Politics and Suicide

The philosophy of political self-destruction

Nicholas Michelsen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317375876
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Politics and Suicide argues that whilst the historical lineage of suicidal politics is recognised, the fundamental significance of autodestruction to the political remains under examined. It contends that practices like suicide-bombing do not simply embody a strange or abnormal 'suicidal' articulation of the political, but rather, that the existence of suicidal politics tells us something fundamental about the political as such and thinking about political violence more broadly.

Recent world events have emphatically shown our need for tools with which to develop better understandings of the politics of suicide. Through the exploration of several arresting case-studies, including the 'Kamikaze' bombers of World War Two, Jan Palach's self-immolation in 1969, Cold War nuclear deterrence, and the suicide-terrorist attacks of 9/11 Michelsen asks how we might talk of a political suicide in any of these contexts. The book charts how political processes 'go suicidal', and asks how we might still consider them to be political in such a case. It investigates how suicide can function as 'politics'.

A strong contribution to the fields of philosophy and international relations theory, this work will also be of interest to students and scholars of political theory and terrorism & political violence.

1Kamikaze

DOI: 10.4324/9781315673349-2

State suicide

Historical experience suggests that, given the right conditions, states can go suicidal. Such suicide states are often symptomatic of a totalitarian nationalism, but this does not bring us to the crux of the matter. The postwar Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima claimed that ‘nineteenth century Asia had only these alternatives: to accept the West and to survive after complete surrender to Westernisation; or to resist and perish.’¹ The Meiji constitution was viewed precisely in terms of surrender by the deposed military class. As Mishima liked to recall, in 1877, one hundred samurai launched an uprising against that surrender, meeting the regimes modern weaponry with swords, and committing suicide when the inevitable defeat occurred. Mishima saw in this act of collective suicide a compressed illustration of the loss inherent in the process of Japan's modernisation, which had resulted, he argued, in the progressive extradition of death from culture and society.² This assignment of a vital political function to self-destruction is the marker of Mishima's distinctive fascism, and would determine his reading of the disastrous progression of the Meiji regime during World War II as the last ember of Japan's creative potential.

The catastrophic telos of modern mechanised warfare seems to have been recognised by Japan's naval leaders. Japan's ‘inevitable’ entry to the conflict coincided with an explicit assessment within the hierarchy that the war would be absolutely disastrous.³ In this sense, we can see traces of apocalypticism written into the war-project from the start. The sense that the war involved a collective desire for death was a recurrent theme in immediate postwar literatures.⁴ Certainly by 1944, the Japanese military apparatus could not have failed to recognise that extinction, in military, if not yet biological, terms, was on offer. In this millenarian climate, Vice Admiral Onishi established the ‘special attack’ corps, now more commonly recognised under the idiom of the kamikaze.⁵ Initially comprised of highly expert airmen who had spectacular success in guiding their bomb-laden planes onto their targets, the quality and length of training of special attack pilots would decrease to a nominal period by the end of the war, and their tactical effectiveness correspondingly declined. By the close of action in the Pacific, four thousand young men, around three-quarters drawn from high schools and the remainder from the top universities, received brief and basic flight training before being sent immediately to death. There was apparently little illusion, within the state bureaucracy, that the war could be won with suicidal methods, but it certainly convinced the Americans that Japan would remain fully committed under almost any conditions. This was supported by the fact that the kamikaze did not appear ex nihilo, but joined an extant array of other suicidal attack methods including explosive speedboats, which deployed even younger men of 15 or 16, and experiments with manned torpedoes or kaiten. More successful, and infamous amongst American soldiers, were banzai infantry special attacks, either with sword, antitank lunge mines – which were cone-shaped explosive charges attached to a six-foot pole which fired on impact – or satchel bombs in the Philippines and Okinawa. Indeed, prior to 1944 it was already tacit convention that Japanese pilots for whom escape was impossible, due to aircraft fault or damage, would seek to crash, if in as militarily useful a manner as possible. The context in which the kamikaze emerged was thus richly steeped with autodestructive activity. The apparently systemic and generalised quality of these practices suggests that the kamikaze programme cannot be explained solely through tactical or strategic rationalisation.⁶ The entire Japanese state appeared, to its US opponent, to have gone suicidal.

The kamikaze pilots have often been viewed as a unique cultural artefact.⁷ Indeed, the sentiment that they were ‘the culmination of centuries of tradition’ is found in most of the literatures that have emerged following the war.⁸ Clearly there is specificity with respect to any cultural milieu, and suicide had a distinct set of meanings in Japan. Japanese literature contains innumerable examples of honourable or valorised death taking place on the field of battle or in defence of honour.⁹ In this vein, the kamikaze may be, and this was an interpretation encouraged by the Meiji regime itself, seen as the continuation of the ethos of the samurai class that had ruled Japan until the Meiji restoration. As laid out in texts such as the Hagakure, the martial ethos of the Samurai class emphasised frugality, stoicism, honour, obedience, a sense of duty, a warlike spirit, loyalty and courage, grounded in self-discipline unto death.¹⁰ The kamikaze were commonly read as revealing how this ethos had ‘filtered down to lower classes and became a common value system among the Japanese’.¹¹ Ruth Benedict famously viewed the Japanese cultural milieu as suspended between aesthetics and militarism, the two coming together in the kamikaze to make sense of martial death as paradigmatically sublime in the Japanese context. In this reading, the kamikaze emerge from a distinctly Japanese sensibility: the construction of a culture that viewed death as a route to symbolic value.¹²

The problem here is that a clear break from the historical lineage of martial suicide in Japanese culture is precisely established by the state-planned character of the kamikaze. The very modernity of the kamikaze suggests the appeal to cultural endogeneity lack sufficiency. The Meiji state was highly active in militarising Japanese society in the period leading up the War, and drew explicitly on the tropes and movements of European fascism in doing so. Centralised army training aspired to mirror, but in the process radically transformed the bushido chivalric code, so as to fit it around a state-nationalist diagram alien to it. The response is to view the practices as the output precisely of an overly successful dissemination of totalitarian state ideology. There was certainly a powerful state-led rejection of the gangrene of the past, and an emphasis on palingenesis or a need to rebirth Japanese society, so that the prior humiliations by the Western agents of modernity could be reversed. The education system had been so militarised that by 1925 military officers were being placed in every school, with hours of military drilling, including instructions in bayonet fighting, now part of the daily routine. The educational system instituted by the Meiji restoration entrenched martial themes bound to responsibility to the sacralised figure of the emperor. Shooting ranges and other martial practices would, by 1943, include teaching students suicidal methods.¹³ Schools become channels for the state ideology, and would be prime locations for the recruitment of kamikaze pilots.¹⁴ Ideology thus appears, to many historians, the prime mover of state suicide. Under the formal ideology, death was explicitly framed as conferring nationalised immortality at the Yasukuni shrine, much like Munich's Tomb of Martyrs.¹⁵

A totalitarian fidelity to the emperor is noted in some of the diaries and last letters of individual pilots, revealing notes of devotion to ‘a life of resignation and self-denial … a chance to die for my country’, as one ensign put it, or for the ‘Japanese way of life’. Recent collections of pilot diaries have, however, cast doubt upon the ease with which the articulation of the kamikaze as revealing the ideological co-option of individuals or simply expressing long-running Japanese cultural forms of ‘life through death’.¹⁶ The danger is that of radically oversimplifying pilots’ own interpretations of their act, which vastly exceeded the state narrative. Many did not embrace, and indeed, were often critical of the imperial ideology.¹⁷ These were not ‘men experiencing the bitterness of defeat and unwilling to accept reality’,¹⁸ but neither were they convinced by the promise of transcendence offered by the state ideology.¹⁹ Each pilot found their own, remarkably diverse, ways of resigning themselves an action that they had little real choice in.²⁰ Making sense of individual participation through a theory of semiotic interruption, Ohnuki-Tierney argues that these young men were defined precisely by that which they lacked in understanding of the state-nationalist project. They sought to rationalise their deaths with meanings of diverse kinds because they did not recognise the state for what it was. The implication here is that what the pilots desired was not what the totalitarian state desired.²¹ If the pilots clearly were caught up, and thus had to come to terms with a suicide already decided for them, how did such a curious urge come to so completely capture the life of the state?

The philosophers that the student pilots read were no less subject to the inexorable movement of a seemingly suicidal state desire. Tanabe Hajime, a member of the Kyoto School which had so profoundly influenced the work of Martin Heidegger, gave lectures to students about to be deployed as kamikaze. He would, in the aftermath of the war, develop a philosophy of self-transcendence as opening only from an active participation in catastrophe.²² In developing this philosophy, Hajime explicitly sought to give a repentant sense to the apocalyptic passion which he perceived to have captured him along with the entire societal formation.²³ Neither Japanese culture nor the signifying regime of the state can explain how a state suicidalism emerged, he implied. The war had assumed its own dynamic trajectory, pulling in everything around it. The implication here is that the totalitarian bureaucracy was, like the pilots, captured to the death-project. Certainly, the special attack concept was developed within the military hierarchy, which then presented it to the state, where it was initially received with considerable suspicion.²⁴ That suspicion is not surprising; with the kamikaze the very vital function of the totalitarian state, its c...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Kamikaze
• 2 Self-burning
• 3 Hunger striking
• 4 Terror
• 5 Cult and revolution
• Index