The theatre of cruelty
Last Updated: 12:01am GMT 01/03/2008
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.
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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".
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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.
Not for nothing, as it were, did the assassin of the US President William McKinley in 1901 choose as his alias "Fred Nobody".
Terrorism for Baader, as for other attention-seekers like Osama bin Laden, is theatre: a chance to direct your own production and to star in it after the manner of your favourite gangster films, among which The Battle of Algiers and The Wild Bunch ("one Red Brigade member had seen it 20 times") tend to feature prominently.
Baader borrowed a 16mm camera to record his arson attacks, dressed up in an array of wigs, and, while driving, stoned, to liberate mankind, liked to pat his face with powder in the mirror of his Mercedes. His bien-pensant apologist, Jean-Paul Sartre, said after meeting him, though not in public: "What an arsehole, this Baader."
Burleigh parades an arsenal of facts, and the cumulative effect is undeniable. Only with his claim that the tactic of terror "never amounted to more than an irritant", and was not crucial in forcing colonial powers to leave Palestine and Algeria, not to mention acceding to power in Ireland and South Africa, do I depart from his thesis.
He prefers to see the PLO, the ANC and Sinn Fein as flapping their armed wings, but never really taking off. Yet look how many "terrorists" did go on to lead their people: Begin, Shamir, Mandela, Tambo, Boumédienne, Arafat, Adams. Spain's present government was swept to power in direct response to the Madrid bombings.
Burleigh shares in his prose style something of the pitiless monotone with which his targets engage with the world. He finds little room for levity in over 500 pages, except where his keenness to be up to date gets the better of him. He has his finger on the pulse, but his foot on the pedal.
Blood & Rage is in all sorts of ways an outstanding book; it is also fuelled by the manic energy and focus of someone accelerating a truckload of intellectual high-explosives into the gates of a "stunningly" credulous soft-liberal establishment, composed of "colluding" human rights lawyers and "celebrity useful idiots" such as Tariq Ali, whom Burleigh witheringly chastises for having "progressively marginalised high intellectual endeavour" while at the same time conspiring to convert cosmopolitan London into the Islamic haven of "Londonistan".
A member of Italy's Red Brigades conceded that ideology was "a murderous drug, worse than heroin". Maybe Burleigh's biggest achievement is persuasively to argue that no ideology is worse than radical Islam - itself motivated by "sheer racial hatred" - which exploits Europe's tradition of freedom of worship (and welfare state) to curtail our freedom of speech. Its leaders are people who know their human rights, but not anyone else's.
Al Qa'eda's chief military spokesman in Europe puts it best: "You love life and we love death." If there are no flies on Burleigh, there are plenty on the moribund dogmas of those he dissects.