Time warp

Peter Rodgers

Michael Burleigh
Blood and Rage: A Cultural History of Terrorism
HarperPress, $60 hb, 545 pp, 9780007241279

Whether they be Irish Fenians, Russian revolutionaries, the ‘guilty white kids’ of Italy’s Red Brigade or (then) West Germany’s Baader Meinhof gang, African National Congress members fighting to end apartheid, Palestinian gunmen, al Qaeda bombers, or an assortment of other evil-doers, Michael Burleigh sets out the terrible things that human beings can do to one another. He provides much information about what happened or allegedly happened, and points the finger in all directions – at individuals, groups and governments alike. Few are spared his disdain.

Unfortunately, the why is largely missing in action in this long book. It rests heavily on the idea that all terrorist acts are the work of nutcases. In Burleigh’s world view, anyone, especially in the West, who seeks to understand motivation must be, at best, a liberal sissy or, worse, filled with malevolent, fellow-traveller intent.

The declaratory, polemic tone is set in the book’s first pages. Burleigh comments that the cliché of yesterday’s terrorist being tomorrow’s statesman does not get us very far. That may well be true, but the cliché provides an important dose of both moral and political complexity to any meaningful discussion of ‘terrorism’. Burleigh adds that if ‘you imagine that Osama bin Laden is going to evolve into Nelson Mandela you need a psychiatrist rather than an historian’. Maybe I have missed something, but I am not aware of a groundswell of argument that such a transformation might, can or indeed should happen. The point is that Nelson Mandela the terrorist evolved into Nelson Mandela the statesman, as did quite a few others, also tainted with violence.

Undeterred by any notion of fine lines or demonstrable transitions, Burleigh charges on, declaring that the milieu of terrorists ‘is invariably morally squalid, when it is not merely criminal’. What is more, ‘endless studies of terrorist psychology reveal that they are morally insane, without being clinically psychotic’. It must be a real comfort to have Burleigh’s world view, in which those who do nasty things, and the individuals or governments who abide, abet or at least don’t stop them, invariably are either evil or just plain useless. But it suggests perhaps the need for a good historian as well as a good psychiatrist.

Burleigh has marshalled an enormous amount of, at times, fascinating detail. We have to take much of it on face value which, given his racy style, is fine up to a point. In excoriating Iran in the early days of the Islamic revolution, he speaks of the mass hysteria employed by the clerics to mobilise martyrs for the eight years of total war with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. It would not have been amiss to mention here that Iraq, with American and other Western support, had actually attacked Iran. A little later in the book, in the same long chapter on Islamist terrorism, Burleigh refers to the fifty-five Palestinians murdered by the fanatical Jewish settler Baruch Goldstein in early 1994. The actual figure was twenty-nine. In this era of ‘Googleisation’ such detail would not have been hard to check.

The chapter on Islamist violence ends the book, with Burleigh demanding that the fight be taken to Muslim societies over Islam’s role in the non-Muslim world. Its operation there, he asserts,

Leaving aside the religious contest implied here (a low-level ‘crusade’ perhaps), there is a certain appeal about the need to counter the sleazy connection between Middle East oil wealth, politics and arms deals. A window opened on this, for example, when Britain’s Serious Fraud Office (SFO) began investigating an alleged slush fund of some $130 million set up by the country’s biggest defence contractor, BAE Systems, to provide members of the Saudi royal family with lavish holidays, luxury cars and other necessities of life. Saudi authorities reportedly ‘hit the roof’ when they learnt that a Swiss magistrate had been persuaded to force disclosure of details of Swiss bank accounts. In late 2006, however, the British attorney-general, Lord Goldsmith, announced that the SFO was ‘discontinuing’ its investigation. This followed representations both to him and to the director of the SFO ‘concerning the need to safeguard national and international security’. Fortunately, the relief felt by the British and Saudi governments and BAE must have soured considerably in April 2008 when the High Court delivered a stinging rebuke to the SFO. Discontinuing the investigation, the court said, may have avoided ‘uncomfortable consequences, both commercial and diplomatic’, but also aroused ‘fear for the reputation of the administration of justice if it can be perverted by a [commercial] threat’.

Burleigh urges, too, that non-Arab Muslim states should be encouraged to contest ‘the imperialist dominance … of Arabic and Arab authorities’ – without making clear (wisely, perhaps) who should do the encouraging. Certainly, there is documented unease in the non-Arab Islamic world about aspects of Arabisation. The former Indonesian president and noted Islamic leader, Abdurrahman Wahid, has commented on the dangers of ‘identifying oneself with Middle Eastern cultures’. The former Malaysian deputy prime minister, Anwar Ibrahim, also publicly criticised the political and social malaise of the Arab world. But urging Muslims broadly to turn their back on the Middle East seems about as practical as urging Christians to get over events in Bethlehem. Burleigh concedes that ‘Muslim fundamentalism is no more inherently menacing than its Christian, Jewish or secularist equivalents’. We might well underline here that the greatest victims of Islamist violence, by far, are other Muslims, the spectacular death toll of 9/11 notwithstanding. Four thousand American military deaths in Iraq pales into relative insignificance compared to the appalling price that tens (or hundreds) of thousands of Iraqis have paid. As an aside, we might note also that, based on annual crime statistics, Americans are at greater risk from other Americans wielding golf clubs and baseball bats than they are from Muslim terrorists.

Looking over the history of terrorism, Burleigh concludes that ‘any number of ideological causes which once fed violent passions … have passed into oblivion. These things take time.’ If he is correct that jihadist violence will eventually fade, his suggestion that, based on the Cold War lifespan of 1947 to 1989, ‘we are in the equivalent of 1953’ is not much comfort. It is even less so if we pretend that all terrorists are psychotics operating in a moral and political vacuum. Al Qaeda could not have turned Iraq into a university for terror without substantial help from the White House.

Peter Rodgers served as Australia’s ambassador to Israel in the mid-1990s. His book on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Herzl’s Nightmare: One Land, Two People, was published in 2004. He is currently completing another book, Arabian Plights, which explores the Arab world of the future.

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