Psychically Abandoned

Groucho Marx's oft-quoted flippancy in his observation that he would not join any club insufficiently discriminating as to accept his membership actually spoke clearly to a peculiarity in deviant human behaviour. There is a mirror-image to that remark. We see its impact on those who profess to 'understand' and feel sympathy and collegiality with societal outcasts and social malefactors, those rejecting societal norms.

We see it in the Manson cult, the acquiescence of the women of Bountiful, the young teen who felt such empathy with her community's grubs and who, for her effort, was gang-raped outside Los Angeles, and in those Western, previously Christian women who feel sympathy for those they see as the oppressed, and adopt Islam to synchronize their sympathies with their commitments. Invariably we see it in women's responses to men's rejections of values held in common respect.

We see it in the all-too-common syndrome of hardened criminals, including multiple-murderers having been brought to justice and incarcerated as a result of their crimes against society, being contacted by ordinary-seeming women who conceive an attraction to them, befriend them, and sometimes marry them. Obviously, this is an expression of a syndrome, of a frail personality seeking some meaning in life to support their emotional turmoil, and fixating on those who reject society and whom society has rejected.

We see its effects on children who have been abducted, kept prisoners for years, constantly raped by their abductor, covertly bearing his children in dreadful living conditions. Yet to survive the horror that their existence has become, they form an emotional bond, an attachment of psychical need to their captor. This is a symptom named the Stockholm Syndrome, coined in 1973 in the wake of a bank robbery in Sweden, and the hostage-taking of three women and a man over a period of five days.

Even though the hostages were held in the vault of the bank, strapped with dynamite until their rescue, they came out of their ordeal feeling sympathy for the men who had so dreadfully abused them. A few years later, when the American newspaper heiress Patty Hearst was a hostage, she exhibited the same sympathetic attachment to her abductors and joined ranks with them in their later robberies. Psychologists explain the syndrome as one where a damaged psyche results from great trauma.

The British Columbia woman, Beverley Giesbrecht, who found herself attracted to the concept of violent jihad as a justified response by fanatical Islamists to what she perceived as Western hostility toward Islam and Muslims, transformed herself from a functioning, if somewhat unhappily confused adult with a miserable childhood into a fundamentalist, jihad-supporting Muslim. She left her old life behind her, travelled to Afghanistan, and made contact with the Taliban.

She believed that her status as a (converted) Muslim, a supporter of violent jihad would give her immunity from danger at the hands of the Taliban, and lend her a certain measure of respect. Enabling her to interview high-placed Taliban leaders, and perhaps even gain her entry to the presence of Osama bin Laden. And with her background as a journalist, and with the prestige of her jihadist website, she would scoop the media with her insights and authentic videos and interviews.

All for the purpose of advancing the agenda of fanatical global jihad, for she considered herself a supporter of that movement. Like others who had converted to Islam, and who spent their energies and their determination in an effort to better the lives of ordinary, poverty-stricken Muslims in theatres of violence, and who were summarily dispatched as interfering Westerners for their efforts, she too has been abducted and ostensibly held for ransom.

Demonstrating the delicate balance of peoples' ability to forge relationships of meaning and value when confronted by the mystifying (to some) disequilibrium between societies, religions, traditions, and hereditary customs, confounded latterly by the clash of worlds far apart from one another through all of those significant parameters. And while that is an interesting and unfortunate set of circumstances for very particular personalities, it also points at a more generalized failing of society at large.

Where ostensibly intelligent, well educated, secular or religious factions of society see little threat to what they hold dear at the presence within their country of those being singled out by intelligence agencies as adherents to, or supporters of, religious fanaticism. When, in fact, their governments and government security agencies, use their powers to pursue and arrest activities meant to threaten and terrorize, these educated and sympathetic groups accuse the government and its agents of persecution.

That in pursuing the greater safety and security of the country, its people and its infrastructure, let alone its way of life, government and its security and policing agencies are abandoning our most dearly-held values and freedoms by abusing the human rights entitlements of those whom they deem to be innocent of evil intent simply because they are unable to digest reality.