The trial and execution of the Will of the People for the assassination of Alexander II in 1881, only intensified the reaction and repression, which in turn aggravated revolutionary violence. But it etched in the Russian mind the romantic image of the revolutionary secret avenger, the hero-martyr and self-sacrificing assassin, that a long line of modern intellectuals from Turgenov to Camus, has universalized and romanticized their aesthetic. Today, more than ever, the image fascinates violent and idealistic young imaginations.
—There’s a moment during Signal Ensemble’s production of Dario Fo’s Accidental Death of an Anarchist when the Madman (Joseph Stearns) asks the Commissioner (Eric Paskey), “Weren’t you the warden of that secret prison who did secret things to secret people?” Would that the question didn’t conjure up images of Gitmo, Bagram Airfield and CIA planes transporting black-hooded terrorist suspects to black sites all around the world, yet it does. It’s impossible to complacently relinquish Fo’s brilliant farce to corrupt 1970’s Italy–and that is precisely the point. That world is too much with us. Under Anthony Ingram’s direction, if Signal’s well-oiled and indefatigable cast demonstrates anything, it’s how Fo peels back layer upon layer of mendacious civilization until nothing is left but raw, exposed, abusive power desperately trying to justify itself.—click image for source…
The anarchists of the 1880′s and 1890′s, especially the French ones, were among the chief forgers both of the modern terrorist ethos and of basic terrorist strategy. The cult of revolutionary destruction preached by Mikhail Bakunin, the nineteenth-century ideologue who is probably closest in spirit to the far-left terrorists of the present, undoubtedly influenced the generation that followed him.
So, although the debt was rarely acknowledged- did Bakunin’s masterful disciple, Serge Nechaiev, who said the only valid criterion of revolutionary morality is the effectiveness of revolutionary action. But both Nechaiev, whose philosophy of revolution had more appeal to the early Bolsheviks than to the anarchists, and Bakunin, not himself a terrorist in the present sense, were soon left far behind by the nanarchist school of “propaganda by the deed” that sprang up after the latter’s death in 1876. ( to be continued)…
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