Friday 5 September 2008

 

The latest culture as recommended by our staff

Clemency Burton-Hill
Clemency Burton-Hill

Clemency suggests


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

Likewise, his attacks on a left-liberal consensus in media, law and academia — which he sees as providing ideological and practical succour to terror — sometimes cross the line from argument to rant. Academics who once studied ‘the comparative history of parliaments or war finance ... are now more likely to be experts on gay and lesbian body art, serial killers or the persecution of witches, rivalling television in their populist pursuit of the lurid or trivial’. Deploring the ‘creed of multiculturalism’ and ‘cultural self-repudiation’, he states that ‘in Britain an entire television station, Channel 4, was progressively devoted to propagating it with programmes that are nowadays difficult to parody within the degraded tacky rubbish which it commissions’. This is the language of the tabloid columnist, not of the historian.

There’s no doubt Burleigh is onto something, but he’d draw more blood if he used less rage.

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