Judas and his Children

This year, World Suicide Prevention Day (September 10) came just one day before September 11, the anniversary of that infamous attack on New York in 2001—suicide or martyrdom, depending on your viewpoint.is a great consolationsuccessfully though many a bad night.

Globally considered in the light of recent terrorist events, including the October bombings in Bali, it is also clear that the terrible loss we face through personal suicide is now abutted by the social losses of the phenomenon we glibly refer to as “suicide bombers.” Not content to take just their own lives, such bombers want to take the lives of others with them. A single tragedy is multiplied into misguided evil. My first knowledge of this was during the 1950s in colonial Fiji, where World War II action comics (“TV” in then-remote parts of the Pacific) featured imagined accounts of Japanese kamikaze pilots, aiming their planes at American warships.

While World Suicide Prevention Day focuses on personal suicide (and the tragic consequences of the phenomenon), the day may gain greater recognition if it took account of the religio-politico-psychiatric condition that leads to suicide bombings. This scourge is generously idealised as “martyrdom” in some quarters, but it is more accurately called “murder,” because it provokes anger and a sense of moral sacrilege rather than grief and pity for the suiciding person.