-Alexis de Tocqueville
Everything you think you know about terrorism is wrong. Every single image and concept that enters your head when you hear about a terrorist attack is fatally distorted by the misconceptions drilled into you by society at large. 9/11? More the result of dumb luck than anything else. And it had almost nothing to do with killing people. Hezbollah's 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks outside Beirut? Hardly even terrorism at all.
You don't know the first thing about terrorists, because you can't help but immediately associate them with the loss of innocent life, with Evil. But no terrorist in the history of the world has ever thought he was doing anything except serving a greater good, and each and every one has died knowing the comrades he was leaving behind would embrace his memory after he passed.
There's no way to keep terrorists with the ability to bring America to her knees out, no way to stop them from entering our country. Because they're already here, we just refuse to admit that they've been right here next to us all along, unable to escape.
We especially refuse to even consider that perhaps at one point or another we've played a part in their creation. That if we too have been one of those good men doing nothing, Evil has already triumphed.
And all we're doing now is waiting for the consequences.
For the first time, an entire book on the history, origins, and future of terrorism is being made available for free online in an easy-to-navigate format. Tremble the Devil was written by a Harvard-educated counterterrorism analyst, it's an accessible, fast-paced distillation of everything you need to know about the world's most dangerous phenomenon.
If you want to bookmark this page to come back to later since you don't have the time to get through an entire book just now and you'd rather read a brief piece about current events, the most R E C E N T P O S T S can be found on the bar to your right. Here's a quick summary of the newest ones:
how the war on class is a war on drugs - stunning account of the inarguable correlation between the passage of drug laws and the increasing level of economic disparity between the classes in America, all pinpointed back to one specific year
do what to a chicken? - the inside story of Iran's oppressive regime, it shows its members as simple petty thieves, and demystifies any sense of Evil you might have about them
Tremble the Devil tells terrorism's story using engaging allusions to everyone and everything from Jesus Christ to Beer Pong and from Malcolm X to Friday the Thirteenth. Each chapter begins with a hook taken from artists ranging from the Rolling Stones and Jay-Z, to William Blake and Tupac Shakur. And it packages the social insights of The Tipping Point along with the compelling colloquial style of Freakonomics.
All of this is woven together in an intriguing and salient book that reads like a novel.
It is, however, a work of non-fiction that divides the aforementioned three levels of comprehension into three parts, and illustrates terrorism theory by recounting the most important modern attacks and tying them to the past, each other, and the future – in the process creating the richest and most complete work on terrorism to date, a book that will change the way you look at everything from organized religion to sports drinks.
Tremble the Devil is a lucid explanation of terrorism in all its forms. To begin you have several options:
Under the P A G E S bar on your right you can surf between the chapters of the book. Or feel feel to begin reading at part I - fear and faith, to select a chapter based on its accompanying quote found in the Table of Contents at the bottom of this page, or to continue on to the Introduction below.
You don’t want to look. Some doors, you think, are better left shut tight. But it is still there. It’s just hiding, waiting. We’ve been telling ourselves that it disappeared a long time ago. And yet deep down you know that’s a lie. Just because something is unseen, that doesn’t mean that it isn’t still there.
You know that we've only increased its power and inevitability by keeping it shut away. Only made it angry. Despite not being able to see it, you can still feel it stir as its breathe flutters over the pages of the news and flickers across your television screen.
As our economic system crumbles and the prospect of international conflict grows in likelihood – the unnerving certainty that something terrible is about to happen has slowly been slipping out of the shadows and into the everyday events happening right in front of us all.
If you want to see it in full, you just have to be willing to let go of a few things and take a little trip into our past.
Back across the footsteps of the world’s most ancient revolutionaries and the first Assassins to the banks of the Jordan River, where the history of violence has flowed in unison with time. To the deepest canopied rainforests, over the bloodied sands of Africa, into pedagogical explosions muffled at the turn of the century by weary Russian snow – yet still echoing across the media each time we are gathered in horror around our televisions.
Because it is only in the stories of our past that we can begin to find the answers to what is happening to us now. The bloody road we will travel on is one that has been well-taken before us, the road is not what’s different. What’s different this time is us, the traveler.
The hunger of the creature that rises from the ashes we’ve created is well beyond our control. It feeds on a miasma made from the currents of hatred and fear that swirl within our own population. When freedom and justice are being choked behind walls we created and continue to allow to exist, walls we refuse to look behind or even admit are really there at all, a terrible possibility arises.
It will burn, it will fight, and it will kill. We will not be able to escape it, not so long as we refuse to see where it comes from or acknowledge what causes its rage. It will seem a force of salvation for some and of unforgettable evil for others. It will be called a group, an ideology, and a movement. It is all and none of these.
And it is coming. We have already felt its first nightmarish breaths, urgent and biting, against our necks.
To continue on down the rabbit hole, you can:- click here to read from the start
- or here to begin at the most salient provocative chapter, which begins explaining the history behind the recently thwarted New York City terrorist cell and the Arkansas military recruitment center shooter.
- select an individual chapter to read from the Table of Contents below
- skip ahead to Part II if you're already familiar with the Middle East's history and religion, or jump to Part III if you're also familiar with the theories and origins of modern terrorism as well as with the Middle East.
- navigate throughout the book using the P A G E S bar back at the top of the page on the right.
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T a b l e o f C o n t e n t s
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part I - fear and faith
Terrorism, as we think of it now, immediately summons images of the collapsed buildings, bombed-out buses, and deathly brown eyes leering through slitted masks. But these memories disguise the rational nature of the complex forces that coalesce as the deaths of innocents. And they do nothing to trace out the deep and inescapable historical roots of every explosion…
the first death
But he didn't choose Brooklyn because it is widely considered America's financial headquarters, nor because it is home to several of the world's largest skyscrapers. Yousef drove around Brooklyn because he'd heard lots and lots of Jews live there. And Yousef was determined to off as many Jews as possible…
to conquer nightstands
Because if you're willing to take a somewhat poetic view of history, you'll learn that the man we've come to know as Osama bin Ladin was born on Christmas Day…
imperial hiccups
Be it in Birmingham, London, Baghdad, or in downtown Beirut – public buses often act as giant motorized canaries for the fumes of civil disorder and discontent…
bring it back
And depending on where you are in the country, you'll frequently find beer-pong known by another name. In many colleges of the American northeast it's called "Beirut," although you'd be hard pressed to find a participant who's able to tell you why that is...
dreamers of the day
That one man can change the way we think about ourselves and bring out boundless acts of grace and horror is born out again and again throughout history. During some point of each man's life, they were considered crazy and on the fringe by established society. But they paid no attention to this…
peace be with y'all
One ancient, troubled, warswept city, host to all three Middle Eastern religions, has come to contain touchstones for Jews, Mohammad, and Christians alike. And its stones would become a Wall, a Dome, and a Temple in a place that has delineated not just the wholeness of peace – but the oneness of violence – as no single city ever has…
friday the thirteenth
Once this gyre, the first stirrings of Political Terrorism, began to swirl it would gain mass and grow in size, drawing in all American designs for the Middle East...
boondock salfists
And then, being a devout Muslim, after apologetically turning her away from your door and then watching her fall flat on her face in the ship's plush hallway you'd probably think to yourself "Hey look – it's a drunk hooker…"
part II - illusions and immigrants
Pouncing on Murad the officers quickly restrained him, but not with handcuffs as most police would use. With clothesline – they'd all forgotten their handcuffs back at the station…
burning bright
And as incongruous as it seems, understanding the deaths caused by terrorist cells is not a matter of understanding their hate for the society around them. It’s a matter of understanding the love they have for each other…
pipe and dagger
But now, with the mass media creating a shared public eye that takes in much more than any one person on a sunlit street, and institutions and society complex and interwoven to an extent far beyond those more ancient times, death often weaves a much more complex web…
progaganda by deed
In simpler parlance: violent acts are necessary to first free the People from their manacling to false social assumptions both in terms of what is possible and what is Right. Violence opens their minds to new revolutionary ideas…
the frontline is everywhere
Robert Stethem's body slapped against the pebbled macadam of Beirut's International Airport as the engines of TWA Flight 847 were brought to a whirring stop by the dark Mediterranean air…
stabling lions
The caricature of an Arab terrorist – swarthy, sandy turban, clutching an AK-47, and possibly ululating on camelback riding to slay the infidel – proved both terrifyingly salient and dramatically inaccurate in the 1990's and early 21st century…
to boil a frog
If you were to take the preceding passage for reality, you might stroll around a downtown European city swiveling your head – just waiting for a brown man to pop out from behind a Peugeot, yelling at you to ask where all the European women are at…
part III - warriors and walls
Despite popular support for the idea that the end of history is near and that our collective fate being all but decided, the end of our story is still a long way off. If anything our history is only horribly replaying itself on a world stage that is not growing more organized, but entropying into a clamor of fearful and increasingly desperate voices…
Ned and the Jeds
He became one of them, and as one of them would become able to lead them – both against foreign occupiers and against each other. Ned's transformation was so complete that he soon gained a moniker that would become the name history remembers him by and that you know him by…
a Gatorade enema
John F. Kennedy didn't really do much other than look pretty, Marilyn Monroe, and perhaps serve to symbolize the death of our national sense of innocence. But in 1961 John Fitzgerald Kennedy enacted an element of policy that's often overlooked by the general public and geriatric academics alike…
between the heavens and the earth
You don't want to know about the men who crashed United Airlines flight 175 and American Airlines flight 77 into the World Trade Center Towers on the morning of September 11th. Really know about them. You don't want to hear about their families. Or about what they were like when they were growing up, when they could still be called kids and not monsters...
remember, remember
When Malcolm told his eighth grade teacher he wanted to be a lawyer when he grew up the teacher responded that he needed to be realistic about being a nigger, and that being a lawyer wasn't a realistic goal for a nigger. That maybe he should aspire to be a carpenter…
vilest deeds like poison weeds
Dr. Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech has been recited and memorized by generations of school children and is easily the most celebrated text of the Civil Rights era. But it was given at an event that presented an image of America that had been bought, one that was a lie…
heard a shot
Even though we cannot see these walls, we still must share his story. Because it is a story that will either save us from the brutal and merciless hatreds of our past, or cause us to be consumed by evils that have been tirelessly guarded by our own injustices…
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If there must be trouble, let it be in my day - so that my children may have peace.
-Thomas Paine
