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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

Hither and yon, he directs his contempt at ‘typical ignorance’ and ‘stunning credulity’. He denounces ‘idiot Belgian socialists’, the ‘loathsome’ Jean-Paul Sartre (‘the veteran armchair revolutionary’); Mussolini’s ‘tawdry Salo republic’; Ulrike Meinhof’s ‘surly pudding face’; neo-cons ‘wearying to listen to’; the ‘lumbering charismatic demagogue’ Ian Paisley; Ariel Sharon’s ‘bumptious thuggishness’. Willie Whitelaw gets off lightly with ‘koala-like’, but Bernard Manning is ‘an unlamented British racist comedian of a vulgar disposition’. An al-Qa’eda cell that tried to blow up the ‘slags’ in a London nightclub are such as ‘many British people may privately regard as amoral, deracinated scum that has fetched up from various Third World hellholes’. Calm down, dear, you want to say. It’s only an advert.

But, of course, it’s not only an advert. If he’s angry, it’s because he has a lot to be angry about — and he argues that we in the West would do well to feel a bit more angry too. The overwhelming lesson of this book echoes the verdict of the aforementioned Jean-Paul Sartre when he visited Andreas Baader in jail: ‘What an arsehole, this Baader.’

Whatever their ideological convictions, Burleigh argues, what the terrorists he describes tend to have in common is that their milieu is ‘invariably morally squalid, when it is not merely criminal’. He evinces a personal contempt for moral outrages, and a historian’s contempt for the radically racist and historically illiterate underpinnings of, say, al-Qa’eda — with its myth of oppression at the hands of a ‘Zionist-Crusader’ conspiracy.

He has forceful if not altogether surprising things to say about the way terrorists are voluntarily attracted by ‘the thrill of clandestine activity in a secret organisation that bestowed status on its members’ rather than forced into it by circumstance. He offers telling quotations — ‘theory was something we half-read, but fully understood’ — and careful judgments. But what it comes down to most often is ‘the murderous vanity of sad little men labouring over their bombs in dingy rooms’.

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