Terrorist Histories

Individuals and Political Violence since the 19th Century

Caoimhe Nic Dhaibheid

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138675483
• eBook ISBN: 9781317199021
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book addresses provides a series of in-depth portraits of men and women who have been labelled 'terrorists', from the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries.

Bridging historical methodologies and theoretical approaches to terrorism studies, it seeks to contribute to the developing historicising of terrorism studies. This is achieved principally through a prosopographical approach. In the preponderance of detailed statistical and quantitative data on the practice of terrorism and political violence, the individuals who participate in terrorist acts are often obscured. While ideologies and organisations have attracted much scholarly interest, less is known of the personal trajectories into political violence, particularly from a historical perspective. The focus on a relatively narrow cast of high-profile terrorist 'villains', to a large part driven by popular and media attention, results in a somewhat skewed picture; of equal value, arguably, is a more sustained reflection on the lives of lesser-known individuals.

The book sits at the juncture between terrorism studies, historical biography and ethnography. It comprises case studies of ten individuals who have engaged in political violence in the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries, in a number of locations and with a variety of ideological motivations, from Russian-inflected anarchism to Islamist extremism. Through detailed empirical research, crucial themes in the study of terrorism and political violence are explored: the diverse individual radicalisation pathways, the question of disengagement and re-engagement, various counter-terrorist and counter-insurgency strategies adopted by governments and security forces, and the changing nature and perception of terrorism over time. Although not explicitly comparative, a number of themes resonate between the case studies, which will be drawn together in the conclusion to this book. These include the role of migration in radicalisation, the influence of radical family heritages, the experience of imprisonment and the narratives which individuals construct to tell their own terrorist life-stories. It also provides an historically grounded answer to one of the most contentious and heated debates in recent literature on terrorism studies: 'what leads a person to turn to political violence?' In examining the life-narratives of a diverse range of men and women who at some point embraced violence, this book seeks to contribute to a growing understanding of the entire arc of a terrorist lifespan, from radicalisation to mobilisation, to disengagement and beyond.

This book will be of much interest to students of political violence, terrorism studies, security studies and politics in general.

1Alexander Berkman

I am not conscious of any personality in matters pertaining to the Cause. I am simply a revolutionist, a terrorist by conviction, an instrument for furthering the cause of humanity.¹

As 21-year-old Alexander Berkman prepared to attack Henry Clay Frick, chairman of the board at the Carnegie Steel Company, his mind was clear. Exulting in what he later described as the ‘first terrorist act in America’, Berkman conceptualised his attack on Frick in July 1892 as a pure example of propaganda by the deed:

to enlighten [the American people] as to the true aims of Anarchy . . . to impart a miniature lesson with regard to the ways and means of liberation – the collective deed as preface to the social revolution – in fine, to make propaganda in the interest of Anarchy, that was the object of my act.²

Three decades later, writing to his friend and political collaborator Emma Goldman, Berkman’s perception of his life’s work was bleaker:

It seems to me there is no field in the world for the propaganda of anarchistic ideas; at least not just now. . . . Yet I am now fully convinced that the world does need our work and that some day it will count. But the present reaction simply excludes all chance of work for us, temporarily anyhow. . . . I want to say by all that that there is either something wrong with our ideas (maybe they don’t fit life) or with our mode of propaganda for the last forty years.³

The contrast between Berkman’s feverish exultation in his botched attempt on Frick’s life and his later, more sombre reflections on the cause to which he had devoted his adult life underscores the fading of the anarchist threat in the first decades of the twentieth century. Berkman’s personal trajectory reflected that diminuendo: the lone actor-style assassinations of the late nineteenth century; the transnational nature of much anarchist violence; the varying inflections of anarchist political thought – communist, individualist, autonomist; the intersection of anarchism with labour radicalism in the early decades of the twentieth century and the attendant spike in violence; anti-militarist agitation during the period of the Great War; the hopes raised and dashed by the Russian Revolution and its rapid turn to terror; and his last years of exile, poverty and ever-diminishing influence.

In the history of anarchism, Berkman was relatively unusual: a theorist and propagandist as well as an activist, his implication in acts of violence was not confined to the attack on Frick, but also extended to the Lexington Avenue bombing in New York 1914 and the Preparedness Day Parade bombing in San Francisco in 1916. Yet through a life of writing – including his introductory ABC of Anarchism, his searing critique of the Russian Revolution in The Bolshevik Myth and especially his moving account of recovering his selfhood, temporarily obliterated by the depersonalising effects of instrumental violence, in Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist – Berkman established himself as one of the most expressive voices of the evolution of anarchism as a political creed and its relationship with violence. The response of the United States authorities to the threat posed by Berkman and the wider anarchist movement reflects the perception of anarchism as a dangerous foreign ideology, bent on destroying the tenets of American society, and of anarchists as dangerous immigrants; as has been pointed out, this raises obvious comparisons with contemporary perceptions of the Islamist threat.⁴ Moreover, if the anarchism represented by Berkman can illuminate modern western preoccupations with another alien and apparently existential menace, the various counter-terrorist measures adopted by the American government – specialised police and federal task-forces, censorship and court-ordered deportation – prompt a closer examination of the place of civil liberties and the conception of citizenship in the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era.⁵

I

Berkman made his political reputation in the United States, but his background, both ideological and personal, was in Tsarist Russia. Although the intellectual antecedents of anarchism (and the related nihilism) were in Proudhon’s writings from France in the mid-nineteenth century, and developed from the tensions inherent in the democratisation of the French political system, anarchist thought spread rapidly across Europe, and especially to Russia.⁶ Anarchist ideology was an extremely broad spectrum, so much so that to speak of a single anarchist political programme glosses over the important distinctions between the various wings of the anarchist movement and its development across space and time in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. There are, however, a number of broad centralising ideals that were common across the anarchist spectrum. The first of these was a fierce critique of contemporary society, and a self-conscious determination for improvement and social justice. Second, anarchism rejected traditional notions of government, instead arguing for a re-organisation of society along mutualist, co-operative lines. Third, although the instrumentality of violence was contested by important anarchist ideologues like Michael Bakunin, by the late 1870s a critical framework for the justification of ‘propaganda by the deed’ emerged, elucidated powerfully by Russian aristocrat Peter Kropotkin. This initially centred around tyrannicide and political assassination, but was subsequently expanded to include officials and notables implicated or participating in the tyrannical state.⁷ Instrumental violence, in the anarchist formulation, was not merely a mechanism to eliminate an unjust ruling elite: it had an inherently transformative effect on social mores, destroying through the evocation of fear and awe the binds of historical convention which fettered humanity, and clearing the way for a new social code to emerge. Both destructive and creative, anarchist violence was the purest form of anti-state terrorism: it was fundamentally opposed to the state itself, despotic and democratic alike.

If anarchist terrorism in its focus on political assassination appeared to revive classical notions of tyrannicide (and echoed its self-appointed elitism), technological innovations transformed both the nature of the violent act and its reception. With the development of dynamite in the 1860s, a certain liberalisation of violence occurred: political assassination no longer required the intimacy of a dagger or poison, but instead could be achieved at a distance, and with a degree of anonymity. This liberalisation, represented by the small bombs or explosive devices which were the favoured currency of the early anarchist terrorists, brought with it the risk of collateral damage associated with later terrorist bombings. Moreover, in the more notorious bombings of the 1890s, civilians at the Barcelona Opera House or the Terminus Café were explicitly targeted. Yet many anarchists, even those in favour of violence, were carefully scrupulous in their choice of target, and the attentat remained by far the most popular form of anarchist political violence. The inherent drama of attentats and bombings raises, of course, another central aspect of the way in which anarchist violence of the late nineteenth century provided the framework in which modern terrorism subsequently developed. As literacy rates increased alongside an expansion in state-funded education, and the relaxation of paper taxes made newspapers more affordable, the subsequent boom in print culture created a new populist readership. With advances in communications technology enabling the rapid transmission of news items, anarchist ideologues and thinkers recognised the publicity opportunities presented by the convergence of innovations in communications, mass media, and weaponry. Propaganda of the deed was designed to exploit this convergence, creating the maximum public impression, and going over the heads of the ruling elite to communicate directly with the masses.

The Russia that Berkman was born into experienced what David Rapoport has identified as the first wave of modern political terrorism. There were a number of reasons for this: in a recent survey of the roots of modern terrorism, Martin Miller has identified the intensely autocratic nature of the Russian monarchy, the relative weakness of the Russian aristocracy, and the expansion of politicised policing and state surveillance under Nicholas I as creating the circumstances in which terrorism emerged in the late 1870s.⁸ The activities of the Narodnaya Volya (People’s Will) and the Socialist Revolutionary Party – most infamously, the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881 – provided the backdrop to Berkman’s early life. Born in Vilnius, in what is now Lithuania, on 11 November 1870 to a prosperous Jewish bourgeois family and the youngest of four children, Berkman benefited from the emancipation of Jews during the reign of Alexander II: as a leather merchant, Osip Berkman’s business expanded rapidly in the 1870s, and by 1877 he had gained permission to move from the Pale of Settlement to St Petersburg. There, Berkman had a relatively privileged upbringing: servants, private tutors, and eventually a classical education at an exclusive private school. Despite the idyllic appearance, however, there were insistent rumblings from the political turmoil outside: it was, as Emma Goldman later wrote, ‘the period when everything in Russia was being torn from its old moorings’.⁹ Berkman’s lessons were interrupted one day by ‘thunder’: the noises rattling the classroom windows were, in fact, bombs thrown by two members of Narodnaya Volya at Alexander II’s carriage as i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Alexander Berkman
• 2 James L. O’Donovan
• 3 Jean Garcin
• 4 Amichai Paglin
• 5 Gudrun Ensslin
• 6 Jackie McDonald
• 7 David Eden Lane
• 8 Omar Hammami
• 9 Daniel McGowan
• Conclusion
• Index