Apocalypse Now

Walter Laqueur’s “The New Terrorism” is gruesomely timely. Buford O. Furrow Jr., the angry, unemployed white supremacist who shot five people at a Los Angeles Jewish community center in August, is exactly the kind of terrorist Laqueur predicts the world will see more of.

“Terrorism has taken some odd turns in the last couple of decades,” Laqueur writes, “and the future will see it assume an even odder and more pathological complexion.

“Political and ideological motivations in the traditional sense, however farfetched, will recede,” he continues, “as fanaticism, whether sectarian, ethnic, or just personal, moves into the foreground.”

Why this change in the nature of fanaticism has come about forms the substance of Laqueur’s book. The reasons are complex, but chief among them are the collapse of the revolutionary left and the mutation of the right’s orientation from authoritarianism to a more personal form of hatred of government of all kinds. In fact, Laqueur, an accomplished historian of terrorism and international strategic affairs, sensibly finds that “left” and “right” are 19th century parliamentary terms with decreasing relevance to contemporary politics.

Like everyone else, he leans on those terms nevertheless and believes that with the waning of the left as a source of terrorism--the decline of the Latin American revolutionary left is an example--the right is waxing as a source. This is especially noticeable, he says, in the “huge conspiracy literature” that is “extremely right-wing in inspiration, as even a short visit to the Internet will show.”

Laqueur, always open-minded and evenhanded, wonders why the left is currently less interested in conspiracy theories of politics and human affairs than the right. Perhaps, he plausibly speculates, the left has a somewhat more optimistic outlook than “the right-wing lunatic fringe.”

“The left believes, by and large,” he writes, “in revolution followed by a better future; the extreme right-wing sects believe they are surrounded by enemies, and victory seems distant if not impossible. Alienated from their own land and people, these patriots are fighting a desperate rear-guard battle.

“The list of the enemies of the patriot sects in the United States is indeed formidable,” he continues. “The government--for some, two conspirators in one, as in ‘the Zionist occupation government’--is at the top of the list, followed by American culture, damaged beyond redemption by various commercial and decadent influences; the financial system; the police and the FBI; all ethnic minorities; universities and schools, which teach false values; the churches (having strayed from the right way); all foreign countries; and also most white compatriots, who have been successfully brainwashed by mendacious official propaganda.”

Although Laqueur has got the nutty American right wing down pat, his book is by no means America-centered. He looks at terrorism around the world, principally since the rise of ideological terrorism in the 19th century, but also with due regard to its roots in all of human history. “The New Terrorism” would serve admirably as a first-rate textbook on the subject.

Looking at the world as a whole, Laqueur makes two principal points. The first will be resented and controversial: As terrorism becomes more fanatical and less ideological, he says, it often springs from conflicts and turmoil in the Islamic world. The reasons for Islamic predominance in terrorism, he says, lie in the course of history, but that qualification will not make him less subject to attack by Muslims.

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Laqueur’s second and overriding point is that weapons of mass destruction are multiplying, are becoming easier to make and are more likely to fall into the hands of fanatics who are unrestrained by reason, ethical dilemmas or any regard for national interest.

“Diderot once noted,” Laqueur writes, “that the transition from fanaticism to barbarism is but one step, and if present trends continue there is every reason for grim forebodings. What we know about past ages of barbarism is frightening enough; the consequences of aggressive madness in the age of high technology and the era of weapons of mass destruction may well be beyond our imagination.”

Laqueur’s description of the 21st century’s cataclysmic possibilities differs from the apocalypse foretold in biblical tradition only in that Laqueur, a rationalist, poses his scenario not as fact but as possibility. The implied but powerful lesson of “The New Terrorism,” a thorough and sobering book, is that it will take all the careful rationalist human inventions of diplomacy, law and politics to steer the world past the dangers posed by the possibility of destructive weapons falling into the hands of fanatics untouched by reason.

If Laqueur’s terrorists are chiefly political, Robert Jay Lifton’s terrorists are what might be called personal. But what most disturbingly unites the two is the increasingly ready availability of weapons of mass destruction.

In “Destroying the World to Save It,” Lifton examines one particular strain of fanaticism, exemplified by the guru-led Aum Shinrikyo cult in Japan, which in 1995 released sarin, a lethal nerve gas, on five Tokyo subway trains. Eleven people were killed, 5,000 hurt.

The cult, still active though its guru and other leaders are in jail, believes in what Lifton calls an “end-time” conception of history, in which the world will be purified through a final catastrophe like, and often modeled on, the Armageddon battle in the Christian Bible’s book of the Apocalypse. Aum and similar cults believe it their task to hasten the fiery end, to destroy the world in order to save it.

Lifton, a psychiatrist who has written books on the survivors of Hiroshima and the German physicians who did the Nazis’ work, sees similarities between Aum and the acts of several violent American cults: the Manson family killings, Jim Jones and the Jonestown suicide-murders, the mass suicide of 39 members of the Heaven’s Gate cult in Rancho Santa Fe and the bombing of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City.

Each of these, Lifton writes, shared a belief in purification of the self and/or the world through death and destruction, and each was under the influence of a powerful guru figure who utterly dominated the wills of his followers. (In the case of Timothy McVeigh, the principal Oklahoma bomber, the guru, Lifton argues, was a book, “The Turner Diaries,” the neo-Nazi account of a white revolution in America leading to a nuclear holocaust in which all Jews and non-whites perish.)

Aum, led by guru Shoko Asahara, failed to create the mass deaths it hoped for, but it did show that lethal agents such as nerve gas can be easily readily obtained by malevolent groups.

The ultimate horror would be the appearance of a nuclear weapon in the hands of any group wishing ill to the world, whether a political group or a cult. Both Laqueur and Lifton’s books sound somber warning bells. *