In this bracingly opinionated account, the author argues that all terrorists are "morally insane". From playboys to psychopaths, narcissists to n'er-do-wells, "the milieu of terrorists is invariably morally squalid, when it is not merely criminal." Slaughter costs, and money laundering, peddling drugs, extortion and armed robbery all fall within the job description.
Burleigh defines terrorism as a tactic. It's also a lifestyle choice which is neither glamorous nor admirable, as Burleigh sets out to show. Spanning the last 150 years, Burleigh examines ideologically-inspired movements (Nihilists, revolutionaries, Red Brigadists, the Baader-Meinhof gang) and nationalist/separatist activists: Fenians, ETA, FLN and OAS, the PLO and various Middle East factions, the ANC, Irish Republicans and Loyalists).
Each informative and absorbing chapter could stand alone, whether it's detailing Algeria's fight for independence or the continuing armed struggle of the Basques. Devoting the final portion of the book to Islamic terrorism, the historian explains why Islamofascist or Islamobolshevik are terms to be avoided. (Jihadi-Salafists is more accurate). Latin American and Sri Lankan terrorists don't figure but the weird Japanese Red Army does, whose operatives embarked on missions with Rimbaud poems and origami dolls tucked inside their pockets.
Burleigh's searing anger isn't just directed at terrorists but the way in which he thinks we deal with them. Britain's tradition of offering sanctuary to foreign radicals is partly answerable for our present status as "Londonistan". If we believe him, it's liberal apologists who started making life easy for terrorists as far back as the l9th century. Around the time the Russian Kadet Party was sympathising with their violent acts, French poet Tailharde was declaring "What do the victims matter, as long as the gesture is beautiful?". Since then, other "useful idiots" have included lawyers who abet their terrorist clients, pundits quick to hog the microphone and terror-groupies such as "that loathsome academic enthusiast for the purifying effects of political violence", Jean-Paul Sartre.
Not only have terrorists consistently exploited the media, but their love affair with technology isn't new, either. Once the superiority of dynamite over gunpowder had been established, Fenian and anarchist newspapers gave tips on handling explosives and advertised bomb-making classes. Today the details are available on the internet. The Red Brigades were already filming their executions in 1980. Blowing up London Transport may seem like a sinister new development; however, Fenians dropped bombs on the Metropolitan Line in 1883. Russian anarchists, meanwhile, were carrying out suicide bombing as early as 1904. Long-haired Nihilists with their tinted glasses may not have been anticipating 72 virgins, but they subscribed to the ultimate meaningless act in a world which (for them) had no meaning.
The refugee camp and the occupied homeland have produced generations of brutalised people with nothing to lose. But Bin Laden and Carlos the Jackal both hailed from the super-rich, and there have been scores of "guilty white kids", the offspring of lawyers, architects and judges who have grabbed guns and joined the fray. The youth who murdered Russia's Prime Minister in 1911 rejected a future of "nothing but an endless number of cutlets". Thirty years earlier, Vera Figner abandoned her privileged position as a "beautiful doll" to help assassinate Tsar Alexander II. The Red Brigades and Baader-Meinhof had "beautiful dolls" too, ruthlessly exploiting their middle-class connections.
Vanity is never in short supply among terrorists. The charismatic peasant and maniac Serge Nechaev basked in the admiration of socially smart women. High on amphetamines in his tight trousers, Andreas Baader also surrounded himself with a harem of radical chicks. The macho Ali Hassan Salameh of Black September liked gold-medallions and a beauty queen on his arm, while the Northern Irish loyalist-cum-drug-dealer "Mad Dog" Adair opted for arms pumped full of horse steroids and a shaved head polished with Mr Sheen.
Burleigh doesn't spare us the details in a world where punishments and spats are settled with acid in the face, kneecappings, chisels and knives. A sense of the ridiculous occasionally dilutes the horror. There's something comic, for instance, about some of the Baader-Meinhof antics, such as Ulrike Meinhof unscrewing a hand grenade, not realising she was supposed to toss it away. In jail, Baader and Jan-Carl Raspe were given communicating cells. After three weeks, Raspe pleaded for the door to be bricked up again.
Engaging and provocative, Burleigh is master of the caustic putdown. Radical cleric Abu Hamza stuck to bomb-making in Afghanistan being "too bulky to romp easily up and down mountains". Gerry Adams has "the tone of a sociology lecturer at a provincial university"; Bin Laden resembles "those self-righteous superannuated rock stars with delusions of grandeur who harangue world leaders about Africa".
Perceiving Islamist terrorism with its Crusader-Zionist fixation as a real threat to civilisation, Burleigh nevertheless ends on a positive note. We need to entice extremists back to normality and he suggests several things we could do: stop identifying ourselves with repressive states; promote democracy; encourage a true dialogue between western and Islamic cultures. Only then will Jihadist- Salafism, like other terrorist movements, begin its death throes.
A review of: Blood and Rage: A Cultural History of Terrorism, by Michael Burleigh.
Marianne Brace
CHAPTER 1
TERRORISM
MORE DEADLY IN THE 1970s & 80s
Source: Statista from Global Terrorism Database.
Sunday, 11 January 2015
SAME STORY, DIFFFERENT ACTORS
They say that those who do not know history are condemned to repeat it. The “Charlie Hebdo” atrocities of last week are many things; frightening, terrifying, atrocious, a horror, an attack on what we stand for. But, as a phenomenon they are not new, or exceptional or uniquely Muslim.
You do not have to be a young Muslim living in the 21 century to be subject to radicalisation. It has always, down the ages been possible to persuade young men (and a few – a very few young women) of all faiths and none to the believe that is noble to kill innocent people in pursuit of what they have been persuaded is a great cause. As far back as the first century, the Jewish Zealots did it against Roman rule. In the 11 century the Shia Muslim Hashashin added another word – assassin – to our vocabulary of terror by their attacks on the Persian Government of the day. In our own time we have had to deal with our own “home grown” so called “Catholic” terrorists of the IRA (who by the way killed and destroyed far more than the current wave of jihadist outrages) – as well as the outrages perpetrated by the anti-imperialist urban terrorism of young middle class white Germans in the Bader-Meinhof Gang and its successor the Rot Armee Fraktion.
Perhaps the closest parallel to what we are seeing now is the Anarchist movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. All entirely “home grown” and without any kind of formal command structures, they too were a collection of “lone wolves” inspired by texts and prepared to kill and maim to abolish states and replace them with borderless self-governed entities which, leaving aside that they were based on a political idea rather than a religious one, bear a striking similarity to the caliphate model of today.
In pursuit of what they called “the propaganda of the deed”, they too killed and maimed by bomb and gun, large numbers of innocents – as well as an extraordinary number of the most powerful and prominent. On June 2 1919 simultaneous bombs attacks in New York, Boston, Pittsburgh, Cleveland and Patterson in New Jersey killed a mayor, a state legislator, three judges, two businessmen a policeman and a catholic priest. A year later perhaps the earliest “car bomb” blew up outside Wall Street killing 39 and injuring