Buda's Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb

By Mike Davis

In a revelatory examination of urban terror, MacArthur Fellow Mike Davis -- dubbed by the British Independent, "the Raymond Chandler of urban geography" -- charts the car bomb's evolution from obscure agent of mayhem to lethal universality. First used by Italian anarchist Mario Buda, who loaded his horse-drawn wagon with dynamite and exploded it near New York's Wall Street in 1920, car bombs have since spread like a virus across the globe and realigned the battlefields of the 20th and 21st centuries. Far from being an ineffective and inarticulate weapon, the car bomb, Mike Davis argues, is instead the "hot rod of the apocalypse."

Stealth weapons of surprising power and destructive efficiency -- able to knock out critical urban nodes and headquarters as well as terrorize populations of entire cities -- car bombs are often blaring advertisements for a cause, leader, or abstract principle. They are, to borrow words from Regis Debray, "manifestos written in the blood of others." These "manifestos" -- inexpensive to produce and able to garner tremendous attention -- have allowed formerly unknown and near-powerless terror groups to make their inglorious debut on the world's stage. As Mike Davis writes, car bombs constitute the "poor man's air force."

Building on Planet of Slums ("A brilliant book." -- Arundhati Roy), in which he charts the economic and social changes that have led to worldwide urban poverty, Mike Davis eschews accepted opinion and examines the connections between the world's new majority -- the urban impoverished -- and the First World's devastating "War on Terror." Buda's Wagon is a disturbing and penetrating exploration that is bound to prove once more that Mike Davis is one of the most innovative and incisive historians working today.

This history of the car-bomb began as a two-part series at Tomdispatch:

Part 1: The Poor Man's Air Force

Part 2: Car Bombs With Wings

A two-part Tomdispatch interview with Mike Davis (part of Mission Unaccomplished) can be read at:

Part 1: Humanity's Ground Zero

Part 2: The Imperial City and the City of Slums

**Comments on Buda's Wagon:**

John Leonard, Harper's Magazine: "...For that kind of rage we need Mike Davis, the radical urbanologist who knows everything, forgives nothing, and shows up periodically to terrify the bourgeoisie, less like a MacArthur Fellow than a Chupacabra, the goat-sucking vampire of Latin American folklore -- see City of Quartz, Ecology of Fear, Late Victorian Holocausts, and Planet of Slums. Buda's Wagon escorts us with a savage sarcasm from the first known instance of the art, the 1920 Wall Street explosion of a horse-drawn wagon full of blasting gelatin and iron slugs that managed to miss J.P. Morgan by the width of the Atlantic Ocean, to present-day Gaza and Iraq, where most people reside outside a Green Zone. Along the way, we spend bloody-minded time with the Stern Gang in proto-Israel, the Viet Cong in Saigon, the OAS in Algiers and Paris, the IRA in Belfast and London, the Cosa Nostra in Palermo, the SDS in Madison, Catalan anarcho-syndicalists in Barcelona, Hezbollah in Beirut, Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, narcotraffickers in Colombia, Shining Path in Peru, bombheads on the loose in Chechnya, Oklahoma City, Bombay, and Buenos Aires, all the way to 9/11, which Davis calls 'car bombs with wings.'

"As usual with Davis, this brilliant little book tells us things we'd rather not hear. On the one hand, the use of the car bomb, with its collateral damage to civilians, invariably corrupts the cause for which it has been enlisted; nothing excuses the death of children. On the other hand, add suicide to fertilizer and it's a tactic we can't beat, an equalizer for the deracinated and deranged alike."

John Pilger:"Typical of Mike Davis, this extraordinary book is a brilliant antidote to official history, allowing us to understand how the weak have fought back, ingloriously, against the onslaught of the strong."

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: "Davis' small book brings home in unsparing terms the bloody past and the even bloodier future of the car bomb"

Hope in the Dark

Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities

By Rebecca Solnit

"Seemingly lost in the woods of deceit and banality, bereft of hope, we are confronted by Rebecca Solnit and her astonishing flashlight. In a jewel of a book that is poetic in substance as well as style, she reveals where we were, where we are and the step-by-step advances that have been made in human rights, as we stubbornly stumble out of the darkness." --Studs Terkel

Nation Books