O'Brien on terror — then and now
Every serious student of terrorism should read Conor Cruise O'Brien for the simple reason that, unlike many contemporary commentators on the subject, the Irish polymath understands the forces behind murder because he's met them head on. And not just in political debate with the mouthpieces of the killers but with the hard men themselves, the foot soldiers, so to speak, as this anecdote reveals:
"The young man who had bumped against me asked why I didn't clap. I said I didn't clap because I didn't agree with a lot the speaker had said (by this time I had a fair idea that I was going to get a beating and on the whole preferred being beaten without having clapped to clapping and then getting beaten as well) ... They hit me several times and I fell down, then they started kicking me. An Apprentice Boy said: 'Is it murder ye want?' After a short while they stopped kicking and went away." States of Ireland (1972)
Long before he got up close and personal with Orange activism in Northern Ireland, Conor Cruise O'Brien had experienced the politics of violence as a UN diplomat in the 1960s. He was in the thick of it in Katanga and he mixed it with Nkrumah's heavies in Ghana. When he held the Albert Schweitzer Chair in the Humanities at New York University, he was on Manhattan's streets protesting against the Vietnam War and a famous encounter with the forces of law and order led him to produce the memorable remark: "When a New York cop kicks you, you stay kicked."
Two years after States of Ireland appeared, O'Brien the liberal was a member of the Irish government and Seamus Deane, an Irish academic and nationalist, was using the pages of The New York Review of Books to say that he was "the minister of Propaganda in the Republic, exercising a severe censorship through radio and television..." Deane felt O'Brien was being one-sided regarding the Provisional IRA, which the minister had accused of "a savage campaign of indiscriminate bombing." In is response to his accuser, O'Brien's observations about the role of the British Army in the conflict offer peculiar parallels to the situation today in Iraq. All one has to do is substitute Sunni and Shia for Catholics and Protestants:
"It is my opinion, and I believe that of most serious observers of the Northern Ireland scene, that as long as antagonisms between Catholics and Protestants remain at anything like their present pitch, the withdrawal of the British Army would entail violence on a far greater scale even than the serious violence which accompanies their presence there."
By 1986, O'Brien's thinking on terrorism had evolved to the point where he was contemptuous of Sinn Fein, the IRA's political front, and highly critical of movements such as the ANC in South Africa and the PLO in the Middle East. This did not endear him to the left, but he was willing to live with the consequences of his beliefs. In "Thinking About Terrorism", which appeared in the June 1986 issue of The Atlantic, O'Brien noted:
"The sentimentalist thinks of the terrorist as driven to violence by grievance or oppression. It would be more realistic to think of the terrorist as hauling himself up, by means of the grievance or oppression and the violence it legitimizes, to relative power, prestige, and privilege in the community to which he belongs. For an unemployed young man in a slum in Sidon or Strabane, for example, the most promising channel of upward social mobility is his neighborhood branch of the national terrorist organization. There are risks to be run, certainly, but for the adventurous, aggressive characters among the unemployed or the otherwise frustrated, the immediate rewards outweigh the risks. In this situation the terrorist option is a rational one: you don't have to be a nut, a dupe, or an idealist.
Despite all evidence to the contrary, the "grievance or oppression" line is still trotted out when it comes to excusing terrorist acts but O'Brien's honesty in nailing this canard remains refreshing, and in the same 1986 Atlantic article he made an observation that appears uncannily prescient:
Today's world — especially the free, or capitalist, world — provides highly favorable conditions for terrorist recruitment and activity. The numbers of the frustrated are constantly on the increase, and so is their awareness of the life-style of the better-off and the vulnerability of the better-off... A wide variety of people feel starved for attention, and one surefire way of attracting instantaneous worldwide attention through television is to slaughter a considerable number of human beings, in a spectacular fashion, in the name of a cause."
And that's what happened in Manhattan on 11 September 2001.
