Clear & present dangers.

[Blood & Rage: A Cultural

History of Terrorism, Michael

Burleigh, Harper Collins, 592

pages]

MICHAEL BURLEIGH is a British historian, now in his mid-fifties, who established a considerable reputation for his work on Germany's past. His research in the federal German archives in Coblenz culminated in The Third Reich: A New History, rightly praised as a major achievement.

What was new was Burleigh's understanding of the religious nature of fascism in general and National Socialism in particular. This insight led him on to broader studies of religion and politics in Europe--Earthly Powers, which starts with the French Revolution, the point at which mass moral enthusiasms became detached from the Christian religion, and ends with World War I; and Sacred Causes, which takes the story on from World War I to today's war on terror. Burleigh, a Roman Catholic, quotes T.S. Eliot in an epigraph to this book: "O weariness of men who turn from GOD ... to fevered enthusiasm/For nation or race or what you call humanity."

Now, in Blood & Rage: A Cultural History of Terrorism, Burleigh shifts his attention from the mass movements to the smaller cadres of fanatics who have sought to goad history in a particular direction with the cattle-prods of massacre, assassination, and atrocity.

His survey is not comprehensive: there is nothing on terrorism in South America, Sri Lanka, or Kashmir, nothing on the Mau Mau in Kenya or EOKA in Cyprus. But it has historical depth, starting in the 19th century with the Irish Fenians and Russian Nihilists and bringing us into the 20th with the terrorist tactics of Jews and Arabs in Israel prior to the establishment of the Jewish state, the Algerian FLN, the Italian Red Brigades, the German Baader-Meinhof Gang, the PLO, Black September, the Provisional IRA, the Basque separatists ETA, and finally the ongoing terrorism of the Islamic jihadists.

The chapters on 19th-century terrorism are accomplished and concise, and there are interesting pointers of things to come: earnest young women played leading roles in the anti-Tsarist conspiracies and were also prominent in the Baader-Meinhof gang in the 1970s; Sergei Nechaev's nihilism resurfaces in the 20th century as "the philosophy of choice for adolescents who have read a bit of Camus"; and the large proportion of Jews among the Russian terrorists ("Some 30 percent of those arrested for political crimes were Jewish, as were 50 percent of those involved in revolutionary organisations, even though Jews were a mere 5 percent of the overall population") presages the terrorism of the Irgun and the Stern Gang in Palestine.

Burleigh's scholarship is remarkable. So, too, the lucidity with which he conveys a mass of historical information to his readers. He describes himself as "a conservative realist, sceptical of zealous neo-cons" and considers the concept of a "war on terror" as meaningless as "a war on blitzkrieg." But a war on terrorists is another matter. Burleigh is vehement in his distaste for the self-appointed champions of the people: "the milieu of terrorists is invariably morally squalid, when it is not merely criminal." Literally squalid, too. In West Berlin, the seedbed of Baader-Meinhof terror in the 1970s, "communal apartments and squats had the usual atmosphere of overflowing ashtrays--even hubcaps were never big enough--soiled sheets, blankets used as curtains and the lingering odours of dope and unwashed clothes."

Here idealism is often a pretext for crazed, self-indulgent banditry and psychotic self-expression. Burleigh is contemptuous not just of the dissolute Andreas Baader but also of the PLO bosses who speed "from diplomatic junket to junket, or from sell-out to sellout, in their fleets of Mercedes, in between tripping the light fantastic in villas and luxury hotels." He reserves a particular contempt for the fellow-travelling academics and intellectuals--"Jean-Paul Sartre, that loathsome enthusiast for the purifying effects of political violence"; "the celebrity useful idiot ... Heinrich Boll, once a greedy Wehrmacht soldier in occupied France"; and the "various charismatic academic charlatans espousing heterodox forms of Marxism ... a fusion of Freud and Marx, leavened with a bit of Gramsci." He quotes a German terrorist: "theory was something that we half read but fully understood."

Burleigh distinguishes only in passing between terrorism used as a tool in wars of national liberation--for example, the FLN in Algeria--and the futile campaigns of robbery, kidnapping, and murder of the Italian Red Brigades and the German Red Army Faction or the pointless atrocities of al-Qaeda jihadis in New York and London. This conflation of the two types of terrorism impedes an understanding of the phenomenon. The use of terror may never be justified--the end never justifies the means--but it was undeniably effective in expelling imperial powers from their possessions in, for example, Algeria, Cyprus, Ireland, and Vietnam. Former terrorists such as Mohamed Ahmed Ben Bella, Jomo Kenyatta, Menachem Begin, Robert Mugabe, and Gerry Adams have gone on to become democratically elected ministers and heads of state.

Burleigh does not ask whether or not the nations of the West--in particular the U.S. and Britain--are in any way responsible for the hatred and resentment felt toward them in Islamic world. He considers the Islamist charge of "Crusader-Zionist" aggression paranoid: "Anyone with even a sketchy recollection of medieval history knows that nothing links medieval Christian crusaders, who on occasion massacred Rhenish Jews prefatory to slaughtering Arabs, with a political movement born in the nineteenth century, primarily as an antidote to European anti-Semitism." This is certainly true; but it is also true that after the defeat of the Ottoman Turks, the Western powers imposed settlements in the Middle East to suit their interests. As Burleigh himself admits, "if huge oil deposits were to be discovered beneath Canada, the West would disengage from the Middle East tomorrow, leaving it to implode amid its multiple conflicts." To protect these interests, Western governments conspired to topple governments that did not suit them (Iran); they sustained--and continue to sustain--autocracies that do (Saudi Arabia, Egypt); they promote democracy, yet when democratic elections risk returning Islamist governments (Algeria) or do return such governments (Gaza), they repudiate the results; and they sustain Jewish settlement in Palestine just as the Latin Catholic powers of western Europe sustained "Outremer," the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem.

Do terrorism in pursuit of national liberation, proletarian revolution, and a universal ummah have anything in common? There has been some overlap. Members of the Baader-Meinhof gang trained with the PLO, and the IRA had links with Libya. Burleigh also postulates a common sociological phenomenon as a root cause of both--the "mindless and supposedly economically driven over-expansion of higher education." In Europe, students alienated from their traditional communities and the world of work came under the influence of "jaded academics, many of them not much older than their students, [who] discovered an antidote for accidie and boredom through laicised left-wing messianisms and the espousal of violence for other people, an especially despicable trait among left-wing intellectuals.... They indoctrinated their students in Marxists theories almost guaranteed to disable these students for the job market"--a true trahison des clercs. In Egypt, the same pool of unemployed and unemployable graduates--the "demi-educated lumpen intelligentsia, whose degrees were the intellectual equivalent of a Western high-school certificate"--were susceptible to the propaganda of the Islamic apostles of jihad.

It is today's clear and present danger of Islamic terrorism that interests Burleigh most, taking up around one third of this long fact-filled book. But it is also the area where the detachment of the historian risks being compromised by the rhetoric of a political commentator. Burleigh is a frequent contributor to London's Daily Mail, and his strong views on the way in which the "elite political correctness and smug irresponsibility" of the liberal establishment has made "Londonistan" into "the epicentre of terrorism" take on the tone of polemic. He is outraged that, while living in Britain, the preacher of jihad Omar Bakri received a total of 275,000 [pounds sterling] in welfare payments and that a 31,000 [pounds sterling] Ford people-carrier to transport his large family was paid for by the state. In Denmark, Burleigh tells us, 40 percent of the welfare budget goes to the Muslim 5 percent of the population.

Blood & Rage is rich in such statistics and these often put things in perspective. Some 3,630 people were killed during the troubles in Ireland. In the United States, on 9/11, "a total of 2,792 people perished in the terrorist strike, which included the Pentagon as well as United Airlines Flight 93 which ploughed into a field in Pennsylvania." These are modest losses compared to the body count in the two World Wars, Korea, Vietnam, or Iraq or the estimated 200,000 Muslim Algerians killed in the struggle between Islamists and the government during the 1990s. But this does not mean that we can be sanguine about the future: in Europe, there remain vipers in the bosom of the body politic--not just what Burleigh terms "the amoral, deracinated scum that has fetched up from various Third World hellholes" but an established Muslim diaspora with roots in North Africa (France) and Pakistan (Britain), the latter a disintegrating state with nuclear arms. It seems likely that, when it comes to terrorism, worse is yet to come.

Piers Paul Read is an author whose works include Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors, a history of the crusading order, The Templars, and recently a collection of essays, Hell and Other Destinations.