Confronting Fear: A History of Terrorism

From Booklist
This mistitled book is less a history than a compilation of writings on various forms of terrorism--political, religious, and "fringe," such as the Unabomber. Cronin, who has written eight books, including a study on American prison life, has an eye for drama in his selections. After a very short introduction (which is basically only a glossary), he begins with what he calls "prehistory," which takes us all the way back to the 1890s and the Greenwich Observatory Bombing of 1894, as well as the assassination of President McKinley. Much more to the point is an essay by Patrick Seale, which is based on his book Abu Nidal: A Gun for Hire, which provides an inside look at a major terrorist group. This is a good volume to have at hand in today's uncertain world as a quick reference to various instant newsmakers who populate our "Breaking News" mindset. Allen Weakland
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Book Description
Confronting Fear addresses the question, “How did we get here?” The events of September 11, 2001, had their origins in both the recent history of the Middle East and in events that took place hundreds of years ago in Europe and elsewhere. The writing collected in Confronting Fear provides the broadest possible basis to probe and understand these horribly destructive acts—whose purpose and rationale is complex and sometimes even contradictory—by offering both a perceptive and comprehensive long view. It gets into the mind of the terrorist, from those who present terrorism as a tool against the status quo to those who see it as a tool to bolster the status quo to those who insist terrorism is a purely ideological act. Confronting Fear includes portraits from a global rogue’s gallery of terrorism, including Robespierre, Lawrence of Arabia, Abu Nidal, Carlos the Jackal, The Red Army, Theodore Kaczynski, Aum Shinrikyo, and Osama bin Laden. There are also discussions of movements that are or have been based in Japan, Russia, Germany, France, Ireland, Algeria, the United States, Afghanistan, Israel, and Palestine, with writings by experts and literary figures ranging from Simon Schama, T. E. Lawrence, and Joseph Conrad to Menachem Begin and V.S. Naipaul.


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Not a history, exactly, but a useful anthology of primary documents and secondary articles on what the Russian nihilists called "Propaganda by Deed." Cronin, an American who worked in international trade and lived in Algeria during a wave of fundamentalist violence, brings no unifying thesis to this collection, save perhaps the obvious one that "terrorism is a form of warfare that has evolving causes, motivations, and objectives." Still, the documents here don't really require commentary. Among them are firsthand accounts of terror from the propagator's point of view: one, for instance, comes from the poison pen of Osama bin Laden himself, who instructs Muslims that it is their duty to kill members of the "Zionists-Crusaders alliance," particularly "the Americans and their allies-civilians and military"; while another, from the portable typewriter of Unabomber Theodore Kaczynski, asserts that the violent overthrow of the technological system is a necessary duty for anyone who values freedom. Other pieces are literary responses to terrorism, including the almost obligatory excerpt from Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent ("A bomb outrage to have any influence on public opinion must now go beyond the intention of vengeance or terrorism. It must be purely destructive") and a thoughtful piece of reportage by Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami about the Aum Shinrikyo gas attack on the Tokyo subway in 1995. Still others are interpretive, ranging from historian Walter Laqueur's brief history of terrorism, tracing its antecedents back to the Hebrew Zealots who from a.d. 66 to 73 assassinated Jewish priests and Roman imperial officials, along the way destroying whole archives' worth of tax records, toSaudi journalist Ahmed Rashid's eye-opening revelation that bin Laden first went to Afghanistan at the behest of the Saudi rulers "in order to show Muslims the commitment of the Royal Family to the jihad." A primer on knowing thy enemy.


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