Whatever George Bush and Tony Blair may say, terrorism is not an ideology. It is not a belief or a policy or a psychotic state or a programme of conquest. It is a weapon, and one as old as battle itself. The Bible is full of terrorism. To Vikings, crusaders, the Inquisition and Vlad the Impaler, terrorising the enemy was part and parcel of victory.

Even in its modern manifestations terrorism is not new. The first London Tube bomb was exploded by Fenians on the District Line in 1883. The first suicide bomber attacked the Russian prime minister in 1906. The first plane packed with dynamite as a missile was planned by the anarchist, Boris Savinkov, in 1907. The first car bomb blew up in Wall Street in 1920. As for courses in terrorism, a Professor Mezzeroff advertised in a Dublin paper in the 1880s a device that had “more force than a million speeches”.

Michael Burleigh starts his survey, or “cultural history”, of this subject with the Irish terror attacks on mid-19th-century Britain, following close on Alfred Nobel’s discovery that nitroglycerine could be stabilised in paste. This, the first advance in terror technology since Guy Fawkes, made wholesale killing available to those short of an army. But its effect was greatly enhanced by the new mass media. The essence of terror lies not in the number of bodies but in the size of the bang.

Burleigh’s cast is voluminous, from Irish Fenians to Russian nihilists, from anarchists to revolutionaries, from Zionists to Palestinians and from Algerians to South Africans. Some of his terrorists are dedicated rebels set on a noble cause. Others are like the Russian, Sergei Nechaev, a maniac who offered to kill Mikhail Bakunin’s London publisher for complaining that he was overdue on a manuscript (a capital offence only to publishers). We read of the “guilty rich kids”, the Red Brigades and the Red Army Faction, psychopathic killers on a drug-in-duced bender. We dabble with Basques and the IRA, and end on familiar ground with the Egyptian wahabist, Sayyid Qutb, Al-Qaeda and today’s various discontents.

Much of this makes rollicking good reading, in the vein of Conrad’s The Secret Agent. I liked the letter published in a Fenian Dublin newspaper offering “$2 for my yearly subscription and $1 for dynamite”. The Fenian attempts to ignite the damp fuse on the Clerkenwell bomb of 1867 reads like the Keystone Kops. (The would-be bomber failed to light the fuse three times before giving up: the next day, Friday, February 13, he had better luck.)

As for the behaviour of the press, crucial to broadcasting the terrorist’s message, it beggars belief. The Times published a letter in 1883 worthy of a Blair scare dossier, claiming to be from an Irish “considerate bomber” warning that “thousands perhaps millions” of Britons would be killed if they did not evacuate their cities at once.

If I have a problem with Burleigh’s treatment of the subject it is that he approaches it as a political rather than a military historian. He defines terrorism as “a tactic primarily used by nonstate actors . . . to create a climate of fear in order to compensate for the legitimate political power they do not possess”. But the word legitimate begs the question of what constitutes a tactic. Bomber Harris set out to “sow terror” by his area bombing of German cities during the second world war. I am sure Britain and America regarded the “shock and awe” bombing of civilian targets in Belgrade and Baghdad as legitimate. I doubt their victims saw it the same way. If terrorism is to be regarded as a weapon rather than an ideology, such uses can hardly be ignored simply by virtue of the user’s status.

Hence Burleigh does not deal with the extensive state terrorism of numerous 20th-century regimes in central and south America, nor with such running controversies as whether antipersonnel land mines, cluster munitions and the aerial bombardment of villages constitute terrorism. If the car bomb is a “poor-man’s air force”, surely the pilot dropping free-fall bombs on populated areas is the rich-man’s terrorist?

In distinguishing the political motives of various terrorist movements Burleigh comes close to validating some terrorism as against others. Likewise did The Times demand in the 1880s that terrorism must be countered “by lawful terrorism”. Is this the same terrorism as Burleigh declares to be “a milieu invariably morally squalid”? At times it seems that he is not discussing terrorism at all but any nonstate violence against the innocent.

Nor does he discuss that crucial component of modern terrorism, the multiplier effect of publicity. As the politics of fear teaches us, people can be terrified without the terrorist going to the risk and expense of actual violence. The rumoured threat of an attack can create panic enough. So paranoid was Washington in the years after 9/11 that, in 2005, George W Bush evacuated the White House on hearing news of a “dense incoming cloud”, which turned out to be just that. In preparing Britain for the Iraq war, Downing Street churned out ricin threats, anthrax threats, smallpox threats and dirty-bomb threats by the week.

Burleigh is good at analysing the response to terrorism, but again it is the response, usually inept, to any non-state violence. The tsars’ savage repression of Russian assassins turned into pogroms against any available minority, notably Jews. Britain’s ham-fisted handling of anticolonial terror ensured the swift collapse of Empire. The tit-for-tat terrorism of Ulster Loyalists and Republicans, and Israe-lis and Palestinians, prolonged conflicts whose terrorist features were a subset of a territorial argument.

By confusing terrorism as a weapon with the causes for which it is deployed, Burleigh is left floundering with such questions as what works and what does not. It is hard to claim that Irgun terrorism in Israel was not effective in exasperating the British. The IRA may not have won Irish reunification through terror, but after the Good Friday agreement they won everything else, including Blair’s release of dozens of killers and former terrorists sharing in government. The African National Congress was starkly successful, after the most limited of terror campaigns in South Africa. But there is no discussion of such tactical matters as the targeting of bombs, the exploitation of the media or the psychological impact of counter-terrorist measures.

But then all of us are at sea here. The one-time “terrorists” of the Kosovo Liberation Army are today hailed in London and Washington as plucky sovereign separatists. The Fedayin heroes armed by the Americans to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan are now the unspeakable Al-Qaeda. Perhaps the best bet is to ban the word altogether, and talk only of man’s apparently unstoppable craving after violence.

Incentives to kill

We may imagine terrorists as anti-establishment types, but as Burleigh points out, they like bureaucracy, on their own terms. Some of the incentives used by Al-Qaeda to tempt recruits in Afghanistan wouldn’t have looked out of place in a conventional business. ‘There were detailed application forms,’ he explains, ‘terms and conditions of employment, and job specifications for senior positions.’ Wannabe terrorists also ‘received a salary of between $1,000 and $1,500 depending on marital status, a round-trip airfare to visit home, medical care and a month’s vacation’.

BLOOD AND RAGE: A Cultural History of Terrorism by Michael Burleigh
Harper Press £25 pp545

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