There’s a type of person I’ve always been interested in. Even admired. The kind of person who believes in something so strongly that they’re willing to put everything on the line for it, including their own life. The kind of person who is willing to die for a cause. It takes courage to do that. It takes selflessness, a forgetting of oneself for a larger purpose. This is no small thing in this ‘me first’ world.
These people, true believers, are not hard to find because they stand out from everyone else. They take many forms. A bunch of wealthy, white male landowners who are tired of paying taxes to England without representation and decide to rebel and form their own country. American soldiers who commit genocide against Native Americans in pursuit of Manifest Destiny. Native Americans who preferred to fight and die rather than be displaced and surrender their land and way of life. Confederates who chose to dissolve the Union and take up arms rather than abdicate their slave-based economic system. Nat Turner and his rebellion. John Brown and Harpers Ferry. Sacco and Vanzetti. A 1940s SS officer who believed Aryans were the chosen people, and Jewish people, Romas, homosexuals, and the physically disabled and chronically ill should be exterminated. An anti-abortion activist who would sooner blow up an abortion clinic than allow it to continue to, in their view, “kill babies.” An ISIS militant who kidnaps and beheads westerners in pursuit of an Islamic caliphate. IDF soldiers who want to destroy ‘Amalek,’ men, women, and children, in pursuit of a “Greater Israel” in Judea and Samaria. Hamas Islamists who want all of their stolen land back, from the river to the sea, and will kill as many Israelis as required to accomplish this. 9/11 hijackers who were willing to die on airplanes to get the United States out of the Middle East. George W. Bush declaring to the world “You’re either with us or against us.” Harry Truman dropping nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing hundreds of thousands of innocent people in the process, to purportedly end World War II without invading Japan.
It’s Joan of Arc, Jesus on the Cross, Luigi Mangione, and Ted Kaczynski.
It’s Patrick Henry saying “Give me liberty or give me death.”
It’s Aaron Bushnell, a former U.S. Air Force serviceman, yelling ‘Free Palestine!’ before lighting himself on fire outside the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C. in protest of Israeli’s genocide in Gaza.
It’s Thích Quảng Đức, the Vietnamese Buddhist monk in the photo above, who self-immolated in Saigon on June 11, 1963, to protest the persecution of Buddhists by the South Vietnamese government. These were his last words:
“Before closing my eyes and moving towards the vision of the Buddha, I respectfully plead to President Ngô Đình Diệm to take a mind of compassion towards the people of the nation and implement religious equality to maintain the strength of the homeland eternally. I call the venerables, reverends, members of the sangha and the lay Buddhists to organize in solidarity to make sacrifices to protect Buddhism.”
Not all of these people are to be admired, obviously. Some of them are racists, war criminals, and psychopaths. And I have a lot of strong beliefs, but I can’t imagine believing in something so strongly that I would be willing to die for it, much less by experiencing one of the most horrifically painful ways to die–being burned alive–in support of my beliefs. But after 20 months of watching Israel shred, snipe, burn, bury, and starve Palestinian children to death, after 20 months of witnessing infants less than a year old have their legs or arms amputated after an Israeli bombing, after 20 months of seeing video after video of children being pulled from collapsed buildings or their tiny, charred bodies burnt to a crisp when Israel bombed the tents where they were sleeping, after 20 months of seeing photo after photo of skeletal, malnourished children starving to death because Israel wouldn’t let any food into Gaza for three months and only now is letting a tiny bit of food trickle in, while war criminal IDF pigs kill 80-100 desperate and hungry Palestinians a day in a dystopian, real-life Hunger Games, I have never understood the mentality of a diehard true believer more than I do right now. Today, at the ripe age of 56, I totally understand how a true believer gets from Point A to Point B. The rage. The fury that leads to action.
True believers are ball movers, history changers, and event accelerators. But in too many cases, true believers have tunnel vision and view the world in black and white terms, which makes some of them homicidal or suicidal, and thus incredibly dangerous. True believers believe in their cause so intensely that their morality and belief systems shift, to the point that some of them believe that any act justifies the pursuit of their cause, including mass murder. Those people are willing to kill, die, or be imprisoned for what they believe.
Anyone who believes in something so intensely, to the point of forgetting their humanity, or minimizing or rationalizing the damage they cause to themselves or others, is a dangerous person. This does not mean that their cause is not worth fighting or even dying for. There’s often a kernel or even an entire cornfield of truth in what a true believer is saying, in what they believe. If you’ve ever read a manifesto by someone like Kaczynski or Mangione or bin Laden or pick your poisonous person, there’s usually a line in there, perhaps two, or an entire paragraph, that resonates as true. It’s the violent acts that sometimes follow these beliefs that are abominable. Tunnel vision, blind rage, and rationalized morality are never a good combination.
It’s also worth noting that in many cases, true believers are mentally ill, delusional, or simply homicidal maniacs who are just looking for an excuse to do something they already want to do that has nothing to do with perceived injustice or the cause they’re purportedly pursuing. They’ve just convinced themselves that they can justify their violent impulses by wrapping them in a righteous cause. I think a lot of soldiers who enlist in the military do so not for patriotic reasons or because there’s an active threat, but rather, because they want the opportunity to kill people without being punished for it. Others do it for love of country and some of them will attempt to justify the worst atrocities ever committed because someone convinced them that their war crimes were necessary, whether it’s killing hundreds of thousands of civilians in the Iraq War, slaughtering civilians in Vietnam, or bombing Cambodia back to the Stone Age. (Google ‘Haditha and Iraq’ or ‘My Lai and Vietnam’.) Or in a more current situation, committing genocide and ethnic cleansing against Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza–and turning food aid distribution in Gaza into a literal Squid Game of ‘Red Light, Green Light,’ where starving people are corralled like cattle and massacred if they stand up at the wrong time, or walk in a wrong direction while they’re trying to get food for themselves or their starving children–as retribution for Hamas’ attack on October 7th. It’s fucking obscene, and I can’t even believe it’s happening.
So what to think of these true believers, these diehards, these rebels with a cause? I’m of two minds. First, as stated, I admire some of these people and believe that humankind would not and will not progress without them. I don’t believe the Vietnam War ends without true believers. (I also don’t believe it ever would have started without anticommunist true believers.) I don’t believe slavery would have ended without true believers. I don’t believe the Civil Rights Movement in the United States would have succeeded without true believers. I don’t believe the Gaza Holocaust will ever end without true believers.
On the other hand, as I said, a lot of these true believers are dangerous, racist, homicidal, violent, and genocidal, so one must be selective in one’s admiration. I don’t like or admire the tactics true believers sometimes use. I don’t believe in violence, even for the most just cause, but I also don’t believe that anyone has to, or should accept oppression or subjugation to anyone else, or that one should never use violence to defend oneself against an oppressor, especially a violent oppressor. I’m not a pacifist. To me, violence is totally justified in self-defense, as long as it’s proportional and discriminate. I believe in the Catholic Just War Theory, one of my few holdover beliefs from my former religion. Thus, I believe armed resistance against Israel’s illegal occupation and war crimes against Palestinians is just. I believe Iran has every right to defend itself against Israel and the United States. I’m totally Team Iran, which yes, is a bit awkward right now, but IDGAF. I still remember how much of a disaster the Iraq War was, and I don’t believe I’m alone. I’m also Team Palestine. Not blindly so, but the injustice involved in these two conflicts is not complicated to me, particularly in the context of history and Israel’s creation, current government, and out of control behavior. It’s not a tough call for me at all.
Some true believers are also to be admired because they were ahead of their time. A scientist in the Middle Ages who refused to adhere to religious dogma and was executed for it. A conscientious objector who refused to serve during Vietnam and was jailed for it, or ran off to Canada. Civil rights protestors during the 60s, some of whom, like Medgar Evers and MLK Jr., were killed for the stands they took in support of civil rights. None of these people were viewed positively by the majority at the time. To the contrary, they were vilified. But history always balances the scales of justice. Always. To me, whether I align with a specific true believer comes down to whether I align with the source motivation and cause these people are pursuing and the tactics they use to pursue this cause, or I don’t. This is necessarily subjective.
Whether I support a true believer or not, what interests me most about all of them is where and how they get their motivation in the first place. What makes them act? What separates them from society and convinces them to do what they do, regardless of the reasons? Let’s take mental illness out of the equation because many of these people are not mentally ill. Many of them are perfectly sane and have decided to act based on their beliefs. But where do their beliefs come from?
At their core, every belief and every action derives from an emotion. Every emotion derives from a thought or group of thoughts. Every thought derives from sensory information we take in, filtered through our unconscious beliefs and biases. So to sum this up, first a person acquires information from a particular source, whether it’s school, online, television, reading, talking to people, or being indoctrinated by someone else. Upon acquiring this information, the person begins to process it, thinking about the issue, allowing their thoughts to ferment. Over time, these thoughts change and evolve. They either get debunked and changed, or they get confirmed and intensify. All the while, these thoughts are generating emotions that may be mild or intense, depending on the information that’s being ingested and processed. It’s those emotions that eventually trigger action, and the type of action a person takes depends on their mental state, risk tolerance, and belief system.
I believe this is the source code of the true believer. One cannot act unless one feels something first. Feels an injustice. Feels anger. Feels sadness. Feels pain. Feels empathy. Feels a desire for change or retribution or salvation of others. True believers are created by the information they acquire, assimilate, and process, and then these processed thoughts and beliefs lead to emotion, which leads to decision-making and action. This is why ‘controlling hearts and minds’ is such a big part of counterinsurgency warfare and counterintelligence. No one is more aware of how this psychological process works than military and intelligence agencies.
So how to feel about these people, these true believers, who are almost always a mixed bag? As I said, I’m of two minds. On the one hand, I’m a firm believer in the old adage “If you don’t stand for something, you will fall for anything.” I may not be one of these true believers, these dead-enders, but I do believe in information acquisition, in being informed and staying informed. I don’t take at face value what someone tells me or what my government tells me. I don’t believe in agreeing to kill people, or in supporting a cause my government is telling me to support, simply because my government tells me it’s necessary and just. Give me a fucking break. I wasn’t born yesterday, and this isn’t my first rodeo. I need to know why I’m being asked to support this. I need to know whether it’s actually justified and whether killing people, which should always be a last resort and done out of necessity, not choice, is truly and absolutely necessary. I need to know whether that fight, that cause, aligns with my beliefs and my core values. If they don’t, I not only won’t support it, I’ll also actively root against it and try to persuade people to do the same.
Some might call this unpatriotic or un-American. Nah. In the first instance, I don’t think blind support of this country is patriotic at all. I don’t think supporting unjust and unnecessary wars started by flawed men–especially two corrupt war criminals in the case of Trump and Netanyahu–is in my country’s interest. In fact, I believe the opposite. So I would argue that I’m more patriotic than someone who takes at face value whatever they’re told to think by a temporary American President who wants us to start bombing the living shit out of Iran and virtually every other country in the Middle East.
In the second instance, if I’m being honest, I really don’t give two shits about patriotism or nationalism. I’m too old for that nonsense and have seen too much in my life. I think patriotism and nationalism are a disease that causes more problems in the world than anything else, give or take organized religion. I have to live with myself and look at myself in the mirror. That’s all I care about now. If people don’t agree with me, that’s fine, but I’m not going to support the United States or Israel sneak attacking Iran and killing people any more than I would support Japan doing it to Pearl Harbor, or Hamas doing it to Israel on October 7th. To the contrary, I think Iran has every right to defend itself. IT was attacked by Israel, not the other way around. Iran should build up its air defenses and acquire a nuclear weapon as soon as possible. I think we’ll have fewer wars in the Middle East and a Palestinian State faster if these things happen. I trust Iran far more with a nuclear weapon than Israel. I think deterrence is necessary in the Middle East. Either Israel should give up its nuclear weapons and make the Middle East nuclear-free, or Iran should acquire one.
As for my second mind on this subject, as stated, some true believers can be extremely dangerous and can do profound damage in blind pursuit of their beliefs, so these people really are a two-edged sword. And yet, despite how dangerous and homicidal true believers can be and how much damage some of them cause, I can’t help but respect even the most misguided and dangerous true believer for believing in something, for being moved by a cause and assuming huge personal risks in taking action based on those beliefs far more than I can tolerate the average disengaged, lazy, low-information, and disinterested American citizen who couldn’t care less what country does to people in other countries until the price of gasoline spikes or we start seeing American coffins draped in flags. Most Americans simply do not care about the immense pain, death, and destruction we cause in the world when we start unnecessary wars because (i) they don’t have to go fight these wars themselves, (ii) none of that death and destruction is happening within our own borders, and (iii) they don’t view Arabs as people or value their lives in the same way they value an American or Israeli life. I’ll die on this hill. There’s no cost for average Americans in these wars. We have no skin in the game. Maybe if we did, we’d be more informed about the world, and our government would stop engaging in these senseless and deadly military adventures, these wars of choice.
You don’t need to be a true believer to stay informed. You don’t need to protest, get arrested, or light yourself on fire to raise consciousness about a cause or issue that you care about. You don’t need to be a true believer to view things from another perspective and ask yourself a few basic questions. For example, is that person or group you’re being told is a ‘terrorist’ really a terrorist? What are their goals? What is it that they want? What’s making them do what they’re doing? What do THEY say they want?
And what does ‘terrorist’ really mean anymore? Isn’t that ‘terrorist’ someone else’s freedom fighter? Nelson Mandela, a former ‘terrorist’ who was jailed for 27 years in South Africa and helped negotiate an end to South Africa’s racist apartheid system, was on the United States’ terrorist list until 2008, more 18 years after he was released in 1990. He died five years later, at the age of 95. So doing the math, the United States had Nelson Mandela, a beloved figure now, on its terrorist watch list until he was fucking 90 years old! Shouldn’t this god damned absurdity make people question who the United States deems a terrorist and who it doesn’t? And if you’re not fine with that, if you always want to swallow the terrorist label without chewing to make Uncle Sam happy, shouldn’t we at least be consistent? Shouldn’t the fact that Israel has done 100,000 times worse things to Palestinians throughout its history than Iran, Hamas, the PLO, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, or any terrorist group in the world have done individually or collectively to anyone else, require the United States to deem Israel a state sponsor of terrorism? Wouldn’t that at least be consistent? And shouldn’t we put ourselves on that list too, since the country of my birth and in which I reside and earn an income is responsible for more death and destruction in the world than any country in the past 50 years?
Inquiring minds want to know.
And then there’s this. Remember the last war you supported and the last American drone strike you cheered, whether it was under Obama, Biden, Clinton, Bush, or Trump? The one that killed a terrorist or two, along with 20 civilians who weren’t terrorists, including women and children? Or how about Israel’s unprovoked recent assassinations of nuclear scientists in Iran in their homes while they slept at night, which also took the lives of their entire families, including children, along with a helpless neighbor or two? Who’s really the terrorist? Us or them? Is there such a thing as proportionality and discrimination any more, or are we now playing by Osama bin Laden’s rules, and now agree that civilians are fair game in any conflict? Or maybe if we look back at our own history, the way we’ve killed civilians in war after war after war without thinking twice about it, we’ll come to understand that he was playing by our rules the entire time?
Troubling questions. Troubling answers. In truth, there’s no shortage of true believers in the United States. Unfortunately, they’re the wrong kind of true believer: lazy, uninformed, hypocritical, myopic, infatuated with spoon-fed double-standards, and easily duped by confirmation bias.
But I grant you this. Being this ignorant is a fuckload less painful than lighting yourself on fire.
