Fighting Terrorism by Reading

By now readers of this blog know how I believe the American policy against terrorism has become over-bloated, over-financed and in the long run counter-productive. I believe more analysis needs to be made of the type of young men being recruited by Al Qaeda and its affiliates and what are the psychological profiles of such men breaking off relations with their families and friends and joining a distant organization for the purpose of committing acts of suicide and terror. I believe we have been mesmerized by our own bias in locating this phenomenon deep in the religion of Islam instead of comparing today's Islamic terrorists with their historical counterparts. It sounds strange for today's reader to hear that the Enlightenment produced terrorists. We have long read about the Terror of the French Revolution but today's terrorist seem more modern in some ways and ancient in others.

Years ago I studied Russian for the sole purpose of reading a writer that mesmerized me in my adolescence (and whom I still read)--Fyodor Dostoevsky. In The Devils, he portrayed the intellectual milieu of Russia's nihilists and their long discussions about the morality and politics of terror.

Let's go back to a suicide bombing attempt on March 1,1887, when a group of students planned to kill Alexander III on the sixth anniversary of the assasination of the Tsar's father by the People's Will.

The leader of the group grew up in a very religious household and was raised by a very loving mother and an authoritarian father. The Father feared he would be "feminized" and sent him away to a military secondary school. There he manifested signs of deep depression and appeared to his fellow students as anxiety-ridden. He deliberately chose to live ascetically and immersed himself in science, winning top honors. He also developed a keen interest in Dostoevsky's House of the Dead and began reading authors like Nicholas Chernyshevsky. His sister wrote that he started distancing himself from the family and stop going to mass. She also wrote that he rarely showed any emotion or even attachment to people. However, he would walk by the neighboring prison and express his concern about the situation of the downtrodden in an abstract way but never personalize it. She records the one moment where they were close and how both he and her mother seem to have an adoring relationship.

Later his sister discovered that the son was hanging out with all the nihilistic students in their circles and that he made the decision to embark on terrorist acts because the police prevented students from commorating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the death of Nicholas Dobrolyubov, who died in his twenties and who was the closest collaborator of Nicholas Chernyshevsky.In those days, the students believed that if the Russian peasants got all the land through agrarian reform Russia would become a modern socialist economy. As a result, they often changed roles and went out into the countryside to provoke rebellion but had little success. Instead, the students planned events to provoke police repression in the hopes of sparking widespread unrest.

The young man started disappearing from his circle of student colleagues and took up residence in a small apartment that resembled something out of Notes from the Underground. He would go off on errands presumably for his family, which were his excuses to purchase nitrates and cynanide for explosives. He became the expert bomb-maker for a tight circle of terrorists, all of whom would knowingly die from the cynanide in their bombs. The young man, although he had rejected his faith, still maintained the basic Christian notions of martyrdom and suffering and the values of the passion narrative. These were explicit in his writings found after his arrest.

The young man and his colleagues were followed by the secret police. One of the more flamboyant of the group mailed a letter that outlined the plot, which was the break the authorities needed. Alexander III missed his assasination because his groom had been a half hour late getting his horses ready. The young man and his colleagues were captured, tried and all but two were hung.

The young man was Alexander Ulyanov, Lenin's older brother. Later , Lenin would have the son of Alexander III --Tsar Nicolas-- executed, partly for revenge of his brother. But Lenin had been critical of his brother as gambling so much for too little gain. He would never make that mistake in his development of his revolutionary organization.

Now with the Soviet Union gone, scholars are now more able to research these historical events. Wesleyan University professor Dr. Philip Pomper has done just that with Lenin's Brother: The Origins of the October Revolution (W.W. Norton, 2010, 275p.) This short but dense book recreates the atmosphere of the young nihilists and the late 19th century revolutionary movements in Russia as well as examines for the first time Ulyanov family documents on Alexander. The book is a genuine contribution to our understanding of that time but also it foreshadows many of the dimensions of the terrrorist problems of today.

In the case of Alexander, we have a young man who has tired of the Tsar's autocratic rule, despite some incremental reforms, and believes his act of terror will help enlighten the people and lead them to socialism. His notion of revolutionary change is based on science, not religion, although religious sentiment floats through his writings. His terrorist colleagues are all upper class students who are alienated from both their class and the political culture of their country. Many of them self-consciously chose an ascetic life style, even deliberately living as the lower class. They adopted a revolutionary morality to deliberately sever relations with their families and adopt behavior very close to the criminals of their time. Almost all Alexander's circle became proficient in using that time's equivalent of plastic explosives. Lenin used to scoff about how little time his brother took to prepare for his actions, since he spent decades as a revolutionary. But Alexander spent an intensive four months mastering his bomb-making skills and planning the assassination--a time approximate to the Islamic terrorists of today.

The first generation of Al Qaeda fit a sociological profile very much like the young Alexander--whether they come from Saudi Arabia, Egypt or Algeria. Well-educated, connected to the elite, tired of the corrupt government and the leaders in their homeland, romanticize the tribal people in Afghanistan, Somalia and Yemen, and believe terrorism will free their countries and initiate a time of Islamic renewal. The new generation seem to be alienated youth, also from elites,known for their sense of loneliness and despression, willing to adopt an ascetic lifestyle to become the terrorist equivalent of drug mules. The element of underdevelopment and poverty has nothing to do with it, except this abstract identification with those who are impoverished. There is a strong element of emotional deprivation in the biographies of all these characters.