The Infernal Machine: A History of Terrorism [Hardcover]

Matthew Carr (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 1, 2007

A dramatic reframing of our troubled present against a century full of striking historical parallels.

In 1881, a small group of Russian revolutionaries calling themselves "terrorists" assassinated Tsar Alexander II in a spectacular bombing attack in St. Petersburg. Far from being psychopathic murderers, these men and women viewed their actions as a just response to tyranny.

The violence in Russia launched a crucial but poorly understood chapter in modern political history. With extraordinary narrative sweep, investigative journalist Matthew Carr unearths the complex realities of terrorist violence and its indelible impact on nations as different as Italy, Argentina, France, Algeria, Ireland, Russia, Japan, and the United States.

Spanning over a century of world history, The Infernal Machine reveals stunning similarities in societies' responses to terrorism despite profound political and cultural differences. Again and again, Carr demonstrates that the true impact of terrorism has been felt in the overreactions of government and the media to acts of political violence, as rulers have consistently seized on terrorist attacks as a pretext for a massive counterassault, sacrificing civil liberties and curtailing democratic institutions in the name of security.

Includes historical accounts of: IRA, Mau Mau, Red Brigades, Baader-Meinhof Gang, PLO, National Liberation Front of Algeria, The Weathermen, ETA/Basque separatists, Carlos the Jackal, Hezbollah, The Tamil Tigers, Al-Qaeda.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

British author and journalist Carr (My Father's House) bookends his engrossing, unsettling history—including accounts of murderous organizations like the 19th-century anarchists, the IRA, Mau Mau, Red Brigades, Basque separatists, FLN, PLO and Hezbollah and the onset of international terrorism 30 years ago—with a scathing critique of the Bush administration's "authoritarian responses" to the attacks of 9/11. Amid an avalanche of information, Carr argues that most terrorist groups—those with a distinct political goal and popular support within their country—are essentially uncrushable, but negotiating with them (Britain and the IRA, for example) has worked. Carr relates scores of terrorist outrages and devotes equal space to brutal government counterterrorism that, he demonstrates, is not only ineffectual, but also nourishes terrorism. Instead of today's war on terror, Carr calls for addressing the wider causes: "the present eruption of Islamist violence is perhaps a symptom of an imbalance of power and the consequence of decades of manipulation, deceit and hypocrisy in Western foreign policy towards the Arab world." Though his analysis of Middle East politics is open to debate, Carr presents an impressive compendium of terrorist violence and government response. (Apr.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

It would be useful to understand the origins of terrorism as a tactic, as well as placing that tactic in its proper historical perspective. Carr, a broadcaster and journalist, certainly has an ambitious goal: tracing the history of modern terrorism from late-nineteenth-century Russia to our present duel with Islamic jihadists. Along the way, he provides often-fascinating accounts of various movements, including the People's Will in Russia, the Mau Mau in Kenya, and the Baader-Meinhof gang in Germany. Carr offers some credible explanations for the resort to violence by these groups; most of them seemed outraged by a sense of powerlessness, while motivated by a frightening confidence in their own moral superiority. Unfortunately, in his desire to see common threads linking the past to the present, Carr ignores fundamental differences between various groups. Also, he frequently falls into the trap of "moral equivalency," equating government actions to resist terrorism with terrorism itself. Although Carr has given us some valuable information here, this is hardly the sober, disinterested examination of modern terrorism that our age requires. Jay Freeman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 410 pages
• Publisher: New Press, The; 1st US Edition edition (April 1, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1595581790
• ISBN-13: 978-1595581792
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.2 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,059,950 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent needed perspective and "reality check", May 27, 2007

By 

L. F Sherman "dikw" (Wiscasset, ME United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Infernal Machine: A History of Terrorism (Hardcover)

Descriptions, explanations, and histories of terrorism have been "one-eyed" - lacking depth perception and without perspective to find their way. History has been written by the establishment and terror defined to exclude "state terrorism". Worse still, accounts have covered up actions that have been government provocation and extreme measures that inspired escalation of conflict. Anger, fear, labeling undermine any hope of truth and understanding. Strong simplistic answers meet emotional needs and belief is inversely proportional to facts and analysis.

The very language of reporting misleads and corrupts implying responsibility and guilt. One would not sense that Israel used every method of terror before the Palestinians did excepting suicide bombing, or that civilian deaths of Palestinians have generally been at least six times as high as Israelis. Israel was founded on successful terror and several Prime Ministers were active with the Stern Gang, Irgun, and other elements. The School for the Americas (renamed but not discontinued) has trained thousands of state terrorists in Latin America. The Contras are terrorists too. Carr at least mentions such things, albeit not greatly emphasizing them. That in itself is a great improvement over "politically correct" writing that is more common.

Terrorism is a strategy of the weak, politically driven, identity based, associated with nationalism and sometimes justified by religion. Violent suppression may reinforce a sense of moral justification. Often terrorism eventually works, discredits governments, and conflict is resolved - counter intuitively - by negotiation and compromise.

Carr briefly tells of terror in the French Revolution then Imperial Russia where, after the introduction of dynamite, the "infernal machine", the bomb, became the tool enhancing the capacity for resistance from minorities committed to a cause believed to be just. A terrorist assassination was a major immediate cause of World War I (hardly more "civilized" than terrorism?).

Cases include Ireland, Mau Mau, Basques, Red Brigades, Japan, Palestine, Israel, Sri Lanka, Argentina, Nicaragua, and others. Many examples are vaguely familiar and here become 3-D and Technicolor. Some lessons can be drawn regarding the political nature of terror, relative success as a strategy for the weak, and blowback of most efforts at suppression. But summaries of key examples rather than a `political science' analysis is the focus. The perspective and openness retelling both sides are what make the book distinctive and valuable. The greater objectivity is greater value.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Terror in a Historic Context, January 21, 2008

By 

J. J. Kwashnak "voracious reader" (Monroe, LA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Infernal Machine: A History of Terrorism (Hardcover)

Many of the books to come out in the aftermath of 9/11 tried to look at the new (to Americans) phenomenon of terror attacks in the context of that attack - meaning in terms of a religious only context. Now that some time has passed, Carr brings us the movement of terrorism as a political tool. He does an excellent job providing an overview of the development of terrorism as a continuum from the late19th century Russian movement to try to violently assassinate Alexander II thus bringing down the stardom. He acknowledges that one man's terrorist can be another man's freedom fighter, especially as he wades into more populist terror activities such as in Northern Ireland, and Lebanon. In the work Carr shows the common threads that bind together all the terror movements, be they radical Marxist, Algerian or Argentinean opponents of government or the more modern religious based terrorism of Al-Qaeda or suicide bombings in Israel.

This terrorism is not examined out of context, and Carr spends a lot of time contrasting the terrorists with the responses of established governments in efforts to root out the terrorists, even to the point of adopting terrorist tactics in order to sway public opinion against the terrorists. Some readers may not agree with Carr's dim view of terrorism vs. state military action - how blowing up a civilian building by an individual is terrorist while the strategic bombing of civilian buildings by the military is acceptable. This view may rankle some but to Carr's credit he consistently applies it across the board. Some of the terrorist movements he writes about may to some point be "understandable" to the author, he does not romanticize them. In a world where even a body like the U.N. cannot agree upon a definition of terrorism, and thus cannot fully condemn it, Carr attempts to cut through the language and his definition, and by applying it to modern history shows the definition of terrorism is a moving target, albeit one with common threads. You may not agree with all that is said, but you will get a much better idea of how terrorism has come to be a force in the modern world.

9 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The lesson is it's not terrorism we should fear, it is the excesses of counter terrorism, April 2, 2007

By 

azphil (Prescott, AZ United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Infernal Machine: A History of Terrorism (Hardcover)

Carr in this book details that citizens of a nation should have more to fear from the counter terrorism measures their governments take than the terrorism they seek to eradicate. In most of the cases mentioned in the book the military counter measures have killed a hundred, if not a thousand, times more people than the terrorist acts that created the emergency. It is a salutary lesson for us that those who would save our civilization are not only more capable of violent actions, but given their control of the military they are more lethal than the terrorists.

No one espouses that states should not confront violent elements within their realm, however in many cases the cure has been more lethal to the average citizen than the desease.

Destroying the values that make a civilization in order to save it makes for a perverse logic that actually does the terrorists work for them.