Killing Strangers How Political Violence Became Modern

261 Pages·2020·1.736 MB·English

by  T. K. WILSON

1
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
United Kingdom
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of
Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries
© T. K. Wilson 2020
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
First Edition published in 2020
Impression: 1
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics
rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the
above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above
You must not circulate this work in any other form
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Control Number: 2020930789
ISBN 978–0–19–886350–2
Printed and bound by
CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY
Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and
for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials
contained in any third party website referenced in this work.
Killing Strangers
How Political Violence Became Modern

T. K. WILSON
1

KILLING STRANGERS

To my father, one of the better things to come out of the 1930s

(W.H.Auden’s ‘low dishonest decade’)
and
To my mother (Blitz Baby, 1940)

Preface ix
For all such kindnesses, both formal and informal, I offer sincere thanks. A
scholar is truly lucky to have such friends. All have planted many good ideas in my
mind. All my errors I harvested without assistance.
Students have also taught me far more than they can possibly realize. I am par-
ticularly grateful to Dan Keenan for all support. Librarians and archivists, the
Engineering Corps of the Army of Knowledge, were invariably helpful at every
turn. We could not advance far without the foundations they lay down. For grace
under pressure, therefore, I especially wish to thank the staffs of: St Andrews
Library, the British Library, the Bodleian Library, and the National Archives in
London. Someone has to fetch the books and files from the stacks.
Someone, too, has to produce the books in the first place. I am indebted to my
editor at Oxford University Press, Cathryn Steele both for her general enthusiasm
for this project and for her tolerance of its erratic process of generation. I apologize
for alternating prolonged silences with occasional slab avalanches of text. As an
avowed technophobe who can barely wire a plug, I am grateful to the extraordinar-
ily generous Roger Davies for explaining the long history of explosives to me so
patiently. Like so many other researchers, I feel privileged to be able to raid the
unique treasure house of information that is the Global Terrorism Database. Long
may it thrive.
All work and no play have certainly taken their toll. During the course of writ-
ing this book, I once made the mistake of outlining the plot of Stanley Kubrick’s
classic 1980 horror film The Shining to my (then) ten-year-old son, Jonny.
I explained in basic outline that the Jack Nicholson character, so-to-speak, ‘loses it
a bit’ after holing up in an out-of-season mountain hotel to write his masterpiece.
Weekend disappearances to work on this manuscript were, thereafter, inevitably
punctuated by regular telephone calls to ask: ‘Daddy, have you gone crazy yet?’
No doubt my own kith and kin have their own answers ready to that particular
query.
Readers and reviewers, I dare to hope, may have others.
viii Preface
this book is dedicated as a token of appreciation. I hope they will forgive my
advertising their ages in it.
Like the Victorian imperialist of whom it was said that his ‘knowledge of foreign
relations must have been acquired in a music hall’ (but without his values), I have
been somewhat surprised by my own official apotheosis as an expert in International
Relations.³ I suspect many of my academic colleagues have been, too. And yet
these colleagues have welcomed this stray refugee from a history department with
nothing but warmth and encouragement since 2011. I deeply appreciate that.
Especial thanks are due to Ryan Beasley, Roddy Brett, Caron Gentry, Tony Lang,
and Gabriella Slomp for all their personal and professional encouragement down
the years. We at St Andrews still miss the untimely loss of Alex Danchev, Nick
Rengger, and Mark Currie; as so many further afield doubtless do as well.
More specifically, this book firmly belongs to the Centre for the Study of
Terrorism and Political Violence (CSTPV): the oldest such research centre in
Europe (founded in 1994) and, I dare to think, still the finest. Somehow I have
found myself its Director in 2016. The support of colleagues in this new role has
been deeply humbling. My gratitude thus goes to: Diego Muro, Peter Lehr,
Bernhard Blumenau, Gilbert Ramsay, Nick Brooke, Kieran McConaghy, and
Javier Argomaniz. Everything would have ground to a shuddering halt long ago
without the administrative support of Julie Middleton and Kim Cartwright, need-
less to say. And Gillian Brunton alone knows all she does for the Centre: the lead
engineer in the CSTPV Engine Room. We would not get far without her.
None of this would have been possible without the sterling back-up and men-
toring given to me down long years by Richard English. His support and mentor-
ing have never flagged, ever since he bought me lunch as a postgraduate student at
Queen’s University Belfast back in 2001 (and then gave me a job at St Andrews ten
years later). He has taught me more than he knows: and I trust he will recognize
his influence in some of what follows. Others who seem to have believed in me and
from whom I have learnt infinite amounts are: Alvin Jackson, Caoimhe Nic
Dháibhéid, Ian McBride, Senia Pašeta, and Roy Foster. In scale, my intellectual
debts to Marc Mulholland err towards truly aristocratic excess: I humbly and grate-
fully acknowledge them here.
Across the Atlantic, Bruce Hoffman at Georgetown has been a huge support and
encouragement down long years. I deeply value that friendship. At a crucial junc-
ture, Audrey Cronin thoughtfully hand-delivered a copy of her Power to the People
to St Andrews—allowing me early sight of a superb study that overlaps with (but
I hope does not entirely pre-empt) my own. When I first met Martha Crenshaw c.
2012 she generously expressed an interest in my research on the deep background
of political violence. She has had a very long wait to see what I might produce: but
I hope this book may still be of some interest to her. Likewise, Max Abrahms has
consistently been a heavyweight cheerleader and supporter for CSTPV.
³ M.  Bentley, Lord Salisbury’s World: Conservative Environments in Late Victorian Britain
(Cambridge, 2001).
Preface
Some go in for counting beads
More go in for chasing women
The scholar sits at home and reads:
Give me the glass with porter brimming!¹
I never was much good at maths (or, indeed, seduction). Reading, it is true, has
been more of a personal strength (or obsession). But either way, it is certainly now
high time for a drink and a chance to reflect. Writing a book is an inevitably edu-
cational experience. One learns through a few notorious lapses that self-indulgence
does not notably improve self-awareness (‘I’m not stressed: I’m focused!’). As a pet
project, the book so monstrously petted, inevitably becomes a monstrous pet.
Weekends and evenings disappear mechanically down its ravenous maw. Even a
short book represents a long haul.
So my thanks, first and foremost, to family for waiting with such patience until
Killing Strangers was finally skewered and dispatched. To my children—to Anna,
Jonny, and Rozie—I am sorry for all of my frequent absences, both mental and
physical. To Anna—thank you for your help in compiling an ever-shifting bibliog-
raphy: here you made the great mistake of proving yourself genuinely useful for the
future. Jonny and Rozie: I’m sorry that I followed few (any?) of your suggestions as
to what this book should really be about. But to all three of my children what
matters is this: you are my emotional foundation in this world, and a healthy
reminder of how little this book really matters.
To my beloved Denise, all my own words of thanks are tawdry and trite. So I’ll
plunder some from Friedrich Schiller instead:
Wer ein holdes Weib errungen
Mische seinen Jubel ein!
Which means (roughly):
Whoever has ‘won’ a lovely wife
He, too, should join in the general jubilation! ²
And I do. Every single day. You have taught me how to live.
My own parents, Tony and Tina Wilson, launched me on this path many years
ago in what I now realize was a highly supportive academic environment and suc-
ceeding in making intellectual curiosity seem normal and foundational. To them
¹ Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem, ‘Water is alright in Tay’: https://genius.com/Clancy-
brothers-water-is-alright-in-tay-lyrics
² ‘Whoever has won a lovely woman/He, too, should join in the rejoicing!’ See: https://archive.
schillerinstitute.com/transl/schiller_poem/ode_to_joy.pdf