{"id":3605,"date":"2010-11-16T04:04:14","date_gmt":"2010-11-16T04:04:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/zenpundit.com\/?p=3605"},"modified":"2010-11-16T05:55:04","modified_gmt":"2010-11-16T05:55:04","slug":"blood-and-rage-by-burleigh","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/?p=3605","title":{"rendered":"Blood and Rage by Burleigh"},"content":{"rendered":"

After an extended\u00a0hiatus, Summer Series 2010: Reviewing the Books!<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0re-starts……<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Blood and Rage: A Cultural History of Terrorism<\/strong><\/a><\/strong>\u00a0by Michael Burleigh<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

British historian Michael Burleigh brings the same kind of unsparingly brutal prose to the history of terrorism that he previously delivered on National Socialism in his acclaimed, The Third Reich: A New History<\/strong><\/a>. There is a wealth of detail about terrorists, their casual atrocities and the warped morality that terrorists habitually employ to rationalize their crimes; a nihilistic mentalite shared with their intellectual groupies in universities and political law firms that will shock and inform the reader. The scattered nature of the case studies that comprise modern terrorism\u00a0though, makes Blood and Rage<\/strong> more of\u00a0a kaleidescope than microscope.<\/p>\n

Burleigh set out to chronicle a comprehensive examination of the evolution of terrorism in the last two centuries. There are Feinians<\/strong> and radicalized Russian Narodniks<\/strong>, murderous FLN<\/strong> Algerians and their pied noir OAS <\/strong>blood enemies, Irgun <\/strong>gunmen and Black September<\/strong>, ETA, IRA<\/strong> and Baader-Meinhoff<\/strong> gangsters consorting with Palestinian radicals and Herbert Marcuse<\/strong>. Burleigh dissects the psychopathology of ultraviolent degenerates like\u00a0Hugh “Lenny” Murphy<\/strong>, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi<\/strong> and Andreas Baader<\/strong>. Terrorists, statistically speaking, are generally not madmen in a clinical sense, but Burleigh records a noteworthy exception regarding Germany’s Baader-Meinhoff Gang:<\/p>\n

….With their numbers by now reduced to about a dozen people, the group was desperate for new recruits. Salvation came from an unlikely quarter. The mad. A radical psychiatrist at Heidelberg University, influenced by the anti-psychiatry of R.D. Laing and the anti-institutionalisation theories of Franco Basaglia, had formed a socialist collective among the mainly student clientele he was treating for various mental disturbances common to that age cohort including depression, paranoia and mild schizophrenia. In early 1971 Baader and Ensslin visited Heidelberg where they met some of the radicalized patients. In the following years, about twelve of the latter, including Gerhard Muller, Siegfried Hausner, Sieglinde Hofmann, Lutz Taufner and others became the second generation of RAF terrorists, initially under the slogan “Crazies to Arms”.<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Blood and Rage<\/strong> makes for a grim read, with the recurring pattern of terrorism and counterterrorist response erupting to demoralize societies until the terrorists in question are\u00a0either dead, imprisoned or mellowed by paunchy middle-age and political irrelevance as the times pass their maniacal political passions by. Only in a few instances, notably South Africa and Northern Ireland\u00a0are political settlements a more feasible option than methodical police and intelligence work followed by tough-minded prosecution and a steely societal rejection of grandiose moral claims of terrorists and their fellow-travelling left-wing lawyer-advocates. Burleigh also makes clear his disdain for militarized CT and multiculturalist enablement alike.<\/p>\n

The weakness of Blood and Rage<\/strong>, unlike some of Burleigh’s other works, is a lack of a strong analytical theme, focus\u00a0or grand theory to explain and unite the relentless and gory\u00a0march of geographically diverse case studies in terrorism, though an intelligent reader should be able to discern patterns present well enough for themselves. Given Burleigh’s stature as a scholar, one can envision him having taken the ball further down field for a deeper level of analysis of terrorism as a societal phenomena. Burleigh would probably reply that such is not the proper\u00a0job of a historian, which while true enough, still leaves me wishing he had.<\/p>\n

As a popular history, Blood and Rage<\/strong> makes a page turner out of rancorous destruction.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After an extended\u00a0hiatus, Summer Series 2010: Reviewing the Books!\u00a0re-starts…… Blood and Rage: A Cultural History of Terrorism\u00a0by Michael Burleigh British historian Michael Burleigh brings the same kind of unsparingly brutal prose to the history of terrorism that he previously delivered on National Socialism in his acclaimed, The Third Reich: A New History. There is a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[365,232,360,262,216,46,420,133,309,483,311,165,51,78,336,150,270,187,436,445,558,607,605,211],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3605","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-19th-century","category-20th-century","category-21st-century","category-4gw","category-academia","category-analytic","category-authors","category-book","category-criminals","category-extremists","category-gangs","category-historians","category-history","category-ideas","category-intellectuals","category-military-intelligence","category-national-security","category-politics","category-psychology","category-reading","category-social-science","category-summer-series","category-tactics","category-terrorism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3605","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3605"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3605\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3605"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3605"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3605"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}