Terrorist, novelist and terrorologist
 ‘Operation Mincemeat’ was a deception plan to distract the Germans
during World War II, through fake ‘top Secret’ documents planted on a
corpse which floated ashore on a Spanish beach. The idea had been
proposed by Ian Fleming in 1939, long before he created James Bond, and
he had probably got the idea from a 1930 detective novel by Basil
Thomson.
Who first thought of a female suicide bomber? Was it Craig Thomas in
his 1976 novel ‘Rat Trap’ where he mentions a woman who explodes herself
inside a packed dance floor during World War II?
The ‘Last Jihad’ by Joel Rosenberg was on the New York Times best
seller list for 11 weeks, because it was a story of a hijacked jet on a
suicide attack on the Presidents motorcade. But this book was written 9
months before 9/11. Tom Clancy’s ‘Debt Of Honor’, which had a vengeful
man planning to fly a plane into Capitol Hill, was published 9 years
earlier.
Stephen Leather’s thriller ‘Soft Target’, about a plot to explode
bombs in the London Underground, was published five months before the
July 7, 2005 terrorist attacks.
Boyd Tonkin, writing to The Independent, shortly after 9/11,
mentioned the back cover of a comedy thriller stating, “Terrorism, it is
the new rock n’ roll”, that it is a tale of “serial murder, mass
slaughter and professional assassination”, “and a bigger body count than
ever before”.
 Boyd Tonkin said, “that whatever human beings can imagine, they will
in due time perform - only far more destructively.” He ends his essay
“Humanistic piety pretends that great art alone has special gifts of
prophecy. Just at the moment, it looks as though the trash will always
have the final word.”
But what he considers as trash has always hit the best seller lists
and always sold millions of copies and will continue to sell. We can not
blame the writer or the publisher, they are giving only what the reader
wants.
Human imagination is used not only to create destruction, but also to
create stories that cater to the need of the reader. That is probably
why we find Doris Lessing (The Good Terrorist) and John Updike (The
Terrorist) had dealt with this subject.
“The terrorist novel feeds off the glow of the violence it condemns,
and in effect turns actual terrorists into advanced publicists “ said
Benjamin Kunkel, co-editor of the literary journal ‘n+1’.
Novels based on terrorist activities have become so popular, that
most of them have exceeded 100 million copies in sales around the world.
When we talk of terrorists, the definition is vague. Today’s
terrorist could be tomorrow’s hero. The British Government once offered
? 100,000 for the head of Menachem Begin, the terrorist. At one time
Yasir Araft was the ‘chief of terrorism’. According to USAToday, Nelson
Mandela was taken off the US Terrorist watch list only in 2008. We find
in www.internationalterrorist.com that George W. Bush was called an
International Terrorist who commanded the world’s largest terrorist
network.
Today there are terrorists, and novelists who write on Terrorism
themes and also Terrorism experts working with or for US type
terrorocracies. They have been called terrorologists by Alexander
George.
When Dan Brown wrote ‘Digital Fortress’, was he trying to ride on the
popularity he gained from his ‘Da Vinci Code’? When he moves away from
history, from the scriptures and the Vatican and picks up on our new Big
Brother, he is moving in a more realistic world. But here too, like most
other thriller writers, he gets bogged down in the controversy, who is a
true terrorist?
And does any government, including the US government, have the right
to totally destroy the privacy of all humanity, and their right to free
speech? Who is the bigger criminal, the one who develops and decodes all
electronic messages and mail flying around the global village, or the
one who tries to destroy this technology, so man could recover his
freedom of communication and free speech?
In a way the terrorist, the novelist and the terrorologist think
almost alike, in their planning, gathering of technical details,
sourcing funds and carrying out the crime. The only difference, often
but not always, is that in the novels, the terrorist fails in the end,
and the terrorologist also tries to prevent the terrorist from
succeeding.
But here again, the anti-terrorist, or the state controlled
terrorists win, and an oft repeated comment in most of these terrorist
fiction is that the terrorist claims his opponent to be no different
from him. They both kill. One in the name of freedom or whatever the
cause they are fighting for. The other in the name of patriotism or
loyalty or just for the money.
When we look at crime novels too, the novelist has to think like a
criminal to be able to write a successful suspense novel.
The writer has to plan the murder, or the robbery, in the same way
the criminal would, and perhaps such novels and films could have
inspired criminals for their planning, and to avoid the mistakes made by
the fictional criminals.
According to the Guinness Records, Dame Agatha Christie is the
best-selling writer of books of all time and has sold more than her
roughly four billion copies of her novels. According to UNESCO, Christie
is the most translated individual author. If she had wanted to, she
could have committed any number of murders and got away with it!
It would be up to the experts to study the possibility of a terrorist
turning novelist or a novelist turning terrorist if their roles had
changed, if their background and opportunities had changed. Governments
and terrorist organizations could make use of the imagination of the
writers, in the same way the British had used Ian Fleming.
That is why perhaps Thomas de Quincey had considered Murder as one of
the Fine Arts.
[email protected]
|
