Why Don't You Make That Rage a Double

I post another shot of Ground Zero from Marsha. The steel post in the foreground is a scaffold support attached to the building she was standing inside of. Her visit to the place have given rise to some reflections on terrorism, which was also sparked by a recent and very widely publicized book on the matter, Blood and Rage, by the British historian Michael Burleigh. Burleigh’s book has been the subject of a number of essays and reviews around the web. It’s an odd one for an academic historian. This history of terrorism, mostly in modern times, describes, of course, the blood (the deeds of the terrorists), but the rage is Burleigh’s own, a rage that he wants all of us to share. He thinks we should all start getting a bit more enraged about terrorism. That’s quite an unusual kind of thesis for a work of academic history.

I have done a lot of thinking about terrorism over the years. Mostly I tend to explore its causes and its justifications. The fine foreign film Paradise Now has been on mind for a couple years. It was about two Palestinian terrorists on the West Bank. It’s implied thesis was that some terrorists, suicide bombers in the case of this film, get in the business (short-term, by definition) because of past personal injustices. But in Burleigh’s opinion nothing quite so high-minded is on the alleged minds of most terrorists. Almost all terrorists are, to Burleigh, to sum it up baldly, assholes. One reviewer describes Burleigh’s conception of these people as:

... the moral squalor, intellectual poverty and psychotic nature of terrorist organisations, from the Fenians of the mid-19th century to today's jihadists -- the latter group, especially, being composed of unstable males of conspicuously limited abilities and imagination, and yet who pose "an existential threat to the whole of civilisation"...

Happy to spread his scorn to all deserving recipients, Burleigh doesn’t hold back from letting himself feel rage for Westerners who have been terrorists or have sympathized with them, such people as Jean-Paul Sartre and Germany’s Baader-Meinhof gang. For this guy, terrorists -- whether secular, Christian, Muslim, or otherwise -- they’re all just scumbags. I don’t know. I’ll have to ponder that simple thesis a little more, even though Burleigh tries to drive it home with a sledgehammer.

All that rage that Michael Burleigh wants us to get in touch with reminded me of a book by Bernard Lewis, that famous scholar of Islam who has written dozens of books and hundreds of essays on the West’s relations with Islam in its many manifestations. A recent collection of Lewis’s essays concerned the hate of the terrorists and the rage that that hate fuels. Lewis’s theory is that Islam’s rivalry with the West, which Westerners mostly don’t even pay attention to, has bred this hate. A hate that won’t soon expend the energy with which it produces rage, Lewis believes. And so it goes. Give in to Burleigh’s call for rage, add it to Muslim rage, and we’ll all wind up with a volatile mixture of rages facing off against each other.

It is at this point that I, an ex-Christian, wonder if maybe only some supernatural power, be it Jesus the Christ -- or whatever supernatural power actually exists and can be tapped into -- can rescue us from the armed conflict that this great big ball of tangled rages will almost surely aggravate and escalate. This is the point at which I still see the sense in turning to God or the Gods, the point when neither the scholarly tomes of human beings nor our war-making seem to be getting us anywhere in ending this conflict. Helpless, I feel drawn to prayer, to the hope that “Something More” is listening, cares for us all, and will DO something to stop us before we carry ourselves away in rages from a hundred competing sources.