Blood and Rage: A Cultural history of Terrorism [Paperback]

Michael Burleigh wrote a well-received history of the Third Reich some years ago, so I thought that this would be a well-researched, balanced and useful book.

I was much mistaken.

There are a number of errors made on things I do know about, like the Troubles in Northern Ireland. This undermines my faith when Burleigh's talking about things about which I know nothing. For example, the old canard about the 'IRA = I Ran Away' graffiti's repeated. As Brian Hanley's shown in History Ireland, there's a single, unreliable source for this, who claimed to have seen graffiti of which there are no photographs. Again, Burleigh claims that the Red Army Faction had 'extensive' contacts with the IRA. These appear to be contacts known solely to himself. And there's the rather bizarre claim that IRA prisoners could exert such dominance over a prison that many prison officers committed suicide. No source for this, interesting though it'd be to follow up.

There's also some dishonesty involved. When he says that Sinn Fein got 65% of the vote in the 'southern' 26 counties of Ireland and 48% throughout the island as a whole in the general election of 1918, it's easy to forget that Sinn Fein won 73 of 105 seats and that some seats were uncontested, so presumably had no vote.

Again, when talking about the anarchists he declares that there was an anarchist 'Black International' in the late 19th and early 20th centuries because there was an anarchist conference of five people in 1881, which did not 'reconvene' until 1907. Which would suggest to me that there was not in fact an anarchist international plotting murder and assassination.

The mixture of error, dishonesty and perverse interpretation of evidence leads me to give the book a poor score.

Burleigh is a conservative in the style of Michael Oakeshott. He believes that the best chance of a peaceful global future is to repel terrorist ideology and its exponents with greater vigour than Europe has mustered up to now. Europe contains enough human rights lawyers, race relations experts and left liberal academics to defend the rights of terrorists. What is needed is a passionate counter-attack on terrorism and its defenders.
There is no mistaking Burleigh's moral outlook: terrorists are to blame for the mayhem they inflict, not governments or their security forces. The most skilled terrorists (Abu Nidal, Carlos the Jackal) quickly descend into graft and corruption, except for a few lucky veterans who have comfortable posts at American universities. Terrorists are globalised and seek access to nuclear technology. The security services need to do better.

This is a big, incisive cultural history of some of the most prominent terrorist groups in the last 150 years. Burleigh doesn't attempt any grand cause-and-effect explanation of the phenomenon. There will always be grievances and some groups will seize on the modern technology of the bomb and the bullet, kidnapping, hijacking and extortion to (in their eyes) move history on. On the other hand, he concludes that the rage of terrorism can subside. Many ideological causes which underpinned terrorism have passed into oblivion.
It is a surprisingly upbeat conclusion from a writer who does not conceal his own outrage at the indiscriminate mayhem perpetrated by terrorists in the name of Liberty, world revolution, utopia and "true" Islam. But Burleigh is not a fan of Washington's neo-cons and George Bush's "War on Terror" either. He is more convinced of the effectiveness of smarter psychological tactics to "turn" the radicals, as in Saudi Arabia's programmeto wean low-level jihadists off violence, using similar methods to those used to retrieve victims of sinister cults. The "war on terror" takes time. The Cold War lasted from 1947 to 1989. "On that calendar, we are on the equivalent of 1953 in the struggle with the jihad-salafis".

But the West is still its own worst enemy. Terrorists organised freely in "Londonistan" and in England's northern cities, protected by "community leaders" and left-liberal "multiculturism". European universities in the 1970s, treasuring free speech, allowed the Red Brigades and Baader Meinhof to recruit and spread the "revolutionary" message of Euro-neo-Marxism. The security services in Britain were slow to switch from penetrating the IRA and loyalist paramilitaries to learning Arabic and Urdu as a preliminary to paying visits to the mosques of Bradford and Birmingham.
Burleigh approaches terrorism as an anthropologist would investigate an exotic tribe, a tribe with its own oral history, spiritual values and rituals. This certainly works for the anarchists and nihilists in the 19th century, and the jihadis of the 21st. A form of political religion offers them a utopian vision and justifies atrocities which are in fact forbidden by all monotheistic religions. But it is less plausible when applied to the South African ANC in its campaign of sabotage in the 1980s. The ANC leadership and the South African Communist Party were certainly willing to kill civilians as well as the security forces in their anti-apartheid campaign, but it was clearly a tactic in their campaign to seize power, and it went parallel with covert negotiations with the regime.
There is a strong chapter in this book on Islamic terrorism. Tracing its modern twentieth century version back to Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini, who seized leadership of the Muslim world from the nationalist dictators and generals after 1970, Burleigh shows how Khomeini created a strong ideological cocktail, mixing Islamic purity with popular anti-Americanism. This was exported to the Middle East through Hezbollah, and it enabled Muslims to unite around the Arab-Israeli dispute. But beyond removing Israel from the map, the ultimate aim, increasingly trumpeted by Al-Qaida, was a new Muslim caliphate, achieved by asymmetric warfare - the heroes would not be Arab armies, but hijackers and suicide bombers.

This is a passionate and thrustful work of intense scholarship. It is short of broad analytical themes Committed left-liberal readers of the New York Times and The Guardian will certainly not give it five stars for inclusiveness. They will wish to raise a debate about "state terror" and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And they will probably prefer to read books with a more nuanced attitude to terrorists. Perhaps the sanest of these is Robert Fisk's account of the Middle East conflict The Great War for Civilisation (Harper, 2006). Burleigh is at his best in Earthly Powers (Harper,2005) and Sacred Causes (Harper, 2006). These two earlier works are a matchless portrayal of terrorism, religion and politics from Robespierre to Bin Laden.

Overall, I was disappointed with book. It is a potted history of several terrorist conflicts, unsurprisingly focusing on the most recents ones within the last 40 years. It gives very little insight into common themes between conflicts, why and how they occur, what sustains them and why they end. It touches on, but doesn't really explore the link and crossover between terrorism and criminality.

The only theme that comes through consistently is Burleigh's total contempt for terrorists and their idealology. This is done through acid one liners which show the moral bankcruptcy and double standards of the terrorist whenever they try and justify their actions. This is fine (though this does get tedious towrds the end) and I can't disagree with him, but it doesn't explain why terrorists will maintain community support (however passive) for their actions and so that they campaign for decades with a constant stream of recruits and funds.

Where Burleigh gets himself worked up into a ferment of rage and loathing is the last section on Islamic terrorism. In some ways it's one the better sections as it's more than just a quick run through of characters and terrorist atrocities (perhaps because the number of incidents has been smaller, although each has been on a much larger scale). Here for Burleigh the liberal lawmaking elite of the Western democracies (shameful left leaning lawyers, worthless asylum laws and benefit handouts for all, are consisted derided) and the poorly co-ordinated security services are almost as much to blame as radical islamic clerics. I feel that Burleigh really just wanted to write about this subject, but for whatever reason thought to expand it to a more general work on terrorism. One final gripe, tying into this, is his constant references to "Londonistan" all through the book. It's as though the final section was on his mind all the time he was writing.

To be fair though it is a good read that keeps up a decent pace, and can serve as good introduction to the terrorist conflicts it covers. For me, I found the part on the Red Brigades and the RAF particularly interesting having little knowledge about these conflicts prior to reading the book.

Overall, you won't be bored reading the book, and it might even get you thinking a little, but if you're expecting deep insight and analysis, you're best looking elsewhere.