And ye shall hear of wars and rumours of wars: see that ye be not troubled: for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet
One of the strange things about terrorism, and suicide terrorism in particular, is that people always think it is “new”. There is something about the fear of terrorism that always makes it fresh, always makes it feel like a new encounter. Add to that the short memories that people have, and the general perception is that suicide terrorism is a newly thought of tactic, or strategy, but as I have detailed here before and as Iain Overton’s excellent “The Price Of Paradise” covers, these tactics are simply recycled, decade by decade, century by century.
There are themes within this tactic too. Themes that play out in public, in the mind of the public, and perhaps which terrorist groups recognise and copy, or reflect. Fact and fiction become confused. There is a theme, played out frequently, of the innocent child, an unwitting, unknowing bomber, tasked with carrying an explosive device, without being aware it is going to explode. You’ve that recently, yes? Nigeria, or was it Yemen? Gaza? Syria? Afghanistan? Well, yes probably, but it’s not new.
Here’s a clip from a 1936 film by Alfred Hitchcock, called “Sabotage”, which plays on the fear of the public in the mid 1930s, of infiltration by terrorist groups bent on destroying the nation. Here, an innocent unwitting child is tasked with delivering a package to a tube station in London- Piccadilly. The clip is classic Hitchcock. Having being delayed en route the boy is on a bus, approaching Piccadilly when the bomb detonates.
This is really very peculiar. Tube stations were attacked in the 1880s with IEDs and again in 1939, three years after this film was made Then again in the 1970s, including the Piccadilly bomb which exploded at a bus stop outside Green Park station in 1975. Then more recently buses in 1996 and 2005 were again attacked and tube stations have also been targeted again. But here in the clip, masterful suspense by Hitchcock weirdly foreshadows numerous attacks. Crowds of people, and military parades included… will the bomb go off? And of course military bands and mounted units themselves became targets for real in 1982
So, it’s really a strange thing to see this modern essence of a threat, a child proxy suicide bomber in a fictional movie from 1936. The rest of the movie (which can be found on YouTube in full) ends with the bomb maker, with a suicide IED hidden in his coat, detonating his device behind a cinema as the police evacuate the theatre and mount a raid to capture him. He had been discovered by an undercover police operation. Such modern themes.