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Blood and Rage: A Cultural History of Terrorism

Creating a climate of fear

Michael Burleigh
HarperPress, 545pp, £25,

Sam Leith

Wednesday, 20th February 2008

Sam Leith on Michael Burleigh's latest book

At the outset of this rich, dense and polemical primer on the modern history of political violence Michael Burleigh has the good sense to define his terms. He describes terrorism as ‘a tactic primarily used by non-state actors, who can be an acephalous entity as well as a hierarchical organisation, to create a climate of fear in order to compensate for the legitimate political power they do not possess’. A phrase that recurs is ‘propaganda by the deed’, and he adds: ‘that modern states ... have been responsible for the most lethal instances of terrorism ... is taken as a given’.

Burleigh doesn’t seek to be comprehensive — South America and indigenous south- east Asian terrorism are largely omitted — but he is impressively wide-ranging. Starting with the 19th-century Fenians, he moves east to round up the anarchists, nihilists and revolutionaries (and drunks and madmen) we glimpse in Dostoevsky and Conrad. He has coherent and very interesting chapters on the way terrorism operated in the postcolonial continua of Algeria and Israel/Palestine — with their escalating call-and-response patterns of opposing paramilitary ultras. Through the PLO and Black September he examines the way terrorism became media-literate, then surveys the ‘guilty white kids’ of the Red Brigades and the Baader-Meinhof mob. ‘Small Nation Terror’ takes in ETA and the Troubles back in Ireland, before a long chapter deals with Islamist terror — which Burleigh calls, I think a little overheatedly, ‘an existential threat to the whole of civilisation’.

This is a very angry book, in a way that’s unusual in the work of a historian. If the terrorists bring the blood, the author brings the rage. Burleigh open-handedly scatters epithets such as ‘psychotic’, ‘atrocity’ (and, on one occasion, ‘enormity’), ‘evil’, ‘infantile’, ‘disgraceful’, ‘monster’ and ‘gobbledygook’. Sometimes, as he witheringly denounces yet another long-dead Mittel-European lunatic, he sounds a bit batty. But it doesn’t half liven things up.

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