It's interesting that Carrol brings up suicidal actions by members of the military and refers to popular representations of them. I can recall three films from World War 2 in which an American suicides. All three involved fighting the Japanese. Two (Bataan, 1943, and Flying Tigers 43) involve fliers who are seriously wounded, presumably dying, and crash their planes into Japanese assets (a bridge across which they will attack, a train carrying vital supplies). In the third (So Proudly We Hail, 43) a nurse, not wounded, walks into a group of Japanese soldiers who threaten to capture the group she is with, blowing herself and the soldiers up with a grenade. In each the decision is spontaneous, there's no group mandate, and little is said about it in the remainder of the film. The fictional example is depicted, but in a certain sense it isn't framed in thought, conceptualized. It seems to be kept very much at arm's length, an ambivalently regarded behavioral option in case the war doesn't go well. Randy Earnest
>
>
> Ken Hanly wrote:
> >
> > Surely it is quite a different tactic to use suicide as in hunger
strikes
> > and to commit suicide as a human bomber inflicting casualties on many
> > innocent people. As for urban uprisings by leftists, some of them may be
> > termed suicidal I suppose but most of the examples seem to be from years
ago
> > not now. I was thinking of suicidal terrorism. Is that a predominant
tactic
> > among Turkish leftists or many other leftists? Marxist influenced
parties
> > obviously will reject any such tactic. It is a type of infantile
> > ultra-leftism in most instances. Although hunger strikes might be
effective
> > in certain conditions.
> >
> > Cheers, Ken Hanly
> >
>
> What about a soldier in combat who exposes himself to certain death in
> order for the enemy machine gun to reveal itself. This tale was told
> over and over again in fiction and journalism during WW2? There is even
> a song about it -- "The Ballad of Private Roger Young."
>
> Bush's (and the media's) claim that this was an act of war does make the
> agents combatants, not "terrorists," hence it is proper to apply to them
> the same criteria that is applied to combatants -- e.g., the pilots in
> the various "thousand-plane raids" on German cities that the headlines
> continuously celebrated back in the '40s. Those raids were directed
> strictly against the civilian population.
>
> Carrol
>