Blood, rage & history: The world's first terrorists

We think of jihadism as a modern creation, but a major new TV film reveals how the 19th-century anarchist movement was equally nihilistic – and equally deadly.

Imagine it. A network of violent radicals is picking off the world's leaders one by one. They have killed the American President, the Russian head of state, the French President, the Austrian head of state, and the Spanish Prime Minister.

Bomb attacks are ripping through the world's richest cities: explosions devastate Wall Street, the London Underground, a theatre in Barcelona, cafés in Paris, parades in Moscow. The police profile of a typical bomber warns: "He walks to his death with courage and no regrets." There is panic, and governments launch programmes of torture and deportation targeted at immigrant communities. Yet still the radicals wash defiantly across the world, killing as they go. They say they have "only one aim, one science: destruction".

It sounds like a feverish novel about al-Qa'ida, set 30 years from now. But it has already happened. It is a story from our past. In the late 19th and early 20th century, anarchist bombers did all this. They were prepared to die for their beliefs. They lived in the same places as today's Islamists – such as Whitechapel, in east London – and they struck the same targets, like lower Manhattan on a clear September morning.

In a new documentary – The Enemy Within, by Joe Bullman – young Islamists read the words of yesterday's Jewish anarchists, from their writings and trial transcripts. While the societies they dream of building after the bombs are very different, their rage, their alienation, and their tactics are almost identical. The words fit so easily into their mouths that the Islamists say it is "creepy".

Mark Twain said: "History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme." Are there lessons buried in this ripple of rage spreading across a century? For decades, anarchist radicals seemed like an ineradicable force that would bleed Western societies forever. Within a generation, they were gone. So can the anarchists show us what makes young men attack their own societies – and what makes them stop? Can it tell us what tactics defeat an amorphous underground movement, and what only makes them stronger? From the nitroglycerine of the 19th century, is there a fuse that ends with the jihadists of 2009?

More: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/politics/blood-rage--history-the-worlds-first-terrorists-1801195.html

From the article:

Quote :: But it took a tiny, malformed German anarchist to see how it could change the world's politics....
Johann Most was a 5ft-tall bookbinder filled with rage. As a child, an operation on his jaw had gone wrong, leaving it painfully jutting forward. His attempts to hide it under a huge red beard only attracted more attention. Most turned his humiliation outwards on to just causes

Relates to what I said about Franc the other day.

But the reporter's adhoms and non-sequiturs are invalid... (yours too) they don't do it because of their, say, malformity... it's the ideology/justice/morality of it all... don't you think?

Quote :: ...it's the ideology/justice/morality of it all

It's always possible that it's genuine, but I suspect it's sometimes just an excuse for punishing the world for giving them unfortunate attributes, to make themselves feel better.

Blood, rage & history: The world's first terrorists

Blood, rage & history: The world's first terrorists

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