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The Atlantic: ’ISIL’ and the Intimate Kill
Local Editor
The dominant media narrative about the so-called "Daesh" ["ISIL"] extremist group both within and outside the Muslim world is that the organization is "terrible" and "terrifying"-exactly the narrative that "Daesh" wants to promote, The Atlantic wrote on Monday.
The Atlantic: "ISIL" and the Intimate Kill
"From the outside, the group's actions look insane. But they aren't. There appears to be a point to the brutality. It is meant to be polarizing. It is meant to force people to take sides. It is meant to provoke a wider war-a war that "ISIL" is convinced it will win," The Atlantic wrote.
"Daesh" released a beheading video on Sunday, "reverting to the shock-and-gore doctrine that has come to define it," The Atlantic added. The video shows the simultaneous beheadings of at least 18 men described as Syrian military personnel and announced the beheading of US aid worker Peter Kassig.
"It is worth pausing to consider the logic behind this staged mass beheading and how it differs from the notorious doctrine that defined the opening stages of the 2003 war in Iraq: "shock and awe." Comparing the two tells us something important about "ISIL" and its reverence of the intimate kill-and ours, too," The Atlantic further wrote.
Moreover, it added: "Face-to-face killing isn't the same as killing at a distance. It is sensually different. And it is harder."
In Violence, Randall Collins, a sociology professor at the University of Pennsylvania, argues that, "It [violence] is hard ... and most people are not good at it, including those who are doing the bragging and swaggering." This is because violence goes against people's "physiological hard-wiring."
Killing at close range, he says, is especially challenging: "There appears to be a special difficulty in confronting another person face to face and sticking him with a knife-edged blade."
Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, author of On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society, also says that distance is the crucial variable in killing: the nearer the "kill target," the harder it is to do, whereas "from a distance, I can deny your humanity; and from a distance, I cannot hear your screams."
Therefore, The Atlantic wrote, in recent months, "Daesh" militants "have made killing look easy. And they have mastered the art of the intimate kill."
""ISIL" doesn't want to convince its detractors and enemies. It wants to command them, if not destroy them altogether. And its strategy for achieving this goal seems to be based on destroying their will through intimate killing. This, in part, is what the group's staged beheadings are about: They subliminally communicate "ISIL's" proficiency in the art of the intimate kill. And this terrifies many people, because they sense just how hard it is to do," it added.
Source: The Atlantic, Edited by website team
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