Blood and rage

Thursday, 27th March 2008

I have just finished reading Michael Burleigh’s splendid new book Blood and Rage: A Cultural History of Terrorism, a worthy successor to his equally magisterial Earthly Powers and Sacred Causes. Burleigh builds a most formidable case by the (nowadays) almost revolutionary academic expedient of allowing the facts to speak for themselves. He does not analyse the various ideologies of the many terrorist causes he itemises; he chooses instead to relate what these terrorists did and the reaction they provoked, in order to show that terrorism has certain universal characteristics. First, all terrorism, without exception, is unequivocally morally unconscionable, whether committed by Irish republicans, Russian nihilists, Zionist Jews, German anarchists or radical Islamists; the glib cliché that ‘one person’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter’ finds no quarter whatever in these pages. And second, all terrorists are ‘morally insane without being clinically psychotic’ — while their victims are united by their desire to live settled lives

without some resentful radical loser —who can be a millionaire harbouring delusions of victimhood — wishing to destroy and maim them so as to realise a world that almost nobody wants.

Through an unremitting barrage of facts, Burleigh dissects and shreds the pretensions of terrorists and their sympathisers. He provides many details that I never knew — such as that Ayman al Zawahiri, al Qaeda’s number two, was on the periphery of the successful plot to assassinate Egypt’s President Sadat and was subsequently further radicalised by his experiences in prison, where he was presumably tortured, to emerge as one of the world’s principal jihadi terror-masters.

Burleigh takes aim, however, not just at the terrorists but at a western culture that excuses, condones and encourages them. His targets include multiculturalism; the useful idiots in the liberal elites who have glamorised terrorism ever since Sartre, whom he skewers gloriously as

that loathsome academic enthusiast for the purifying effects of political violence;

human rights lawyers whose

cynical occupation of the moral high ground

over the Baader Meinhof gang forty-odd years ago meant they themselves escaped press scrutiny, or the human rights lawyers of today who,

while prepared to believe the [terrorist] detainees innocent of every charge of abuse, reflexively believe the worst of the US military and CIA

along with the rest of the international left

who preposterously claimed in their ignorance of socialism’s grim record that Guantanamo was a new gulag.

Yet even-handedly, Burleigh also disapproves of America's creation of such

little pools of extra-legal darkness.

It is when he moves into the area of Islamist terror that he becomes most animated and exercised about the lethal wrong turnings that have been taken, and offers a range of suggestions about what should be done instead. Lamenting the wider failure to educate the British public about what is at stake and help them join up the dots between the global jihad and home grown terrorism, he identifies the worst possible combination at which the west has arrived in appeasing terrorism at home, sucking up to it abroad and meanwhile torturing those who are suspected of being involved in it. By contrast, he draws attention to the success Saudi Arabia has had in weaning radicals off terrorism by treating them as members of a cult who have to be systematically deprogrammed. He also identifies our era of high frivolity and the cult of the trivial as bringing about a state of philistinism and ignorance which leaves politicians quite unable to defend a civilisation they no longer even comprehend. One reason for the problem of jihadism, he says, is that the ‘massive political bias’ of various western institutions and professions is never questioned but accepted as a given. Thus

…already highly politicised universities are allowed to use free speech arguments to defend sinister Islamist organisations active on campuses rather than challenged about their greed for high overseas fees.

His doorstep of a book which tells a story of unremitting grimness and moral squalor is studded on almost every page with witticisms and sardonic one-liners which on occasion made me laugh out loud. He takes aim at all the right targets — and as a result has inevitably turned himself into a target for all the right people who are so terribly wrong on everything.