Michael burleigh blood and rage a cultural his ism (v5 0)

MICHAEL BURLEIGH Blood and Rage A CULTURAL HISTORY OF TERRORISM CONTENTS PREFACE CHAPTER Green: The Fenian Dynamiters CHAPTER Red: Russian Nihilists and Revolutionaries CHAPTER Black: Anarchists and Terrorism CHAPTER Death in the Sun: Terror and Decolonisation CHAPTER Attention-Seeking: Black September and International Terrorism CHAPTER Guilty White Kids: The Red Brigades and the Red Army Faction CHAPTER Small-Nation Terror CHAPTER World Rage: Islamist Terrorism NOTES SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY INDEX ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS AFTERTHOUGHTS About the Author By the same author Copyright About the Publisher PREFACE T his book’s starting point is the moment when recognisably modern terrorist organisations emerged in the mid-nineteenth century, dubious precedence being accorded here to the Irish Fenians We could venture back to the medieval Assassins of Syria or the early modern British Gunpowder Plot, but my knowledge of both has faded with age and I not regard either as especially helpful in understanding contemporary terrorism The book’s working assumptions are evident throughout There are well over a hundred de nitions of terrorism and it is possible to aggregate those elements that recur most frequently Terrorism is a tactic primarily used by non-state actors, who can be an acephalous entity as well as a hierarchical organisation, to create a psychological climate of fear in order to compensate for the legitimate political power they not possess It can be distinguished from, say, guerrilla warfare, political assassination or economic sabotage, although organisations that practise terror have certainly resorted to these too That modern states, from the Jacobins in the 1790s onwards, have been responsible for the most lethal instances of terrorism, including self-styled counter-terror campaigns, is taken as a given, which does not absolve non-state actors through repetition of this historical truism State violence is currently on the defensive, as various rabble armies run amok under the guise of Islamic or liberation or people’s revolution or whatever they call themselves Nor does the cliche that yesterday’s terrorist is tomorrow’s statesman really get us very far If you imagine that Osama bin Laden is going to evolve into Nelson Mandela, you need a psychiatrist rather than an historian The Al Qaeda leader does not want to negotiate with us since what he desires is for all in dels and apostates to submit or be killed This book focuses on life histories and actions rather than the theories which validate them, roughly in accord with St Matthew’s precept ‘By their fruits ye shall know them’ This is not because I am dismissive of ideas and ideology - quite the contrary - but because these seem a relatively neglected part of the picture Ideology is like a detonator that enables a pre-existing chemical mix to explode Terrorists make choices all along their journey, and it is these I am most interested in Hence the book is about terrorism as a career, a culture and a way of life, although obviously one involving death, for the terrorists’ victims and sometimes for the terrorists themselves, unless they deliberately court this through suicidal operations like Hamas, Hizbollah or the Tamil Tigers Terrorism is violent, which is why there is much detailed discussion of violence in the book, as well as material intended to demystify and deglamorise terrorist operations Some terrorists indeed kill people; many others spend their time laundering money or stealing vehicles Since much of this material is in the public domain, it is of no operational use to would-be terrorists As the book tries to make crystal clear, especially to anyone who might appear to harbour a sneaking admiration for those who wish to change the world by violence, the milieu of terrorists is invariably morally squalid, when it is not merely criminal That is especially evident in the chapters below on Russian nihilists, the Baader-Meinhof gang, and both loyalist and republican terrorists in Northern Ireland The unexpressed goal of bringing about transformative chaos becomes the element in which terrorists are most at home Destruction and self-destruction brie y compensate for some perceived slight or more abstract grievances that cause their hysterical rage As endless studies of terrorist psychology reveal, they are morally insane, without being clinically psychotic If that a iction unites most terrorists, then their victims usually have one thing in common, regardless of their social class, politics or religious faith That is a desire to live unexceptional lives settled amid their families and friends, without some resentful radical loser - who can be a millionaire loser harbouring delusions of victimhood wishing to destroy and maim them so as to realise a world that almost nobody wants That unites the victims of terror from Algiers, Baghdad, Cairo, via London, Madrid and New York, to Nairobi, Singapore and Jakarta They all bleed and grieve in the same way If this book were to be absolutely comprehensive, it would be doubly long, losing its human focus That is why such subjects as terrorism in Latin America from the Tupamaros to FARC, the US itself, and the Sinhalese-Tamil ict in Sri Lanka have been omitted, although there is passing allusion to them all Alert readers will realise that buried in the history are suggestions about which past policies worked, and which didn’t, regarding, for example, how to deal with imprisoned terrorists who routinely try to convert jails into universities or how to derange terrorist nancing by encouraging organised crime In this I have learned a great deal from studies and programmes in such varied places as Italy, France, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia and Singapore, whose existence and importance are routinely ignored Since this is not a counter-terrorism manual, any prescriptions are highly tentative, such as disaggregating terrorist movements along their inner fault lines, while emphasising the commonality of su ering that terrorism produces in all our respective civilisations As long as people hardly react to the news that x number of people, remarkably like ourselves in longing for life, have been killed by a bomb in Egypt or Malaysia, there will be no e ective global response to this current epidemic A properly funded police, intelligence and military response is essential; but so are improved public diplomacy and e orts to deradicalise potential terrorists, for the Hot and Cold Wars are now parallel They have to learn not only that they cannot win, with even 9/11 merely a ecting the operations of Wall Street for a few days, but that they are ghting precisely those societies that can most help their own societies overcome their wounding intellectual and material dependency on the West When the cause is discredited, Islamist terrorism, like that of anarchists or Nihilists, will significantly abate, although die-hards will never stop Nothing would be gained in these pages by attempting to impose uniformity on the spelling of Muslim names Many Western Muslims have their own preferred forms; French transliterations from the Arabic, for example, di er from English; and there is even debate about the most respectful way to spell the Prophet’s name My policy is to aim for consistency with each person’s name and not to worry that one is Mohammed, another Mahomed, a third Muhammad and so on I have similarly left it to my sources to determine whether measurements are imperial or metric I would like to o er warm thanks to Heather Higgins of the Randolph Trust and Director John Raisian of the Hoover Institution, Stanford University for making it possible for me to research and write this book under the aegis of a leading US thinktank Self-evidently it is not one that espouses the sanctimonious ethos of the New York Times and is all the better for that Andrew Wylie, Peter James and several friends at HarperCollins have made producing this book a pleasure despite a subject matter that frequently lowers one’s spirits Among the people who have a orded insight and encouragement from within the counter-terrorism milieu, I would especially like to thank Shmuel Bar, Paul Bew, Adrian Weale and Dean Godson as well as others who wish to remain anonymous Michael Burleigh August 2007 CHAPTER Green: The Fenian Dynamiters I FRIENDS ACROSS THE OCEAN I rish grievances against the British in the nineteenth century were many The British had garrisoned Ireland with troops, and favoured the industrious Protestant Scots-Irish of the North, because they suspected that its predominantly Roman Catholic inhabitants would rebel with the aid of a foreign foe at the rst opportunity In addition to the Ulster Presbyterians, there was an established, that is privileged, Protestant Church of Ireland, even though most of the population were Catholics There was a ne Protestant university, Trinity College, Dublin, but none for Catholics Ireland was part of a global empire, but was often treated as an o shore agricultural colony where labourers and poorer tenant farmers lived in chronic insecurity at the whim of absentee English landlords Millions had left for the US (and industrialising Britain) where they adopted radical views that were far in advance of those of most people in Ireland itself Confronted by virulent strains of American Protestantism, they compensated for discrimination by becoming more aggressively Irish, caricaturing the English as latterday Normans and sentimentalising the old country with its ancient barrows, bogs, castles and mists That these were historically authentic was partly due to their being noted, from 1824 onwards, on detailed Ordnance Survey maps, while another British intrusion - the national census - ironically contributed to a growth of Irish cultural nationalism Successive censuses had startling revelations Whereas in 1845 half the population spoke Irish (or Gaelic), by 1851 this had fallen to 23 per cent, and below 15 per cent forty years later The Gaelic League was born of a desire for an Irish-Irish patriotic literature at a time when the brightest stars in that rmament were Anglo-Irish Protestant nationalists like J M Synge, Sean O’Casey or W B Yeats.1 Many complexities about the real, as opposed to imaginary, Ireland were lost in the Atlantic translation as fond hearts lled with hatred Irish volunteers for the British army, replete with their own Catholic military chaplains, won a disproportionately high number of Victoria Crosses during the Crimean War English and Irish liberals, led by the High Anglican prime minister William Ewart Gladstone, combined with British nonconformists to disestablish the anomalous Church of Ireland in 1869 Partly due to the disruptive ingenuity of a caucus of Irish MPs in the House of Commons, notably under Charles Stewart Parnell, and endemic rural criminality, Land Acts alleviated the insecurity of the smallest class of tenants Finally, more and more British politicians, led eventually by Gladstone himself, were persuaded that Ireland’s future lay in some degree of Home Rule, with separate legislatures bene ting both England and Ireland, the two countries joined at a more exalted level for defence or foreign policy by an imperial parliament continuing to sit at Westminster That prospect, which became real enough on the eve of the First World War, was su cient for the Protestant majority in Ulster to seek German arms to preserve their membership of a more developed BelfastGlasgow-Liverpool industrialised axis, if necessary detached from the benighted clerical South.2 Irish terrorism grew out of a venerable insurrectionary tradition that was manifestly failing by the mid-nineteenth century, only to return with a vengeance after an intervening lull in the late 1960s The older history created many of the myths and martyrs of the more recent Troubles, as well as patterns of behaviour and thought that have survived in armed Irish republicanism within our lifetimes There were many malign ghosts On 17 March 1858 an organisation was founded in Dublin by a railway engineer called James Stephens It was St Patrick’s Day Within a few years this mutated into the Irish Republican Brotherhood, although that name was never employed as widely as ‘Fenians’ This referred to a mythical band of pre-Christian Irish warriors, or the Fianna, roughly similar to romantic English legends about the Knights of King Arthur For the English it meant a dastardly gang of murdering desperadoes Fenianism encompassed a range of activities, with harmless conviviality and labour activism at the legal end of the spectrum, through to rural disturbances, insurrection and terrorism on the illegal margins Incubated in the political underworld of Paris, or the rough-and-ready slums of North America’s eastern seaboard, the culture was heavily indebted to that of secret societies, with arcane rituals, masonic oaths and signs, a major reason why the Roman Catholic Church was largely unsympathetic The general goal was the ‘disenthralment’ of the Irish race and the achievement of an Irish republic through violent struggle, all this within a broader context of Gaelic cultural self-assertion to which there has been some allusion.3 The strategy, ultimately derived from the 1798 Wolfe Tone rebellion, was to transform British imperial di culties into Irish opportunities The imperial di culties included the Crimean War, the Indian Mutiny and the Zulu, Sudan and Boer Wars, as well as crises in British relations with France in the 1850s, with the US in the 1860s, and with Russia in the 1870s, for a war with any of these would enhance the prospects of an independent Irish republic While the number of Irish heroes in the Crimea seemed to suggest that this strategy had failed, the Fenians took courage from the war’s exposure of Britain’s military de ciencies and the barely concealed rift with its French ally In addition to trying to arm the Zulus, even the mahdi’s ‘swarthy desert warriors’ became objects of Fenian interest, a trend that would continue into the late twentieth century in the form of Irish Republican Army links with the Palestine Liberation Organisation and Libya.4 The Fenians drew upon the wider Irish emigration, whether in mainland Britain or the United States of America They included refugees from the conditions that had produced the mid-nineteenth-century famine, of which many Irish-Americans had raw memories Life in the urban Irish ghettos of the US (or industrial Britain) was primitive The Irish were also heartily disliked by the Protestant aristocracy that dominated the US, a fact which may explain their ight into a vehement Irishness which had much purchase in Boston or ‘New Cork’ The American Civil War marked an important turning point since Britain was perceived to have supported the Confederate South, at a time when 150,000 Irish-Americans were ghting predominantly for the North The Irish-Americans would inject Fenianism with money and military expertise The US government was culpably indulgent towards Fenian terrorism, as it would be for the next hundred years Despite British government protests, nothing was done by the American authorities to stop the Fenians openly soliciting money in the US for antiBritish outrages, notably through the so-called Dynamite Press The Fenians were even allowed openly to use riverbank yards to develop a submarine whose sole object was to harass British shipping US authorities rejected all British attempts to extradite Irish fugitives All of which is to say that the Fenians had discovered an important terrorist tactic, that of using a benign foreign base for fund-raising and launching terrorist operations British protests to Washington might have been taken more seriously had England, and especially London, not itself been a welcoming haven for every species of foreign radical The French, who reacted with alacrity in detecting and deporting Parisbased Fenian supporters, chivalrously overlooked the fact that the bombs used by Orsini in his 1857 bid to kill Napoleon III had been manufactured in Birmingham Within six years, the Fenians had over fty thousand supporters in Ireland There, Fenianism was often little more than an assertive badge of identity and an opportunity for politicised recreation, in which young men joined a parallel society based on military drill, picnics and the adoption of non-deferential American manners towards priests, policemen and squires.5 The movement had its own newspaper, Irish People, and in James Kickham at least one writer of note Across the Atlantic it enabled demobilised veterans of the Civil War to defer their return to civilian normality and to act on behalf of an Ireland that assumed mythical proportions through greater distance from its complex realities In February 1867 a Civil War veteran and Fenian, captain Thomas J Kelly (he promoted himself to colonel when he entered the service of Ireland), ordered a series of risings in Ireland, to be accompanied by diversionary supporting incidents in England, and two invasions of Canada, in the name of the US, which were frustrated by a British secret agent and the US government itself One escapade involved the capture of Chester Castle, which contained an arsenal with thirty thousand stands of ri es The Fenian plan was to commandeer a train to take the arms to the port of Holyhead where a steamer would ship them to Ireland Telegraph wires would be cut and rail track ripped up in the train’s wake so as to stymie pursuit Fires in the city and interference with the water works would create even greater chaos, the rst manifestations of future co-ordinated terrorist campaigns The raid on the castle involved a hard core of American veterans, supported by several hundred ru ans who in ltrated themselves into Chester by rail from Liverpool and other northern cities with large Irish minorities The raid was halted before it started Tipped o by spies, and concerned about the convergence of large groups of young Irishmen on Chester, the British authorities poured troops and police into the city, the mere sight of whom led to the dispersal of the Fenians They dropped their cartridges, clubs and revolvers into the River Dee or the nearest ditch The rising in Ireland was crushed as a result of the suspension of habeas corpus and the arrest of prominent nationalists; increases in troop numbers; and deployment of ships to watch the Atlantic approaches It coincided with the worst snowstorm in fty years, which put paid to national deliverance by Irish-American soldiers on Erin’s Hope Fifty thousand British troops and police mopped up a few thousand Fenians, although not before they had issued their proclamation: We therefore declare that, unable to endure the curse of Monarchical government, we aim at founding a republic based on universal su rage, which shall secure to all the intrinsic value of their labour The soil of Ireland in the possession of an oligarchy belongs to us, the Irish people, and to us it must be restored We declare also in favour of absolute liberty of conscience, and complete separation of Church and State.6 Colonel Kelly, who in the interim had created an assassination unit to deal with agents and informers, and captain Timothy Deasy were initially picked up in Manchester under the Vagrancy Act News of their arrest spread throughout Manchester’s substantial Irish minority, and eventually reached the ears of two IrishAmerican o cers, Edward O’Meagher Condon and Michael O’Brien Together they assembled a team of ten to rescue Kelly and Deasy as they were being transferred in a Black María for remand hearings at another city prison Six policemen rode on top of the horse-drawn box, in which a sergeant Brett sat with the keys to the prisoners’ locked cage Four more o cers followed in a carriage behind None of the ten policemen was armed The carriage was ambushed as it passed beneath a railway bridge Once shots were red to kill the o -side horse, the escort ran for cover The rescuers then red at the lock on the prison van, contriving to hit sergeant Brett in the head as he peeped apprehensively through the ventilator grille Kelly and Deasy seized his keys and joined their rescuers, who made a run for it across Manchester’s criss-crossed railway tracks Neither man was captured - although Deasy in his dark pea jacket, grey trousers, deerstalker and handcu s might have been thought conspicuous They resurfaced as heroes in America The authorities had more luck in apprehending the rescuers and their penumbra of supporters Twenty-eight people appeared in the dock of Manchester magistrates’ court, of whom ve were then sent for trial by judge and jury for murder, felony and misdemeanour As an indication of how seriously the government regarded the trial, the prosecution case, which was one of common cause due to uncertainty about which individual had murdered sergeant Brett, was put by the attorney-general, the Crown’s leading law o cer After a ve-day hearing, all of the defendants were found guilty of murder and sentenced to execution by hanging The British press managed to have one ... reprieve Barrett took place at a time when the authorities in Australia and Canada had hanged Fenians who had shot a renegade Fenian (he had since become a Canadian cabinet minister) and wounded.. .MICHAEL BURLEIGH Blood and Rage A CULTURAL HISTORY OF TERRORISM CONTENTS PREFACE CHAPTER Green: The Fenian Dynamiters CHAPTER Red: Russian Nihilists and Revolutionaries CHAPTER Black: Anarchists... executions was evident in America, Australia, Canada, South Africa and New Zealand, as well as across Europe In Ireland itself, huge mock funeral processions were held, which suggested that the Catholic