The first car bomb

Mike Davis
BUDA’S WAGON
A brief history of the car bomb
192pp. Verso. £12.99.
9781844671328
 
On a warm day in September 1920, a few months after the arrest of his comrades, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, an immigrant anarchist militant called Mario Buda left his horse-drawn wagon near a corner of Wall Street, New York, directly across the road from J. P. Morgan and Company. Buda was a follower of Luigi Galleani, anarchist editor of Cronaca sovversiva, a publication that had been condemned by the Department of Justice as the most dangerous paper in the United States. As the bells of nearby Trinity Church tolled noon, the Cronaca’s inflammatory exhortations passed into the violence of the deed: the vehicle’s contents (explosives, probably stolen from a tunnel construction site) became a vast ball of fire. Iron slugs had been mixed into the brew to achieve maximum impact. Panicking crowds tumbled out of the highrise buildings nearby, stepping over the dead and injured, who were strewn, as Mike Davis does not shrink from pointing out in his timely new book, in postures of agonized convulsions across the street. The personal grief and emotional devastation attendant on such explosions are largely left to the imagination, but gruesome accounts of scattered body parts litter many of these pages, as Buda’s Wagon brings us up to speed on the development of the car bomb. A new edition will presumably soon be prepared to expand on the already extensive list of locations and targets – Piccadilly, Glasgow Airport, the latest – but the stark analysis of the underlying crisis is unlikely to require updating for the foreseeable future. Car bombs, it is painfully clear, constitute a chronic material reality and part of the phantasmagorical background to modern city life, albeit with vastly uneven effects around the world.

Buda had shown how large quantities of high explosive could be brought to a precise point next to – or inside – a high-value target at minimal cost. Davis’s account opens in New York but soon proceeds to a dizzying global tour that takes in, among other places, Barcelona, Jerusalem, Saigon, Algiers, Belfast, Beirut, Colombo, Johannesburg, Florence, Oklahoma City, Moscow and Kabul. The car bomb, Davis observes, has proliferated along a “vine of destruction”, and it has taken root in “the thousand fissures of ethnic and religious enmity that globalization has paradoxically revealed. It also flourishes in the badlands of extreme inequality, on the edges of poor cities, and even in the embittered recesses of the American heartland”. Note the “also” and the “even” – for car bombs have been used promiscuously, by an extraordinary variety of shadowy non-government organizations, as well as by the intelligence agencies of a number of the major powers themselves. The thrust of Davis’s argument, nonetheless, is that such missiles have most importantly been used to reduce – if not of course to level – the odds between military “fleas” and “elephants”.

Crazed individuals acting alone have also followed Buda: for instance, a deranged Michigan farmer, a “diabolical amateur”, destroyed a school and thirty eight children inside in May 1927. Today there are more cities under siege from bomb attacks than at any time since the Second World War. Davis doesn’t condone the car bomb, and at one point even calls it inherently “fascist”, but he does seek to illuminate its very considerable attractions and explicable purposes for the groups who have made use of them. Some of these causes (if not the methods) clearly evoke his sympathy, but the use of car bombs by pieds-noirs in Algeria and, later, by extreme right-wing plotters, hellbent on preventing Nelson Mandela’s election to the presidency of South Africa, is cast unambiguously as the ultimate instance of moral corruption and political imbecility.

The brevity of Buda’s Wagon lends itself to a rather telegraphic style of analysis. It is perhaps best, for this reason, to see this book as part of a compelling and important series of studies that Davis has written in recent years, on urban disasters, human-induced catastrophes and political injustices, around the globe. The rapid shifts of time and place also prevent us from following any individual episode very far, although we do learn that Buda himself slipped back undetected to his native Romagna, where, rumour had it, he became a spy for Mussolini. Many of the other bombers, hijackers, terrorist financiers and state-sponsored torturers who make up Davis’s cast list are inevitably consigned to the role of bit players in the larger narrative. The year 1920 is one point of origin, but we are also referred back, for instance, to Fenian dynamite blasts in the 1870s, as well as to assorted anarchist operations in the 1890s and early 1900s. In an endnote, an even earlier inaugural moment is suggested, the occasion in 1800 when a huge cask of gunpowder mixed with iron scrap was attached to a cart, and exploded by Breton chouans in the rue Saint-Nicaise in Paris, with the intention of killing Napoleon, who was on his way to hear the premiere of Haydn’s Creation.

Just seven months after the Wall Street bombing of 1920, Catalan anarcho-syndicalists provided a motorized version as part of a campaign that included numerous deaths in Barcelona and the surrounding area. Another seminal date in Davis’s account is January 12 1947, when Zionist extremists, the Stern Gang, drove a truck of explosives into a British police station in Haifa to lethal effect. The survey highlights the dramatic technical innovations, shifting political circumstances and inexorable refinements of horror, culminating in the daily onslaught in the Iraqi capital. Given the earlier catastrophic experience of car bomb attacks in Lebanon in the 1990s, it is astonishing, as Davis points out, that the Bush administration’s “planning” for post-war Iraq paid so little heed to the potential of this weapon in an insurgency or in inter-ethnic strife. Illuminating charts and sobering statistical information bring home the sheer extent of the car bomb phenomenon, the balance sheet of death and injury rates, the shifting nature of the “hard” and “soft” targets that have been blown up in various theatres of war and violent civil resistance.

Suicide bombers, the Internet and the increasing size of payloads have brought a capacity for spectacular destruction – and publicity – beyond even Buda’s wildest dreams, and, as we are repeatedly reminded here, there are no technical or military “quick-fix” solutions in sight, despite the many millions that are now going into researching counter-measures at the Pentagon. As daunting as are the problems of protecting military patrols from improvised explosive devices, passenger airlines from hijackers, and public-transit systems from suitcase bombs, “they are dwarfed by the extraordinary challenge of protecting sprawling cities, rich and poor, from roving car bombers”. Hardening of targets in one place simply leads to displacement. In response to Martin Amis’s recently expressed concern that boarding a bus may become the vexatious equivalent of a journey on El Al, Davis caustically retorts that he need not worry. The Israeli airline has a level of professional security far beyond what most cash-strapped municipalities or transport companies will ever be equipped to provide. Moreover, whatever scientists may hope, we are glumly reminded here that the vast majority will continue to live in the “Red Zone”, not the “Green Zone”. Indeed in the case of Baghdad, the constant reinforcement of the Green Zone, Davis contends, is a fundamental admission of defeat. In a bravura passage he describes the surreal contrast between life either side of the barricades. Recognition that neither technology nor brute force will be adequate to resolving this crisis “must be pounded into the heads of politicians and police officials besotted with fantasies of ‘beating the terrorists’ with panoptical surveillance, ion detection technology, roadblocks, and, that sine qua non, the permanent suspension of civil liberties”. As the IRA discovered, two men with shovels can make up a 1,000lb bomb in a Fermanagh cowshed. You cannot decommission shovels. “It’s minds which have to be decommissioned”, a senior RUC officer recognized, in a remarkable assessment of the role of car bombs in the “Troubles”, quoted approvingly by Davis. Gordon Brown perhaps sought to echo this point, when, alongside security issues, he referred last week to a battle for “hearts and minds”. He also soberly made clear that whatever policy changes, cultural messages or propaganda campaigns were to follow, success would at best be relative. Ireland is one success story, but elsewhere, for good reason, Buda’s Wagon can offer us only the bleakest of assessments about the political direction of travel.

Despite the fantastical hopes – and terrors – that some pundits have associated with so-called postmodern warfare, it is indeed a simple, motorized version of Buda’s contrivance that remains the most common instrument of terror, deployed in many insurgencies as well as counterinsurgencies around the world. We may well – quite understandably – fear most deeply the consequences of stolen nuclear weapons, sarin gas and anthrax, but old-fashioned bombs on wheels (cycles, automobiles, lorries) remain “the brutal hardware and quotidian workhorses of urban terrorism”. Davis again: “It is the car bombers’ incessant blasting-away at the moral and physical shell of the city, not the more apocalyptic threats of nuclear or bioterrorisim, that is producing the most significant mutations in city form and urban lifestyle.” He does not shy away, however, from pondering the apocalyptic possibilities that may yet lie ahead. Be that as it may, the detonated automobile is now routinely deployed in “hot spots” around the world in protracted campaigns that aim to disrupt and unnerve entire urban-regional economies. A glance at the vicissitudes of the tourist industries of Kenya, Indonesia or Egypt in recent years underscores the point. In the immediate wake of the frightening near-miss in London came news that major retailers had swiftly downgraded their sales forecasts for the coming season.

Davis’s angry Italian anarchist did not survive to see the final apotheosis of his simple device in our own times, but he was able to enjoy, with personal impunity, its immediate consequences: the death total on Wall Street was forty, with over 200 people hurt. The fact that the blast led to the temporary suspension of the Stock Exchange was to be a prescient demonstration of the financial repercussions of a single, low-cost operation, launched in the right place at the right time: a lesson not lost on the IRA who targeted the City of London or, of course, on al-Qaeda. As Davis remarks, “a poor immigrant with some stolen dynamite, a pile of scrap metal, and an old horse had managed to bring unprecedented terror to the inner sanctum of American capitalism”. The impact of 9/11 or the subsequent Indonesian bombings may be hard to calculate but clearly runs into many billions of dollars.

Davis ends with the thought that Buda’s wagon is now truly the “hot rod of the apocalypse”. There is, despite the grimness of the subject, a particularly suave quality to the writing which often, but not always, comes over well. It may seem churlish, given the impressive erudition and educational aims of this book, to raise a question about how it works to be so readable. The pace of the narrative, stylish turns of phrase and arch chapter headings (such as “Welcome to Bombsville”, “Hell’s Kitchen” or “Festivals de plastique”) make it a page-turner, but at the risk of inducing a certain queasiness. To speak of Havana being “serenaded by concerts of dynamite” in the early 1930s is surely to hit a false note. The Bombay Stock Exchange bombing in 1993, according to another journalist, again quoted uncritically by Davis, offered us a “macabre mosaic of blood, limbs, glass and share application forms”, in which “mounds of food [are] splattered with the remains of people’s bodies”. The narrative runs a fine line between “unflinching” reportage and connoisseurship of the monstrous. This uneasy and uneven effect is not helped by the liberal use of adjectives such as “ingenious”, “brilliant”, “daring” and “innovative”, to catalogue the technical prowess displayed in various atrocities. When he tells us how a kamikaze bomber blew up an SUV in front of Jakarta’s Marriott Hotel in August 2003, Davis cannot resist adding that the bomber’s head reportedly landed on the fifth floor of the building.

A vocabulary verging on pastiche, full of “blowbacks”, “rogue assets”, “megalomaniac bomb-school graduates”, “super-Capones” and “remnant Maoists”, seems curiously at odds with the deeper recognition of waste and tragedy, and of necessary political engagement, that Davis’s now considerable body of work powerfully supports. Those who become seduced by the world of the car bomb, he suggests aptly, can become “blinded to its savage moral and political consequences”.

For all its gripping “noirish” flourishes and “cool” asides, this is a serious, disturbing and pessimistic book that resonates with widespread contemporary terrors. Although it concentrates throughout on a single form of killing machine, Buda’s Wagon provides enough political background and moral compass to make sense of the myriad plots and blasts that shape its story. Davis shows the fiendish and perhaps ultimately irresolvable difficulties now faced by governments (even relatively benign ones) in light of the threat. Above all, Buda’s Wagon is an excellent analysis of the arrogant miscalculations, cruelties and sometimes wanton stupidity of various governing elites.

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Daniel Pick is Professor of History at Birkbeck, University of London, an editor of History Workshop Journal and an associate member of the British Psychoanalytical Society. He is the author of War Machine: The rationalisation of slaughter in the modern age, 1993, and Rome or Death: The obsessions of General Garibaldi, 2005.