Terror Incognita (Sydney Morning Herald, 26/07/2008)

Brett Bowden and Michael T. Davis (eds)
Terror: From Tyrannicide to Terrorism
UQP; $59.95; 379pp

It is in the nature of certain journalists to look for connections where none are apparent. Thus, in July 2005, when London was unexpectedly successful in its bid to host the 2012 Olympics, beating the runaway favourite Paris, a few facetious hacks suggested that two hundred years after the battle of Trafalgar – another unlikely victory – the French still hadn’t learned their lesson. Similarly, when, the following day, four bombs exploded in central London, killing 52 and injuring hundreds, some were moved to make a connection with another group of religious terrorists, whose plot to blow up the Houses of Parliament exactly 400 years before had shaken the English people to the core.

Edited by Brett Bowden and Michael T. Davis, Terror: From Tyrannicide to Terrorism happens to take these two events, the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 and the attacks on London in 2005, as the ‘bookends’ between which its sixteen essays on ‘the historical terrain of terrorism’ are shelved, in chronological order. Thus, we move from the Plot itself (the subject of a fine essay by Chris R. Kyle), to the legitimation of political violence that resulted from the execution of Charles I, through the post-revolutionary Terror in France, anarchist terrorism, the Terrors of communism, the terror tactics of the Fascists and Nazis, the ethno-nationalist terrorism of ETA and the IRA, to the current wave of Islamic terror. The result is an important book, albeit an uneven one.

The book addresses two types of terror: terror as a limited tactic designed to effect a political change; and terror as a means of social control. Or, to put it another way: terror from below and terror from above. Most of the time, we are able to talk of these two types of terror in isolation. (Robert Mugabe practices terror, but is rarely, if ever, described as a terrorist.) But there is a relationship between the two and the most enlightening essays in this book seek to explore and explain that relationship. Aristotle Kallis’s essay on fascism is particularly good in this regard, suggesting that European fascists saw violence, not only as a means to an end, but also as an end in itself. The current terrorist threat from al-Qaeda also fuses the two kinds of terror in that its tactics are partly designed as a punishment for apostasy and heresy. Its tactics are linked, in other words, to its totalitarian interpretation of Islam.

Only occasionally does this collection descend into moral equivalence, but, when it does, it does so with enthusiasm. In his essay on the British Jacobins, contributing editor Michael T. Davis draws parallels between the Loyalist reaction to the threat from France in the 1790s and the victimisation of Arabs and Muslims in the wake of the attacks on the London Underground. Suggesting that this victimisation is tantamount to a campaign of terror, he goes on to describe it in the following terms:

The report [by the International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights] found that most attacks on Muslims involved verbal assaults as well as physical violence and crimes against property, such as arson targeting mosques or Muslim grave sites.

This is a very slippery sentence. At first glance, ‘as well as’ seems to mean ‘and’. But surely it cannot be the case that ‘most attacks’ involve physical violence and arson attacks on mosques and grave sites. ‘[A]s well as’ must mean ‘as opposed to’. That the ambiguity is not unhelpful to Davis’s argument is doubtless a coincidence. But I think we have a right to expect a bit more rigour in the circumstances.

Still, this book has plenty to recommend it. Above all, it demonstrates that 9/11 did not usher in an ‘age of terror’ but rather a different form of terror and that only by taking the long view can we ultimately defeat the enemies of reason.