Mass suicide
Encyclopedia : M : MA : MAS : Mass suicide
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Mass suicide occurs when a number of people kill themselves together with one another or for the same reason and is usually connected to a real or perceived persecution.
Examples
Mass suicide sometimes occurs in religious or cultic settings. Suicide missions, suicide bombers, and kamikazes are military or paramilitary forms of mass suicide. Defeated groups may resort to mass suicide rather than capture. Suicide pacts are a form of mass suicide unconnected to cults or war that are sometimes planned or carried out by small groups of frustrated people, typically lovers. Mass suicides have been used as a form of political protest.
Notable mass suicides
- During the late 2nd century BC, the Teutons are recorded as marching south through Gaul along with their neighbors, the Cimbri, and attacking Roman Italy. After several victories for the invading armies, the Cimbri and Teutones were then defeated by Gaius Marius in 102 BC at the Battle of Aquae Sextiae (near present-day Aix-en-Provence). Their King, Teutobod, was taken in irons. The captured women committed mass suicide, which passed into Roman legends of Germanic heroism: By the conditions of the surrender three hundred of their married women were to be handed over to the Romans. When the Teuton matrons heard of this stipulation they first begged the consul that they might be set apart to minister in the temples of Ceres and Venus; and then when they failed to obtain their request and were removed by the lictors, they slew their little children and next morning were all found dead in each other's arms having strangled themselves in the night.
- The 960 members of the Jewish community at Masada, who collectively committed suicide in the first century C.E., rather than be conquered and enslaved by the Romans.
- In medieval times, the siege of several towns, cities and forts by Muslim armies in northern India resulted in the practice of jauhar, where the men would ride out to fight to the last soul, and women would immolate themselves to prevent capture, rape and molestation.
- During the Ottoman occupation of Greece and shortly before the Greek War of Independence, women from Souli, pursued by the Ottomans, ascended the mount Zalongo, threw their kids over the precipice and then jumped themselves, to avoid capture.
- In May 1945 about 900 residents of Demmin, Germany, committed mass suicide in fear of the advancing Red Army.
- Japan is known for its centuries of suicide tradition, from hara-kiri ceremonial self-disemboweling to kamikaze warriors flying their aircraft into American warships during World War II. During that same war on the island of Saipan hundreds of trapped Japanese committed mass suicide rather than surrender to the invading American forces. [link]
- The Jonestown suicides in Guyana, where 913 people died in 1978 under the direction of Jim Jones, an evangelist preacher and head of the Peoples Temple. (It should be noted that it is believed that many of those 913 people were murdered, or forcibly injected with cyanide against their will.)
- The Heaven's Gate mass suicide occurred in a hilltop mansion near San Diego, California, in 1997. They believed an alien spaceship was hiding behind the Comet Hale-Bopp and killed themselves in order to reach it. The victims were self-drugged and then suffocated by other members in a series of suicides over a period of three days. Thirty-nine died, most were in their 40's and came from a wide range of backgrounds. [link]
Murder Suicide Plot
Heidi Fittkau-Garthe German psychologist, and a previously high-profile Brahma Kumaris, Heidi Fittkau-Garthe was charged in the Canary Islands with a plot of murder-suicide in January 1998[link]Time.Com JANUARY 19, 1998 Near-Death Experience in which 31 cult followers, including five children, were to ingest poison. After the suicides, they were told they would be picked up by a spaceship and taken to an unspecified destination.See also
External links
- [Cult Mass Suicide]
- [39 men die in mass suicide near San Diego] - CNN, March 26, 1997
- [link]Time.Com JANUARY 19, 1998 Near-Death Experience
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