Terrorist's Creed [electronic resource] : Fanatical Violence and the Human Need for Meaning /
Griffin, R.author.
Terrorist's Creed casts a penetrating beam of empathetic understanding into the disturbing and murky psychological world of fanatical violence, explaining how the fanaticism it demands stems from the profoundly human need to imbue existence with meaning and transcendence.
Description based upon print version of record.
Cover; Contents; Acknowledgements; 1 Forethoughts: The Liquid Fear of Terrorism; Apocalypse in the subway; The Titanic syndrome; Liquid meanings: The need for definition; The place of this book within terrorism studies; The terrorist's creed; The book's structure; 2 Terrorism as Zealotry: Defending the Nomos; The human need for a 'sacred canopy'; Defending a beleaguered tradition: The Zealotic response; Zealotic terrorism in the ancient world: The Sicarii; The Assassins' defence of their nomos; Chechen terrorists as modern Zealots; The Tamil Tigers' defence of their sacred canopy
3 Modernist Terrorism: Creating the NomosThe dynamics of cultural renewal; Modernism as a revolt against anomy; Terrorism as a form of programmatic modernism; The modernist dynamic in Russian nihilism; The active nihilism of God's orphans; Fin-de-siècle anarchism and 'modernism of the deed'; 4 The Metapolitics of Terrorism in Fiction; Fyodor Dostoevsky: The terrorist as 'devil'; Building towers and destroying towers; Joseph Conrad: The terrorist as 'propagandist of the deed'; André Malraux: The terrorist as existentialist; Tom Robbins: The terrorist as anarchic individualist
Sunjeev Sahota: The terrorist as Zealotic orphan5 The Metapolitics of Terrorist Radicalization; Terrorist radicalization Stage One: Nomic crisis; Stage Two: Splitting and the Manichaean world-view; Heroic doubling; The Alice Syndrome; Stage Three: The bliss of completion; Two Hollywood takes on the metapolitics of radicalization; Terrorism's pyrrhic victory; 6 Modern Zealots of the Sacred Homeland; The modernization of Zealotry; Religious fundamentalism again; Chechen rebels and Tamil Tigers revisited; The Sikhs' quest for Khalistan; Recovering the Promised Land of the Israelites
Inferences about Zealotic terrorism7 Modernist Terrorism Red, Black, and White; The vitality of terrorism before 9/11; The radicalization of an 'in-between generation'; The post-nihilism of the Baader-Meinhof Gang; The holy warriors of the Kali Yuga; Timothy McVeigh strikes back against ZOG; The cleansing power of blood; 8 The Hybrid Metapolitics of Religious Terrorism; The intricacies of 'religious terrorism'; Defining religious terrorism; The secular dimension of some 'religious conflicts'; The temporal immortality of 'the inner thing'; 'Cosmic truth' in an ocean of anomy
From fantasy war to act of religious terrorism9 Islamism's Global War against Nomocide; The elusive nature of political Islam; Six Islamic reactions to the threat of nomocide; Maududi, Qutb, and the first wave of Islamism; The 'second wave': Statist Islamism; Renomizing the world through terror; Islamism as a 'mazeway resynthesis'; 10 Afterthoughts on the Nature of Terrorism; Rethinking the dynamics of terrorism; Rethinking the role of the sacred in terrorism; Rethinking 'religious' and 'secular' terrorism; Rethinking what we read in the newspapers about terrorism
Rethinking terrorism's impact on the social imaginary
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Terrorist's Creed casts a penetrating beam of empathetic understanding into the disturbing and murky psychological world of fanatical violence, explaining how the fanaticism it demands stems from the profoundly human need to imbue existence with meaning and transcendence.
World politics.
World history.
Crime—Sociological aspects.
Philosophy.
Organized crime.
Criminology.
Political History.
World History, Global and Transnational History.
Crime and Society.
History of Philosophy.
Organized Crime.
Criminology and Criminal Justice, general.