I was reading about the Wall Street bombing of 1920 by anarchists. What seems weird is that unlike modern terrorists who bomb for religious reasons , what exactly were anarchists hopping to accomplish by blowing up a bunch of innocent people (apparently most killed were innocent people just who happened to be walking by wall street) ? It almost seems like they just did it for the hell of it, which doesn’t seem much like a political ideology.
They were hoping to achieve a better, fairer society, where people would not be dominated and exploited by others, as most people were in those days, and still are. That was, and is, a very reasonable and even admirable goal.
Whether the way they went about trying to achieve it was in any way sensible (either as a short or long term strategy) is another matter. We can probably agree that the means they chose to try to achieve their goal were misguided, even evil, and laughably ineffective. It does not follow, however, that the ends they sought were not, in many or even most respects, good ones (although their vision, such as it was, of how a better society might function was, very arguably, very naïve too).
Actually, modern terrorists hope to achieve a better society too. They do not really terrorize and kill people “for religious reasons”. No religion (certainly not Islam) commands its followers to be terrorists. However, in many cases, unlike the anarchists of earlier times, the modern religious terrorists’ sense of what is wrong with current society, and their vision of what a better one would be like, is structured and conditioned by their religion. Unlike the anarchists (who were often atheists, though some were Christian), they do not want a society without domination and hierarchy; they just want those whom they consider to be the right sort of people, backed by the right sort of supernatural beings, to dominate.
If we have to have terrorists, I think anarchist terrorists are much nicer (even though they kill you just as dead). If their utopia actually (per impossible) came about, I would not mind living in it. It might actually be a better world than this one. I am sure, however, that I (and even most devout Muslims) would absolutely hate living in Osama bin Laden’s vision of utopia (or Timothy McVeigh’s, come to that).
I suspect that someone who’s gone that badly astray has developed a sort of thousand-yard stare for dealing with society: They’re so invested in their vision of advancing the cause of humanity that they’ve lost the ability to see and care about other people as individuals.
But with a modern political or religious terrorist, you can at least see what their plan is even while deploring it. Their basic idea is “We’ll commit acts of terror against the people in this society until their government gives us what we want or until the people force the government to give us what we want.”
But what is the plan that anarchists see? Do they think “We’ll commit acts of terror until the government agrees to dissolve itself”? Same thing with directing their message to the people - acts of terrorism result in popular calls for stronger governments not weaker ones.
I completely disagree. The worst possible outcome would be an anarchist success. I’d rather be living in a society with both government and terrorism than an anarchy.
On paper, anarchy is at heart a very peaceful and nonaggressive political philosophy. I’ve never quite been sure how it became synonymous with bomb-throwing except for that short period in the early 20th.
OTOH, anarchy is like most alternative theories of government… fabulous on paper, absolutely unworkable with real people in the mix. I agree with Nemo: I’ll take a working if imperfect government over idealism and (in the broader sense) anarchy.
In both cases, the terrorism was a tool used by a small group to try to mobilize a large group of (theoretical) sympathizers into joining the fight.
In the case of turn of the last century anarchism, it was to be literal class warfare where the vast working multitudes could easily overthrow the ruling class if only they would unite. Drawing a severe response from the government which would radicalize even more of the working class was, in large part, the whole point of assassinations and bombings. In the case of modern Islamic extremism, terrorism is designed to partly to provoke (and then sustain) a conflict with the west which they hope will cause regular Muslims to take up the cause.
That’s the purpose of all terrorism, in a nutshell. Provoke the government into overreacting to radicalize the general population into overthrowing it. That’s why terrorists do “senseless” things like blow up buses full of school children - the target is mass emotion, not “sensibility.”
Has there ever been any case in which the targets of terrorism sympathized with the terrorists? I can’t think of one. The usual response is that sympathy for the terrorists’ supposed cause is reduced, even among those who had been semi-supportive of that cause.
Now it’s possible in a society that’s divided into different groups to attack one group and arouse support in other groups: one could argue that the terrorists are showing the other groups that attacking the first group is possible. This is essentially the tactic used by many Islamic terrorists, where various Muslim terrorists make attacks against non-Muslims in hopes of drawing support among the general Muslim population.
But the strategy isn’t possible for anarchists. Their target group is the population in general and that, by definition, is the same group they want to win over. Which means that every time an anarchist group makes an attack, it reduces the support people have for anarchy and increases the support people have for the government.
“Come the revolution, everyone will have peaches and cream.”
“But I don’t like peaches and cream.”
“Come the revolution, everyone will have peaches and cream, and they will like it, or else!”
(There was a poisonously funny bit in an old Modesty Blaise strip where someone reminded a terrorist of all the innocent people who had died in a particular airport bombing. The terrorist said, “I honor them as involuntary martyrs.”)
In terms of those guys, most were fascists or radical socialists or communists, or some combination there of. They targeted financial institutions in capitalist democracies like America (and in Europe) because they felt that capitalism was inherently non-democratic. That the rich & poor were just the latest version of the aristocracy and peasant. That God & religious zeal had merely been replaced by the almighty dollar and greed for it. IMO for America even in the time of the robber barons and 10-hour/6-day work week they were still hopelessly misguided and outright wrong.
Of course a lot of them were also just bored malcontents looking for a quick route to fame…
No, because in their philosophy, you have the vast working classes and then a small ruling/owning class. The attacks are supposed to be striking at members of the ruling classes, or their agents like the police or military, although as pointed out in the OP much of the collateral damage came from the working class. Yes, I’m sure theoretically they would like the ruling classes to renounce their position and property and become proper anarchists, just like the Islamic terrorists would theoretically like everyone to convert to their particular brand of Islam, but since that’s not really going to happen destroying them is the next best thing.
The issue is that there have always been two main strains of thought within anarchism on how to achieve a completely anarchist society - the “change from within” group and the “revolutionary” strain which advocates the violent form of propaganda of the deed. Neither of these are really concerned with anarchism itself, but on how to get there.
I can think of one where the purpose of a bombing was to stop the targets from sympathizing with the terrorists.
C. 1986, Basque Independentism was getting more support from Catalonia than from all of Euskal Herria put together (measured in “votes for them”). From the point of view of ETA this was actually a bad thing: their strategy called for being able to complain about opression from Elsewhere, not for their political arm having enough of a parliamentary pressence to have to behave, specially when said pressence was due to votes from Elsewhere. Elsewhere was supposed to opress them, damnit, not vote for them! All this support was unacceptable!
Enter the Hipercor bomb: 21 dead changed the minds of a lot of people, from “ETA are brave freedom fighters” and “no true Basque” fallacies, to “anybody from Navarre or Euskadi is a murderer”.
That sounds more like communism than anarchism, although I’ll concede that sometimes the distinctions between these ideological extremes can get pretty fine.