The best
Terrorism books:
Reddit reviews
From 3.5 billion Reddit comments
The best of Terrorism books by number of unique Reddit comments:
![Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army [Revised and Updated]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/41cKSd6hQ7L._SL500_.jpg)
Top Reddit reviews mentioning Terrorism books:
The biggest reason is that the two families have business links.
Great book to get started with that doesn't fall into the conspiracy tropes.
https://www.amazon.com/House-Bush-Saud-Relationship-Dynasties/dp/0743253396
Great article again by Robert Fisk. I'd be fairly certain, there is no Western journalist who has spent more time of the frontlines of the Middle East than Fisk has.
His book "The Great war for Civilisation" is a fantastic 1,000+ page book of similar reporting over 30 years. Covering the frontlines of the Iran-Iraq war, the Lebanon Civil War (he lived in Beirut during the majority of the war and still lives there today), Palestine-Israel's various wars, First Gulf war, and the US invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan.
It's a great introduction book for people who want to know more about the Middle East and how we got to the current situation.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Why-Civil-Resistance-Works-Nonviolent/dp/0231156839
Collected data on protests between 1900 -2006. Showed that non-violent protests are about twice as likely to work than violent protests. This is the book that extinction rebellion frequently talk about.
We're not in the end times; the Millennial generation is simply at the same age the Boomers were in the 1970's. The Boomers were horribly destructive at that age, and the Millenials are simply repeating the behavior of their parents. Eventually, people will get hate-fatigue and it will be Morning in America again.
I have no problem blaming only the Sunni fundamentalists that are responsible for Islamist violence and I simply don't understand why that is so hard for my fellow Americans to see and actualize in policy — this mass ignorance of World Religions is what allowed the United States to get duped into invading Iraq in retaliation to the actions of the Saudi-connected Sunni terrorists that committed the World Trade Center attacks in 2001.
Soon, Americans will be led into a war against Iranian and Lebanese Shi'a people and against Lebanese Catholics, and they will justify it by pointing to the actions of Sunni people and by blaming all of Islam. Middle Eastern Christians themselves can testify that Shi'a and Christians living under Sunni fundamentalist governments will often experience similar levels of persecution.
I can not and will not pass judgment on Shi'a, Alawites, etc. for the actions of the Islamic equivalent of the KKK.
>Princeton University’s Omar Wasow studied protest movements in the 1960s and found that violent upheaval tended to make white voters more conservative, whereas nonviolent protests were associated with increased liberalism among white voters. “These patterns suggest violent protest activity is correlated with a taste for ‘social control’ among the predominantly white mass public,” wrote Wasow in his study.
>
> Stephan and Erica Chenoweth produced a book, <em>Why Civil Resistance Works</em>, which found nonviolent resistance movements were twice as likely as violent movements to achieve their aims in the 20th and early 21stcenturies.
Important message here. It shows that violence is counter-productive.
Those followup questions feel like they deserve more depth than I can go into. I know Ayers' history from looking him up during the 2008 campaign culture wars. The usual recommendation is Days of Rage, which hasn't actually made it's way to the top of my To Be Read list yet.
Political scientist Erica Chenoweth studies the amount of a population that is protesting in effective popular revolutions and failed revolutions. IIRC, she found no protest movements in her dataset that failed with over 4% of the population protesting regularly, and no nonviolent movements that failed with something like 2.5% protesting regularly.
I don’t mean to say that’s predictive here, where the movement has to overcome not just the local HK authorities, but a superpower as well, and furthermore I don’t think this is the scale of protests everyday. But clearly it shows the power of a small group of people protesting regularly, and, as you say, 10% is nothing to laugh at.
Short and sweet: during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan we were sending a shitload of weapons to the Afghanis through Pakistan. The paki isi(their cia) pretty much gave everything to the taliban. The northern alliance got shit. The pakis (isi)and the talis pretty much teamed up wrg to weapons/training/etc. To top it off the feds were so impressed with the paki/tali religious dedication and a lot of our cash funded madrassas which in turn radicalized a shit ton of people which lead us into the situation we’re in now. It’s fucking absolutely nuts. If you want to read an amazing account of that whole ordeal I highly recommend “Ghost Wars”. And the follow up “Directorate S”
We basically caused 9/11 the rise of the taliban, the shitshow going on now and pretty much every terrorist attack claimed by isis and a lot more. I can’t even find the words to describe how I felt after absorbing everything.
The audiobook is great and there’s so much crazy shit thst pops up your constantly like “WTF!!”
There were hundreds of domestic bombings in the 1970s. And many of the bombers and their supporters received little to no punishment. It is strange that hardly anyone seems aware of these extraordinary events. I only accidentally stumbled across this stuff.
https://www.amazon.com/Days-Rage-Underground-Forgotten-Revolutionary/dp/0143107976
The name of a book that covers the Weather Underground. They were a communist terror group that waged an actual insurrection through bombing campaigns against the Senate, the Pentagon, and other folks they didn’t like.
The federal government dropped all charges against them. One of the people who bombed the Pentagon, Bill Ayers, never saw jail and became a professor at the University of Chicago.
Biohazard: The Chilling True Story of the Largest Cover Biological Weapons Program in the World—Told by the Man Who Ran It by Ken Alibek.
Ridiculously long title written by Fall Out Boy (uncredited)
Assuming we are not talking about white-washed liberal assumptions of nonviolent resistance, the answer to if non violence works is again... it depends. If you have enough people early on enough, violence can be avoided; it incentivizes larger numbers do to a feeling of less risk, and violence is more expen$ive and this fact can be used to the advantage of nonviolent resistors given they don’t have as many budget constraints. Prolonged use of violence is State building- you can do everything with beyonets except sit on them.
Yea it's not like they had a bombing campaign in the 70's and 80's that targeted Businesses, Government Institutions, and homes.
Maybe you should get some required reading in.
The Great War for Civilisation is a good book if you really want to learn about it.
> If someone advocates truck bombs and the tight-knit community backs him up, do not be surprised if a lurker truck bombs. It's not complicated; the causal line is perfectly clear.
Can you name a single person, community, organization or outlet on the left that you will similarly blame for any instance of left-coded political violence? Say, the congressional baseball shooter, or the guy who just tried to assassinate Kavanaugh, or the guy who murdered that 18 year old, or, you know, any of that summer of political violence we recently had, or the decade of political violence we had back in the Days of Rage?
That's old hat, too.
The Weathermen, the SDS, the SLA. If violence is hardwired into anyone it's progressives.
https://www.amazon.com/Days-Rage-Underground-Forgotten-Revolutionary/dp/0143107976
That world you believe in is a fantasy. It's not that there are no people who've done what you claim hasn't been done, but people like you don't want to listen to them, because people like you believe it's impossible that some things are too big to talk about, and that reality is like Hollywood where the good guys always prevail.
Your logic is circular. You don't want to listen to people because you assume that if they were worth listening to, you would've heard it on the news, but since you haven't, you think you're justified in ignoring them. It's a self-reinforcing mechanism based on wilful ignorance.
Here's a book doing exactly what you're asking, perhaps you could read it, and get back to me once you're ready to discuss the contents. https://www.amazon.com/Debunking-11-Mechanics-Defenders-Conspiracy/dp/156656686X
I first learned about Mike Ruppert from the very first episode of this great conspiracy-related show, Guns and Butter, that aired a month after 9/11/01. Ruppert was discussing insider trading and prior knowledge of the event by the CIA. https://m.soundcloud.com/guns-and-butter-1/we-remember-mike-ruppert-john-judge-300
He also wrote a great book, Crossing The Rubicon. It deals a lot with 9/11, the deep state Bush/Saudi/Israeli actors and their histories/connections. https://www.amazon.com/Crossing-Rubicon-Decline-American-Empire/dp/0865715408
I'm mainly talking about the incompetence described here: The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11
But since you brought up the commission report.. The report that failed to mention WTC7? Then couldn't explain how it fell? Then said they could, but kept the simulation/model secret? That is incompetence to me. They had every chance to disprove conspiracy theories, but instead fuled it.
That is an incredibly simplistic and also largely incorrect assessment of what actually transpired. Contrary to popular opinion, the US did not support extremists in Afghanistan to counter the commies.
This is an amazing, amazing book that presents a very thorough recounting of the Soviet invasion and it’s aftermath by Steve Coll, a Pulitzer winner who’s currently the head of Columbia's school of journalism. I can’t recommend it enough.
It's a terrible way to solve things though. Look at the American Civil War. It ended slavery, but it opened Jim Crow and a century plus of racism and deep political divisions in American that go right up through Trump. Also, for 20+ years Americans were deeply scarred with their lost war dead on both sides.
https://www.amazon.com/Why-Civil-Resistance-Works-Nonviolent/dp/0231156839
The cia didn’t fund Al qaeda. Osama barley spent any time in Afghanistan, he fought in one battle, and was completely irrelevant. Read a book, I recommend this one. https://www.amazon.com/Looming-Tower-Al-Qaeda-Road-11/dp/1400030846
Honestly, to make yourself feel better you should pick up a few books on the political violence that happened in the late '60s and early '70s - specifically anything that includes the Weather Underground.
It was a lot worse then than it has ever been, even during Trump. "Days of Rage" is a good book, and it 100% made me feel better about present day America.
Here's a book recommendation for anyone who wants a deep dive into Weather Underground and other 1970s-era political violence.
This blog post provides a good overview of the above book. To answer OP's question, I don't know about "active members of the Democratic Party," but it's true that the former Weather Underground members weren't really punished for their violence, and went on to have pretty nice careers as part of the establishment.
> In the end, the Weather’s fugitives turned themselves in with little trouble. To give you an idea: Bill Ayers was scott-free. Cathy Wilkerson did a year. Bernardine Dohrn got three years probation and a $1500 fine. The radical lawyers, accessories to Weather’s bombings? Nada. Zip. Zero. > > They did pretty well afterwards. Bernardine Dohrn was a clinical associate professor of law at Northwestern University for more than twenty years. Another Weatherman, Eleanor Stein, was arrested on the run in 1981; she got a law degree in 1986 and became an administrative law judge. Radical attorney Michael Kennedy, who did more than any to keep Weather alive, has been special advisor to President of the UN General Assembly. And, of course, Barack Obama, twice President of the United States, started his political career in Bill Ayers’s living room. > > This is the difference between the hard Left & hard Right: you can be a violent leftist radical and go on to live a pretty kickass life. This is especially true if you’re a leftist of the credentialed class: Ph.D. or J.D.
OP have you ever read any books?
Are you too young not to realize the Soviet Union had the largest bioweapons program in the world during the Cold War
Go read https://www.amazon.com/Biohazard-Chilling-Largest-Biological-World-Told/dp/0385334966
Then come back and apologize for being so stupid and not realizing why any country would still want vaccines for things like smallpox, anthrax and would want to work on Ebola vaccine as well
Book. "Biohazard" by Ken Alibek
Details USSR's work into weaponizing smallpox. Designing delivery systems, aerosols, growing the needed quantities of smallpox.... testing.
Terrifying.
Their motive? They knew they couldn't match USA in nuclear megatonnage, nor delivery accuracy. But smallpox would reach to the corners of the earth, in a population no longer vaccinated. Google "dead hand USSR"
Guess who DID have vaccine stockpiled for their elites, ACCORDING TO ALIBEK's BOOK.
Not all, but definitely a lot that was passed in that era and largely due to the Black Panthers influence. It's discussed in the book Days of Rage is and quite an interesting historical piece.
>You’re flat out wrong
According to Ghost Wars by Pulitzer winning Steve Coll, this is indeed a huge failing in American Intelligence. To say that the relationship between Woodley and Clinton was cold would be an understatement.
Clinton hated yhe CIA. He was straight up combative with them.
Just cause you have deluded yourself with mass media, doesn't even come close to what is actually true. They lie to you, regularly.
Here, I'll do you a favor. Read about it yourself, 20 bucks to be more educated. Hell of a deal.
https://www.amazon.com/Ghost-Wars-Afghanistan-Invasion-September/dp/0143034669
This was in direct response to your comment about comparing the military spending in Afghanistan with the whole military budget. I pointed out that was a false dichotomy but still entertained your non-sequitur. And then you went way down the rabbit hole and completely left the budget argument behind as some sort of collateral attack on the last 40 years of military doctrine. I am not saying that is not a valid discussion, I am saying it does not belong in this thread.
I don't even really disagree with some of your premises, I just think you are painting with too broad a brush. Have you read Ghost Wars by Steve Coll? If not, I highly suggest it. It covers your points well, but it with a bit more nuance in my opinion.