J. Bowyer Bell – författare

This is an analysis of one of the most prevalent forms of political violence at the end of the millennium. The author has been shot at, kidnapped, expelled and questioned in wars from Central America to Northern Ireland. The book reflects his access to the cultures of political violence.

This is an analysis of one of the most prevalent forms of political violence at the end of the millennium. The author has been shot at, kidnapped, expelled and questioned in wars from Central America to Northern Ireland. The book reflects his access to the cultures of political violence.

Based on thousands of interviews over 35 years with the leaders and members of the Republican movement and the IRA itself, as well as the Irish, British and Americans involved in the Troubles, the focus of this study is on the workings of an organization involved in armed struggle.

Based on thousands of interviews over 35 years with the leaders and members of the Republican movement and the IRA itself, as well as the Irish, British and Americans involved in the Troubles, the focus of this study is on the workings of an organization involved in armed struggle.

Irish history sounds a long litany of grievance and vengeance—lost battles, escaped earls, and institutionalized injustice. The gun, certainly in this century, has played a prominent part. In The Gun in Politics, J. Bowyer Bell presents the story of one Ireland—the Ireland of the Troubles—and about an approach to understanding political violence. In particular, he examines the Irish Republic Army, the longest-enduring unsuccessful revolutionary organization. He de-scribes the covert world of gunmen and the great game they play in the street.His is a lively, telling account of sophisticated weapons transfer, of the impact of civil war on society, and of appropriate democratic responses to terrorism. Bell's association with active Republicans, his endless tea seminars at the United Irishman, drinks at Hennessy's, and constant conversation throughout Ireland on political matters over a period of twenty years has provided the author with unique background for this guide to a fascinating, though brutal, undercurrent of Irish history.

Cheating and deception are terms often used but rarely defined. They summon up unpleasant connotations; even those deeply involved with cheating and deception rationalize why they have been driven to it. Particularly for Americans and much of Western civilization, official cheating, government duplicity, cheating as policy, and conscious, contrived deception, are all unacceptable except as a last resort in response to threat of extinction. As a distasteful tool, deception is rarely used to achieve national interests, unless in relation to the deployment of military force. As an area of study, it has by and large been ignored.Intrigued by attitudes toward cheating and deception, the authors decided to analyze its roots, structure, and process. They asked fundamental questions: are there categories of deception, general steps in the process of deception, and ways to evaluate its results across time and in different modes? The book that results is a typology of kinds of deception, beginning with military deception, but extending into other categories and stages.In his introduction to this new edition, Bell outlines how the book came to be written, describes the mixed emotions toward the subject displayed by govenmental and nongovernmental funding sources, and speculates about its critical and commercial reception. He discusses widespread new interest in the subject, the research that has been undertaken since this book was first published, and its limitations.This book provides a general overview of this complex subject, creating a framework for analysis of specific instances of cheating or deception. It will be of particular interest to political scientists, those interested in military affairs and strategy, and psychologists. The general reader will find the book written with a light touch, drawing examples of cheating and deception in the pursuit of love and money. The specialist reader will be intrigued by its broad-ranging examples drawn from policy and politics, wars and rumors of wars.

For centuries international order has been troubled by small wars, insurrections, and revolts--low intensity conflicts. With the implosion of the Soviet empire many thought such violence could be eradicated through the growth of democracy, open societies, and increased productivity and education. Instead the world remains filled with turmoil, pogroms, famine, civil war, rebellion, and terror, often instigated by armed and dangerous zealots. To Americans such killers seem alien and inexplicable, fanatics without reason, beyond the reach of conventional containment or retaliation. J. Bowyer Bell here explores the psychological and strategic ecosystems (which he terms dragon worlds) of modern political violence and suggests how America might effectively deal with it.Dragonwars combines analysis with historical examples drawn from America's involvement with armed struggle in Lebanon, Central Am-erica, Greece, and Vietnam. In each instance, Bell argues, American policy was flawed by lack of empathy and historical understanding combined with a belief that failure could be traced to mistakes in details and procedures. The break up of the old bipolar U.S.-Soviet confrontation released suppressed ambitions, tribal greed, and greater flexibility for the small player. With new technologies of terror, zones of security will become smaller, since open societies present attractive targets for zealots. Bell rejects the notion that massive force can effect a swift and final result. Instead, a new type of warrior will be required; one versed in history and empathetic to the belief-systems of the dragonworlds in which they are deployed.Bell acknowledges that his proposals run counter to American belief and practice, but argues that in the face of insoluble conflicts, incremental advantages, through limited altered global arena, Dragonwars will prove an indispensable guide for policymakers, military planners, historians, and political scientists.

The essence of Ascent of the Mountain, Flight of the Dove remains intact: its vision of religious studies as sustained refl ection on our lifelong voyage to discover who we are. The story we choose for ourselves, the story we live, can sacralize or secularize our lives and our world by the way in which we choose to relate to it. With this awareness of the story dimension of life, Ascent of the Mountain, Flight of the Dove opens us to awe, reverence, and wonder at the risks and possibilities of human freedom.This book is even more important than it was thirty years ago. We need religion to strike deeply into the self, away from public glare. Unless Americans become more sophisticated about the language of the self, inner life will shrivel. In addition, our people will continue to be vulnerable to fundamentalist movements. Such movements take over too many innocents. Th ey promise, and sometimes deliver, a touching happiness. But they do so by closing the spirit in a powerful and dangerous way.Families and schools do not provide a large and critical vocabulary by which to express the inner longings of the spirit. The souls of many are parched and they gladly accept water, any water, from those who off er it. Th e liberation of the religious spirit from trivial, closed, and simplistic systems of thought can only be achieved through the development of a critical language, exercises, and disciplines that open rather than close the mind, that lead to higher viewpoints, breakthroughs, and new syntheses, in a constant enlargement of spirit. Novak's book leads us to that place.

Assassination as a political act has a long history, predating the murder of Julius Caesar and continuing into our own time. The murder of the mighty has long fascinated artists and rebels but only rarely has it been studied in a scholarly manner. In Assassin, J. Bowyer Bell combines existing historical evidence with years of personal interviews with terrorists in Africa, the Middle East, and Europe. The result is an incisive study of that enigmatic figure, the revolutionary killer. As Bell makes clear, the motives of the actors, and effectiveness of assassination, vary widely across time and place. Assassination in many parts of the world has not only been a normal political act, rational, explicable, but also often effective, in some cases taking fewer lives in the transfer of power than an election. Likewise, there have been all kinds of assassins--personal, psychopathic, professional, ranging from lonely failures trying to make their mark to authorized agents of the state. Using the assassination of Henry IV of France as a historical backdrop, Bell writes about contemporary political murder from the perspective of one who has studied the subject of political violence for decades. Bell has met with or known well the perpetrators, conspirators, and intended victims of assassination who have escaped. His interviewees include a radical Irish revolutionary leader, an American Arabist diplomat, a spokesman for the PLO, and the president of a Mozambique liberation movement. The itinerary of his investigative journeys covers most of the flashpoints of contemporary political violence.The people and places studied here at firsthand are engaged in a deadly game. The attrition rate is often high, the power fleeting, and the consequences often unforeseen. If past is prologue, assassination is to be with us for years to come. The volume will be essential reading for those engaged in the prevention of political violence and terror as well as historians and political scientists.

J. Bowyer Bell's Beseiged is built on the premise that as long as men have constructed walls, other men have tried to scale them. From ancient Jericho and Joshua's trumpet to London and the onslaught of the Luftwaffe, people have always devised cunning weapons, with all the skills at their command, to breach such barriers and invade the camps and fortified places of their enemies.Beseiged is the story of seven great modern sieges: Madrid in the Spanish Civil War; London, Warsaw, Singapore and Stalingrad in World War II; Berlin during the Post World War II Airlift; and Jerusalem under Arab attack from four sides in 1947. Bell, a veteran historian, describes in detail the actual battles involved, clearly demonstrating the universality of sieges and siegecraft and showing that all these beleaguered places have things in common and obey certain basic laws or principles.Bell points out commonalities showing, for example, though no bullets were fired during the Berlin Airlift, the city itself was as much under siege as was Warsaw, where the Polish Underground fought a fierce but hopeless battle against Hitler's Wehrmacht. By the same token, Bell shows though no German infantry ever came close to London, it was nonetheless besieged by aerial squadrons just as surely as Stalingrad was by both German and Russian ground forces. The histories of these sieges are ones of heroism and cowardice, meticulous planning and incredible blunders, all of which can be studied and used even currently in similar situations in either defending, or piercing the defenses of, a location in times of unrest or war.Beseiged is a must-read for those interested in modern conflict pondering the enigma of human endeavor in wall building and breaking involved in siegecraft. A must-read for everyone from military strategist aficionados and historians to science and technology buffs. If it is to be believed the danger of not knowing history is the possibility of unknowingly repeating it, then Beseiged should appear on all required reading lists.

Cheating and deception are terms often used but rarely defined. They summon up unpleasant connotations; even those deeply involved with cheating and deception rationalize why they have been driven to it. Particularly for Americans and much of Western civilization, official cheating, government duplicity, cheating as policy, and conscious, contrived deception, are all unacceptable except as a last resort in response to threat of extinction. As a distasteful tool, deception is rarely used to achieve national interests, unless in relation to the deployment of military force. As an area of study, it has by and large been ignored.Intrigued by attitudes toward cheating and deception, the authors decided to analyze its roots, structure, and process. They asked fundamental questions: are there categories of deception, general steps in the process of deception, and ways to evaluate its results across time and in different modes? The book that results is a typology of kinds of deception, beginning with military deception, but extending into other categories and stages.In his introduction to this new edition, Bell outlines how the book came to be written, describes the mixed emotions toward the subject displayed by govenmental and nongovernmental funding sources, and speculates about its critical and commercial reception. He discusses widespread new interest in the subject, the research that has been undertaken since this book was first published, and its limitations.This book provides a general overview of this complex subject, creating a framework for analysis of specific instances of cheating or deception. It will be of particular interest to political scientists, those interested in military affairs and strategy, and psychologists. The general reader will find the book written with a light touch, drawing examples of cheating and deception in the pursuit of love and money. The specialist reader will be intrigued by its broad-ranging examples drawn from policy and politics, wars and rumors of wars.

"We fight, therefore we are." This revision of Cartesian wisdom was enunciated by the late premier of Israel, Menachim Begin. It is the leitmotif of this brilliant study of the military origins of modern Israel. J. Bowyer Bell argues that the members of Irgun, Lehi (the Stern Gang), and the Zionist underground in British mandated Palestine had clear motives for the violent path they took: the creation of a sovereign homeland for the Jewish people in oppressed lands. These advocates of terror pitted themselves against not only the British and the Arabs, but also against less violent brethren like Ben Gurion, Moshe Dayan, and Yitzhak Rabin.This is the definitive story of desperate, dedicated revolutionaries who were driven to conclude that lives must be taken if Israel were to live. The dynamite bombing of the King David Hotel, the assassination of Lord Moyne in Cairo, and Count Bernardotte ,in Palestine were but a few acts of terror which forced the British out of the Middle East. Terror Out of Zion evaluates whether these acts were extremist or necessary, and whether these men and women were fanatics or freedom fighters.Terror Out of Zion serves as a primer for those who would understand contemporary political divisions in Israel. It is based on careful historical research and interviews with surviving members of the Irgun, chronicling bombings, assassinations, hah- breadth prison escapes, and endless cycles of retaliation in the terror that gave birth to Israel, but, no less, continues to inform its political relations. Bell has fashioned an adventure story that also explains the sources of current tensions and frictions within Israel.Publishers' Weekly wrote that "Bell's book crackles with suspense and explodes with tales of carnage and violence; it could hardly be otherwise. Yet he writes with compassion and insight into the black despair that engendered the terrorist's brutal deeds." And a highly laudatory New York Times review said "excellent ... a skillfully written, fast-paced anecdotal narrative of one of the bloodiest and least documented chapters of Zionist history . . . the story is more than mere history; it is detailed portrait of the formulating experiences of Israel's new leadership."

The Secret Army is the definitive work on the Irish Republican Army. It is an absorbing account of a movement that has had a profound effect on the shaping of the modern Irish state. The secret army in the service of the invisible Republic has had a powerful effect on Irish events over the past twenty-five years. These hidden corridors of power interest Bell and inspired him to spend more time with the IRA than many volunteers spend in it. This book is the culmination of twenty-five years of work and tens of thousands of hours of interviews. Bell's unique access to the leadership of the republican movement and his contacts with all involved British politicians, Irish politicians, policemen, arms smugglers, and others committed or opposed to the IRA explain why The Secret Army is the book on the subject. This edition represents a complete revision and includes vast quantities of new information.Bell's book gives us vital insight into our times as well as Irish history. This edition of The Secret Army contains six new chapters that bring the history of this clandestine organization up to date. They are: The First Decade, The Nature of the Long War, 1979-1980"; "Unconventional Conflict, The Hunger Strikes, January 1980-October 3, 1981"; The Protracted Struggle, September 1981-January 1984"; "War, Politics, and the Split, January 1984-December 1986"; The Troubles as Institution, 1987-1990": and The Armed Struggle Transformed, 1991-1996, The End Game." In his new introduction, Bell reflects on his decades of research, the experiences he has had, and the people he has met during his extensive visits to Ireland.

Assassination as a political act has a long history, predating the murder of Julius Caesar and continuing into our own time. The murder of the mighty has long fascinated artists and rebels but only rarely has it been studied in a scholarly manner. In Assassin, J. Bowyer Bell combines existing historical evidence with years of personal interviews with terrorists in Africa, the Middle East, and Europe. The result is an incisive study of that enigmatic figure, the revolutionary killer. As Bell makes clear, the motives of the actors, and effectiveness of assassination, vary widely across time and place. Assassination in many parts of the world has not only been a normal political act, rational, explicable, but also often effective, in some cases taking fewer lives in the transfer of power than an election. Likewise, there have been all kinds of assassins--personal, psychopathic, professional, ranging from lonely failures trying to make their mark to authorized agents of the state. Using the assassination of Henry IV of France as a historical backdrop, Bell writes about contemporary political murder from the perspective of one who has studied the subject of political violence for decades. Bell has met with or known well the perpetrators, conspirators, and intended victims of assassination who have escaped. His interviewees include a radical Irish revolutionary leader, an American Arabist diplomat, a spokesman for the PLO, and the president of a Mozambique liberation movement. The itinerary of his investigative journeys covers most of the flashpoints of contemporary political violence.The people and places studied here at firsthand are engaged in a deadly game. The attrition rate is often high, the power fleeting, and the consequences often unforeseen. If past is prologue, assassination is to be with us for years to come. The volume will be essential reading for those engaged in the prevention of political violence and terror as well as historians and political scientists.

J. Bowyer Bell's Beseiged is built on the premise that as long as men have constructed walls, other men have tried to scale them. From ancient Jericho and Joshua's trumpet to London and the onslaught of the Luftwaffe, people have always devised cunning weapons, with all the skills at their command, to breach such barriers and invade the camps and fortified places of their enemies.Beseiged is the story of seven great modern sieges: Madrid in the Spanish Civil War; London, Warsaw, Singapore and Stalingrad in World War II; Berlin during the Post World War II Airlift; and Jerusalem under Arab attack from four sides in 1947. Bell, a veteran historian, describes in detail the actual battles involved, clearly demonstrating the universality of sieges and siegecraft and showing that all these beleaguered places have things in common and obey certain basic laws or principles.Bell points out commonalities showing, for example, though no bullets were fired during the Berlin Airlift, the city itself was as much under siege as was Warsaw, where the Polish Underground fought a fierce but hopeless battle against Hitler's Wehrmacht. By the same token, Bell shows though no German infantry ever came close to London, it was nonetheless besieged by aerial squadrons just as surely as Stalingrad was by both German and Russian ground forces. The histories of these sieges are ones of heroism and cowardice, meticulous planning and incredible blunders, all of which can be studied and used even currently in similar situations in either defending, or piercing the defenses of, a location in times of unrest or war.Beseiged is a must-read for those interested in modern conflict pondering the enigma of human endeavor in wall building and breaking involved in siegecraft. A must-read for everyone from military strategist aficionados and historians to science and technology buffs. If it is to be believed the danger of not knowing history is the possibility of unknowingly repeating it, then Beseiged should appear on all required reading lists.

The essence of Ascent of the Mountain, Flight of the Dove remains intact: its vision of religious studies as sustained refl ection on our lifelong voyage to discover who we are. The story we choose for ourselves, the story we live, can sacralize or secularize our lives and our world by the way in which we choose to relate to it. With this awareness of the story dimension of life, Ascent of the Mountain, Flight of the Dove opens us to awe, reverence, and wonder at the risks and possibilities of human freedom.This book is even more important than it was thirty years ago. We need religion to strike deeply into the self, away from public glare. Unless Americans become more sophisticated about the language of the self, inner life will shrivel. In addition, our people will continue to be vulnerable to fundamentalist movements. Such movements take over too many innocents. Th ey promise, and sometimes deliver, a touching happiness. But they do so by closing the spirit in a powerful and dangerous way.Families and schools do not provide a large and critical vocabulary by which to express the inner longings of the spirit. The souls of many are parched and they gladly accept water, any water, from those who off er it. Th e liberation of the religious spirit from trivial, closed, and simplistic systems of thought can only be achieved through the development of a critical language, exercises, and disciplines that open rather than close the mind, that lead to higher viewpoints, breakthroughs, and new syntheses, in a constant enlargement of spirit. Novak's book leads us to that place.

For centuries international order has been troubled by small wars, insurrections, and revolts--low intensity conflicts. With the implosion of the Soviet empire many thought such violence could be eradicated through the growth of democracy, open societies, and increased productivity and education. Instead the world remains filled with turmoil, pogroms, famine, civil war, rebellion, and terror, often instigated by armed and dangerous zealots. To Americans such killers seem alien and inexplicable, fanatics without reason, beyond the reach of conventional containment or retaliation. J. Bowyer Bell here explores the psychological and strategic ecosystems (which he terms dragon worlds) of modern political violence and suggests how America might effectively deal with it.Dragonwars combines analysis with historical examples drawn from America's involvement with armed struggle in Lebanon, Central Am-erica, Greece, and Vietnam. In each instance, Bell argues, American policy was flawed by lack of empathy and historical understanding combined with a belief that failure could be traced to mistakes in details and procedures. The break up of the old bipolar U.S.-Soviet confrontation released suppressed ambitions, tribal greed, and greater flexibility for the small player. With new technologies of terror, zones of security will become smaller, since open societies present attractive targets for zealots. Bell rejects the notion that massive force can effect a swift and final result. Instead, a new type of warrior will be required; one versed in history and empathetic to the belief-systems of the dragonworlds in which they are deployed.Bell acknowledges that his proposals run counter to American belief and practice, but argues that in the face of insoluble conflicts, incremental advantages, through limited altered global arena, Dragonwars will prove an indispensable guide for policymakers, military planners, historians, and political scientists.

Irish history sounds a long litany of grievance and vengeance—lost battles, escaped earls, and institutionalized injustice. The gun, certainly in this century, has played a prominent part. In The Gun in Politics, J. Bowyer Bell presents the story of one Ireland—the Ireland of the Troubles—and about an approach to understanding political violence. In particular, he examines the Irish Republic Army, the longest-enduring unsuccessful revolutionary organization. He de-scribes the covert world of gunmen and the great game they play in the street.His is a lively, telling account of sophisticated weapons transfer, of the impact of civil war on society, and of appropriate democratic responses to terrorism. Bell's association with active Republicans, his endless tea seminars at the United Irishman, drinks at Hennessy's, and constant conversation throughout Ireland on political matters over a period of twenty years has provided the author with unique background for this guide to a fascinating, though brutal, undercurrent of Irish history.

"We fight, therefore we are." This revision of Cartesian wisdom was enunciated by the late premier of Israel, Menachim Begin. It is the leitmotif of this brilliant study of the military origins of modern Israel. J. Bowyer Bell argues that the members of Irgun, Lehi (the Stern Gang), and the Zionist underground in British mandated Palestine had clear motives for the violent path they took: the creation of a sovereign homeland for the Jewish people in oppressed lands. These advocates of terror pitted themselves against not only the British and the Arabs, but also against less violent brethren like Ben Gurion, Moshe Dayan, and Yitzhak Rabin.This is the definitive story of desperate, dedicated revolutionaries who were driven to conclude that lives must be taken if Israel were to live. The dynamite bombing of the King David Hotel, the assassination of Lord Moyne in Cairo, and Count Bernardotte ,in Palestine were but a few acts of terror which forced the British out of the Middle East. Terror Out of Zion evaluates whether these acts were extremist or necessary, and whether these men and women were fanatics or freedom fighters.Terror Out of Zion serves as a primer for those who would understand contemporary political divisions in Israel. It is based on careful historical research and interviews with surviving members of the Irgun, chronicling bombings, assassinations, hah- breadth prison escapes, and endless cycles of retaliation in the terror that gave birth to Israel, but, no less, continues to inform its political relations. Bell has fashioned an adventure story that also explains the sources of current tensions and frictions within Israel.Publishers' Weekly wrote that "Bell's book crackles with suspense and explodes with tales of carnage and violence; it could hardly be otherwise. Yet he writes with compassion and insight into the black despair that engendered the terrorist's brutal deeds." And a highly laudatory New York Times review said "excellent ... a skillfully written, fast-paced anecdotal narrative of one of the bloodiest and least documented chapters of Zionist history . . . the story is more than mere history; it is detailed portrait of the formulating experiences of Israel's new leadership."