The Infernal Machine:
A History of Terrorism
by Matthew Carr
We’ve heard a lot about terrorism in our times. The 21st century started out with a bang when Al Qaeda hijacked airplanes on September 11, committing the worst atrocities on American soil since the attempted Native American genocides of the 17th and 18th centuries. Following that attack, Western countries were subjected to a long string of smaller acts of violence and Israel had to put up with sporadic suicide bombings that prevented anybody from feeling a sense of safety or security. Since Islamic terrorist campaigns have run their course, a new problem has arisen in America in the form of right-wing domestic terrorism that went on the rise after Barack Obama got elected president. But as Matthew Carr demonstrates in The Infernal Machine, terrorism is nothing new and, if sticking to its standard definition, might be caused by similar environmental factors in most cases.
The opening chapter establishes a definition of terrorism. Generally speaking, it is an act of violence that is committed with the intent to force political change. There are a couple key concepts for the book. One is that of “asymmetrical warfare” or the revolt of the powerless against their perceived oppressors, a matter of punching up at those above. The other is “propaganda by deed”, meaning that terrorists don’t literally commit acts of violence in the belief that they will have an immediate impact on political policy. Rather their actions are symbolic and meant to be disruptive of an abstract idea. Not all terrorist attacks deliberately target people, sometimes being limited to property destruction or sabotage. Other times, an attack may be accompanies by a press release or the publication of a manifesto. In more extreme cases, they are meant to provoke a sense of unease and paranoia throughout society, sometimes in hope of a long-range destabilization of the political order. Terrorism is a form of unconventional warfare and, from the author’s point of view, and not necessarily that of others, it is a strictly modern phenomenon. It is also a common misconception that terrorist organizations are formed by poor or downtrodden people; most often they are led by ideologues coming from the educated middle or upper classes who elect themselves to be the vanguards of revolutionary change. Matthew Carr ends the first chapter by claiming he intends to examine the root causes of terrorism.
From there he launches into a fairly comprehensive history. It all started in 19th century Russia when a group of upper class activists, some of which worked in the medical profession, set off a series of bombings. These people were anarchists and called themselves People’s Will. They set a precedent for a style of rebellion that has lasted until the current day despite the fact that most terrorists are unaware of its placement on a historical continuum. Other prominent terrorist groups rose up out of the anti-colonialist and nationalist struggles in the early modern era. Carr covers the Mau Mau in Kenya, the Irish Republican Brotherhood, the Algerian revolutionary war, and the 1948 Israeli bombing of the British colonial headquarters in Jerusalem. At the peak of early modern terrorism is the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo by the Serbian nationalist teenager Gavrilo Princip, an act of violence that resulted in World War I. These chapters on the early to mid 20th century are the best in the book. While Carr does a spotty job of analyzing the causes and dynamics of these conflicts, he does a good job of laying out the historical events and the impact they had on contemporary politics.
As the narrative moves along in the later 20th century, his study of urban guerilla movements and Left wing radicalism gets a little bit weak. He brings up the IRA, the Basque separatist group ETA, and the rise of Islamic terrorism, mostly in relation to Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi and Yasser Arafat’s push for Palestinian liberation from Israel. But most of this section gives accounts of First World activist groups like the Weather Underground in America, the Baader-Meinhof gang in West Germany, and the communist inspired RAF in Italy; all of these groups were involved in hijackings, bombings, robberies, kidnappings, and murder. Obviously none of them were successful.
While telling the stories of bumbling Left wing ideologues, he also delves into the extreme reactions of the dominant cultures. Sometimes he indulges so much in the retaliatory violence of the oppressors that the terrorists get overshadowed and it becomes easy to forget what the book is actually about. Carr might be trying to show that the dominating governments are often more cruel and brutal than the terrorists themselves, but he goes a bit too far and overstates his case. The idea emerges that even though the terrorists commit deplorable crimes in the name of freedom fighting, they ultimately have legitimate grievances and are therefore partially justified in what they do since they have no other way of fighting injustice. That assertion rests on thin ice as Carr’s narrative approaches the 1990s and 2000s.
There were several prominent terrorist incidents in the 1990s that get brought into the discussion, but two of them merit special consideration. One is the Aum Shinrikyo sarin gas attacks on the Tokyo subways. Technically this shouldn’t even be considered a terrorist attacks in the strict definition of the word since the group was a religious cult led by a blind yoga teacher who claimed to be Jesus. They believed they were taking the people who died of gas poisoning to Heaven, saving them from the imminent apocalypse. They made no political demands and appeared to be acting solely out of a bizarre millenarian conviction. Despite the atrocity, it is a bad choice of events to include this book as it doesn’t relate to the stated subject matter which is political in nature.
The other major event was the Oklahoma City bombing done by Timothy McVeigh, a Second Amendment fundamentalist and right wing extremist who declared war on the American government by blowing up an office building, killing hundreds of children in its daycare center and a bunch of office workers too. While Carr, rightly condemns the actual bombing, he writes about McVeigh with sympathy, saying he was so overcome with fury that he felt like he could do nothing else. His sympathetic treatment of McVeigh is quite off-putting since you can assume that most Americans, to some degree, feel that the American government is unjust, but most of them are sensible enough not to commit an act of terrorism to express their frustration. McVeigh was not the ordinary, angry citizen that Carr makes him out to be since something is obviously lacking in the mind of someone who could commit such an atrocity. There is more to this than simple political anger. But as Carr continues on in his analysis, another pattern to his thinking emerges: he blames just about every terrorist attack on governmental injustice and never on the psychological shortcomings of the terrorists themselves. He almost exclusively links every terrorist attack from the 1960s onward to the governments of America and Israel. Carr’s hidden political agenda comes out into the light of day in his defense of McVeigh and the right wing militia movement that has grown ever since.
Carr’s bias becomes even more evident in his analysis of the attacks of 9/11. Again, he condemns the actual violence while lending an ounce of sympathy to the idea that Al Qaeda were targeting America solely because they disagreed with the American presence in the Middle East and their support for Israel. He never mentions Al Qaeda’s stated intention of establishing a new caliphate to rule over the Muslim world, nor does he bring up the fact that American intelligence forces had tried several times to assassinate Osama bin Laden in the 1990s. Certainly America’s presence in the region had something to do with it, but it isn’t the complete story. If Carr had done more research he would have known that.
Carr’s case is weakened also as he tries to make a tu quoque (appeal to hypocrisy) logically fallacious argument by stating that 9/11 was somewhat justified because what America has done in the Middle East is far worse than the hijacking of the airplanes and the mass murder of thousands of people in a single day. The committing of one crime does not justify another. Taking an eye for an eye leaves everyone blind, as Gandhi said. Of course, if you are an Islamic fundamentalist or an apologist for Islamic fascism, ordinary logic doesn’t apply since power acquired with violence is the ultimate goal. Even worse, the author from there degenerates into entertaining conspiracy theories, accusing the government of hiring the terrorist to attack America in a plot that involved the CIA in secret American training bases and supposedly teaching them to fly in an aviation school in Florida that he says doesn’t actually exist. Carr claims the group’s leader, Mohammad Atta could not have been an Islamic fundamentalist because he liked cocaine, vodka, nightclubs, and prostitutes, but then again it is easy to see how this lifestyle could make a man so psychologically divided against himself that he could want to commit suicide in the worst possible way. Straight out of Alex Jones’s Infowars, he claims the hijackers weren’t even on the planes that day. These are some of the easier to understand conspiracy theories proposed by Carr. Others are too nonsensical to even follow. At least he does admit that the official version of the event could be possible, but his descent into this conspiracy theory maelstrom just makes him look naive and dumb by the end of the book.
The strongest part of Carr’s writing is the historical overview of terrorist movements and their impact on the wider society. The weakest part is his analysis and causal explanation. He uses the injustice of America and Israel as a one-size-fits-all explanation and tries to fit everything into this tiny little box, restricting his ability to see nuances that might be obvious to others. It is entirely true in some cases that terrorists might have legitimate grievances and it might be true that some of them feel so overcome with anger at the world situation that they feel they need to do something drastic to initiate change, but using that as a foundation for all analysis of terrorist activities is amateurish and overly simplistic. To say that Mau Mau, the IRA, Baader-Meinhof, Yaser Arafat, Timothy McVeigh, and Al Qaeda all start from the same place ignores the individual circumstances of each case and dismisses by default a lot of important details that would contribute to a fuller understanding of what happened each time. Carr’s stated intention of explaining why terrorists do what they do ultimately fails, mostly because his analysis is predicated by a weak, inaccurate premise that also completely leaves psycho-sociological explanations untouched. Finally another big weakness of this book is his constant references to the depiction of terrorism in literature, movies, and popular culture as if that would have anything to do with the causes of terrorism.
So The Infernal Machine has some big flaws when it comes to actually explaining terrorism. It does have some merits though in how it provides a narrative timeline and overview of this political problem. It serves as a good introduction to the subject matter, but otherwise is poorly thought out in its analysis. It is commendable to stand up in defense of the underdogs at times, but it is a mistake to think that all underdogs are equally worth defending. It is also fallacious to attribute their status as underdogs to only one cause as well. Sometimes it is their own fault that they are underdogs, sometimes it isn’t. It has to be looked at on a case by case basis. Matthew Carr’s constant gratuitous references to movies and popular culture make me wonder if he spends too much time watching TV. If he had spent less time doing that and more time researching his subject matter, he could have come up with a more convincing argument in his favor and a book that is less hastily thrown together.
The opening chapter establishes a definition of terrorism. Generally speaking, it is an act of violence that is committed with the intent to force political change. There are a couple key concepts for the book. One is that of “asymmetrical warfare” or the revolt of the powerless against their perceived oppressors, a matter of punching up at those above. The other is “propaganda by deed”, meaning that terrorists don’t literally commit acts of violence in the belief that they will have an immediate impact on political policy. Rather their actions are symbolic and meant to be disruptive of an abstract idea. Not all terrorist attacks deliberately target people, sometimes being limited to property destruction or sabotage. Other times, an attack may be accompanies by a press release or the publication of a manifesto. In more extreme cases, they are meant to provoke a sense of unease and paranoia throughout society, sometimes in hope of a long-range destabilization of the political order. Terrorism is a form of unconventional warfare and, from the author’s point of view, and not necessarily that of others, it is a strictly modern phenomenon. It is also a common misconception that terrorist organizations are formed by poor or downtrodden people; most often they are led by ideologues coming from the educated middle or upper classes who elect themselves to be the vanguards of revolutionary change. Matthew Carr ends the first chapter by claiming he intends to examine the root causes of terrorism.
From there he launches into a fairly comprehensive history. It all started in 19th century Russia when a group of upper class activists, some of which worked in the medical profession, set off a series of bombings. These people were anarchists and called themselves People’s Will. They set a precedent for a style of rebellion that has lasted until the current day despite the fact that most terrorists are unaware of its placement on a historical continuum. Other prominent terrorist groups rose up out of the anti-colonialist and nationalist struggles in the early modern era. Carr covers the Mau Mau in Kenya, the Irish Republican Brotherhood, the Algerian revolutionary war, and the 1948 Israeli bombing of the British colonial headquarters in Jerusalem. At the peak of early modern terrorism is the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo by the Serbian nationalist teenager Gavrilo Princip, an act of violence that resulted in World War I. These chapters on the early to mid 20th century are the best in the book. While Carr does a spotty job of analyzing the causes and dynamics of these conflicts, he does a good job of laying out the historical events and the impact they had on contemporary politics.
As the narrative moves along in the later 20th century, his study of urban guerilla movements and Left wing radicalism gets a little bit weak. He brings up the IRA, the Basque separatist group ETA, and the rise of Islamic terrorism, mostly in relation to Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi and Yasser Arafat’s push for Palestinian liberation from Israel. But most of this section gives accounts of First World activist groups like the Weather Underground in America, the Baader-Meinhof gang in West Germany, and the communist inspired RAF in Italy; all of these groups were involved in hijackings, bombings, robberies, kidnappings, and murder. Obviously none of them were successful.
While telling the stories of bumbling Left wing ideologues, he also delves into the extreme reactions of the dominant cultures. Sometimes he indulges so much in the retaliatory violence of the oppressors that the terrorists get overshadowed and it becomes easy to forget what the book is actually about. Carr might be trying to show that the dominating governments are often more cruel and brutal than the terrorists themselves, but he goes a bit too far and overstates his case. The idea emerges that even though the terrorists commit deplorable crimes in the name of freedom fighting, they ultimately have legitimate grievances and are therefore partially justified in what they do since they have no other way of fighting injustice. That assertion rests on thin ice as Carr’s narrative approaches the 1990s and 2000s.
There were several prominent terrorist incidents in the 1990s that get brought into the discussion, but two of them merit special consideration. One is the Aum Shinrikyo sarin gas attacks on the Tokyo subways. Technically this shouldn’t even be considered a terrorist attacks in the strict definition of the word since the group was a religious cult led by a blind yoga teacher who claimed to be Jesus. They believed they were taking the people who died of gas poisoning to Heaven, saving them from the imminent apocalypse. They made no political demands and appeared to be acting solely out of a bizarre millenarian conviction. Despite the atrocity, it is a bad choice of events to include this book as it doesn’t relate to the stated subject matter which is political in nature.
The other major event was the Oklahoma City bombing done by Timothy McVeigh, a Second Amendment fundamentalist and right wing extremist who declared war on the American government by blowing up an office building, killing hundreds of children in its daycare center and a bunch of office workers too. While Carr, rightly condemns the actual bombing, he writes about McVeigh with sympathy, saying he was so overcome with fury that he felt like he could do nothing else. His sympathetic treatment of McVeigh is quite off-putting since you can assume that most Americans, to some degree, feel that the American government is unjust, but most of them are sensible enough not to commit an act of terrorism to express their frustration. McVeigh was not the ordinary, angry citizen that Carr makes him out to be since something is obviously lacking in the mind of someone who could commit such an atrocity. There is more to this than simple political anger. But as Carr continues on in his analysis, another pattern to his thinking emerges: he blames just about every terrorist attack on governmental injustice and never on the psychological shortcomings of the terrorists themselves. He almost exclusively links every terrorist attack from the 1960s onward to the governments of America and Israel. Carr’s hidden political agenda comes out into the light of day in his defense of McVeigh and the right wing militia movement that has grown ever since.
Carr’s bias becomes even more evident in his analysis of the attacks of 9/11. Again, he condemns the actual violence while lending an ounce of sympathy to the idea that Al Qaeda were targeting America solely because they disagreed with the American presence in the Middle East and their support for Israel. He never mentions Al Qaeda’s stated intention of establishing a new caliphate to rule over the Muslim world, nor does he bring up the fact that American intelligence forces had tried several times to assassinate Osama bin Laden in the 1990s. Certainly America’s presence in the region had something to do with it, but it isn’t the complete story. If Carr had done more research he would have known that.
Carr’s case is weakened also as he tries to make a tu quoque (appeal to hypocrisy) logically fallacious argument by stating that 9/11 was somewhat justified because what America has done in the Middle East is far worse than the hijacking of the airplanes and the mass murder of thousands of people in a single day. The committing of one crime does not justify another. Taking an eye for an eye leaves everyone blind, as Gandhi said. Of course, if you are an Islamic fundamentalist or an apologist for Islamic fascism, ordinary logic doesn’t apply since power acquired with violence is the ultimate goal. Even worse, the author from there degenerates into entertaining conspiracy theories, accusing the government of hiring the terrorist to attack America in a plot that involved the CIA in secret American training bases and supposedly teaching them to fly in an aviation school in Florida that he says doesn’t actually exist. Carr claims the group’s leader, Mohammad Atta could not have been an Islamic fundamentalist because he liked cocaine, vodka, nightclubs, and prostitutes, but then again it is easy to see how this lifestyle could make a man so psychologically divided against himself that he could want to commit suicide in the worst possible way. Straight out of Alex Jones’s Infowars, he claims the hijackers weren’t even on the planes that day. These are some of the easier to understand conspiracy theories proposed by Carr. Others are too nonsensical to even follow. At least he does admit that the official version of the event could be possible, but his descent into this conspiracy theory maelstrom just makes him look naive and dumb by the end of the book.
The strongest part of Carr’s writing is the historical overview of terrorist movements and their impact on the wider society. The weakest part is his analysis and causal explanation. He uses the injustice of America and Israel as a one-size-fits-all explanation and tries to fit everything into this tiny little box, restricting his ability to see nuances that might be obvious to others. It is entirely true in some cases that terrorists might have legitimate grievances and it might be true that some of them feel so overcome with anger at the world situation that they feel they need to do something drastic to initiate change, but using that as a foundation for all analysis of terrorist activities is amateurish and overly simplistic. To say that Mau Mau, the IRA, Baader-Meinhof, Yaser Arafat, Timothy McVeigh, and Al Qaeda all start from the same place ignores the individual circumstances of each case and dismisses by default a lot of important details that would contribute to a fuller understanding of what happened each time. Carr’s stated intention of explaining why terrorists do what they do ultimately fails, mostly because his analysis is predicated by a weak, inaccurate premise that also completely leaves psycho-sociological explanations untouched. Finally another big weakness of this book is his constant references to the depiction of terrorism in literature, movies, and popular culture as if that would have anything to do with the causes of terrorism.
So The Infernal Machine has some big flaws when it comes to actually explaining terrorism. It does have some merits though in how it provides a narrative timeline and overview of this political problem. It serves as a good introduction to the subject matter, but otherwise is poorly thought out in its analysis. It is commendable to stand up in defense of the underdogs at times, but it is a mistake to think that all underdogs are equally worth defending. It is also fallacious to attribute their status as underdogs to only one cause as well. Sometimes it is their own fault that they are underdogs, sometimes it isn’t. It has to be looked at on a case by case basis. Matthew Carr’s constant gratuitous references to movies and popular culture make me wonder if he spends too much time watching TV. If he had spent less time doing that and more time researching his subject matter, he could have come up with a more convincing argument in his favor and a book that is less hastily thrown together.
No comments:
Post a Comment