Death Orders: The Vanguard of Modern Terrorism in Revolutionary Russia (Praeger Security International) [Englisch] [Gebundene Ausgabe]

Nobody. I mean NOBODY touches this woman's work on terrorism!

Aside from the entire book's being extraordinarily well developed, chapter 7 details the systemic or socio-cultural hysterical intellectual response to trauma created by terrorism better than any writer to date that I've had the good fortune to read. I have been a researcher, writer and manager in the field of trauma for thirty-five years. Death Orders is an interpretive must for those considering themselves terrorism experts, or better yet leaders and other managers of consensually run populations.

Magnificent scholarly work that throws the widest intellectual loop around the thoughts, mind constructs, ideologies, factual histories, epistemologies and methodologies of the predator class! Thanks, Dr. Geifman, for giving it to us.

Jesse W. Collins II

Anna Geifman presents the reader with a thought provoking, cogent, gripping and sobering analysis of contemporary Islamic terrorism. A world famous expert in pre-Revolutionary Russian Terrorism, Geifman demonstrates the striking phenomenological similarities (verging on identity) between the terrorists of that by-gone era and the scourge of contemporary Islamic jihadism.

The effort is not only cogent and convincing, it is a courageous tour de force that demands that the reader learn the lessons of history in order to secure the stability and security of today's world. This should be required reading for anyone who wishes to understand today's geo-political challenges, uninfluenced by the opium of political correctness.

This study reveals the close correspondences between terrorism in Tsarist Russia in the early 20th century and the contemporary Jihad. The author takes a psycho-historical approach to the phenomenon to demonstrate how the violence in Russia serves as a blueprint for contemporary terror. From 1901 to 1917 more than 20,000 terrorist acts resulted in about 17,000 wounded or dead in Russia. Starting out as targeted assassinations, these killings by a wide array of anarchists and radical socialists soon became indiscriminate. The value of human life evaporated.

Applying Robert Lifton's paradigm of dislocation, Geifman shows that the whole framework of values, meanings, standards and ties that maintain cultural and psychosocial cohesion collapsed in late Tsarist Russia. All cultures are however, vulnerable to such dislocation which is a precondition for terrorism. Alienated from their roots, Islamic terrorists attempt to annihilate the world in which they feel displaced.

A startling revelation is that the stated ideology, political motive or dogma is not the driving force - death worship is. The killers were attracted to a bewildering array of political cults, some of which openly declared that murder was more important than ideology. Geifman also casts light on the reason why revolutions devour their children. Should the murderers gain power as the Bolsheviks did in Russia in 1917, a terror state is the result and the killing proceeds on a much larger scale.

The personality type of the suicide-homicide bomber is illuminated along with the psychology of the movement that promotes it. In this regard, Eric Hoffer's True Believer is of value in tracing the development of the mass movement and those that join it. The killer is a damaged individual who believes in ideologically justified destruction of himself and others in order to change the world. In this toxic spirituality murder/suicide seem to be the only escape from meaninglessness. Two other personality types are associated with the romantic nihilist: the sinister intellectual that justifies murder on idealistic grounds and the predator that takes advantage of the mayhem caused by the nihilist and the mask of idealism created by the intellectual.

The murders in Russia soon metastasized from a means into an end in itself. Geifman shows that this type of violence grows like a living organism which needs perpetual motion to survive. The word "movement" is no accident. When attacking external forces, the momentum continues but the instant it is contained, the killing turns inward as the organism starts feeding on its components and the perpetrators exterminate one another. Deluded by the idea that they are the masters of life and death, the members of these movements are in reality only the agents of Thanatos.

The worship of death which expresses itself in human sacrifice is a feature of all utopian salvationist ideologies. The utopian urge is never extinguished and those who take the path either end up dead or create hell on earth for others as Robert Conquest shows in Dragons Of Expectation. It thus appears that there will always be thanatophiles but the good news is that these death cults all eventually devour themselves.

It is therefore irresponsible to negotiate with the Ayatollocracy or to think that terror groups like Hamas or Hezbollah could ever become moderate or tolerant. Recognition by the EU and other countries of a Palestinian state which would necessarily include Hamastan in Gaza would be a deadly mistake that will only increase the misery of Palestinians.

The author contributes major new insights on the history, psychology and modus operandi of terrorism with this intercultural, diachronic study spanning more than a hundred years. The book is impeccably researched and contains a comprehensive bibliography.