A trail of blood and bigotry

This is an even better book than the author’s erudite, dense and sprawling triumph of last year, Earthly Powers. With Sacred Causes, we are now in the present day, near enough — and that terrible, human, susceptibility to secular or religious ideologies possessed of unbending certitude, which in a way is Burleigh’s theme, should tweak the interest of all those who worry a little about the rigorous proclivities of Islam; just as it should interest those who are dubious of the fashionable thesis that, were we to smite God fatally once and for all, our troubles would be over. For despite the commendable industry of Osama bin Laden and his followers, Al Qaeda lags woefully behind those rational atheists Stalin and Hitler in the premiership league table of murder and genocide and, particularly in the murder of Jews, of course, which must gall Al Qaeda no end.

So, Sacred Causes is, by its subject matter, a more accessible work. But it also benefits from a continual drip feed of very dry and very black humour; few of our conservative historians are minded to provoke belly-laughs in their readership, but here one at least chuckles, uncomfortably, on almost every page.

There is still Burleigh’s great gift, the mark of the very best of historians, to wring meaning and significance from those most arcane footnotes of history, stuff which others might designate mere ephemera. He is terrific, and very funny, on the profusion of proto-hippy, new age gurus and charlatans which emerged, barking at the moon, from the philosophical and economic chaos of post-Versailles Germany. I had not known about Ludwig Christian Haeusser, with his addiction to ‘cunnilingus and sado-masochism’, his occasional delight in vomiting over his adoring audiences and his maniacal howling: ‘Bloodhound! Blood-storm! Blood-blood-blood-blood shall flow.