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The Infernal Machine: A History of Terrorism

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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.

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.

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.

Matthew Carr's "The Infernal Machine" has an approval blurb from Mike Davis on the back, and that is an accolade not lightly ignored. And for good reason: the book is an excellent and well-balanced history of terrorism, understood as a specific method (or range of methods) for political movements to achieve their goals. Carr's history ranges from the assassinations of Czarist officials in 19th-century Russia and the infamous anarchists of the fin-de-siècle to the Rote Armee Fraktion and Al-Qaeda, giving a systematic and balanced overview of the various terrorist campaigns that have gripped the attention of the world, whether briefly or during prolongued conflicts. The author's narratives of the different terrorist campaigns and the major individuals involved in them is engaging and exciting, which is all the more impressive because of the balanced approach he has towards terrorism as a method of achieving political aims. Although it has throughout the age been condemned as the height of immorality and as Satanic nihilism, and though rejected as political practice by Marx and Lenin both, Carr shows that more often than not terrorism is a method used in cases of despair, by groups that have much conviction but are politically and militarily weak. Often the figures involved are themselves hardly enthousiastic about the means used and only rely on methods of assassination and indirect warfare because of the enormous difference in strength between them and their opponent.

In this context, it is interesting to note how Carr makes a thorough comparison between the 'traditional' terrorism, actions by individuals or small groups to assassinate major figures in order to provoke repression and/or revolt, and the more common post-war method of the 'urban guerrilla'. To the latter category belong groups like the Brigate Rosse and the Rote Armee Fraktion, but also the many attempts in Latin and Central America to overthrow hated dictatorhips through insurrection in urban areas. Carr does away with much mythologizing in this respect, emphasizing that despite the reputation of such groups, urban guerrilla movements have failed utterly to achieve their political aims far more often than they have succeeded, barely getting beyond the romantic ineffectiveness of the anarchists' "propaganda of the deed". Yet that is not to say that all such movements were futile, or that the propaganda of the deed does not exist. Although the author sometimes balances on the edge of cynicism, it is still better to have fought and lost than not to have fought at all (if one may paraphrase a common saying) in many of these cases, even if the losses are horrendous - after all, unchallenged dictatorships are no less ferocious for having little effective opposition. Also, as Carr shows very well in his work, opposition in one part of the world can inspire opposition in another, with many a 'terrorist' movement having taken inspiration from another and even copied their tactics. The recently defeated LTTE in Sri Lanka, for example, had been using suicide bombings long before these became a familiar part of the Intifada in the 1990s, and the romanticism of the European left-wing urban terrorists in turn inspired 'urban guerrillas' in Latin America and vice versa.

Very wisely Matthew Carr does not neglect to study the methods and history of counter-insurgency either. He shows the hypocritical responses of repressive regimes, whether 'true' dictatorships or liberal ones like the Western governments, to the methods of terrorists which they forever decry as the deepest immorality and the vilest murder while they leave the groups they oppress little other choice through their overwhelming superiority of conventional arms. Such regular militaries kill far more people in every single conflict than terrorism and terrorist methods ever have, but because they favor the already powerful as tactic, they are not considered as criminal as the methods of insurgencies. As Carr emphasizes besides, counter-terrorism forces and the further repression by regimes from Algeria to Uzbekistan in the name of 'war on terror' have also been far more deadly than all modern terrorism combined. That is not to say that terrorism by religious fanatics or romantic fantasists is not to be taken seriously at all - as Marx pointed out after a Fenian group blew up a prison and killed many passersby, however sympathetic one can be to a particular movement, one cannot expect people to just sit still and let themselves be blown up for another's cause. But Carr underlines that we cannot allow an inanity like the 'war on terror' to frighten us into allowing our own governments endless more leeway in militarist, warlike responses at home or abroad, especially since they kill more people than terrorism does and thereby create whole generations worth of new terrorists, as proven in the case of the American support for the Mujahideen in Afghanistan.

The only disappointments of the book are that Carr's vignettes on the individual protagonists of various urban terorrist groups sometimes veer towards character assassination rather than useful analysis of terrorism as a method; it would have been preferable had he spent more time analyzing more different types of such insurgencies using terrorist methods and building more definite conclusions about their utility rather than their morality. Also, the last chapter somewhat pointlessly indulges various conspiratorial theories about the terrorist attacks on major US targets on the 11th of September, 2001. Speculation of this sort never does anyone any good, especially since it encourages people to think in terms of individual actions and spectacular events rather than effective strategies of resistance, whether they include terrorist methods or not, as his book should be concluding with. But other than that, this is a truly accessible and engaging history of terrorism and free of either the usual over-romanticizing or the usual excessive moralizing about the subject.

The "Infernal Machine" is a survey of terrorist activity from anti-Tsarist Russian groups in the latter part of the nineteenth century to the war with Al-Qaeda as of 2006, when the book was published. It provides an informative look at the lesser known terrorists incidents and reactions to them of a hundred years ago, as well as reminding us of the turmoil of the early Arab-Israeli conflicts and the Algerian war, continuing with the brutal guerrilla wars in Latin America, Europe, and to a lesser extent in the United States in the 1960's-70's. The last part of the book concentrates on Palestinian and Islamist terrorist groups from the 1980's to the present day.
Mr. Carr draws several conclusions from the study of all of these groups that may seem startling or unusual to many readers: 1) Whether it is the Russian Tsar in the 1870's or the American President in 2001, the countries suffering terrorist attacks generally present the danger they pose as being a threat to civilization in general. 2) Since the terrorists are seeking to destroy civilization itself, they must be no less than bloodthirsty maniacs, sadistic murderers, or brainwashed individuals completely committed to a totalitarian ideology or an extremist view of religion. 3). Naturally if terrorists are portrayed as being little better than mad dogs, then it follows that nations are justified in using their military forces to track down and kill the killers, or as the saying goes, to "terrorize the terrorists" by using any and all means necessary. .
4) But these characterizations and responses by nations reacting to terrorist attacks are very one-dimensional at best, and may be downright cynical and self-serving at worst. 5) Terrorists often come from groups that have been so oppressed and mistreated for so long that they turn to violence out of desperation and as a last resort. Their murderous behavior of targeting civilians for execution shows both the seriousness with which they take their cause, and is usually the only "military" response they can offer, since they are too few or too poor to hope to meet and defeat a modern military force on the field of battle. 6) Finally, no matter how deadly the terrorist attacks are (even the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon), they pale in comparison to the sheer numbers of innocent people killed in retaliation by modern artillery and laser-guided bombs.Usually the governments responding to these attacks also clamp down on civil liberties in their own country in the name of increased security against the terrorist threat.
Now all of this is great build-up, and I could not wait to see what the author's more nuanced and realistic approach to terrorism would be. You ready? Here it is: "...societies that seriously wish to eliminate or reduce such violence need to address the wider causes and grievances that inspire it (terrorism) and accept their share of responsibility for even the most ostensibly 'evil' terrorist acts."
One of the many incidents that Mr. Carr describes in his narrative is the 1985 hijacking of the Italian cruise liner, The Achille Lauro, by Palestinian terrorists. During this hijacking an American tourist, wheel-chair bound 69 year old Leon Klinghoffer, was shot and dumped overboard by the terrorists. Mr. Carr's prescription, it seems, would be for us as Americans to examine the wider causes that produced such a murderous rage in the hijackers, and to own up to our part in this ostensibly 'evil' act.
Aside from such soul-searching on our part, what practical action does the author think we should take in response to such an atrocity? Your guess is as good as mine.
But if you are looking for a book that wants to make sure you understand how oppressed the terrorists are, and how you (as a member of a "Western" society) "forced them into it", so to speak, then this is definitely the book for you.

I felt strangely comforted by the realizations I gained from "The Infernal Machine: A History of Terrorism." It contextualizes our present struggle. Don't expect to find a final all-encompassing theory on terrorism here. Rather, you may experience an almost religious acceptance of the inevitable struggle. It's as if Matthew Carr is taking the Hindu god Vishnu's point of view.

Once in awhile Carr does force a more dogmatic perspective on the reader. Raising a question here and there would have been more effective. Perhaps he could have saved his conclusions and beliefs for a final chapter. Though Carr is more critical of the status quo powers, the counter-terrorists, I felt the total effect of his judgment was to redress an imbalance.

One is left amazed by the variety and differences in individuals, groups, and causes, and their matching and usually more terroristic counter-terrorists. Some similarities Carr reiterates throughout the book:

1. Remember the number of people killed by terrorists is relatively small. Terrorists who become the government, such as in the Soviet Union under communism, or governments who practice (counter)terrorism themselves, kill many many more people.

One major criticism: Carr does not address the fact that sometimes the terrorists win! Although if, following his approach, the Tsar, for example, had addressed the legitimate grievances of his people and understood the need for change...things would have been different.

However, it is intellectually irresponsible to ignore the Communist takeover when your discussion of terrorism is based on the very movements that led to it.

2. Always flesh out the facts--the full story. It's important to learn as much as possible about the situation, motives etc. of "terrorists." Each group, each individual, has a story that provides a bit more of the puzzle of a particular time and cultural/political situation.

Symbolism is central--behavior as message, often preceded or followed by words. Reflecting on the symbolism is a way to "connect the dots" or make sense of a seemingly senseless behavior--not to excuse it but to understand the "other," and yourself. Perhaps if we understand them, we will finally "get" them.

3. The language of the government uses is often a smoke screen that hides and distorts the facts.

4. Terrorism will always finally remain a mystery. Why did these particular people decide at this time that they had to take these particular horrific actions? The mystery at the center of terrorism raises the questions: Do they understand the larger forces behind their choices. Do we understand our reactions? One is left starring into a void.

Carr's approach has a strong affinity with Jungian psychology, applied not to individuals so much as to whole societies and political situations. The dark side must be met. Mortal combat continues unless we go deeper into the pathology of our own behavior, the contradictions of our rhetoric.

Countries and "civilizations" like individuals need to live with integrity--consistently true to their deeper principles. So the challenge of the "terrorist" can be met more clearly and with less fear and reactive destruction.

It is counterproductive to focus primarily on the "evil" of the enemy--often one's own shadow (or blowback). The "enemy" is an opportunity to own one's own identity and values, to weigh one's own soul and transcend it's failings. Only then do you win.

Jihad in spiritual terms is also an opportunity to respect without force or dominance the higher values of the "other." No one can study a history of such groups without feeling some respect for them as human beings. Unfortunately too many people would rather lash out in the dark in anger, hate, and ignorance rather than read a book like this.

Fascinating history we all need to study and reflect on.

This is a superb book that should be read in conjunction with Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism. Terrorism is nothing more nor less than individual and small group asymmetric violence that breaks the state's monopoly on violence.

THe author is to be commended for stating in blunt and ably-documented terms that terrorism is a logical asymmetric response and it is not senseless nor cowardly but rather coherent and calculated.

I share the author's view that most Western analysts of terrorism are witness, uninformed, and devoid of historical, cultural, or contextual analytic skills and knowledge. Most on the right, including the Zionists, push their ideological beliefs rather than the empirical evidence. As the author notes, Israel has genocided the Palestinians and out-terrorized their opponents time and again (while also attacking the USS Liberty, a war crime that will never be forgotten by our men and women in uniform).

There are other books that have documents the use by the extreme right of fake leftist terrorist actions that are actually extreme right and fascist actions intended to increase the totalitarian and fascist nature of the state. 9-11 certainly enabled Dick Cheney to do that. See American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War On America and Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency.

In the author's view, the CIA created the conditions for the Islamic jihad with its over-turning of the Iranian election results and restoration of the hated Shah to the throne--as we learn in Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA, CIA has been all too fond of dictators and secret police as their proxies; its presence in Saudi Arabia (ably covered by Robert Baer in Sleeping with the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude, and of course providing billions in aid (see Charlie Wilson's War: The Extraordinary Story of How the Wildest Man in Congress and a Rogue CIA Agent Changed the History of Our Times that the Pakistani's used to create jihad with close ties to Afghan drugs, guns, and global logistics.

The author makes three key points in his conclusion:

1) USG ignores and does not publicize the thousands of acts of civil dissent, including hundreds (as many as 900) bombs a year across America;

2) The government consistently lies to the public and covers up larger group anger by claiming that major incidents are "a lone wolf" operation. This has since been proven untrue for the JFK assassination (see Someone Would Have Talked: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy and the Conspiracy to Mislead History and A Farewell to Justice: Jim Garrison, JFK's Assassination, And the Case That Should Have Changed History, and in the Oklahoma City bombing and most certainly in the 9-11 case where CHeney, Gulliani, and Silverstein and Rumsfeld are clearly more culpable than Bin Laden or the Pakistanis for the bulk of the deats (see Debunking 9/11 Debunking: An Answer to Popular Mechanics and Other Defenders of the Official Conspiracy Theory among many other books and DVDs.}

The author ends by calling the US Government, essential, a persistent liar, with hollow propaganda and specious claims that--in combination with the destruction of civil liberties--do vastly more damage to the national fabric than any small band of terrorists might. As one reviewer notes, what 19 alleged terrorists have done is nothing compared to the state terror that Bush-Cheney have unleashed on Iraq, Iran, around the world in secret renditions and secret torture, and of course here at home, where a "state of fear" and grotesque abuses of executive privilege are used to avoid justice and liberty for all, reducing both dignity and accountability.