ilchinealach reviewed Buda's Wagon by Mike Davis
Review of "Buda's Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb" on 'Goodreads'
3 stars
Impressionistic history of explosives deployed in urban areas, from anarchists on Wall Street at the beginning of the century to American-occupied Iraq at the end, moving through Palestine, Ireland and Lebanon along the way. Davis' central argument is that IEDs are the archetype of warfare under global American hegemony given their unparalleled capacity to level the playing field for those facing an occupying force with a far more sophisticated technological and political arsenal.
Davis vents most of his spleen in the direction of imperial paramilitaries, whether Zionist in Palestine or French loyalist in Algeria, for their stoking of ethnic and religious tensions by targeting civilians, as well as the CIA who Davis represents as the true architects of the present ecology of spree killings, suicide bombings across Asia and Africa, given how many fundamentalists they were responsible for training in order to de-stabilise a particular regime they had fallen out …
Impressionistic history of explosives deployed in urban areas, from anarchists on Wall Street at the beginning of the century to American-occupied Iraq at the end, moving through Palestine, Ireland and Lebanon along the way. Davis' central argument is that IEDs are the archetype of warfare under global American hegemony given their unparalleled capacity to level the playing field for those facing an occupying force with a far more sophisticated technological and political arsenal.
Davis vents most of his spleen in the direction of imperial paramilitaries, whether Zionist in Palestine or French loyalist in Algeria, for their stoking of ethnic and religious tensions by targeting civilians, as well as the CIA who Davis represents as the true architects of the present ecology of spree killings, suicide bombings across Asia and Africa, given how many fundamentalists they were responsible for training in order to de-stabilise a particular regime they had fallen out with, as well as the repression their various garrison states continuously dole out.
However Davis also has stern words for national liberation movements such as the ETA and the IRA and I'll focus the criticisms I have on his representation of Ireland. There are two chapters on the long war, one on the Dublin-Monaghan bombings of 1974 - enacted by loyalists, armed equipped and trained by British intelligence - and the other on Bloody Friday, an operation undertaken while Seán MacStíofáin was sitting on the IRA's army council.
Though Davis' analysis is not pro-imperial, MacStíofáin is the villain, and is depicted as a fanatic with no strategic principles. It is first necessary to say that MacStíofáin was off the army council within six months of Bloody Friday, secondly that there were significant differences of opinion within the IRA leadership right the way along through the conflict on military versus political action - which are not always so easy to separate from one another, particularly in wartime - and third that the first car bombing we can connect with the war was a loyalist bombing of the national broadcaster in the twenty-six counties. These facts of historical detail are important but Davis misses them. At another point he compares the strategy of the Provisional IRA to that of Lehi, a far-right Zionist organisation active in the forties that, on a few occasions, sought an alliance with the Nazis. I don't think Davis actually believed what he's saying here, rather he was brought to it by the logical conclusion of his argument that car bombing is 'inherently fascist'.
Before I get mistaken for an internet idiot I'll say: indiscriminate civilian deaths that are an inevitable consequence of car bombings are unconscionable and the likes of Shankill or Omagh have been one of the many ways in which support for national liberation struggles have been undermined both domestically and internationally. However unpalatable as it may be though, military actions need to be looked at in their context and there is a qualitative difference between loyalist bombings of civilians because of their confessional affiliations versus accidental deaths arising from attacks on military targets. I'm not sure how we get into the nature of either by identifying them with fascist ideology and in fact I'm not sure how a technology and an ideology can be mapped onto one another like that. What Davis puts forward as the alternative, are the legal, working-class politics favoured by the Official IRA / Worker's Party, who split from the Provos in 1969. Here, and in his use of the phrase 'moderate Catholics' in referring to a section of the population let down by the collapse of Sunningdale, I think Davis has been fed a line and / or has torn through the Lost Revolution at his trademark breakneck reading speed; the trajectory of the OIRA has been everything but a movement towards a set of classically revolutionary socialist politics.
Overall this is an entertaining book with a lot of information about e.g. the Tamil Tigers links to Indira Gandhi that I was not aware of. As the book goes on though a lot of Davis' sources seem to be drawn from the New York Times and adjacent establishment outlets and I feel like I often do when reading a synoptic overview of secondary sources from New Left luminaries, i.e. that I'm being cheated by graduate school high-wire acts.