It’s difficult to comprehend the magnitude of the atrocities that occurred in Verla, India, this week. Terrorists stormed the streets of Mumbai carrying machine guns and bags of grenades. Rumors of executions of children, torturing of hostages, and group shootings flew around the city. What is most chilling about the conflict, however, is the way the terrorists went about their work.
Typically, acts of terror require a sense of deindividuation among members: Terrorists or soldiers experience a loss of individual identity, accompanied by diminished self-regulation. In other words, being a part of a group helps them feel less like individuals. They consequently feel lessened responsibility for their actions, lessened concern with evaluation of others, and weakening of internal controls.
This is useful to terrorists because when shame, guilt and fear are diminished, they can commit horrific acts with ease. Paired with the energizing effect of others in a group, they will do almost anything.
Additionally, terrorists typically experience thoughts of deindividuation among their victims. They are conditioned to view their enemies as “less than human” so that killing them will not produce any cognitive dissonance. In other words, if a man killed someone, he would most likely feel an aversive state of arousal because killing typically carries a great deal of guilt. However, if he made the cognitive change of defining his victim as less than human and unworthy of living, then cognitive dissonance ceases to exist for him.
What occurred in India was an act of pure hatred that defied these usual “rules.” “They did not strike with the terrorist’s fleeting anonymity,” says the New York Times.
“…What slowly became clear was that this was an attack of especial barbarism, because it was so personal. It was unlike the many strikes of the last many months, bombs left in thronging markets or trains or cars: acts of shrinking cowardice. The new men were not cowards...They killed face to face; they wanted to see and speak to their victims; they could taste the violence they made.”
The personal nature of these attacks is both horrifying and intriguing. Here, deindividuation of the victims is clearly not necessary. In fact, the opposite is true. These terrorists derive pleasure from killing “face to face” and getting to know their victims. Disturbingly,
“Their work was fastidiously deliberate…They took time to ask your nationality and vocation. Then they spared you, or herded you elsewhere, or shot you in the back of your skull.”
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