The First War on Terror
What the fight against anarchism tells us
about the fight against radical Islam
Brian Doherty from the
January 2011
issue
The World That Never Was: A True Story of Dreamers, Schemers, Anarchists,
and Secret Agents, by Alex Butterworth, Pantheon Books, 482 pages,
$30
In the late 19th century, as today, a terrorist cabal detonated bombs
in the heart of the Western world. Judged by the number of successful
attacks on politicians and royalty, that force was more directly
threatening to the inner circles of power than today’s radical
Islam.
This episodic violence, loosely associated with the extremist wing of the
anarchist movement, lasted roughly from 1880 to 1910. It claimed the
lives of only about 150 private citizens but also killed a president, a
police chief, a prime minister, a czar, a king, and an empress. Yet the
wave of terror eventually receded. No one has lived in mortal fear of
bomb-throwing, dagger-clutching anarchists for nearly a century. Will
citizens in 2110 view radical Islamic terrorism as a similar historical
curiosity, useful mostly for colorful storytelling?
I don’t know, and neither does Alex Butterworth, author of The World
That Never Was: A True Story of Dreamers, Schemers, Anarchists, and
Secret Agents. The book is a detailed chronicle both of the
anarchistsintellectuals and peaceful activists as well as terroristsand
of the cops and spies who set out to nab and crush them. It is
irresistible, while contemplating this history in 2011, to look for
analogies that might illuminate the current war on terror.
Butterworth, an English historian, brings up that comparison casually in
the introduction. It feels like a last-minute addition to give a long
tale of days gone by a ripped-from-the-headlines promotional hook. The
author himself never returns to the idea. But perhaps the rest of us
should.
The anarchists were considerably more precise in their attacks on
political leaders, implying, perhaps, that they were more efficient,
clever, or at least focused than today’s more civilian-oriented
terrorists. Although their plots never approached the scale of 9/11, they
did outdo the Islamists when it came to the number of successful fatal
attacks within Western cities.
Might smarter, more effective intelligence and policing in the 21st
century explain the difference? Butterworth provides stories and data
relevant to that question but no decisive answers. He does not, after
all, have access to a century’s worth of delayed revelations about our
current twilight struggle. Still, the first war on terror does offer
tantalizing hints about what we face when confronting organized nonstate
international killers.
Butterworth’s walk through the oft-told tale of 19th-century
anarchism includes plenty of familiar material. Peter Kropotkin and
Mikhail Bakunin, the Communards and the narodniki, the First and
Second Internationalsall get plenty of attention. (So do many tangential
stories, some interesting and some not, about the historical milieu in
which they lived.) The freshest and most relevant parts of the book are
Butterworth’s tales of cops and spies at war with anarchist radicals. The
most valuable player in this battle against the international anarchist
terror conspiracywhich didn’t actually exist, in the sense of one
organization centrally planning attacks across national lineswas the
Russians’ man in Paris, Peter Rachkovsky.
Rachkovsky started as a possibly sincere, possibly duplicitous mover in
St. Petersburg’s radical underground in the late 1870s, after having been
dismissed (for leniency toward political exiles) from a job as a
prosecutor for the czar’s government. He ended up running the show for
the Okhrana, the Russian secret police, in Paris, where so many radicals
considered dangerous to the czarist regime had immigrated.
From 1885 until 1902, Rachkovsky was responsible for keeping anarchists
under surveillance and on the runand also, in many cases, financed and
supplied with ideas. Butterworth notes that “prominent among his early
initiatives were provocations designed to lure credulous émigrés into the
most heinous crimes of which they may never have otherwise conceived.”
Rachkovsky’s aim was to entrap his targets into committing acts that
would help ensure that his job seemed of vital importance to the czar.
This guaranteed him a solid berth in Paris that was lucrative both in
salary and prestigeand, Butterworth’s research leads him to strongly
suspect, in opportunities for corrupt under-the-radar dealings with a
French government doing heavy business with Russia.
Rachkovsky wasn’t the first cop to use agents provocateurs among the
French radicals. Louis Andrieux, the French prefect of police during the
early 1880s, had been frustrated that all his spying on the anarchists
failed to uncover a crime worthy of his time and attention, so he decided
that “it was necessary that the act was accomplished for repression to be
possible.”
Rachkovsky’s bosses in Russia and his hosts in Paris both feared the
radicals, allowing the Russian agent to tighten the ties between the two
nations. He succeeded so well that Butterworth argues he was partly to
blame for the Russo-French alliance that helped make World War I such a
bloody mess.
The British government, by contrast, initially resisted czarist efforts
to capture Russia’s radical émigrés. In 1890 Vladimir Burtsev, wanted by
the czarist police, boarded a British boat bound from Constantinople to
London. When the ship found itself surrounded by Turkish police vessels
with Russians on board, the captain refused their demand to hand over the
fugitive, announcing: “This is English territory. And I am a gentleman!”
But soon even Britain’s Special Branch ended up playing the spy and
provocateur game.
Although Butterworth warns today’s governments and spymasters that future
historians will “have access to the material necessary to hold those
leaders to account for any deceptions they may have practiced,” his own
research into the century-old fight indicates that that won’t necessarily
be so. The current keepers of the Special Branch’s archives, which could
shed light on the history of police behavior toward the radicals of the
time, keep access to the relevant records “tenaciously guarded” even
now.
It would be comforting to assume that one of the reasons the radical
anarchists were able to gin up more consistent bombing action in the West
than radical Islam does today was because their idealsstorming the
bastions of illegitimate power, winning a better deal for the working
man, crafting a future without any coercive authoritywere more
inherently inspiring than Shariah or a new Caliphate. These
anarcho-radical movements were huge in the late 19th century. Star
anarchist figures such as Kropotkin and Errico Malatesta could get tens
of thousands, sometimes more than 100,000, fans to show up whenever they
arrived in town. The number of people who subscribed to the anarchist
movement’s many publications was in the tens of thousands in France
alone. But the active participants in anarchist congresses numbered less
than 1,000, and while many of those activists and intellectuals excused
the violence, others opposed it. The number of people actively involved
in planning and executing terror plots seems to be no more than a few
dozen.
Terror then and terror now both hoped to inspire popular insurrection;
both failed. Although anarchists referred to their violent actions as
“propaganda by deed,” acts such as blowing up cafés or opera houses were
really far more successful propaganda against anarchism than for
it. Similarly, there is scant evidence that even the spectacularly
destructive strike of 9/11 did much to help Al Qaeda recruit smart,
useful, self-destructive folk willing to wage constant war on the
decadent West. Suicide attacks in the name of jihad are only about 30
years old; they arose from modern circumstances and could disappear as
those circumstances change.
To the powers of the time, the anarchist threat was not to be downplayed
or doubted. After the anarchist-linked Leon Czolgosz assassinated U.S.
President William McKinley, McKinley’s successor, Theodore Roosevelt,
issued a pronouncement that presaged George W. Bush’s rhetoric about the
post-9/11 threat of radical Islam: “When compared with the suppression of
anarchy, every other question sinks into insignificance.” Collaborations
of national secret police agencies created an ad hoc global force to
fight the nonexistent global anarchist conspiracy, and the very advocacy
of anarchist ideas was outlawed in most of the West.
As history has shown, Roosevelt was wrong about the significance of the
anarchist threat. So was George W. Bush when he used the jihadist threat
as an excuse for policies that may have done far more to damage America
and elsewhere than they did to prevent attacks.
The legacy of the secret police war against anarchists is ongoing and
ugly. Both the CIA and the KGB learned from the techniques of the
Okhrana, and the authorities today still cling to the notion that
policing terror sometimes means encouraging it. Many of the alleged
terrorists captured over the past several years were influenced, and in
some cases provided materials by, police informants, including the Miami
Seven, the accused Rockford, Illinois, shopping mall bomber Derrick
Shareef, and Sami Samir Hassoun, who was charged with conspiring to bomb
a nightclub near a Dave Matthews concert in Chicago.
Likewise, Butterworth concludes from his scattered documentary record
that provocateurs were close to the planning and/or financing of many
headline-making anarchist bomb plots, and that the staff of the British
radical magazine Commonweal may have consisted entirely of
informants, unbeknownst to each other. (Even today, with unprecedented
access to police files, Butterworth is often unsure who was reporting
back to the cops.) The French grande dame of anarchy, Louise Michel, once
joked, “We love to have [agents provocateurs] in the party, because they
always propose the most revolutionary motions.” In his fanciful 1908
novel The Man Who Was Thursday, inspired by the milieu of
anarcho-skullduggery that Butterworth chronicles, G.K. Chesterton
describes a convocation of anarchist conspirators in which all of the
plotters turn out to be cops sent to infiltrate the group.
Anarchists may have been relatively effective at decapitating power, but
they were not a mortal threat to Western civilization, and neither are
the Islamists. They do not warrant the suppression of civil liberties or
the huge cost, in lives and money, of the wars waged by Bush and Barack
Obama.
Cracking down on supposed terror threats, whether through mass arrests in
the late 19th century or drone air attacks in the 21st, can create
martyrs and encourage counterattacks. Many acts of anarchist terror were
explicitly conceived to avenge comrades caught and killed or brutalized
by Western governments. Sometimes the blowback is more long term, harder
to predict, and more terrifying. The 1887 hanging of Alexander Ulyanov, a
member of the Russian terror group People’s Will, inspired his younger
brother to become the revolutionary known as Lenin.
Butterworth’s most important lesson for our current war on terror is
buried in the middle of the book. Discussing the British police reaction
to a bombing campaignthis one not by anarchists but by Irish
nationalistshe comments that “the threat may have been smaller than
those responsible for its policing liked to maintain.” That haunting
thought should help guide American voters and politicians as they
consider the future of the Second War on International Terror.
Senior Editor Brian Doherty is author of
This is Burning Man (BenBella),
Radicals for Capitalism (PublicAffairs) and
Gun Control on Trial (Cato Institute).
http://reason.com/archives/2010/12/17/the-first-war-on-terror/singlepage
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