A scholar who dares to look terror in the face

23 February 2008

Douglas Murray talks to the historian Michael Burleigh about his new book on the culture of terrorism and the West’s craven reluctance to confront the nature of the threat

Michael Burleigh is riding a career high. The author of the 2000 bestseller The Third Reich: A New History has just published the last of a gargantuan trilogy of books on religion and politics in Europe since the French revolution. Earthly Powers and Sacred Causes took us up to the war on terror. Now, with Blood and Rage: A Cultural History of Terrorism, Burleigh comes right up to date. Not that Blood and Rage is only about Islamic fundamentalism. As the 52-year-old former academic tells me when we meet at his home in south London, the new book is about terrorism as a culture — as a way of life, and death.

‘I wrote Earthly Powers and Sacred Causes because I was confronted by the prospect before I left academia of spending the rest of my life writing books on Nazi Germany and the second world war, and this was such a grim prospect for me. In a way 9/11 forced us [all] to think about the wider world.

‘The two religion books are in a sense my trying to look at what I think is a very neglected area of modern European history. Most historians are secular. They think there is just an onward march to universal secularity... The thing about the arrival of radical Islam in our midst is that it’s like a sort of sudden traffic-stop to people who think, “Oh well, we’re all going to get more and more secular and we’ll reduce these people to the same level of accepting all the tenets of liberalism”. And suddenly bang, that hasn’t worked out, that’s not the case. So now we have this terrific problem of how societies which understand themselves as becoming ineluctably more secular and more liberal, how they will deal with people for whom very strong religious belief is part of it.’

But what links terrorist organisations across the decades? Nineteenth-century Fenianism, Russian Nihilism, the Baader-Meinhof brigades?

‘Undemocratic minorities, whether in dem-ocracies or in other systems,’ says Burleigh as he lights another cigarette. ‘Twenty-five members of the Baader-Meinhof group wanted to overthrow German capitalism. Well 25 people is not a great democratic caucus, so therefore they resorted obviously to extreme political violence. I wanted to look at these particular groups in various historical contexts and to look at the mindset of why people join them, how the dynamics of the group operate psychologically — that terrorism can become almost a way of life — and particularly to focus on the thing that everybody seems to slightly neglect, which is that the main thing they do is to kill people... I think it’s quite important to establish that and also maybe to say look, there are some terrorists that you can negotiate with... there are demands you can make which at least might diminish the support they might have within given communities, and there are other people whose objectives are completely insane. I mean, we’re not going to abolish Western civilisation on behalf of the jihadists.’

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Stephen Fox

February 21st, 2008 11:44am Report this comment

'...Germany’s frontiers are now on the Hindu Kush'. Shame her soldiers aren't there too, instead of being tucked away in northern Afghanistan.

C Powell

February 21st, 2008 9:49pm Report this comment

Michael Burleigh is one of the best historians I've read in a while: clear-sighted, fair and makes you look at matters with a fresh eye.

Riaz Ahmad

February 22nd, 2008 12:15am Report this comment

Every one with even an ounce of sanity knows terrorism is henious,and terrorists the devils. But people like Douglas are not interested in truth or reality, rendered blind and brain dead by vested interest. Perhaps Douglas may care to read history a bit more. He takes the moral high ground with with usual hipocricy. Of course, citizens have to be protected from the jehadi devils, but it will help the cause of decent peace loving people, if writer like Douglas start telling the truth, the evils of hipocricy, the double standards, the racket called the security council, half a century of persicution of Palistinian people. Bin Ladin is devil incarnate, but no one has a good word either for the warlords ruling USA, ready to obliterate anyone for a barrel or two of oil.

Sempronius

February 22nd, 2008 1:42pm Report this comment

"Bin Ladin is devil incarnate, but no one has a good word either for the warlords ruling USA, ready to obliterate anyone for a barrel or two of oil." Dismal attempt at moral equivalence. The Americans removed a mass-murderering maniac and his despicable regime in Iraq. Look in the mirror (and a dictionary) before you accuse others of double standards and hypocrisy.

Chris Ashton

February 27th, 2008 4:12am Report this comment

This article has lightened my heart this morning. All is not lost then. Small lights of intelligence and honesty still shine in the pc smog of contemporary Britain. I'm going staight to Amazon.com to order this book.

Ian

February 27th, 2008 11:50am Report this comment

It suits Burleigh, like so many others, to elevate the small group of inadequates, psychopaths, sociopaths and utopians that inhabit every society known to history into an "-ism". But that's all these are - misguided and dysfunctional individuals. Sometimes, if they combine, they can cause a little damage. But we create far more by elevating them into an "-ism". To treat them thus is to surrender to an insidious "inevitability of gradualness" that just doen't exist, except in our febrile imaginations. We seek patterns where none really exist.

M Clyde

April 28th, 2008 1:16pm Report this comment

I think that what Burleigh seeks to highlight is not the dangers posed by Islamist extremism but the craven attitude of western liberals who seek to establish some kind of moral equivalence between radical Islam and western liberalism and democratic values. It really is not so different from those in 1930s Germany who were fooled into thinking that Adolf Hitler was a bit OK, perhaps justifiable. Rough, a bully, but he had his reasons, real issues, and these needed addressing. It is the old philosophical conundrum of whether ends can ever justify means. No true liberal can do other than oppose jihadi theology and confront its Islamic roots just as no true defender of liberalism could ever be so craven as to consider Hitler a bit OK.

That there is a quietist spiritual side to Islam with a rich literature and tradition cannot be doubted, but this is not mainstream; it exists in spite of the Quran, not because of it.

The Islamists are therefore right when they say the Quran is their constitution. Read it yourself and see how often the word 'kill' is mentioned. One third of the Quran (according to Tantawi, the leading intellectual of Al Azhar university in Cairo) deals exclusively with the Jews - always in a hostile manner.

The roots of the Palestinian problem are therefore in Quranic anti-semtism.

The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Amin al Husseini was a Nazi collaborator; his grandson was Yasser Arafat. Until Muslims look critically at Muslim anti-semitism as endorsed by the Quran there will never be a peaceful or rational solution to the Palestinian problem. The problem is hate-filled ideology.

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