Roger Griffin - Terrorists Creed: Fanatical Violence and the Human Need for Meaning

an original, insightful, and innovative contribution to the literature on terrorism.

Jeffrey M. Bale, Monterey Institute of International Studies

among the most original and sweeping theoretical works to come from the terrorism studies genre in the last decade.

Jeffrey B. Cozzens, White Mountain Research LLC

It is rare to find a work of such originality in a field like terrorism studies, which is dominated either by journalistic cliches or a crudely logistical analysis. Griffin locates terrorism in a richly conceived context that is ethical and epistemological as much as it is political.

Dr. Faisal Devji, University of Oxford

In an analysis that is at once philosophical, psychological, political, and historical, Roger Griffin brings to the study of modern terrorism the same breadth of knowledge, aquaintance with specialized literature, and empathic insight he brought to his study of Modernism and Fascism. This new book builds upon the foundation of Griffins study of modernism and the responses to it which determined the epochal nature of the twentieth century. For him, terrorism is a product of a fear of loss of meaning in the world combined with the conviction that the world must be remade if meaning is to be saved. Thus, terror is a response to a historical situation that regularly recurs, but modern terrorism can be understood only within the context of the threats to meaning posed by modernism itself. The book has a practical aspect as well as a theoretical one. It tries to provide insight into the inside of modern terrorism what motivates, sustains, and reproduces the terrorist.

Hayden White, Professor Emeritus of Historical Studies,
University of California

both innovative and original

The Bookseller

Since 9/11 there have been any number of detailed studies of terrorist groups, many of them by counter-terrorism professionals or reporters specialising in a particular region. Meanwhile, a small band of academics have tried to step back from the present so as to metaphysically locate what all or most terrorists are seeking to achieve, whether they realise it or not. Roger Griffin is a wellknown expert on political violence and European Fascism. He brings a great deal of conceptual clarity and prodigious learning to a subject where emotion and prejudice are often uppermost. This is a valuable contribution to understanding the terrorism phenomenon.

Michael Burleigh, author of Blood and Rage: A Cultural History of Terrorism

Terrorists Creed

Fanatical Violence and the Human Need for Meaning

Roger Griffin

Professor in Modern History, Oxford Brookes University

Roger Griffin 2012

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First published 2012 by
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ISBN 9780230241299 hardback

ISBN 9780230241305 paperback

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To Mariella and Vincent,
my antidotes to terror

Of war and peace the truth just twists,

Its curfew gull just glides.

Upon four-legged forest clouds

The cowboy angel rides,

With his candle lit into the sun,

Though its glow is waxed in black

All except when neath the trees of Eden

The savage soldier sticks his head in sand

And then complains

Unto the shoeless hunter whos gone deaf

But still remains

Upon the beach where hound dogs bay

At ships with tattooed sails

Heading for the Gates of Eden

With a time-rusted compass blade,

Aladdin and his lamp

Sits with Utopian hermit monks

Side-saddle on the Golden Calf,

And in their promises of paradise

You will not hear a laugh

All except inside the Gates of Eden

Gates of Eden written by Bob Dylan. Copyright 1965 by Warner Bros. Inc.; renewed 1993 by Special Rider Music. All rights reserved. International copyright secured. Reprinted with permission.

Contents

Acknowledgements

Writing acknowledgements for a new book reminds me (at least in my case) of preparing a speech for an awards ceremony when you have not even been shortlisted for a prize, and which will in any case not be covered by the media. Who will read these lines other than a few intimate friends and family who will probably not read the book, or a few students who peruse them as a displacement activity when they should be studying the text? But I welcome the convention as an opportunity to thank in writing those who made this book possible.

And that is where the problems start. Those of us working in the human sciences are all dwarfs standing on the backs of giants, or stage-divers borne aloft by many pairs of hands. In writing a book so far beyond my habitual comfort zone of comparative fascist studies, I feel particularly puny and assisted. Its completion has been reliant on the wonderful academic resources and institutions which have formed coral-like over the centuries as a vast barrier reef, teeming with the weirdest life-forms of independent intellectual and spiritual life, protecting society against the storm-waves of collective fanaticism and charismatic politics, and the predatory deep-sea Krakens of ignorance, superstition, and despotism. They are organisms worth preserving against all totalitarianisms, secular or religious, who are prepared to destroy them entirely by dynamite fishing for non-existent shoals of new men or new believers.

The staff of the Bodleian and Brookes libraries, the many editors, publishers, and translators who have made it possible for hundreds of specialists, some of them of extraordinary multi-lingual talent and culture, to make their knowledge available in print or in cyberspace on which I have drawn so extensively in researching for this project, the gifted novelists and film-makers who have fashioned bathyscaphes plunging far deeper and more creatively into the recesses of the human psyche than I ever could: all their work is subsumed in this book. It is a book which is, as a study of generic patterns of phenomena within an extremely broad remit, far more lightweight and superficial than much of the material I have devoured to write it. I am also deeply appreciative of the algorithmic and communication miracles conjured up by IT geniuses in the last 40 years, and Google in particular, whose search engine has allowed me to carry on writing much of this book many miles away from the nearest library by supplementing my own considerable paper archive of books, photocopies, and notes.