The Economist
Aug 18 2005
For jihadist, read anarchist
Aug 18th 2005
>>From The Economist print edition
Mary Evans
Repression did little to stop anarchist violence. But eventually the
world moved on and the movement withered
BOMBS, beards and backpacks: these are the distinguishing marks, at
least in the popular imagination, of the terror-mongers who either
incite or carry out the explosions that periodically rock the cities
of the western world. A century or so ago it was not so different:
bombs, beards and fizzing fuses. The worries generated by the two
waves of terror, the responses to them and some of their other
characteristics are also similar. The spasm of anarchist violence
that was at its most convulsive in the 1880s and 1890s was felt, if
indirectly, in every continent. It claimed hundreds of lives,
including those of several heads of government, aroused widespread
fear and prompted quantities of new laws and restrictions. But it
passed. Jihadism is certainly not a lineal descendant of anarchism:
far from it. Even so, the parallels between the anarchist bombings of
the 19th century and the Islamist ones of today may be instructive.
Islamists, or at least those of the Osama bin Laden stripe, have
several aims. Some-such as the desire “to regain Palestine”, to
avenge the killing of “our nation’s sons” and to expel all “infidel
armies” from “the land of Muhammad”-could be those of any
conventional national-liberation movement. Others are more
millenarian: to bring everyone to Islam, which, says Mr bin Laden,
“is the religion of showing kindness to others, establishing justice
between them, granting them their rights, and defending the oppressed
and persecuted.” All this will come to pass once everyone is living
in an Islamic state, a caliphate governed by sharia law. Hence “the
martyrdom operations against the enemy” and the promise of paradise
for those who carry them out.
Lessons from the 19th-century anarchists
Aug 18th 2005
Terrorism and civil liberties
Aug 11th 2005
Northern Ireland
Jul 28th 2005
Islam
Terrorism
Click to buy from Amazon.com: “The Secret Agent”, by Joseph Conrad
(Amazon.co.uk); “The Devils”, by Fyodor Dostoevsky (Amazon.co.uk).
Anarchy Archives, an online research centre, provides information and
links about Proudhon, Bakunin, Malatesta, Kropotkin and anarchist
history. The Observer publishes Mr bin Laden’s “Letter to America”.
The Council on Foreign Relations has resources about terrorism.
Anarchists have always believed in the antithesis of a Muslim state.
They want a world without rule. Their first great theoretician,
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, wanted to abolish centralised government
altogether. This, though, would not bring the chaos with which the
word anarchy is often considered synonymous. On the contrary, a sort
of harmonious order would ensue, the state being replaced by a system
of autonomous groups and communities, glued together by contract and
mutual interest in place of laws. Justice, argued this essentially
non-violent man, was the “central star” governing society.
Though Proudhon is remembered for the dictum, “Property is theft!” he
actually believed that a man had the right to possess a house, some
land and the tools to work it. This was too much for Mikhail Bakunin,
a revolutionary nationalist turned anarchist who believed in
collective ownership of the means of production. He believed, too,
that “the passion for destruction is also a creative urge,” which was
not a description of the regenerative workings of capitalism but a
call to the barricades. Regeneration, however, was very much an
anarchist theme, just as it is a jihadist one. As one of anarchism’s
leading interpreters, George Woodcock, has put it, “It is through the
wrecks of empires and faiths that the anarchists have always seen the
glittering towers of their free world arising.”
What prompts the leap from idealistic thought to violent action is
largely a matter for conjecture. Every religion and almost every
philosophy has drawn adherents ready to shed blood, their own
included, and in the face of tyranny, poverty and exploitation, a
willingness to resort to force is not hard to understand. Both
anarchism and jihadism, though, have incorporated bloodshed into
their ideologies, or at least some of their zealots have. And both
have been ready to justify the killing not just of soldiers,
policemen and other agents of the state, but also of civilians.
The heads roll
For anarchists, the crucial theory was that developed in Italy, where
in 1876 Errico Malatesta put it thus: “The insurrectionary deed,
destined to affirm socialist principles by acts, is the most
efficacious means of propaganda.” This theory of “propaganda by deed”
was cheerfully promoted by another great anarchist thinker, Peter
Kropotkin, a Russian prince who became the toast of radical-chic
circles in Europe and America. Whether the theory truly tipped
non-violent musers into killers, or whether it merely gave a pretext
to psychopaths, simpletons and romantics to commit murders, is
unclear. The murders, however, are not in doubt. In deadly sequence,
anarchists claimed the lives of President Sadi Carnot of France
(1894), Antonio Canovas del Castillo, the prime minister of Spain
(1897), Empress Elizabeth of Austria (1898), King Umberto of Italy
(1900), President William McKinley of the United States (1901) and
Jose Canalejas y Mendez, another Spanish prime minister (1912).
Such assassinations, it may be argued, were less similar to
al-Qaeda’s than to those of the Narodniki, the members of the Russian
Party of the People’s Will, who believed in “destroying the most
powerful person in government” to undermine its prestige and arouse
the revolutionary spirit. This they had undoubtedly done in 1881 by
murdering Tsar Alexander II, even though he had been a reformer and,
indeed, a liberator of the serfs. In truth, the practice of
assassination is as old as the hills, though it got its name only in
the 11th-13th centuries when it was followed by the Nizari
Ismailiyun, a Shia sect that considered the murder of its
enemies-conducted under the influence of hashish (hence assassin)-to
be a religious duty.
Mr bin Laden would surely delight in some dramatic assassinations
today. Presidents and prime ministers, however, do not nowadays sit
reading the newspaper on the terraces of hotels where out-of-work
Italian printers wander round with revolvers in their pockets, as
Canovas did, or walk the streets of Madrid unprotected while looking
into bookshop windows, as Canalejas did. So Mr bin Laden must content
himself with the assertion that on September 11th, “God Almighty hit
the United States at its most vulnerable spot. He destroyed its
greatest buildings…It was filled with terror from its north to its
south and from its east to its west.”
The anarchists, too, were happy to resort to more indiscriminate acts
of terror. “A pound of dynamite is worth a bushel of bullets,” said
August Spies, the editor of an anarchist newspaper in Chicago, in
1886. His readers evidently agreed. A bomb thrown soon afterwards was
to kill seven policemen breaking up a strikers’ gathering in the
city’s Haymarket Square.
France, too, had its dynamitards. One of their bombs blew up the
Restaurant Very in Paris in 1892. Another, some months later, which
was destined for a mining company’s offices, killed six policemen and
set off a flurry of wild rumours: acid had been placed in the city’s
water supply, it was said, churches had been mined and anarchists
lurked round every corner. A year later a young anarchist, unable to
earn enough to feed himself, his lover and his daughter, decided to
take his own life-and at the same time make a protest. Ready to bomb
but unwilling to kill, he packed some nails and a small charge of
explosive into a saucepan and lobbed it from the public gallery into
the Chamber of Deputies. Though it caused no deaths, he was
executed-and then avenged with another bomb, this one in the Terminus
cafe at the Gare St-Lazare which killed one customer and injured 19.
The perpetrator of this outrage, designed to “waken the masses”,
regretted only that it had not claimed more victims. A popular street
song boasted:
It will come, it will come,
Every bourgeois will have his bomb.
And many were inclined to agree. Four more bombs went off in Paris in
the next two months.
Other countries were hardly more peaceful. A bomb was lobbed into a
monarchist parade in Florence in 1878, another into a crowd in Pisa
two days later. In 1893, two bombs were thrown into the Teatro Liceo
in Barcelona, killing 22 opera-goers on the first night of the
season. A year later a French anarchist blew himself up by accident
in Greenwich Park in London, presumably on his way to the observatory
there. Two years later, at least six people taking part in a
religious procession in Barcelona were blown to bits by an anarchist
bomb. Countless attempts were also made on the lives of bigger names,
such as King Alfonso XII of Spain (1878), Kaiser Wilhelm I of Germany
(May and June 1878), Andrew Carnegie’s business partner, Henry Clay
Frick (Pittsburgh, 1892), a Serbian minister (Paris, 1893) and King
Alfonso XIII and his English bride (Madrid, on their wedding day,
1906). In this last incident alone 20 bystanders died.
Then, as now, alarm and consternation broke out. Admittedly, violent
attacks on prominent figures were quite frequent: one American
president had been assassinated in 1865 (Lincoln) and another in 1881
(Garfield), and seven attempts were made on Queen Victoria’s life
before her reign ended in 1901, none of them by anarchists. Even so,
governments could hardly do nothing. The response of some was
repression and retribution, which often provoked further terrorist
violence. Germany arrested 500 people after the second attack on the
kaiser, many for “approving” of the attempts on his life. Spain was
particularly prone to round up the usual suspects and torture them,
though it also passed new laws. After the Liceo bombing, it brought
in courts-martial for all crimes committed with explosives, and only
military officers were allowed to be present during the trial of the
supposed bombers.
France, too, resorted to unusual measures. After the bombing of the
French Chamber of Deputies, 2,000 warrants were issued, anarchist
clubs and cafes were raided, papers were closed down and August
Vaillant, the bomber, was tried, found guilty and sentenced to death
in a day. An apologist who declared that not a single man in France
would grieve for the president if he confirmed the sentence (as he
did), and then was assassinated (as he was), was jailed for two years
for incitement to murder. The French parliament made it a crime not
just to incite sedition but also to justify it. Criminal
“associations of malefactors” were defined by intent rather than by
action, and all acts of anarchist propaganda were banned.
Similarly, in Britain soon after last month’s bombings, the prime
minister, Tony Blair, announced that “condoning or glorifying
terrorism” anywhere, not just in the United Kingdom, would become a
crime. Places of worship used as centres for “fomenting extremism”
are to be closed down. Measures will be taken to deport foreigners
“fostering hatred, advocating violence to further a person’s beliefs,
or justifying or validating such violence.” Naturalised Britons
engaged in “extremism” will be stripped of their citizenship.
Jihadists, of course, cross borders, and many are presumed to be
indoctrinated by foreigners, even if they commit their deeds at home.
So it was too with the anarchists, even though they often plotted and
acted alone. Many of the ideas came from Russia. Besides Bakunin,
Russia also produced Kropotkin, “an uncompromising apostle of the
necessity of violence”, according to Barbara Tuchman in “The Proud
Tower”.
Italy, by contrast, produced many of the assassins: for example,
those who killed Carnot, Canovas, Empress Elizabeth and King Umberto.
It also exported utopians who founded anarchist settlements like the
Cecilia colony in Brazil. Germany, too, had its share of fanatics,
including Johann Most, the editor of an incendiary New York
newspaper, Freiheit, and many of the Jewish anarchists who
congregated in London’s East End. France also sent anarchos abroad: a
prominent theorist, Elisee Reclus, taught in Brussels. The man who
shot McKinley was the child of Polish immigrants to America. And
Switzerland, like England, played host to exiles who came and went
with considerable freedom.
No wonder, then, that anti-foreigner feeling ran high in many places.
In the United States, President Theodore Roosevelt asked Congress to
exclude anyone who believed in “anarchistic principles” and, by
treaty, to make the advocacy of killing an offence against
international law. Congress duly obliged with an act that kept out
anyone “teaching disbelief in or opposition to all organised
government”.
By then an international conference had been held (in 1898) at the
behest of Italy to seek help in fighting anarchism. The Italians did
not get all they wanted: Belgium, Britain and Switzerland refused to
abandon the right of asylum or to extradite suspected anarchists. But
in 1893, just after the Liceo bombing, Britain had reluctantly banned
open meetings of anarchists after the Liberal home secretary, H.H.
Asquith, had come under attack for allowing an anarchist meeting to
commemorate the Chicago Haymarket martyrs.
The vast majority of anarchists, like the vast majority of Islamists,
were not violent, and some of those who once believed in bloodshed,
notably Kropotkin, were to turn against it in time. But those who
relished indiscriminate violence used an argument with striking
similarities to that used by Mr bin Laden. Thus Emile Henry, who had
left the bomb in the cafe at the Gare St-Lazare, was to justify his
act by saying that those in the cafe were all “satisfied with the
established order, all the accomplices and employees of Property and
the State…There are no innocent bourgeois.” For his part, Mr bin
Laden, in his “Letter to America” of November 2002, justifies the
“aggression against civilians for crimes they did not commit” with a
slightly more sophisticated variant. They deserved to die, he said,
because, as American citizens, they had chosen “their government by
way of their own free will, a choice which stems from their agreement
to its policies.”
Such sentiments recall the characters of Conrad’s “The Secret Agent”
and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “Devils”. Inspired by 19th-century anarchist
intellectuals and events, they describe men of almost autistic lack
of empathy and contorted moral sense. For Conrad’s protagonist,
nicknamed the Professor, the world’s morality
was artificial, corrupt and blasphemous. The way of even the most
justifiable revolutions is prepared by personal impulses disguised
into creeds. The Professor’s indignation found in itself a final
cause that absolved him from the sin of turning to destruction as the
agent of his ambition. To destroy public faith in legality was the
imperfect formula of his pedantic fanaticism; but the subconscious
conviction that the framework of an established social order cannot
be effectually shattered except by some form of collective or
individual violence was precise and correct. He was a moral
agent-that was settled in his mind. By exercising his agency with
ruthless defiance he procured for himself the appearances of power
and personal prestige. That was undeniable to his vengeful
bitterness. It pacified its unrest; and in their own way the most
ardent of revolutionaries are perhaps doing no more but seeking for
peace in common with the rest of mankind-the peace of soothed vanity,
of satisfied appetites, or perhaps of appeased conscience.
Anarchists like the Professor, a quiet man who went round with a bomb
in his pocket that he could detonate with the squeeze of a rubber
ball should he be arrested, were difficult to detect and impossible
to deter. So why did their wave of terror pass? Not, it seems,
because of the measures taken to deter them. The main reason, rather,
was that the world became consumed with the first world war, the
Russian revolution, the fight against fascism and the struggles
against colonialism. Another was that, after a while, the more
rational anarchists realised that terrorism seldom achieves the ends
desired of it-as the IRA has recently acknowledged.
But in truth the wave did not entirely pass; it merely changed. The
anarchist terrorists of 1880-1910 were replaced by other
terrorists-Fenians, Serb nationalists (one killed the Archduke Franz
Ferdinand and thus sparked the first world war), Bolsheviks, Dashnaks
(revolutionary Armenians), Poles, Macedonians, Hindu nationalists
(among them the killers of Mahatma Gandhi), fascists, Zionists,
Maoists, Guevarists, Black Panthers, Red Brigades, Red Army
Fractions, Palestinians and even al-Qaeda’s jihadists. Few of these
shared the anarchists’ explicit aims; all borrowed at least some of
their tactics and ideas.
And the world went on. It probably would even if yesterday’s
dynamitards become today’s plutoniumards. But terrorism is unlikely
to be expunged. As long as there are men like Conrad’s Professor,
there will be causes to excite them, and therefore deeds to terrify
their fellow citizens.
Sources:
“Anarchism”, by George Woodcock, Pelican Books, 1962.
“The Anarchists”, by James Joll, Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1964.
“The Proud Tower”, by Barbara W. Tuchman, Macmillan, 1962.
“How Russia Shaped the Modern World”, by Steven G. Marks, Princeton
University Press, 2003.
“East End Jewish Radicals 1875-1914”, by William J. Fishman, Five
Leaves Publications, 2004.
“Violent London: 2,000 Years of Riots, Rebels and Revolts”, by Clive
Bloom, Sidgwick & Jackson, 2003.