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Matthew Carr

The Infernal Machine: A History of Terrorism Hardcover – April 1, 2007

by Matthew Carr (Author)

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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.

Print length

410 pages
Language

English
Publisher

The New Press
Publication date

April 1, 2007
Dimensions

6.46 x 1.45 x 9.36 inches
ISBN-10

9781595581792
ISBN-13

978-1595581792
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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

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ 1595581790
Publisher ‏ : ‎ The New Press (April 1, 2007)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 410 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9781595581792
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1595581792
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.69 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.46 x 1.45 x 9.36 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #3,051,159 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #2,905 in Political Freedom (Books)
- #4,988 in Terrorism (Books)
- #18,556 in History & Theory of Politics

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Terror in a Historic Context

Reviewed in the United States on January 21, 2008

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.

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M. A. Krul

Excellent overview of terrorism and urban guerrilla struggle

Reviewed in the United States on October 1, 2010

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.

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Great Read

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 13, 2014

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Very accessible, used it extensively for my course in the subject matter. Reads with a vibrant narrative, never dull or academic.

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