihad, defined as a ‘resolute, offensive, violent struggle’, which demands ‘syahadah’ or ‘martyrdom’ through ‘istimata’ or ‘suicide bombing’.

And You And Me

Grossman concludes his book On Killing by saying that the same techniques used by the military and militants are now being used by the media in society at large, so that not only soldiers and terrorists, but also civilians, like you and me, are being socialized to kill or at least support others killing on our behalf, without constraints, by watching movie heroes kill outside the constraints of the law; being desensitized to the act of killing by seeing thousands of people being killing on television; and being engineered to kill reflexively by shooting at human targets with model guns in life-like video games.

To help all of us recover our true humanity we need to help one another rediscover our innate compassion for all human beings, our intuitive aversion to killing anyone in the human family and reverse the processes used by both proponents of terror and the war against terror to condition us to kill or at least support others killing on our behalf: by re-framing ‘killing’ as ‘taking lives’ and ‘not killing’ as ‘saving lives’; portraying the ‘other’, including the ‘enemy’, as ‘human’; decreasing the distance between people in dispute, so all of us can see, hear, smell, taste and touch the humanity of the ‘other’ up close and personal; demanding every person assume ‘responsibility for our own actions’, not project our personal responsibility onto some impersonal chain of command; and developing each person’s ‘capacity to resist any external push and/or internal pull to act contrary to our own conscience’, regardless of the political propaganda, peer pressure, and direct orders to do so.

Dave Andrews