Contract Killing in the Information Age
()
About this ebook
A personal vendetta or self-driven interests are typical motives for pulling the trigger. In recent years, however, crime records have seen a staggering increase in the number of cases involving hired guns. This book explores why and how the phenomenon is growing to threaten all strata of a highly destablizied society.
Read more from Jason Ray Forbus
La Leggenda di Robert Johnson Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Child Far Away Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Final Reaping Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Related to Contract Killing in the Information Age
Related ebooks
Snipers and Shooters Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Assassins: Cold-blooded and Pre-meditated Killings that Shook the World Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsPrison Guide: Prison Survival Secrets Revealed Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Sniper Encyclopaedia: An A–Z Guide to World Sniping Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsDead Biker: A Novel Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Murder Hobo Handbook Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Boston Mob Guide: Hit Men, Hoodlums & Hideouts Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Soldier of Fortune Guide to How to Disappear and Never Be Found Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBolters and Coolers: Tales of a Bouncer, Bodyguard and Cook Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSharpshooters: Marksmen through the Ages Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBiker: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Prize Possession Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5True Crime: Gangsters Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsHow to Operate Your Rifle Like a Pro: U.S. Army Official Manual, With Demonstrative Images Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsUnderworld: How to Survive and Thrive in the American Mafia Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5What the Citizen Should Know About Our Arms and Weapons: A Guide to Weapons from the 1940s Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Ultimate Biker Anthology: An Introduction To Books About Motorcycle Clubs & Outlaw Bikers Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsCommunist Guerilla Warfare Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsHow to Undertake Surveillance & Reconnaissance: From a Civilian and Military Perspective Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsRecce: Small Team Missions Behind Enemy Lines Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Own the Night: Selection and Use of Tactical Lights and Laser Sights Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsCOMBAT TERRORISM Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBlood In, Blood Out: The Violent Empire of the Aryan Brotherhood Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Hearts and Mines: With the Marines in al Anbar: A Story of Psychological Warfare in Iraq Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Ultimate Guide to U.S. Army Combat Skills, Tactics, and Techniques Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Jersey Tough: My Wild Ride from Outlaw Biker to Undercover Cop Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5Technical surveillance counter-measures A Complete Guide Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Murder For You
The Devil You Know: Encounters in Forensic Psychiatry Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Under the Bridge Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Devil's Knot: The True Story of the West Memphis Three Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Mindhunter: Inside the FBI's Elite Serial Crime Unit Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Slenderman: Online Obsession, Mental Illness, and the Violent Crime of Two Midwestern Girls Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Evidence of Love: A True Story of Passion and Death in the Suburbs Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5In with the Devil: A Fallen Hero, a Serial Killer, and a Dangerous Bargain for Redemption Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Three Sisters in Black: The Bizarre True Case of the Bathtub Tragedy Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Haunted Road Atlas: Sinister Stops, Dangerous Destinations, and True Crime Tales Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5All That Remains: A Renowned Forensic Scientist on Death, Mortality, and Solving Crimes Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Anatomy Of Motive: The Fbis Legendary Mindhunter Explores The Key To Understanding And Catching Vi Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5After Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Deaths of Sybil Bolton: Oil, Greed, and Murder on the Osage Reservation Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Cruel Deception: A True Story of Murder and a Mother's Deadly Game Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Road to Jonestown: Jim Jones and Peoples Temple Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Death Row, Texas: Inside the Execution Chamber Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Written in Bone: Hidden Stories in What We Leave Behind Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Confession of a Serial Killer: The Untold Story of Dennis Rader, the BTK Killer Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5An Assassin in Utopia: The True Story of a Nineteenth-Century Sex Cult and a President's Murder Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsJourney Into Darkness Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Party Monster: A Fabulous But True Tale of Murder in Clubland Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Whoever Fights Monsters: My Twenty Years Tracking Serial Killers for the FBI Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/518 Tiny Deaths: The Untold Story of Frances Glessner Lee and the Invention of Modern Forensics Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Hunt A Killer: The Detective's Puzzle Book: True-Crime Inspired Ciphers, Codes, and Brain Games Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Trial of Lizzie Borden Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Reviews for Contract Killing in the Information Age
0 ratings0 reviews
Book preview
Contract Killing in the Information Age - Jason Ray Forbus
978-1-326-48004-2
FOREWORD
A street thug and a paid killer are professionals - beasts of prey, if you will, who have dissociated themselves from the rest of humanity and can now see human beings in the same way that trout fishermen see trout.
So speaks the American psychiatrist Willard Gaylin. His view seems to confirm one of the many myths and legends that surround the mysterious figure variously known as the professional (or hired) killer, the assassin and the hit man.
Such a person is widely thought of in modern society as standing alone, outside of the common run of humanity, coldly and calculatedly observing fellow human beings as if they were animals to be hunted or as mere objects to be manipulated at will.
Such a view is perpetuated in countless popular fictions.
At the current time the comprehensive online film database IMDB lists 1015 movies that have the keyword ‘hit man’ attached to them.
The related term ‘assassin’ yields some 841 films that concern such a figure.
The majority of these films seem to date from the last twenty years or so, indicating that the hit man has become one of the central figures in contemporary popular culture, ranking along other sinister but compelling personages as the zombie and the vampire.
Something about modern popular culture finds the professional killer a highly fascinating figure, a character that is constantly resurrected and reworked, from the existential loners of Le Samourai and Ghost Dog, to the ‘ordinary’ guys who just happen to murder for a living, as in Grosse Pointe Blank.
Perhaps the key characteristic of the fictionalised assassin is his (or in the case of La Femme Nikita, her) cool.
This is coolness in two senses: the level-headedness needed to make a hit successfully, evading capture and pocketing the fee; and the coolness of the lone individual handling high-specification, hi-tech hardware with minimum fuss and maximum expertise and precision.
Any fool can (mis)handle a gun, says popular culture; but only the hired killer knows and understand the aesthetics of the rifle barrel and the silencer, the silence of the kill, and the cleanliness of a job well done.
If we were to believe what we watch and what we read in films and magazines, the professional killer is cool personified, walking and shooting cool.
This myth has particularly been proposed, reiterated and reworked since the 1960s. The two great source-texts are these.
First, the films of Jean-Pierre Melville (such as Le Samourai noted above), where trench- coated, trilby-wearing assassins stalk the streets of Paris, presented as emblems of humankind’s existential predicaments – the human creature quite alone in a world not of his own making, at odds with and utterly removed from all other human beings.
Melville can be credited with turning the Sartrean existential individual of the 1950s into a hired assassin, a person whose one meaningful connection with other people is when he trains his sights upon them.
The author major source of the modern fetishisation of the hired killer as the epitome of cool is Frederick Forsyth’s The Day of the Jackal, turned into a highly influential film in the early 70s.
As the Jackal speeds around summertime Italy and France in his open-top white convertible, preparing the means for an impossible hit – the assassination of de Gaulle – the viewer is left to wonder – could I do that? Could I kill people – rich and powerful people, perhaps wicked and depraved people – for a living? Even the most mild-mannered person may be tempted to engage in such thoughts, even just for a moment.
Popular culture has set up the assassin as a powerful attraction figure, someone who – at least in the best cases – is truly Nietzschean, being thoroughly beyond good and evil. The assassin, like God, sits in judgement on the lives of those below him. While God sees all from the sky or some transcendent viewpoint, the professional killer sees all through his telescopic sight, while perched on a rooftop.
Like God’s the hit man’s gaze is downward and panoptic, as well as being able to home in on the minutest details of its target.
There are theological resonances in how we imagine the doings and characters of those who kill for money.
It is particularly remarkable that the hitman should have such a positive image. Of course, one need not be a fully paid-up Lacanian to realise that popular culture is full of the most peculiar perversities.
After all, the serial killer is widely presented as someone that has a certain sort of allure, from the warped morality of a Dexter to the ineffable charm of Hannibal Lecter.
But the striking thing is