Sacred monsters
Michael Burleigh: Blood & Rage: A Cultural History of Terrorism
The New Criterion, October 1, 2008
New York City, September 2001 © Andrew Stuttaford
If you are searching for a few scraps of comfort about the nature of our species, you would do very well to avoid Blood & Rage: A Cultural History of Terrorism, the latest in a series of profoundly depressing books by the British historian Michael Burleigh. If, on the other hand, your objective is to examine the current global eruption of Islamic extremism through a wider perspective than the usual minaret, mullah, and middle-eastern rancor, Blood & Rage is an essential, imperative read, and well worth crossing the cyber pond to buy (it’s as yet unavailable in the United States).
A decade ago this was probably not a volume Professor Burleigh would have anticipated writing. In the final sentences of his grim, grand, and uncomfortably perceptive The Third Reich: A New History (2000), even the generally gloomy Burleigh was cheered by the way that the disasters of the twentieth century appeared to have dealt a devastating blow to the millenarian dreaming that had done so much to devastate that era:
The lower register, the more pragmatic ambitions, the talk of taxes, markets, education, health and welfare, evident in the political culture of Europe and North America, constitute progress… . Our lives may be more boring than those who lived in apocalyptic times, but being bored is greatly preferable to being prematurely dead because of some ideological fantasy.
The following year, the twin towers fell.
History, once again, had made a fool of the historian. By 2008 Burleigh could write, apocalyptically enough, of “an existential threat to the whole of civilization.” If the Clinton years had seemed a little “boring” when compared with what had gone before, it was only because we were too distracted, too complacent, and too incurious to notice what beasts were slouching our way.
Burleigh doesn’t want us to repeat that mistake. Blood & Rage is urgent, insistent, and angry, so much so that it occasionally topples over into the clichés of what Brits dub “saloon bar” wisdom (imagine Fox’s Bill O’Reilly pontificating in a Surrey pub). Like much of Burleigh’s work, Blood & Rage is panoramic in its scope (it begins with Fenians and ends with jihadis), and it’s packed with intriguing and awkward historical detail, quite a bit of which is guaranteed to irritate the usual suspects on campus and in the media. The book has been criticized for lacking a clear unifying theme, but there’s not a lot that nationalist killers such as, say, the IRA, ETA, or Black September have in common with the millenarian butchers of al Qaeda or the Russian anarchist fringe—except, most notably, the corpses they leave behind (it says a great deal about Burleigh that he often takes the trouble to record the names of the victims). If there is one broader lesson to be drawn from Blood & Rage, however, it’s this: terrorism may ebb and flow, but it will, like Cain, always be with us.
For a deeper understanding of the specific plague that we pigeonhole as “al Qaeda,” read Blood & Rage in conjunction with Earthly Powers (2005) and Sacred Causes (2006), Burleigh’s remarkable two-volume depiction of the danse macabre of religion, politics, and revolutionary violence that has whirled its way through four centuries of an emerging “modern” era that still has, evidently, plenty of room for the old Adam. Taken together, these three extraordinarily wide-ranging books can be seen, among the many other attributes they share, as a shrewd and unsettling investigation of the persistence, allure, and danger of religious (in a very broad sense of the word) absolutism, a phenomenon that has, in one way or another, been an important element in all too many of mankind’s attempts to establish an organizing principle for its societies.
In earlier epochs, enforcing its imperatives was made (for those who needed it to be made easier) by the belief that to do so was God’s will. Thus killing the heretic was worship, not murder, a tough, noble deed that brought heaven just a touch closer. But in Earthly Powers and Sacred Causes Burleigh reminds us that you don’t need God for an Inquisition or, for that matter, a religion. Oddly, Sacred Causes is subtitled “The Clash of Religion and Politics, from the Great War to the War on Terror.” Clash? It’s true that the years after 1918 were marked by an onslaught on the established churches by Europe’s new totalitarian states, but the nature of that attack was itself, in many respects, “religious.” This wasn’t a clash between religion and politics so much as an attempt to merge the two forcibly. Belief in God was sometimes a casualty, rationality always. “The people dream,” wrote Konrad Heiden (Hitler’s first biographer), “and a soothsayer tells them what they are dreaming.” As Burleigh explains, these totalitarian regimes “metabolized the religious instinct.” Both state and state-sponsored cult became, he argues, “objects of religious devotion,” their ideologies “political religions” of a type already visible in the revolutionary France that is in some ways the principal villain of Earthly Powers.
This is, I suppose, a perverse tribute to the persistence of man’s innate religious instinct, something to which Burleigh attaches an importance at odds with the usual orthodoxies. Of course, it’s not particularly novel to regard Nazism as a cult (although in The Third Reich, Burleigh extends this analysis further than most), but it’s somewhat rarer to see a similar diagnosis applied so comprehensively to Bolshevism (the Asian variants of Communism are, unfortunately, outside the scope of these books, although I can guess what Burleigh, a writer who is as humane as he is caustic, would have made of Maoism) and, more provocatively still, to the very roots of supposedly “scientific” socialism itself.
But if God died, He took His time doing so. We have grown accustomed to the idea that religion in Europe spent the post- Enlightenment centuries rapidly retreating to the private sphere, and thence to quietist oblivion. This process may have been uneven, but it was, so runs the argument, as continuous and as inevitable as the defeat of those throne-and-altar types who tried to impede it. Burleigh reveals this narrative to be as inaccurate as it is incomplete. He resurrects philosophers, politicians, and movements largely written out of more conventional accounts of the past. To be sure, some of those exhumed are so marginal and so mad that they might have been better left to molder on undisturbed, but the cumulative effect is fascinating, a rich rococo mess, rather than the dully one-directional tramline that defines the progressive view of history.
If the religious instinct survived (as it was always bound to—we are what we are), the weakening of long-established vehicles for its expression left it vulnerable to the new political religions and with them the delusion that it was possible for man to build heaven here on earth, a fantasy that paved the way for attempts to create a state of limitless reach and unbridled cruelty. That’s not to claim (and Burleigh wouldn’t) that the totalitarian impulse is now solely the preserve of the unbeliever. In an age defaced by the Taliban and al Qaeda, who could? Besides, attempting to pin the blame on either godliness or godlessness is less useful than looking at the very nature of belief itself—and how it can, and frequently does, mutate so horrifically, and how, for that matter, it can be manipulated. After reading Burleigh’s books and contemplating their rogue’s gallery of madmen, prophets, and monsters, it’s difficult to avoid the conclusion (even if it’s never directly spelled out) that the origins of jihadi violence lie as much in the darker recesses of the human psyche as in the peculiarities of any one religion or, indeed, region. As Burleigh demonstrates, a Bernard Lewis may be an invaluable guide to the appeal of bin Ladenism, but so is Fyodor Dostoevsky.
In his ideas, in the breadth of his writings, and in the distinct, acerbic, and sometimes bleakly humorous spirit that permeates them, there’s a hint of Edward Gibbon about Burleigh. If we listen to what he has to say (including some useful practical suggestions at the end of Blood & Rage), we may have a better chance of avoiding our very own decline and fall. The last one was bad enough