Malicious Intent
By LOUISE RICHARDSON
BLOOD
AND RAGE
A
Cultural History of Terrorism
By Michael Burleigh
Illustrated. 577 pp. Harper/HarperCollins
Publishers. $29.99
Michael
Burleigh’s ambitious cultural history of terrorism is indeed suffused with
blood and rage. The blood is provided in graphic, detailed, often nauseating
descriptions of the vicious brutality of terrorists ranging from the Irish
Fenians to Al Qaeda. The rage, on the other hand, is in the pen of the author, and it is
equally wide ranging. Burleigh rages against terrorists and all their
apologists: “unserious” academics, ineffably polite interrogators, colluding
human rights lawyers and those scourges of the modern age, the
multiculturalists.
Behind
the blood and the rage, this is a learned and erudite book. Burleigh’s broad
survey provides detailed descriptions of many of the most important terrorist
movements and the sociopolitical contexts in which they have operated since the
mid-19th century. He seamlessly synthesizes vast amounts of historical material
and provides often riveting accounts of terrorist atrocities and the literary
and political environments where they took place. He treats Russian nihilists,
European anarchists, Fenians of both the 19th- and 20th-century variety,
Algerians, Palestinians, South Africans, the Italian Red Brigades, the German Red Army Faction
and the Basque ETA before coming to his real interest, Islamic terrorism. A less ambitious
author might have given his readers two books, as there is little direct
connection between the various parts other than the unstated point that Islamic
terrorism is just the most recent manifestation of an old phenomenon. The
implication is that, like its precursors, it too will pass.
Burleigh
is a respected historian widely known for his work on the Third Reich, and with
“Blood and Rage” he has written a deeply idiosyncratic book. He provides no
explanation for why he includes some terrorist organizations and not others;
important groups like the Colombian FARC,
the Shining Path of Peru and the Tamil Tigers
of Sri Lanka receive little or no mention, nor do most other Latin American or
Asian groups. Burleigh’s
interest remains Europe.
Neither
does he have any time for defining terrorism. He concludes his book by forgoing
any academic definition, substituting instead a heartbreaking account of the
suffering of a victim of the July 7, 2005, attacks on the London underground —
though the description could equally apply to anyone facing an unexpected
death. Definitions are in fact useful in helping us decide what to include.
Burleigh gives long accounts, for example, of the sabotage and guerrilla
activities of the African National Congress and the assassination campaigns of the 19th-century anarchists while
suggesting that these are not really acts of terrorism. He writes about them
anyway.
Burleigh
asserts the motive of terrorists to be the creation of a climate of fear “in
order to compensate for the legitimate political power they do not possess.” He
may be right (though I don’t think so), but in any event he would be more
persuasive if he argued the point rather than asserting it. He insists that
terrorists are “morally insane,” whatever that means, and that they are driven
by perceived slights or abstract grievances into hysterical rage. One does not
have to be an apologist for terrorism to recognize that many of these
grievances — occupation, political disenfranchisement, confinement in refugee
camps — may be quite concrete and far from slight. One has only to read the
statements or listen to the audiotapes of terrorist leaders to detect more cold
calculation than what Burleigh terms obsessional killing rage.
It
is a great shame that Burleigh could not bring himself to provide sources for
most of the remarkable material he presents. He derides academics for providing
footnotes to “prove earnestness.” In fact most academics provide footnotes
because they don’t presume that theirs is the last word on a subject and want
to encourage their readers and their students to delve further. Not Burleigh.
At
times his account is thoughtful and nuanced, as in his discussion of the role
of torture in the French campaign in Algeria, but on other occasions he
generalizes with breathtaking self-confidence. Speaking about a fifth of the
world’s population, he asserts that “Muslims liked to point out” and “Muslim
girls toe the line at home” and “most Muslims do not seem to grasp the fact
that.” Sometimes he is quite funny, as when he compares Osama
bin Laden to “superannuated rock stars” like Bono and Bob Geldof, though it is not always clear that he means to be.
To
appreciate the virtues of this book (it is, in its way, an exceptional
synthesis), one has to make a conscious and concerted effort to ignore the
condescending tone, the incessant sneering, the unsupported assertions and the
gross generalizations. Few escape Burleigh’s ire. He describes Sartre as a
“loathsome academic” at one point and an “aged useful idiot” at another.
Foucault is a “silly Western intellectual.” Chernyshevsky’s utopian novel,
“What Is to Be Done?,” is “execrable,” and liberal artists are idiots. He
complains of “the sanctimonious ethos” of The New York Times and describes
students at the London School of Economics as “Eurotrash and Americans doing
‘Let’s See Europe.’ ” There is certainly a lot of rage here, but quite what it
has to do with terrorism is often hard to tell.
Clearly,
Burleigh’s hyperbole is designed to stamp out any shred of residual sympathy
for terrorists. But at times, apparently, he’s trying to be gratuitously
offensive, as when he describes as “undiplomatic” the suggestion that all Jews
be thrown into the sea, or says the undisciplined Black and Tans introduced “a
certain indiscriminate vigor,” or attributes the decline in the Protestant
population of the Republic of Ireland to something approaching “ethnic
cleansing.”
On
other occasions he seems unaware of his prejudices. This is particularly the
case when it comes to his treatment of the crimes of women. The Russian
nihilist Vera Figner became alienated from her husband “notwithstanding his
having given up his career for her,” while the German Gudrun Ensslin “used her
fiancé to sire a son.” Horrors! When he wants to ridicule Osama bin Laden,
Burleigh cites a description of his having weak hands and a simpering smile
“like a girl’s.”
In
several instances, Burleigh seems to lose his critical faculties altogether in
order simply to be offensive. Rather than arguing the quite reasonable point
that the discrimination against Catholics in Northern Ireland under the
Stormont government was not egregious and was better than the treatment of blacks
in the American South, he writes: “Protestant friends of mine from Dungannon
say that they often dated Catholic girls, who tended to be more feminine than
the butch Unionists. Unlike the U.S. Deep South, they could do this without
fear of being lynched.” He then goes on to miss the point about the Catholic
civil rights movement in Northern Ireland. For the first time Catholics were
claiming rights within Northern Ireland rather than demanding the overthrow of
the state, and it was the inflexible government’s blindness to this opportunity
— and the consequent emergence of violent republicanism — that had such tragic
consequences for the province.
Having
worked himself up into a red-hot rage in the course of his book over Islamic
terrorism and its apologists in the British liberal elite, Burleigh ends with
what is actually a reasoned analysis and with quite moderate prescriptions. He
calls for more financing for public diplomacy, development aid, strengthening
of democratic institutions and reliance on intelligence over armed force —
prescriptions that are not that much different from those of the liberal elite
he castigates. Had Burleigh written with less self-regard and with more regard
for his readers, and had he written with less simplistic snideness and more of
the sophisticated synthesis at which he excels, “Blood and Rage” could have
been a very good book.
Louise
Richardson, the principal and vice chancellor at the University of St. Andrews
in Scotland, is the author of “What Terrorists Want.”
Blood and Rage By
MICHAEL BURLEIGH
First Chapter
Irish
grievances against the British in the nineteenth century were many. The British
had garrisoned Ireland with troops, and favoured the industrious Protestant
Scots-Irish of the North, because they suspected that its predominantly Roman
Catholic inhabitants would rebel with the aid of a foreign foe at the first
opportunity. In addition to the Ulster Presbyterians, there was an established,
that is privileged, Protestant Church of Ireland, even though most of the
population were Catholics. There was a fine Protestant university, Trinity
College, Dublin, but none for Catholics. Ireland was part of a global empire,
but was often treated as an offshore agricultural colony where labourers and
poorer tenant farmers lived in chronic insecurity at the whim of absentee
English landlords. Millions had left for the US (and industrialising Britain)
where they adopted radical views that were far in advance of those of most
people in Ireland itself. Confronted by virulent strains of American
Protestantism, they compensated for discrimination by becoming more
aggressively Irish, caricaturing the English as latterday Normans and
sentimentalising the old country with its ancient barrows, bogs, castles and
mists. That these were historically authentic was partly due to their being
noted, from 1824 onwards, on detailed Ordnance Survey maps, while another
British intrusion - the national census - ironically contributed to a growth of
Irish cultural nationalism. Successive censuses had startling revelations.
Whereas in 1845 half the population spoke Irish (or Gaelic), by 1851 this had
fallen to 23 per cent, and below 15 per cent forty years later. The Gaelic
League was born of a desire for an Irish-Irish patriotic literature at a time
when the brightest stars in that firmament were Anglo-Irish Protestant
nationalists like J. M. Synge, Sean O'Casey or W. B. Yeats.
Many
complexities about the real, as opposed to imaginary, Ireland were lost in the
Atlantic translation as fond hearts filled with hatred. Irish volunteers for
the British army, replete with their own Catholic military chaplains, won a
disproportionately high number of Victoria Crosses during the Crimean War.
English and Irish liberals, led by the High Anglican prime minister William
Ewart Gladstone, combined with British nonconformists to disestablish the
anomalous Church of Ireland in 1869. Partly due to the disruptive ingenuity of
a caucus of Irish MPs in the House of Commons, notably under Charles Stewart
Parnell, and endemic rural criminality, Land Acts alleviated the insecurity of
the smallest class of tenants. Finally, more and more British politicians, led
eventually by Gladstone himself, were persuaded that Ireland's future lay in
some degree of Home Rule, with separate legislatures benefiting both England
and Ireland, the two countries joined at a more exalted level for defence or
foreign policy by an imperial parliament continuing to sit at Westminster. That
prospect, which became real enough on the eve of the First World War, was
sufficient for the Protestant majority in Ulster to seek German arms to
preserve their membership of a more developed Belfast-Glasgow-Liverpool
industrialised axis, if necessary detached from the benighted clerical South.
Irish terrorism
grew out of a venerable insurrectionary tradition that was manifestly failing
by the mid-nineteenth century, only to return with a vengeance after an
intervening lull in the late 1960s. The older history created many of the myths
and martyrs of the more recent Troubles, as well as patterns of behaviour and
thought that have survived in armed Irish republicanism within our lifetimes.
There were many malign ghosts.
On 17 March
1858 an organisation was founded in Dublin by a railway engineer called James
Stephens. It was St Patrick's Day. Within a few years this mutated into the
Irish Republican Brotherhood, although that name was never employed as widely
as 'Fenians'. This referred to a mythical band of pre-Christian Irish warriors,
or the Fianna, roughly similar to romantic English legends about the Knights of
King Arthur. For the English it meant a dastardly gang of murdering
desperadoes. Fenianism encompassed a range of activities, with harmless
conviviality and labour activism at the legal end of the spectrum, through to
rural disturbances, insurrection and terrorism on the illegal margins Incubated
in the political underworld of Paris, or the rough-and-ready slums of North
America's eastern seaboard, the culture was heavily indebted to that of secret
societies, with arcane rituals, masonic oaths and signs, a major reason why the
Roman Catholic Church was largely unsympathetic. The general goal was the
'disenthralment' of the Irish race and the achievement of an Irish republic
through violent struggle, all this within a broader context of Gaelic cultural
self-assertion to which there has been some allusion.
The
strategy, ultimately derived from the 1798 Wolfe Tone rebellion, was to
transform British imperial difficulties into Irish opportunities. The imperial
difficulties included the Crimean War, the Indian Mutiny and the Zulu, Sudan
and Boer Wars, as well as crises in British relations with France in the 1850s,
with the US in the 1860s, and with Russia in the 1870s, for a war with any of these
would enhance the prospects of an independent Irish republic. While the number
of Irish heroes in the Crimea seemed to suggest that this strategy had failed,
the Fenians took courage from the war's exposure of Britain's military
deficiencies and the barely concealed rift with its French ally. In addition to
trying to arm the Zulus, even the mahdi's 'swarthy desert warriors' became
objects of Fenian interest, a trend that would continue into the late twentieth
century in the form of Irish Republican Army links with the Palestine
Liberation Organisation and Libya.
The Fenians
drew upon the wider Irish emigration, whether in mainland Britain or the United
States of America. They included refugees from the conditions that had produced
the mid-nineteenthcentury famine, of which many Irish-Americans had raw
memories. Life in the urban Irish ghettos of the US (or industrial Britain) was
primitive. The Irish were also heartily disliked by the Protestant aristocracy
that dominated the US, a fact which may explain their flight into a vehement
Irishness which had much purchase in Boston or 'New Cork'. The American Civil
War marked an important turning point since Britain was perceived to have
supported the Confederate South, at a time when 150,000 Irish-Americans were
fighting predominantly for the North. The Irish-Americans would inject
Fenianism with money and military expertise.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Blood and Rage by Michael Burleigh Copyright © 2009 by
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excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the
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