Blah blah blah anarchist terrorism blah blah blah state control blah blah blah…
The International Campaign Against Anarchist Terrorism, 1880-1930s
Richard Bach Jensen
Terrorism and Political Violence, Vol.21, No.1 January 2009
Abstract
This essay presents a short overview of the “classic” era of anarchist terrorism between 1880 and World War I, while concentrating on an analysis of the little-known efforts by diplomats, politicians, and the police to control and repress anarchist terrorism. These efforts included the Rome Anti-Anarchist Conference of 1898 and the St. Petersburg Protocol of 1904. Before World War I, a combination of economic, social, and political factors, combined with a systematic government effort to redefine and downplay the nature and importance of anarchist terrorism provides the best explanation for why this form of violence declined in certain countries but not in others. Careful police intelligence work and international police cooperation, together with a more rigorously professional system of protection for monarchs and heads of state, could aid in reducing the problem of anarchist terrorism, but heavy-handed repression only worsened it. The essay concludes with a sketch of anarchist terrorism after 1914 and a brief comparison between present-day terrorism and its nineteenth-century predecessor.
David C. Rapoport has chosen to label the first era of modern terrorism as the “anarchist wave,” a persuasive designation.1 This article will examine the specifically anarchist qualities of the first wave, presenting a short overview of its archetypical era between 1880 and World War I, concentrate on analyzing the little-known efforts to control anarchist terrorism during that period, and conclude with both a sketch of anarchist terrorism after 1914 and a brief comparison between present-day terrorism and its nineteenth-century predecessor. Although the Irish Fenians, the Italian nationalists, and the Russian populists, particularly the Nihilists, all made their contributions to the creation of modern terrorism, it is only after 1880 with the widespread appearance of anarchist terrorism, or “propaganda by the deed,” that terrorism became a European-wide, and then an international, phenomenon. The powerful and frightening symbolism inherent in the idea of anarchy and anarchism, and in the reality of the anarchist bomb thrower and assassin, proved so powerful that it tended to dominate all perceptions of terrorism, at least until the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. Anyone who threw a bomb or assassinated a prominent person tended to be labelled an “anarchist” whether or not he or she subscribed to anarchist ideology.
The period from 1880 to 1914 might be termed the canonical, and certainly the most famous, era of anarchist terrorism.2 It was a worldwide phenomenon spread and connected by emigration (principally from Europe) and immigration, and by worldwide webs of shipping lines, communications networks, and not least, by cheap publications—above all, the mass market newspaper. Countries on every continent, except Antarctica, experienced acts of terrorism committed by real and alleged anarchists; even those lands free of anarchist violence became seriously concerned about such deeds. Anarchist assassinations and bomb-throwings occurred in sixteen countries on three continents: in Europe, Australia, and North and South America.3 Among other places, important anarchist groups developed in Egypt, China, and Japan. In 1898 Kaiser Wilhelm did not visit Egypt precisely because he feared an attack by resident Italian anarchists. In 1910, before their arrest and trial, Japanese anarchists were apparently plotting to murder the Emperor.4 For Australia, one can point to a single act of propaganda by the deed, and that is, the July 27, 1893, bombing of the ship Aramac by an Australian anarchist named Larry Petrie (or De Petrie) during a labour dispute.
Multiple acts of violence in India demonstrated both the global reach of the “anarchist wave” and the way in which the anarchist label was applied (and misapplied) to non-anarchist terrorism. Anarchism, which normally viewed the nation-state and religion as oppressive forces, exercised relatively little influence on the development of Indian terrorism.5 Nonetheless, before the first World War the British press and the British government tended to label all Indian nationalists carrying out violent anti-British deeds as “anarchists,” and linked them directly to anarchist attentats in Europe. Following an April 1908 bomb explosion killing two Britons in Bengal, the London Times quoted a “high police official” in India as attributing “the Anarchist tendency now to be observed in India to the influence upon a certain section of the population to the doings of Anarchists in Europe and America.”6
The death toll caused by anarchist terrorism, at least outside of Russia, was relatively small compared to today’s horrifying standards. According to my calculations, during the period 1880-1914 and leaving the Tsar’s empire apart, at least 160 people died and about 500 were injured due to anarchist bombs, guns, or daggers.
Anarchist terrorism in Russia deserves a separate discussion both because of its peculiar features and its late development. It did not exist before the 1905 revolution. In that revolution’s conditions of insurrection, quasi-civil war, and the temporary collapse of central state authority, however, terrorist acts by both Socialist Revolutionaries and anarchists mushroomed astronomically. Four thousand people were murdered in 1906-1907 for political ends, and if Anna Geifman’s estimates are correct, at least half of these were killed by anarchists. She claims that the majority of the 17,000 wounded and killed between 1901 and 1916 by terrorists suffered their fate at the hand of the anarchists.7
If, outside of Russia, anarchist terrorism before World War I killed relatively few people, it is significant for a number of other reasons. “Anarchists began the use of letter-bombs and automobiles for terrorist purposes.” In Russia, some became suicide bombers.8 They also initiated the mass and random slaughter of innocent civilians.9 This feature of anarchist terrorism, although it had begun in Spain, reached its height in Russia with its limitless, “motiveless,” and purely criminal terror. In Spain, besides the terrorist bloodbath, the special contribution made to terrorism’s murderous history (and often attributed, perhaps falsely, to the anarchists) was the anonymous bombing campaign in which explosions went on for years at a time, but without a clearly identified author or motivation. Anarchist “deeds exercised an enormous impact due to the powerful symbolism of the targets chosen and the advent of a mass journalism eager to publicize terrorist acts.” For example, seven European, Russian, and American monarchs and heads of state or government were assassinated by anarchists (or former anarchists) in the fourteen years between 1894 and 1912. No other terrorist group in history murdered so many rulers. Several other assassinations during this period, e.g., of Prime Minister Petkov of Bulgaria in 1907, and of the King and Crown Prince of Portugal in 1908, were often attributed to the anarchists, although probably falsely. “Anarchist ideology had less to do with unleashing this wave of terrorism than local and national traditions of violence and conditions of socio-economic and political malaise” in individual nations.10
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