DesertFox
03-01-2008, 06:14 PM
Nicholas Shakespeare reviews Blood & Rage: a Cultural History of Terrorism by Michael Burleigh
We live in an age of cultural disorder, where to point a finger at the absurdities of radical Islam is to be branded a racist, a fascist or a bigot. This timely and important book would probably not have been published 10 years ago, but its relevance is bracing.
Michael Burleigh's theme: the moral squalor, intellectual poverty and psychotic nature of terrorist organisations, from the Fenians of the mid-19th century to today's jihadists - the latter group, especially, being composed of unstable males of conspicuously limited abilities and imagination, and yet who pose "an existential threat to the whole of civilisation" with their crusade to realise "a world that almost nobody wants", all in the hope of an afterlife featuring 72 virgins and rivers foaming with honey and beer.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/graphics/2008/03/01/bobur101.jpg
Trail of destruction: firefighters survey the wreckage of the World Trade Center
A winner of the 2001 Samuel Johnson Prize, Burleigh is no racist, fascist or bigot. He is a clear-eyed historian in the impatient, sceptical mould of Richard Dawkins. He sets his targets in context, like ducks in a row, and then pulverises them with an orderly and ceaseless barrage of facts, even as he acknowledges that "facts do not seem to inhibit emotion and prejudice".
His book does not aim to be comprehensive - regrettably, he omits any analysis of Latin American, Armenian or Malayan terrorists - but shows a thorough acquaintance with the arenas in which it does deal, namely Ireland, Russia, Italy, Spain, Germany and the Middle East.
Burleigh has read and travelled enough to express an impeccable contempt for the "theoretical gobbledygook" of the IRA or the "stunningly tedious" ideology of the New Left, while sharing the bemusement of the kidnapped German industrialist Hans Schleyer "at the incredible ignorance his captors [the Red Army Faction] demonstrated about the higher workings of the German economy".
The Baader-Meinhof's ignorance of politics was almost as dangerous as its co-founder's ignorance of ballistics: Ulrike Meinhof, a former modish journalist, once pulled the ring of a hand grenade "without grasping the point that she was supposed to throw the already fizzing object".
Meinhof's co-revolutionary Andreas Baader embodies many of the resentful and narcissistic traits that Burleigh identifies in his subjects: sour, lazy nobodies, ugly, of febrile imagination and indifferent talent, who can only become somebody by blowing others, inevitably persons more talented and intelligent, up.
More (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2008/03/01/bobur101.xml)
We live in an age of cultural disorder, where to point a finger at the absurdities of radical Islam is to be branded a racist, a fascist or a bigot. This timely and important book would probably not have been published 10 years ago, but its relevance is bracing.
Michael Burleigh's theme: the moral squalor, intellectual poverty and psychotic nature of terrorist organisations, from the Fenians of the mid-19th century to today's jihadists - the latter group, especially, being composed of unstable males of conspicuously limited abilities and imagination, and yet who pose "an existential threat to the whole of civilisation" with their crusade to realise "a world that almost nobody wants", all in the hope of an afterlife featuring 72 virgins and rivers foaming with honey and beer.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/graphics/2008/03/01/bobur101.jpg
Trail of destruction: firefighters survey the wreckage of the World Trade Center
A winner of the 2001 Samuel Johnson Prize, Burleigh is no racist, fascist or bigot. He is a clear-eyed historian in the impatient, sceptical mould of Richard Dawkins. He sets his targets in context, like ducks in a row, and then pulverises them with an orderly and ceaseless barrage of facts, even as he acknowledges that "facts do not seem to inhibit emotion and prejudice".
His book does not aim to be comprehensive - regrettably, he omits any analysis of Latin American, Armenian or Malayan terrorists - but shows a thorough acquaintance with the arenas in which it does deal, namely Ireland, Russia, Italy, Spain, Germany and the Middle East.
Burleigh has read and travelled enough to express an impeccable contempt for the "theoretical gobbledygook" of the IRA or the "stunningly tedious" ideology of the New Left, while sharing the bemusement of the kidnapped German industrialist Hans Schleyer "at the incredible ignorance his captors [the Red Army Faction] demonstrated about the higher workings of the German economy".
The Baader-Meinhof's ignorance of politics was almost as dangerous as its co-founder's ignorance of ballistics: Ulrike Meinhof, a former modish journalist, once pulled the ring of a hand grenade "without grasping the point that she was supposed to throw the already fizzing object".
Meinhof's co-revolutionary Andreas Baader embodies many of the resentful and narcissistic traits that Burleigh identifies in his subjects: sour, lazy nobodies, ugly, of febrile imagination and indifferent talent, who can only become somebody by blowing others, inevitably persons more talented and intelligent, up.
More (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2008/03/01/bobur101.xml)