…The arrogant, callous, almost senseless crime in the Cafe Terminus by Emile Henry in 1894, followed some years later by the emergence of the Bonnot gang- motorized bandits who professed anarchist convictions but likewise robbed and murdered for their personal enrichment- discredited terrorism as a revolutionary weapon in the eyes of the French working class. Even the usual police overreaction failed to produce new sympathizers for the anarchist cause. The progressive moral deterioration of the so-called Black terror in France illustrates the general pattern for clandestine organizations that rely primarily on acts of criminal violence to achieve their objectives: idealists launch what they view as a struggle for justice; violence escalates in reaction to opposing violence; in the end the gangsters and the psychopaths take over.
Not all terrorist movements degenerate so radically. When freedom of speech and assembly are respected, and police overreaction is kept within bounds by the law, the degeneration may take a positive form: a progression from real violence to purely rhetorical violence. Military discipline, even that maintained in a guerrilla force, checks pathological degeneration in some, but not all, cases.
If the terrorists feel they have the moral support of the community within which they operate, they may resist the psychological forces that tend to desocialize and dehumanize them. However, terrorist groups that have no significant community support, or that feel their support is slipping, are particularly tempted to employ inhuman extremes of violence. ( to be continued)…
ADDENDUM:
(see link at end)…For all practical purposes these high explosives were unusable until Nobel devised the blasting cap and employed the stabilizing element kieselguhr, a spongy, absorbent clay abundant in northern Germany.
The wave of terrorism brought forth by this immense new physical power, as well as by economic, social and political discontent, began in the 1880s, reached a terrifying climax in the 1890s and, after a few years pause, resurfaced in the early twentieth century. It was usually identified with the anarchist movement. Because of anarchism’s fearsome physical power and explosive ideas, one Italian author described it as ‘the most important ethical deviation that may ever have disturbed the world”. After the assassinations of the Empress Elizabeth and President McKinley, German newspapers noted that ‘society…dances on a volcano’ and that ‘a very small number of unscrupulous fanatics terrorize the entire human race….The danger for all countries is very great and urgent’. Even in 1908, years after the great wave of anarchist bombings and assassinations during the 1890s had largely subsided, President Theodore Roosevelt declared that ‘when compared with the suppression of anarchy, every other question sinks into insignificance’. While in popular imagination the terrorist bomber and the anarchist became the same thing,in retrospect we know this was not true. Few anarchists became bomb-throwers or carried out violent acts. Moreover, not all the alleged ‘anarchist’ terrorists were anarchists, the label ‘anarchist’ simply becoming the easiest means for many journalists and some politicians to identify the myriad, often-obscure malcontents who carried out violent deeds during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries….
…A month and a half after the appearance of Kropotkin’s article, in July 1881, an international congress of anarchists, including Kropotkin and Malatesta, met in London and officially adopted the policy of ‘propaganda by deed’, a policy of illegal acts. These acts aimed against institutions and toward revolt and revolution were necessary since verbal and written propaganda had proved ineffectual. At the congress Kropotkin also called for the study of the technical sciences, such as chemistry, in order to make bombs that could be used for offensive and defensive purposes.Subsequently anarchists like Johann Most (1846-1906), a violent German publicist and orator nicknamed ‘the Wild Beast’, published detailed directions for manufacturing and using explosives.It should be noted that Kropotkin and many other anarchists assumed bombs and propaganda by the deed would be used in the service of mass revolution, rather than of random acts of terror. Most, on the other hand, advocated using bombs, burglary, poison and arson against the bourgeoisie whenever possible. This equivocation over the exact meaning of ‘propaganda by the deed’, and whether it justified individual terrorism or not, was never to be decisively resolved or clarified by the anarchists.Read More:http://slackbastard.anarchobase.com/?p=23096