Bill Maher got blasted for his comments, a long time ago, that the 9/11 terrorists weren’t “cowards,” but in this instance I think Maher was speaking unpopular truth.
Call suicide-attack terrorists what you will - evil, misguided, murderous, inhumane, crazed, etc. - but “cowardly” just isn’t the right term.
Courage and evil are not incompatible at all. Hijacking an airplane and flying it into a building requires *audacity and boldness *- character traits that are the *opposite *of cowardice. Blowing yourself up in a suicide attack requires overcoming natural human fear of death - an extremely powerful instinct that many people can’t overcome.
Well, I suppose it depends. Do the suicide bombers THINK that, by killing themselves they will get some sort of reward or whatever in the afterlife? If so, then while they might be deluded they aren’t exactly being brave either. If they actually aren’t sure or think that when they die that’s it, then THAT would be a ‘brave’ act (unless they are clinically depressed or their lives are so miserable that death is preferable…in which case we are back to it not being exactly heroic bravery to sacrifice their lives).
Personally I think they ARE cowards, by and large, since they are engaging soft targets and they usually think they are doing so to get some sort of reward in heaven or whatever. But then the words ‘coward’ and ‘brave’ have different connotations depending on culture. To many, the US/western world using mechanized warfare, as opposed to riding out on horseback with swords drawn and fighting chest to chest is ‘cowardly’, while to most westerners it’s simply smart.
It’s the “backstabbing” element – killing people who are sitting down to a nice morning cup of coffee. That’s what’s “cowardly” about it: it’s attacking people who are helpless to defend themselves, and who, in general, may not even be guilty of doing harm to the attacker’s people.
Not really. To me, at least, the difference is if one attacks soft, pretty much helpless targets for no better reason than to instill fear in them, one is a ‘coward’ regardless of whether they think they are going to heaven or not…but certainly thinking one is going to be rewarded by such an act takes away any sort of appeal to ‘bravery’.
I freely concede that MMV on this, however and certainly the view point is going to depend on ones perspective. I’ve seen similar arguments used to claim the US/Europe/Western militaries who fight from the air or use artillery or really any weapons you can kill without being chest to chest is ‘cowardly’, regardless of the motivation or rationale of those employing those methods of warfare.
But if we’re talking about suicide attacks, then how is it relevant that they’re “attacking people who are helpless to defend themselves”? The suicide attacker is, presumably, going to die upon attacking anybody; how would it be less “cowardly” to attack other people and die than to attack these people and die? Doesn’t it take an equal amount of willingness-to-die in either type of suicide attack?
Attacking a defenceless target, or a target unable to offer resistance is, I suppose, cowardly, at any rate if you have selected the target, or the mode of attack, precisely in order to avoid any danger to yourself. But if that’s cowardly, then many of the tactics employed by the US are very cowardly - e.g. drone attacks, aerial strikes, etc. As XT says, we may be more inclined to categorise our own use of superior technology as smart rather than cowardly, but of course it can be both.
More to the point, if the essence of cowardice lies in the fact of a defenceless target, there’s nothing specifically cowardly about suicide bombing. Arguably, in fact, a suicide attack on a defenceless target is less likely to be “cowardly” in movitation, since whatever led the attacker to choose a defenceless target it clearly wasn’t a desire to avoid any risk of harm to himself.
Maybe when people describe suicide attackers as cowardly, what they are really pointing to is a form of moral cowardice; the suicide bomber chooses not to live with the knowledge of, and responsibility for, what he has done; not to have to account for, defend or justify what he has done. And of course he also puts himself beyond the reach of revenge or punishment.
But imagine two guys: one, a suicide bomber, goes into a restaurant full of civilians and blows himself up to kill them; and his brother goes into a restaurant full of civilians and leaves behind a bomb that kills them.
By your logic, the guy who was willing to die is the coward – and the guy who wasn’t willing to die is the brave one?
It’s not my logic - I’m just trying to understand the way in which people use this term to describe suicide bombers. I myself don’t use this term for them.
But, yeah. We can run with your hypothetical for a minute. Can we ask ourselves why Guy A decided to blow himself up (when he clearly didn’t have to in order to attack the diners) and Guy B decided not to? If Guy A blew himself up purely to increase the shock value of his actions, and therefore maximise their effect as a form of terrorism, I don’t think you could meaningfully characterise that as cowardly. I don’t think it matters for this purpose whether Guy A thought that he was going to get a glorious reward in the afterlife or not. His choice was not motivated by any kind of fear, which is the only factor that would justify us in calling it cowardly.
But if Guy A blew himself up because he didn’t want to live after having done such a thing, because he was afraid that he might not always feel the burning certitude that he feels at the moment, because he would prefer to die than to face the possibility of arrest, disgrace, humiliation, a long stretch of imprisonment, or for fear of something else, then I think you can call that cowardly. Quite simply, he was more afraid of one of these things than he was of simply dying, and his choice to die was driven by that fear.
Of course, in the real world we can’t really known what his motivation was. His claims beforehand, if they are known, cannot be taken at face value, and afterwards he is not around to ask, or to be psychoanalysed. So if we describe him as cowardly we are making an assumption or assertion about his motivation which, really, has to be speculative.
So long as the target is a legitimate military target, then it isn’t quite as bad as when the targets are civilians in marketplaces.
During wartime, if a sniper takes out the enemy’s general, even while the general is at dinner or the theater, it’s an accepted practice of war.
And…yeah, in personal terms, it is a bit cowardly. Sniping is not a morally admirable tactic, although it is legitimate, and productive, and sometimes even necessary.
Land mines are also morally questionable, because of their tendency to harm innocents. Yet mines, as a weapons system, are effective.
High-altitude bombing, especially over cities with no functioning air defense, is “cowardly” in this sense. Again, it may be hugely productive in strategic terms, but that’s somewhat different from saying it’s admirable in immediate personal terms.
What if Ransom Stoddard had snuck up and shot Liberty Valance in the back?
Legitimate targets: Broadly speaking, we take the view that enemy combatants are legitimate targets while non-combatants are not. OK, you can argue about who exactly constitutes a “combatant”, given the nature of modern warfare, but, basically, this is still a principle which holds some moral force. So, an enemy general is a legitimate target, even when he is at dinner or at the theatre, but civilians dining in a civilian restaurant are not.
Is a particular tactic cowardly? Attacking non-combatants isn’t inherently cowardly, since it’s a tactic that may be adopted out of reasons other than fear. But if you choose to attack non-combatants rather than combatants because you thereby expose yourself to less risk, yes, that’s cowardly. Similarly if you adopt a tactic that poses a greater risk to non-combatants than some alternative tactic, and you do so because it poses a lesser risk to yourself, that too is cowardly.
An obvious example is where you shell a bunch of people from afar, because some or one of them is a legitimate target, rather than engaging more closely with them in a way that would enable you to target the legitimate target. If you have made that choice because engaging with them more closely would create a greater risk for you then, yes, that’s cowardly.
If it’s brave then it would imply that suicide in general is brave.
Heck, most methods of suicide are slower and more painful than just blowing yourself up, and have greater risk of an unpleasant failure, so they must be crazy brave, right?
A soldier going over the top in WWI is brave because they don’t want to die, they don’t want to get hurt and are fighting against their fears. It’s not the same at all as someone who’s made a cold calculated decision that dying suits their aims, and they’re going to press the “Die in a millisecond then go to heaven” button.
Again, the action is revolting, but I’m not sure that “cowardice” is the right word for the quality that makes it revolting. If you’re setting off a bomb in a crowded marketplace, you’re obviously willing to kill children. If you make certain of that outcome by strapping a child to the bomb, I don’t think “cowardice” is quite the mot juste.