Synopses & Reviews
In
The Lessons of Terror, novelist and military historian Caleb Carr examines terrorism throughout history and the roots of our present crisis and reaches a provocative set of conclusions: the practice of targeting enemy civilians is as old as warfare itself; it has always failed as a military and political tactic; and despite the dramatic increases in its scope and range of weapons, it will continue to fail in the future.
International terrorism the victimization of unarmed civilians in an attempt to affect their support for the government that leads them is a phrase with which Americans have become all too familiar recently. Yet while at first glance terrorism seems a relatively modern phenomenon, Carr illustrates that it has been a constant of military history. In ancient times, warring armies raped and slaughtered civilians and gratuitously destroyed property, homes, and cities; in the Middle Ages, evangelical Muslims and Christian crusaders spread their faiths by the sword; and in the early modern era, such celebrated kings as Louis XIV revealed a taste for victimizing noncombatants for political purposes.
It was during the Civil War that Americans themselves first engaged in total war, the most egregious of the many euphemisms for the tactics of terror. Under the leadership of such generals as Stonewall Jackson, the forces of the South tried to systematize this horrifying practice; but it fell to a Union general, William Tecumseh Sherman, to achieve that dubious goal. Carr recounts Shermans declaration of war on every man, woman, and child in the South a policy that he himself knew was badly flawed, had nothing to do with his military successes (indeed, it hampered them), and brought long-term unrest to the American South by giving birth to the Ku Klux Klan.
Carrs exploration of terror reveals its consistently self-defeating nature. Far from prompting submission, Carr argues, terrorism stiffens enemy resolve: for this reason above all, terrorism has never achieved nor will it ever achieve long-term success, however physically destructive and psychologically debilitating it may become. With commanding authority and the storytellers gift for which he is renowned, Caleb Carr provides a critical historical context for understanding terrorist acts today, arguing that terrorism will be eradicated only when it is perceived as a tactic that brings nothing save defeat to its agents.
Review
"Only occasionally dry or repetitive, this often fascinating, accessible tome skillfully contends that the terrorizing of civilians has a long and controversial history but, as an inferior method, is prone to failure; it is rooted as much in human nature as it is in the need for military expediency." Publishers Weekly
Review
"[I]t is difficult to follow [Carr's] logic because, quite often, he doesn't use any....The author conveys his reasoning in misshapen prose, a sludge of redundancies, bad grammar, pointless asides, tin-eared diction, and more redundancies." Troy Patterson, Entertainment Weekly
Review
"The book has an enviable firmness of tone and authoritative manner, yet it's general and sweeping enough to stir faint suspicions that things couldn't possibly be this simple. And, somehow, when you try to apply Carr's forceful dictums to the situation at hand, they tend to become as slippery and elusive as a handful of live minnows....Carr's unpredictable opinions make The Lessons of Terror a provocative read....But in the end, the confidence with which he teaches his lessons seems premature. Exceptions to Carr's rules tend to creep into the reader's mind, undermining the whole enterprise, even when he takes the trouble to refute them....It would be comforting to believe that somebody somewhere understands absolutely, positively how to handle terrorism, but I suspect that we're better off listening to the kind of experts who grasp that they, like the rest of us, are still learning." Laura Miller, Salon.com
About the Author
Caleb Carr is a contributing editor of MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History and the series editor of the Modern Library War Series. His military and political writings have appeared in numerous magazines and periodicals, among them The World Policy Journal, The New York Times, and Time. He currently lives in upstate New York.