It's happened again. On 27 April a suicide bomber in Damascus stood in close proximity to both a school and a mosque, and detonated the explosives in his belt. At least nine people died and 30 were injured.
Philosophers have always had a lot to say about what might be called private suicide. While Nietzsche remarked ironically that the thought of suicide can get one through many a long night, Wittgenstein considered that suicide was the pivot on which every ethical system turns, because it is life's central issue. Albert Camus agreed that suicide was the one serious philosophical problem in that it poses the question as to whether life is worth living; he went on to suggest that suicide is prepared within the silence of the heart, as is a great work of art.
Suicide is as individual as the person who attempts it: some people simply reach a depth of despair so great that they relocate to another space where they cannot be reached. The threat of suicide can also be coercive: many people make attempts, but never complete the act, often because the so-called cry for help has been answered.
And then there is suicide as public protest: the newspapers of my youth featured pictures of Buddhist monks self-immolating in Vietnam more often than I care to recall.
I am very muddled on the subject of suicide, both private and public. Like many people, I have tended to think suicide bombers are either madmen or irredeemable religious fanatics buoyed by enticing visions of Paradise. Not so. Flinders University maintains a Suicide Terrorism Database, and has kept records since 1981, yet there is no discernible pattern, except that most such suicides are completed by young men.
Religion may play a part, but politics, a sense of humiliation, altruism and a desire for revenge are more important. Also a sense of desperation and impotence, pride, anger and a local tradition of resistance. Such suicides are coercive and strategic, a bizarre exercise in public relations in an attempt to deal with injustice.
Again there are the individual examples. What are we to make of the suicide of Dimitris Christoulas? On 4 April this 77-year-old retired pharmacist took up his position near a tree in Athens' busy Syntagma Square, near the metro station; the Parliament building is clearly visible across the street. At 9am, when crowds of people were on their way to work