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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

The problem with Burleigh’s approach is that he covers so much factual ground in such detail that not very much in the way of an overarching argument is allowed to emerge — except that, as I say above, terrorists are arseholes. Indeed, the word ‘cultural’ in the subtitle seems distinctly optional. Each chapter is a boiled-down book in itself — a sanguinary journey through thickets of accidental explosions and fissiparous acronyms. If you really want to know about ETA, you should read a book about ETA — but if you need a crib Burleigh’s chapter will do you handsomely. Though he slips occasionally — the famous ‘ricin plot’ never involved any ricin, and ‘a new generation of robot weapons’ that ‘apparently’ have ‘built-in moral systems’ sounds science-fictional to me — he is in general a deft and judicious guide.

The anger that informs the book is seldom allowed to cloud the author’s judgment. He’s just as alert to Israeli bad behaviour as he is to that of the PLO, for example; just as able to discern and condemn state terror as non-state, and yet rightly clear in his conviction that the former is no justification for the latter. In one very lucid and careful passage, discussing the origins of al-Qa’eda, he rejects ‘Islamofascist or the more appropriate Islamobolshevik’ as terms in favour of the more precise if wordier compound ‘jihadi-salafist”.

He also has pragmatic suggestions as to how the ‘long war’ against jihadi-salafism can be made shorter — a combination of cutting across some of our more fastidious liberal shibboleths, and a softly-softly approach to ‘de-programming’ low-level recruits. He can marshal velvet glove as well as iron fist.

For a writer so frequently discriminating, though, Burleigh is oddly free at other times with bar-room stereotypes. The Bedouin are ‘fiercely proud nomads’. Of the anarchist Karl Heinzen he writes: ‘Being German, he had to flourish analytical categories to give his obsessions the simulacrum of scientific respectability.’ Later we meet ‘heavy Teutonic sociability’. ‘Inadvertently giving the lie to the notion that the Italian establishment was capable of a coherent conspiracy to do anything ...’ gives way to ‘Italy being what it is...’ ‘Charm was not the average Afrikaner’s strong suit.’ Australians have a ‘characteristic lack of circumlocution’. It’s only half-clear he’s paraphrasing sources when he describes Copts as ‘bumptious’ or Afghans as ‘child-like, barbaric and venal, with an unhealthy interest in boys’. A ‘homosexual paedophile’ and ‘gay Protestant terrorist’ are passingly identified as such with no obvious relevance, and I’m not sure it’s on to describe destitute women begging in burqas as ‘black sacks holding their hands out’.

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