Last July I posted a comment on Bruce Schneier’s blog about Kamikaze pilots and their love/loyalty to their family, as opposed to a devotion to their Emperor or nation:

I recently heard a compelling radio report that interviewed Kamikaze pilots who survived. They discussed their reasons for “volunteering” and the shame involved in surviving or never having a chance to fight. It radically changed my understanding of why/how these men chose self-sacrifice as a form of attack — often as a measure of loyalty to help protect their family. This idea of extended honor and preservation through personal sacrifice seems like the sort of glorious afterlife theme I often hear with regard to today’s Islamic bombers, although they seem to infer radical Islam is the family (since parents are unaware to avoid detection or because of their natural objections to the conflict).

I probably could have been a little more clear, but the point I was trying to make is that personal sacrifice is justified by some kind of attachment to principle and purpose.

The Allies almost invariably portrayed the kamikaze pilots as men with feverish devotion to an evil leader. What if they were portrayed as men devoted to protecting their families and their livelihood (as if a common perspective were possible at the time)?

I went on to say:

Ohnuki-Tierney’s book (Kamikaze, Cherry Blossom, and Nationalism) on the “tokkotai” or “special attack corps” echoes this theme. She discusses the way in which the Kamikaze were told by the state that they needed to “volunteer” to “defend their country against American invasion”, but they ultimately carried with them a variance of religious, philosophical, and utopian ideologies that they individually used to justify self-sacrifice. She even goes so far as to suggest that many of the pilots borrowed Christianity from Europe to provide them with a model of sacrifice for others and the notion of life after death.

This suggests that the men were indeed thinking individuals that not only had to be persuaded/enlisted to sacrifice their lives, but that their individuality stuck with them until their last moments.

The Guardian Unlimited just posted a story called “We were ready to die for Japan” that is based on an interview with a pilot that survived. The survivor reinforces this notion of individual agents struggling with the ethics of suicide attack:

He has little time for the notion that the young men who flew into enemy warships did so happily in a selfless display of loyalty for the emperor.

“We said what we supposed to say about the emperor, but we didn’t feel it in our hearts,” he said. “We were ready to die, but for our families and for Japan. We thought people who talked seriously about wanting to die for the emperor were misguided.

“It was more like a mother who drops everything when her child needs her. That’s how the kamikaze felt about their country.”

In a literal sense, the idea of “mother” might seem appropriate, but what if the word is interpreted as a more general concept such as “caregiver” or “provider”? The article continues:

Mr Hamazono is certain that, had he been able to see his mission through to its conclusion, his final words would have had little to do with Japan’s wartime state Shintoism or its spiritual figurehead.

“Mother … that’s the only word. You have only seconds left,” he said. “The idea that we laughed in the face of death is a myth.”

Not an easy problem to solve, clearly, from a general perspective and it begs the question of how to understand the majority feelings and perhaps try to change them so that hope replaces hopelessness, trust replaces fear.

One has to wonder if a similar perspective for today’s bombers will surface fifty years from now? In a nutshell, what/who is really winning hearts and minds in modern conflict?

Someone suggested to me that many of the suicide bombers and soldiers recruited/trained by al Qaeda may in fact come from families who have already been forced to make sacrifices as non-combatants, or come from orphanages in remote and depressed regions around the world.

In that sense, the idea of defending one’s “mother” takes on a strange twist since the more conflict in a region the more orphans in want of a replacement for mother…

How should we define “family” and what is justified to defend it/them?

There was so much to do today I almost did not have time to digest some of the important information in the news about security. Take the BBC report about Somali telecoms for example, which they gave the rather suggestive title “Telecoms thriving in lawless Somalia”.

Mr Abdullahi says the warlords realise that if they cause trouble for the phone companies, the phones will stop working again, which nobody wants.

“We need good relations with all the faction leaders. We don’t interfere with them and they don’t interfere with us. They want political power and we leave them alone,” he says.

There’s something beneath the surface of this story that I can’t quite put my finger on yet, but I find it disturbing. Communication and media control is almost always one of the main tenets related to seizing political power, and yet we are told that the “warlords” don’t want to interfere with phone companies? This conclusion defies logic, and so I feel like I’m searching for a better explanation or understanding of market/political forces going on there, and why the telecoms are so resiliant that they have no need for physical security.

“All the infrastructure of the country has collapsed – education, health and roads. We need to send our staff abroad for any training.”

Another problem for companies engaged in the global telecoms business is paying their foreign partners.

At present, they use Somalia’s traditional “Hawala” money transfer companies to get money to Dubai, the Middle East’s trading and financial hub.

With a government would come a central bank, which would make such transactions far easier.

The article goes on to say that the telecoms look forward to taxes, once a government exists again, but hope that the percentage of their revenues will remain low while all the infrastructure of the country is rebuilt. Wishful thinking.

Here is an alternative theory: Somalia is evolving into a new structure that we might benefit from evaluating without any preconception of what constitutes a “nation” with taxes and fair “representation”. For some reason this reminds me of the origins of the nation-state in Italy when small groups of “freemen” joined in a common purpose, expressly independent of a monarch but without much else defined. Perhaps Somalis are not only ready to revisit that problem, but come up with new answers based on a new market of information and technology.

The shockingly lower market costs of cell service are really not all that new, I guess. Cell phones have been wildly successful in many countries where infrastructure is seen/made to be prohibitive. Brazil, for example, had a waiting list of years and a slew of high fees for any kind of land-line, yet the introduction of cell service meant just about anyone could afford to have service in a week’s time or less.

Here’s another odd story along the same lines (ha ha), from the Register, called “Need cheap DSL? Go to Rwanda”:

Wyler arrived in Rwanda two years ago, looking for aid work as a teacher. While hunting down a job, he ran across a project to put computers in Rwandan schools and link them to the internet via satellite connections. The plan, which included the purchase of $2,300 PCs, appeared too expensive and inefficient to Wyler. Why purchase expensive computers and then deliver just 64kbps connections to the students?

“The thing is that money is not the problem,” Wyler said. “The problem is the way they spend it. You’ll find that a lot of money goes to consultants and to buy $2,300 computers when a $500 computer will do. So, I started a company to try and give them an idea of how to do this.”

Wyler zeroed in on building out the country’s networking infrastructure. If you’re going to buy computers, they may as well connect to the internet at a useful speed – 300kbps and up – and at an affordable price.
[…]
Over the next few years, Terracom will work with Sun Microsystems to put 20,000 thin client computers in hundreds of Rwandan schools. The thin clients do not have power hungry processors, disk drives or fans and require about 20W as compared to a 200W PC. The power savings should make it possible to run the thin clients on solar power, according to Wyler.

Fascinating project. The people with access to this infrastructure will undoubtedly benefit, as will the telecoms, but will their country? Note the irony in Wyler’s concern about pre-existing infrastructure:

“Everybody wants us to do this in their country,” Wyler said. “In order for us to even think about expanding, the country would need to have a political environment that is clean and forward thinking. If we can get the computing density up in Rwanda, then it’s a great model for these other countries.”

Ah, but what if you don’t start off with the presumption that stability of a nation is required, just the ability of all the warlords/politicians to agree to leave telecoms alone for the greater good? Here’s an analogy that might help make the point, although I admit it is a bit esoteric: In western/european music drummers are basically required to keep time in a rigid structure that presumes everything is a subdivision of a universal law/rule. If the tempo is 100, for example, then you can play at 50, 25, 10, etc. or sometimes even in thirds if you want to be a little crazy and try to bend the rules. African drumming, on the other hand, is based on a phrase (sample) played by someone that runs in a repeating sequence. The other beats are thus played in relation to an agreed-upon phrase, not really a subject of the phrase or defined by it, but more in a kind of agreement not to be too far off a common/shared goal (rhythm). It looks like chaos to the outsider who has been trained to dole out the Western tempos into legal parcels of time, but some might argue that the Africans actually end up with a simpler and more resiliant structure that produces a comparable, if not superior, output for consumption.

A whole new way of governance might someday emerge from the creative use of information technology to break down the sense of nationalism that we all now take for granted. If nothing else, radio transmissions will continue to seriously challenge anyone who hopes to secure information.