The Infernal Machine: From the Assassination of Alexander II to Al-Queda

Rating:	★★★★★
Category:	Books
Genre:	Nonfiction
Author:	Matthew Carr

It was Sweden's Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, who unintentionally privatized weapons of terror. He made it possible for "every day" folks with an agenda to kill statesmen and bystanders wihtout having to lug around a lot of gunpowder. It was dynamite that created small "infernal machines" that brought fear (or to some desperate people, hope) to both the King and the President, as well as the lowly who might serve as collateral damage in some conflagration. The horor of the bomber/terorrist captured the imagination of authors like Fyodor Dostoyevsky in "The Demons" and Joseph Conrad in "The Secret Agent".

Matthew Carr takes a broad and very through look at the roots of modern terrorism, from its rise through the "People's Will" cells that dynamited Czar Alexander II in 1881 through pre-1914 Europe when bombers and assassins using knives and pistol terrorized heads of state all of Europe under the general heading of "anarchists". These cells of extremists did in indeed kill several royal personages and prime minister and Presidents, some of whom were simply targeted because they were royalty and not that they wielded any real power. Some who called themselves anarchists were simply deranged, like Leon Frank Czolgosz, who shot and killed President William McKinley at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York in 1901. Gzolgosz had briefly met anarchist leader Emma Goldman, but didn't belong to hers or any organized group.
It was, of course, after the shooting of Austria-Hungary's Archduke Ferdinand and his wife in Sarajavo, Bosnia, in July, 1914, that the head honchos of Mighty Europe's capitals took over and gave the assassins' a run for their money in bloodletting. The result was "the war to end all wars", and millions of dead soldiers and civilians who thought in the Summer of 1914 that the war would be a cakewalk against their old nationalist foes.

Much of the book goes back and forth--chapter by chapter--between "underdog" terrorist groups like the bloody deeds of the IRA and the bloody deeds of the counter-terrorist "over lords" like the British "Black and Tan" flying units of terror competing to win hearts and minds through putting more and more of each other's foes into the ground. The IRA/Black and Tan strugle is repeated over and over again for the next 90 years. The geography changes, the people involved and their languages change, the weapons get more ominous, but on and on the push-and-pull of fear and counter-terror goes forward.
Carr examines terrorism and the aims of "asymetrical warfare" in a dispassionate style that allows many opinions to come through his chapters. He documents the 1950's with the "Mau Mau uprising", in three dozen total dead white settlers were matched with many thousand black African deaths. The British Colonial government in Kenya turned to concentration camp, or a "pipeline" system, to house hundreds of thousands of Kikuyu who were made to swear alligence to the colonial government to be free. The liberal use of hanging also helped keep order in the brush. The French, not to be outdone, had similar terror campaigns of torture, confinement and bombing to quell the anti-colonial violence in Algeria.
Later on, the ugly side of the USA's "Alliance for Progress" in Latin America is examined as American CIA, FBI and military special forces institute programs of training right-wing paramilitaries from El Salvador to Uruguay to keep "friendly" dictatorships in charge in Latin America and counteract the "many Vietnams" approach of revolutionary war taken up by Che Guervara and other pro-Communist insurgents.

Carr writes of our own time that "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." It's pretty clear no matter what the future holds that the ugly process of terror and state sponsored counter-terror will continue. Carr does point out the dangers of free societies using intrusive and draconian tactics to stop terrorism. And he reminds that much of the brutal deaths in this world are not the result of terrorism but of "good" old-fashioned war in places like the Congo where 3 million people died in a past few years recently, as opposed to the few thousand killed by terrorists in developed countries.