Deja vu -- Al Qaeda and the Anarchists

Graham Stewart at the Times notes the parallels between the current wave of Islamist terrorism and the Anarchist terror campaign of a century ago.

AL-QAEDA’S international terror network is not unrivalled in history. A little over a century ago, anarchist cells, operating throughout the Western world, caused havoc. In the space of nine years between 1892 and 1901, anarchists assassinated the President of the United States, the President of France, the Prime Minister of Spain, the Empress of Austria and the King of Italy. As scalp hunting goes, this was an impressive collection.

In London, post offices were blown up and public figures were targeted. A bomb went off on an Underground train as it was passing from Farringdon into what was then the Aldersgate Tube station. The carriage was shredded. Miraculously only one man was killed. Bombs were lobbed from upper galleries on to the floors of the Paris stock exchange and the French Chamber of Deputies. Army barracks were attacked. A bomb was detonated in a café near the Gare Saint-Lazare. Another device was tossed into a Madrid theatre, killing 20 people.
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The militant atheists of late 19th- century Europe would have found little common intellectual ground with 21st-century Islamists. Yet, both were ascetic movements whose followers were repelled by the decadence and thoughtless exploitation they believed inherent in Western bourgeois society. Both movements turned away from the world as it was in favour of an idealised world as it might be. Like the Islamists, the anarchists rejected the political compromises of the democratic process. The more desperate among them put their point across with dynamite instead.

Anarchists justified terrorism with the euphemism “propaganda by the deed”. The argument was lucidly expressed by Emile Henry when he stood in the dock during his trial for bombing the Parisian station café: “I wanted to show the bourgeoisie that their pleasures would no longer be complete, that their insolent triumphs would be disturbed, that their golden calf would tremble violently on its pedestal, until the final shock would cast it down in mud and blood.”

These sentiments are reminiscent of those believers in American hubris who applauded when the mighty twin towers came tumbling down. Like al-Qaeda’s operatives, anarchists thrived on the cult of death. The 30,000 killed in the suppression of the Paris Commune in 1871, the hanging of four anarchists on flimsy evidence for a Chicago bomb explosion and even the death of three protesters at the hands of the police trying to prevent an illegal demonstration in Trafalgar Square in 1887 (the original “Bloody Sunday”): all were co-opted as martyrs to the cause whose deaths should be avenged.

Read it here.