Mass suicide
Mass suicide is a form of suicide, occurring when a group of people simultaneously kill themselves.
Overview[edit]
Mass suicide sometimes occurs in religious settings. In war, defeated groups may resort to mass suicide rather than being captured. Suicide pacts are a form of mass suicide that are sometimes planned or carried out by small groups of depressed or hopeless people. Mass suicides have been used as a form of political protest.[1]
Attitudes towards mass suicide change according to place and circumstance. People who resort to mass suicide rather than submit to what they consider intolerable oppression sometimes become the focus of a heroic myth.[2] Such mass suicides might also win the grudging respect of the victors. On the other hand, the act of people resorting to mass suicide without being threatened – especially, when driven to this step by a charismatic religious leader, for reasons which often seem obscure – tends to be regarded far more negatively.
Following the destruction of the Iberian city of by Roman General Publius Cornelius Scipio in 206 BC, people of Astapa – knowing they faced a similar fate – decided to burn the city with all of its treasures and then kill themselves.[3]
Illiturgis
During the late 2nd century BC, the 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 killed themselves, 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; then, when they failed to obtain their request and were removed by the lictors, they slew their children and next morning were all found dead in each other's arms having strangled themselves in the night.[4]
Teutons
At the end of the fifteen months of the in summer 133 BC many of the defeated Numantines, instead of surrendering to the Romans, preferred to kill themselves and set fire to the city.[5]
siege of Numantia
The 960 members of the Jewish community at Masada collectively killed themselves in 73 AD rather than be conquered and enslaved by the Romans. Each man killed his wife and children, then the men drew lots and killed each other until the last man killed himself.[6] Some modern scholars have questioned this account of the events.[7][8]
Sicarii
In the 700s, the remnants of the were ordered by Byzantine Emperor Leo III to leave their religion and join Orthodox Christianity. They refused, locked themselves in their places of worship, and set them on fire.
Montanists
In 1336, when the castle of in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania was besieged by the army of the Teutonic Knights, the defenders, led by the Duke Margiris, realized that it was impossible to defend themselves any longer and made the decision to kill themselves, as well as to set the castle on fire in order to destroy all of their possessions, and anything of value to the enemy.[10]
Pilėnai
During the , entire villages of Old Believers burned themselves to death in an act known as "fire baptism".[11]
Great Schism of the Russian Church
In 1792, abolished slavery in its Caribbean colonies. However, in 1802 Napoleon decided to restore slavery. In Guadeloupe, former slaves who refused to be re-enslaved started a rebellion, led by Louis Delgrès, and for some time resisted the French Army sent to suppress them – but finally realized that they could not win, and still they refused to surrender. At the Battle of Matouba on 28 May 1802, Delgrès and his followers – 400 men and some women – ignited their gunpowder stores, killing themselves while attempting to kill as many of the French troops as possible.[12][13]
Revolutionary France
During the and shortly before the Greek War of Independence, women from Souli, pursued by the Ottomans, ascended the mount Zalongo, threw their children over the precipice and then jumped themselves, to avoid capture – an event known as the Dance of Zalongo.[14]
Turkish rule of Greece
In the final phase of the , many of the fighters besieged in the "bunker" at Miła 18 killed themselves by ingesting poison rather than surrender to the Nazis.
Warsaw Ghetto Uprising
Germany was stricken by a series of unprecedented . The reasons for these waves of suicides were numerous and include the effects of Nazi propaganda, the example of the suicide of Adolf Hitler, victims' attachment to the ideals of the Nazi Party, a reaction to the loss of the war and, consequently, the anticipated Allied occupation of Nazi Germany. Life Magazine speculated about the suicides: "In the last days of the war the overwhelming realization of utter defeat was too much for many Germans. Stripped of the bayonets and bombast which had given them power, they could not face a reckoning with either their conquerors or their consciences. These found the quickest and surest escape in what Germans call selbstmord, self-murder."[15]
waves of suicides during the final days of the Nazi regime
On 1 May 1945, about 1,000 residents of , Germany committed mass suicide in the advent of the Red Army's capture of the town.[16]
Demmin
A mass ritual suicide is called a puputan. Major puputan occurred in 1906–1908 when Balinese kingdoms faced overwhelming Dutch colonial forces. The root of the Balinese term puputan is puput, meaning 'finishing' or 'ending'. It is an act that is more symbolic than strategic; the Balinese are "a people whose genius for theatre is unsurpassed" and a puputan is viewed as "the last act of a tragic dance-drama".[17]
Balinese
is known for its centuries of suicide tradition, from seppuku ceremonial self-disemboweling to kamikaze warriors flying their aircraft into Allied warships and banzai charge during World War II. During this same war, the Japanese forces announced to the people of Saipan that the invading American troops were going to torture and murder anyone on the island. In a desperate effort to avoid this, the people of Saipan committed suicide, many jumping from places later named "Suicide Cliff" and "Banzai Cliff". Similar cases of mass suicide by Japanese civilians and colonial settlers also happened during the subsequent Battle of Okinawa and the Soviet invasion of Manchuria.
Japan
Cult
Religious fanaticism
Khovanshchina
Puputan
Folie à deux
Archived 2012-10-23 at the Wayback Machine by Barry Isaacson
"From Silver Lake to Suicide: One Family's Secret History of the Jonestown Massacre"
– CNN, 26 March 1997
39 men die in mass suicide near San Diego
Time.com 19 January 1998
Near-Death Experience
Arunima Dey, "Women as Martyrs: Mass Suicides at Thoas Khalsa During the Partition of India", Indi@logs, Vol 3 2016, pp. 7–17
by Larry Lee Litke. Published at The Jonestown Institute. Originally published 1980