The Zimbabwe Situation

DORIS LESSING IS rightly one of the most famous of living authors. She is so famous that publishers are willing to bring out collections of her occasional papers, essays and reviews, even very short ones. Fourth Estate publish one such collection - Time Bites - this month.

This collection includes an essay on Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, the country where she grew up, and it is quite the best and wisest thing I have read on that troubled land, and on the man who has brought ruin upon it.

There is scarcely a page that doesn’t contain a sentence or a paragraph that makes you stop and ponder it. Even Lessing’s occasional pieces are writing that matters.

But the one I would like to draw attention to is called "The Wrong Way Home". Its subject is terrorism, and there is no subject today on which it is more urgent to talk sense and shed light. Some things she says are already widely recognised - the existence, for instance, of the "Young Son Syndrome" - the young man of "good family who becomes violently opposed to what has made him".

Members of the Italian Red Brigades came into this category. So did Lenin. So does Osama bin Laden. "These types of malcontent, revolutionary, or reformer are easily spotted and understood."

They attract sympathisers to whom we may choose to attach the terrorist label, but who, she suggests, "have little in common with the true terrorist, like Bin Laden’s specially trained terrorist groups". These sympathisers, of whom she takes the young Afghans who became the Taleban as an example, find no place for themselves in the modern world because they have been denied an education. Instead these young Afghans were "educated as the poor have been in Islam for centuries, by no more than a ritual chanting of the Koran. They might just as well be 14th-century people," she suggests.

How do we prevent the emergence of other similar groups. Lessing has no doubt. "You cannot legislate against terrorist groups once they come into being, but you can prevent terrorists from coming into being. A good modern education is the solution."

This will not, as she realises, rid us of terrorists of the Younger Son sort, whose alienation and desire to kill and destroy arise from their dissatisfaction with their education, from the apprehension that the world is not as it was sold to them. But it will isolate them.

To become a terrorist is to become a member of a cult, of "an invisible brotherhood". That is part of the attraction.

Second, Lessing recognises that "the enjoyment of destruction is deep in the human psyche ... My question is, how often is this deep and sick need to destroy being led under the guise of ideology?"

To understand terrorists, read Dostoevski’s great novel The Devils, sometimes translated as "The Possessed". Terrorist groups are cults: "The main plank of cultish behaviour is that the outsider, the person not on your side, is demonised."

There are two things to be done. First, to detach the sympathisers - a long task, because education takes time. Second, to catch "those highly trained ruthless groups waiting ... to murder, poison and destroy."

It will help if we "stop using the word ‘terrorist’ like a witch’s spell and restrict it to the real terrorists."

Will our leaders heed these wise words?

September 25 2004 at 10:48AM