Blood & Rage: A Cultural History of Terrorism
by Michael Burleigh
Harper Press, £25

MICHAEL BURLEIGH’S new book is a history of terrorism beginning in the mid-19th century with the Irish Fenians and Russian Nihilists and ending with the terrorism of today, which he terms jihadi-salafist. Burleigh looks at the lives and the actions of the terrorists and the choices they make rather than focusing on their ideologies, though these are addressed, because he regards ideology as “a detonator that enables a pre-existing chemical mix to explode”.

It’s a grim history containing many gruesome crimes. The viscous acts of groups such as Baader-Meinhoff were often compounded by the support they received from those on the left whose ideological stance prevented them condemning murder and violence. To read this book is to be transported to other times – but then to realise that much remains unchanged.

It is striking how many terrorist groups adopt a similar approach to – and often echo – the Russian Nihilists. Small groups, frustrated by their lack of support, find their ideologies encourage them to commit dramatic and horrific acts of destruction. As these acts – blowing up bombs, torturing and murdering people – mount in number and scale, the groups become ever more cult-like. They convince themselves their acts will bring about revolutionary change. As Burleigh writes: “The unexpressed goal of bringing about transformative chaos becomes the element in which terrorists are most at home.” In this they fail, prompting an escalation of terror. Burleigh believes terrorists are morally insane without being clinically psychotic.

Governments are often painfully slow to appreciate the threat they face. Detection efforts are poorly resourced while terrorists are often clever and outwit police efforts to stop them. Governments may also adopt appeasement strategies, believing the terrorists’ cause has some legitimacy, not realising they are dealing with people whose appetite for violence can never be satiated. Terrorist suspects and convicted terrorists, he says, are often treated leniently.

Alternatively, governments sometimes risk increasing support for unpopular terrorists by draconian measures against whole populations in response to terrorism rather than identify the (often small) band of terrorists responsible. State terror is not addressed in this book.

The jihadi-salafist terrorist threat is, next to climate change, the most serious we face and Burleigh believes we are not taking it as seriously as we should. Interventions in places such as Afghanistan should continue so that terrorists are denied operating and training space. But the West must, he says, not be identified with authoritarian allies in the “war on terror”. Greater effort must be made to unite public opinion against terrorism around the world and convicted terrorists should not be grouped together on prison wings.

Burleigh believes we should learn from the Saudi Arabian approach where those on the “lower rungs of jihadism” are weaned off extremism. Clerics educate prisoners about their religion and explain why the prisoners’ outlook is a distortion. He argues for a celebration of our own cultural values alongside a mutual curiosity about each other from Muslim and non-Muslim societies that avoids what he sees as the trap of multiculturalism. More controversially, he believes that Islam’s place in British society should be linked to the freedom of non-Muslim religions in Muslim societies; this, though, generalises Muslims in a way he argues against elsewhere.

Burleigh has a distinctive style – he tries to get away with mentioning Jesus Christ, Adolf Hitler and Steven Berkoff in the same sentence – ranges across his subject and his conservative political outlook is apparent. He writes history infused with his own personal and polemical commentary but this raises questions, to my mind, about how he marshals the facts he deploys. Nevertheless, Blood & Rage is a sobering if challenging read.

Stephen Beer