Excerpt from Nicholas Shakespeare's Telegraph review of Blood and Rage: A Cultural History of Terrorism by Michael Burleigh:
Michael Burleigh's theme: 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" with their crusade to realise "a world that almost nobody wants". . . .
Throughout history, terrorists have been "sour, lazy nobodies, ugly, of febrile imagination and indifferent talent, who can only become somebody by blowing others, inevitably persons more talented and intelligent, up." Imagine the kind of person (in this case, Andreas Baader) that even Jean-Paul Sartre would call "an arsehole."
Hmmmmm, maybe we're looking at Shakespeare's brother? You know, the one that couldn't get laid?
Posted by: ken | March 04, 2008 at 11:08 PM