After the 9/11/01 Al Qaeda attacks against the USA that killed 2977 and injured more than 25,000, I developed a course on terrorism titled Terrorism and Democracy. I thought I would teach the course one or two times but it turned into a popular course that I offered every year until I retired in 2018.

From 2002 through 2015 I lead five January term three-week study groups to Northern Ireland to study the conflict between Catholics and Protestants that included terrorist attacks by groups acting in the name of each community. The 1998 Omagh bombing by The Real IRA killed 29 and injured 220. These trips together with my own study encouraged me to include a unit on terrorism in Northern Ireland in Terrorism and Democracy.

In 1995 in Oklahoma City Timothy McVeigh parked a truck full of explosives outside the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building that when detonated killed 168 people and injured 680 others in what was until the September 11th attacks the deadliest act of domestic terrorism in American history.

Even without the Oklahoma City attack, American history provided ample examples for my course of violence against innocents in pursuit of a political goal, the definition of terrorism, including the 4743 lynched between 1882 and 1968. American domestic white Nationalist terrorism has killed more Americans since 2001 than Islamic jihadists.

Whether perpetrated by Al Qaeda or ISIS, the Irish Republican Army or Ulster Volunteer Force, America’s home grown lone actors or domestic terror groups such as Aryan Nation or The Order or Klu Klux Klan, terrorism is the logical end point of fanaticism. Of the 50 books I used over the almost twenty years I taught Terrorism and Democracy, the author and book that offered the best insight into fanaticism was the late Israeli novelist Amos Oz’s How to Cure a Fanatic.

To Oz, the essence of fanaticism is

Righteousness entrenched and buttressed within itself, righteousness with no windows or doors, is hallmark of this disease.

Terrorists driven by fanaticism are not interested in argument. They are not interested in you or I as persons. They see us solely as instruments. They want change now and are willing to kill to get it. They pretend to be altruists, knowing what is good for you and I but not interested in our point of view. Oz is surely right when he says fanaticism is an “elemental fixture of human nature…a bad gene.”

Fanatics and fanatic groups live and operate at the margins for good reason. Fanaticism is a purely defensive reaction to the world. The fanatic has to give up too much of what truly makes us human. As Oz suggests, fanatic asks us to shut all the windows and doors so that we can stew in his/her little world.

How to cure the fanatic? Oz offers several solutions but the one that resonated the most with my students and I was the power of curiosity and imagination, primarily focused on how others live. Literature and film are especially good at this. I started watching international (we called them ‘foreign) films as a college student, after being introduced to Ingmar Bergman’s films.

To this day, I love exploring the lives of others, in other places, through film. The 2006 German film The Lives of Others that won an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film shows that even spying on others can lead one to not only an understanding of their lives but to a change in behavior by an officer of the East German Stasi, a cog in the fanatical East German state that terrorized its citizens.

On one of the Northern Ireland trips, a former IRA member spoke to our group and stated that he began to change his perspective when he learned more about the actual lives of Protestants in his community, especially the fear their culture would be swallowed up by a Catholic state. This fear, of losing one’s culture, was exactly why this former IRA foot soldier joined the IRA. A window in his righteousness had opened.

There is a line in Leonard Cohen’s “Anthem” that expresses this: “There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.” In my life, I am continually looking for the cracks, the doors and windows, of the world I fashion in my mind.

Fanatics, and the little fanatic that lives in all of us, live small, pinched-up lives. Their simple, black & white, no argument worldview asks too much from this complex, grey and conversational world.

This is the failure of fanaticism.