For jihadist, read anarchist (The Economist)

[Stockholm]

Repression did little to stop anarchist violence. But eventually the world moved on and the movement withered

BOMBS, beards and backpacks: these are the distinguishing marks, at least in the popular imagination, of the terror-mongers who either incite or carry out the explosions that periodically rock the cities of the western world. A century or so ago it was not so different: bombs, beards and fizzing fuses. The worries generated by the two waves of terror, the responses to them and some of their other characteristics are also similar. The spasm of anarchist violence that was at its most convulsive in the 1880s and 1890s was felt, if indirectly, in every continent. It claimed hundreds of lives, including those of several heads of government, aroused widespread fear and prompted quantities of new laws and restrictions. But it passed. Jihadism is certainly not a lineal descendant of anarchism: far from it. Even so, the parallels between the anarchist bombings of the 19th century and the Islamist ones of today may be instructive.

Islamists, or at least those of the Osama bin Laden stripe, have several aims. Some—such as the desire “to regain Palestine”, to avenge the killing of “our nation's sons” and to expel all “infidel armies” from “the land of Muhammad”—could be those of any conventional national-liberation movement. Others are more millenarian: to bring everyone to Islam, which, says Mr bin Laden, “is the religion of showing kindness to others, establishing justice between them, granting them their rights, and defending the oppressed and persecuted.” All this will come to pass once everyone is living in an Islamic state, a caliphate governed by sharia law. Hence “the martyrdom operations against the enemy” and the promise of paradise for those who carry them out.

Anarchists have always believed in the antithesis of a Muslim state. They want a world without rule. Their first great theoretician, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, wanted to abolish centralised government altogether. This, though, would not bring the chaos with which the word anarchy is often considered synonymous. On the contrary, a sort of harmonious order would ensue, the state being replaced by a system of autonomous groups and communities, glued together by contract and mutual interest in place of laws. Justice, argued this essentially non-violent man, was the “central star” governing society.

snip

What prompts the leap from idealistic thought to violent action is largely a matter for conjecture. Every religion and almost every philosophy has drawn adherents ready to shed blood, their own included, and in the face of tyranny, poverty and exploitation, a willingness to resort to force is not hard to understand. Both anarchism and jihadism, though, have incorporated bloodshed into their ideologies, or at least some of their zealots have. And both have been ready to justify the killing not just of soldiers, policemen and other agents of the state, but also of civilians.

http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=4292760

[PunkPop]

1. So violence is seldom solved by violent counter measures.

Yet The Economist was all in favor of violently overthrowing Saddam.

I wish these war cheerleaders would get their stories straight.

[K-W]

2. What a load of crap. Although there are shreds of truth.

I wish I had time to deconstruct the whole article, but essentially it creates a narrative where terrorism is a tactic of social movements, which ignores the real history of terrorism which has always been largely the actions of powerful against the less powerful.

Anarchist terrorism was nothing compared to the terrorist campaigns waged by US industrialists and officials against workers, just as Islamic terrorism, for all its horrors pales in comparison to contemporary acts of state terrorism.

We are to believe that terrorism is this disease that besets radicals, and not the predictable response of social movements to intense oppression and state violence (not to mention provocation).

And the reason the American left became less violent is for two reasons. 1. They succeeded in gaining some access to the political process 2. The US government turned away from using violence to oppress workers and towards the modern model of economic control and propaganda.

Once the labor movement had non-violent opportunities to act, and once the state/industry turned toward less violent means of oppression, the violence stops.

This tells us exactly how we can stop Islamic violence. We end the violent oppression of various muslim populations. This would greatly reduce the emotional fuel that feeds the violent ideological fires while at the same time eliminating the barriers to effective non-violent resistance.

[Stockholm]

3. I agree with your solution

and maybe he is a bit loose with the word "terrorist" (freedom fighter/terrorist depends on the perspective) but I don´t think the writer intends to equate terrorism and social movement in general.

What draw me to it was the historical angle which I have not seen in a while.

[K-W]

4. It is the opposite, he is not loose enough.

Because he completely ignores state terror.

As far as equating terror and movements

The anarchist terrorists of 1880-1910 were replaced by other terrorists—Fenians, Serb nationalists (one killed the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and thus sparked the first world war), Bolsheviks, Dashnaks (revolutionary Armenians), Poles, Macedonians, Hindu nationalists (among them the killers of Mahatma Gandhi), fascists, Zionists, Maoists, Guevarists, Black Panthers, Red Brigades, Red Army Fractions, Palestinians and even al-Qaeda's jihadists. Few of these shared the anarchists' explicit aims; all borrowed at least some of their tactics and ideas.

I think he is pretty blatent about it.

[fedsron2us]

6. You are right that the state is always the biggest killer

However, the article does at least give some historical background to the subject and it has the decency to reference its sources in the footnotes. The anarchists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries were almost forgotten outside academic circles until recent events caused some people to re-examine the origins of 'suicide' bomb attacks. I wonder how long it has been since an article that mentions Proudhon, Bakunin and Kropotkin was last printed in the Economist. Personally I think it is a minor miracle to see even this limited analysis in such an ardently pro capitalist pro establishment publication.

[K-W]

7. Yah, it is bittersweet, its nice to see that history discussed

but it sucks to see such a warped analysis of it.

[wli]

5. dovetails into anti- anti-WTO/FTAA Gestapo tactics

When it comes time to describe who was demonstrating vs. the WTO, FTAA, CAFTA, etc., "anarchists" is one of the favorite MSM monikers, regardless of the fact that far from being "anarchists" the people demonstrating largely did so out of economic self-interest. Not to mention that none of the affair had the slightest to do with the system of governance at all, but rather specific legislation, policies, and non-governmental organizations.

In this article, the Economist is attempting to connect this "anarchism" to Islamic fundamentalist terrorism (regardless of whether that even exists as a threat to the US outside false flag attacks), and paint them as villains of the same stripe. This is a propaganda move to delegitimize the neocons' nonviolent political opposition and to provide a pretext for escalating the violence of the military assaults carried out on the demonstrations and protests, in all likelihood to the level of lethal force.