From: Vincent Campbell (VCampbell@dmu.ac.uk)
Date: Mon 06 Sep 2004 - 11:23:49 GMT
Hi Everyone,
The list has been pretty quite for a while now.
After 9/11 some debate was had on the list about the liklihood, or
otherwise, of copycat attacks linked to theories of suicide contagion etc.
etc.
These haven't been borne out, in terms of hijacked airliners anyway,
although a stronger case could be made for suicide bombing of the more
simple kind (i.e. a person with a bomb on them, or in a car they drive into
something) having begun to spread through wider dissemination of them
through global media.
There was an interesting piece in New Scientist a few months back reviewing
a study that attempted to dismiss the the significant of religious
fundamentalism on suicide bombing on the rather tenuous grounds, in my view
anyway, that the majority of suicide bombers have been tamil tigers. I
think they missed the point that the wider usage of suicide bombing has come
in recognisable regions where religious fundamentalism is a significant
issue. Poverty is obviously a contributory factor (not in the sense of
poverty making people violent, more in the sense of poverty means inability
to buy heavy weapons to compete with an organised military, so suicide
bombers become a viable strategy on those grounds).
Anyway, with the horror of Beslan, comes the strident possibility of this
kind of attack occurring again elsewhere. Schools are soft targets, with
maximum potential for doing what terrorism is all about- causing terror.
Of course the added factor today is that even a school in the depths of the
central asian/russian republics can be in millions of homes as it happens,
and now not only Western homes as satellite TV reaches ever further into the
developing world. Of course whether this is enough- i.e. the transmission
of the tactic- is enough to see it replicated elsewhere, is another matter,
of the kind key to memetics.
Vincent
===============================================================
This was distributed via the memetics list associated with the
Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission
For information about the journal and the list (e.g. unsubscribing)
see: http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Mon 06 Sep 2004 - 11:52:19 GMT