Matthew Carr has produced a very interesting, thought-provoking, and in some eyes controversial book about the long, and usually not very elegant history of terrorism. I had the pleasure of interviewing Matthew recently. I have interviewed many authors, but this one has a twist in the tail that I certainly did not expect. The Infernal Machine - A History Of Terrorism is the second book in as many months that I have reviewed and has been banned from being sold in the United Kingdom. One wonders what has happened to 'free speech' over there?
Can you tell us a little about yourself?
I’m 52 years old. I was born in London, but I spent my childhood in the West Indies. I returned to England and spent my teenage years in Cambridge. Since then I’ve lived in various countries. My resume reads as if I never had a clear goal; over the years I have worked dozens of jobs, building laborer, postman, signwriter, English teacher, bookshop assistant, house painter, and bike messenger. I’ve lived and traveled in various countries. A year in Holland. Three and a half years in New York in the '80s, where I did various dead end jobs and played guitar in a rock 'n' roll band. I spent the '90s living in Spain. I'm currently living in a small town in Derbyshire that few people have ever heard of with my partner and 11-year-old daughter, where I attempt to eke out a living writing books.
I believe you are a journalist and broadcaster - can you tell us a little about that?
I’ve worked as a freelance journalist for a number of publications, beginning in the '80s when I wrote about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the Gaza strip and covered the Sicilian Mafia trial for The Observer. I’ve also done pieces on human rights issues and the state terror in Central America, on the Spanish government’s use of death squads against ETA, in addition to numerous disparate assignments that freelancers get used to doing. When I lived in Spain I did a lot of radio work for the BBC, from short packages to longer documentaries. Nowadays the only regular journalist work I do is for the First Post online magazine.
Where did you get the idea for The Infernal Machine from?
Violence has been part of the backdrop of my life ever since childhood. I grew up in a violent era, with the Vietnam war, apartheid, Northern Ireland, revolution and counterrevolution in the Third World. So I’ve always been concerned with issues of war and peace and the role of violence in human affairs. Politically, my background is on the left, and I have supported many movements that have been described as terrorist by their enemies. So I’m not a pacifist, but I’ve always been conscious of the devastating impact that violence can have on its victims and its perpetrators. I lived in the States, at a time when the Reagan administration was stridently denouncing terrorism even as it supported the homicidal governments of El Salvador and Guatemala, so the hypocrisy and cant that surrounds the subject of terrorism is not new to men. All this finally made me think that it would be useful to write a book about it.
Article comments
1 - Amy K
Interesting book though one would wish to learn more about what is behind terrorism. Even today, things are still getting out of hands. Obviously, it has to do with wealth vs poverty on a global basis. Maybe knowing about global political and economic map is more meaningful. For this, I recommend another great book: China and the new world order: how entrepreneurship, globalization, and borderless business are reshaping China and the world, by a chinese journalist named george zhibin gu, which offers a more realistic picture about changing world politics and business.