Book Review | 'God, Guns, and Sedition' talks about outrageous acts of violent American far-right extremism

India and America have multiple national and traditional security issues in common. The most blatant predicament that persists is that of Islamist terror. However even as the United States has been able to cordon and stave off the Threat of the Salafi to a considerable extent after the horrific al-Qaeda attacks of 9/11, India continues to battle Islamism of the rabid form. The banning of the Popular Front of India in recent times was a robust move. But one of the rolling fallacies in the Indian State is the myth that deradicalisation is possible.

This reviewer has spoken, proclaimed and written against this erroneous belief and consequently the continuance of utilising deradicalisation as a state-sponsored method to counter Islamist terror.

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Research has shown that a number of Saudi Guantanamo detainees that were “deradicalised” have returned to terrorism upon release. Although there have been arguments that deradicalisation creates a barrier to recidivism, there is really no way to fathom or evaluate whether a thorough cauterisation has taken place. Or are there deradicalised terrorists—disengaging because of purely instrumental reasons—who continue to harbour a radical world-view?

Who determines whether the law-enforcer is erring or not by arranging theological correction of “radicalised minds” that have never actually read the Qur’an? Answers to such questions can only come to the fore where a science that “looks inside the brain” is employed. This theory applies for so-called ‘deradicalised terrorists’ as well as ones who have been thought to have been radicalised by religious injunction. After all is it not conceivable that there are extra-religious reasons or considerations that could have propelled perpetrators of crimes to adopt a nihilistic weltanschauung that led to the death and gore that have been witnessed since the “baying” from Ar-Raqqah began?

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Has a neurological study ever been conducted on an Islamist radical who had attempted to undertake the hijrah and have been apprehended midway? Shrunken Amygdala or smaller ventromedial prefrontal cortex (which is indicative of brains that propel aggressive conduct disorder) cannot be said to be any less intelligent. No less innovative are suppressed homosexuals and loners such as Omar Mateen (Orlando) and Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel (Nice).

The only way to appreciate what they did is to read deeper into what Byron might have understood in his immortal work Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage as the “wandering outlaw of his own dark mind”. The so-called “thought virus” that was reportedly being spread by people such as Zakir Naik only enforces the call of the wild. One of the convenient explanations which the sole survivor of the 1 July 2016 attack in Dhaka’s Holey Artisan Bakery gave was that he was inspired by Naik’s speeches.

Therefore, the “radical” not only found an outlet which had been sanctioned by an “establishment” (in this case, Daesh), but deceived the counter terrorism apparatus and the world that it was the call of an Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi that drove her into a killing frenzy.

Therefore, even as a counter radicalisation programme is set in motion, the most important (initial) examination that must be conducted is to clinically unearth the real motivation of the perpetrator.

The simplest explanation is to term a killer “a bad Muslim” because they have misinterpreted the Qur’an. The acceptable explanation could well have been to call them psychopaths who found a universe of discourse and a clear, unambiguous, audible paradigm where her behaviour not only is encouraged, but one which is glorified by recourse to prophetic injunctions.

After all in Dabiq, almost all acts of barbarism had instant “endorsement” by recourse to a Shura. For instance, the burning alive of the Jordanian pilot Mu’adh Safi Yusuf al-Kasasibah—according to Daesh—was called “equivalent response”. It quoted an ayat from An-Nahl thus: “And if you punish (an enemy), punish with an equivalent of that with which you were harmed”.

In other words, it says that in burning the Jordanian pilot alive and burying him under a pile of debris, Daesh carried out a just form of retaliation for his involvement in the bombing campaign which resulted in the killing of countless Muslims who, as a result of these airstrikes, are burned alive and buried under mountains of wreckage.

Daesh cleverly made use of the Qur’an to justify its ghastly acts, utilised such acts to deter other pilots and sought to appeal to minds on the prowl for dark passageways.

Op Inherent Resolve might have ousted Daesh from Iraq and Syria, but it has not been able to completely destroy either its following or its resolve. In fact, with the second Talibanisation of Afghanistan and the manner in which the Taliban reneged on the Doha Agreement, it is this reviewer’s considered belief that Daesh has only become more emboldened.

It is, therefore, in the realm of the mind that the final fitnah is to be waged.

Prof Bruce Hoffman is perhaps the world’s foremost expert on terrorism. The latest work of Hoffman along with Jacob Wave is God, Guns, and Sedition: Far Right Terrorism in America.

The book is about outrageous acts of terror that have erupted from violent American far-right extremist groups in recent years. The mass murders of 2015 at a famous Black Church in Charleston and the 6 January 2021, attack on the United States’ Capitol stand out.

But as the authors write these incidents are neither unprecedented nor novel. They are waypoints of a process that has been unfolding for several years, in which radical ideologies by way of racism, White supremacy, anti-Semitism, xenophobia, and opposition to the state meet. Hoffman and Wave see a threat to democracy in these disturbing series of incidents.

Indeed, the authors visualise a forward movement of the far-right. The age of whirling information and what Noam Chomsky had termed as Manufacturing Consent have made the threat even more powerful and menacing. An excerpt from the book is in order at this juncture:

America’s violent, far-right extremists have long understood the importance of messaging and have therefore sought to spread their ideology through the media and the entertainment industry. The Ku Klux Klan’s revival in the early twentieth century was partly attributable to the popularity of the film The Birth of a Nation. Decades later, the emergence of digital technology and desktop computing was enthusiastically welcomed by racist, anti-government extremists as an especially promising, cheap, and effective means by which to reach a wider constituency…

Recent events in Manipur where Hindu Meiteis and Christian Kukis are baying for the other’s blood is also a concern.

God, Guns, and Sedition provides a wondrous description of the rise of far-right terror activism in the United States.

Unravelling history, Prof Bruce Hoffman and Jacob Ware gauges the threat posed by the extremist movement. Written in a narrative style that is compelling, the authors unearth the macabre aspects of a dark progression that has the potential to tear apart the “flower garden” that America’s founding fathers had dreamt of and nursed.

The book also provides sage recommendations to stem the nefarious growth of the vicious far-right and address it as a universal terrorist threat:

Terrorism is also a strategy of provocation; it is meant to provoke governments to react in ways that play into the terrorists’ narrative of reluctant warriors cast on the defensive against an allegedly predatory, aggressive state.

Divided into nine smart chapters, namely (1) Acceleration Reborn (2) Battle Plan (3) Race War (4) Armed and Dangerous (5) Leaderless Resistance (6) Racism Rekindled (7) The Movement Goes Global (8) American Carnage and (9) Countering Far-Right Terrorism, God, Guns, and Sedition is one of the first authoritative works of its kind. Its exclusivity lies in its ability to serve as a wake-up call for all right thinking people and governments around the world.

A must read.

The author is a conflict theorist and bestselling author. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely that of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.

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