The 18 August 2005 Economist magazine carried one of the most brilliantly written critiques of world governments’ responses to terrorism. By looking back at the Anarchist movement of the late 19th century, and seeing what governments did then and what effect it had, the author of this insightful piece (click here to read it – premium content) argues that the current approach is not working. This little piece is just an editorial comment, and I have reproduced it below.
The full article appears later in the magazine, and over 3 pages expands these concepts and provides suggestions. You’ll need to read these at the Economist’s site: For jihadist, read anarchist.
Today’s jihadists, like yesterday’s anarchists, will fade. Terrorism won’t
http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=4293225
ON THE face of it, anarchists, who believe in no government, have little in common with jihadists, who believe in imposing a particularly rigid form of government on everyone. The theoreticians for both movements have often been bearded and angry, of course, and their followers have readily taken to the bomb. But there the similarities end, don’t they, so what lessons can be drawn from a bunch of zealots who flourished over 100 years ago and whose ideology now counts for practically nothing?
At least two, actually. The first is that repression, expulsion and restrictions on free speech do little to end terrorism. All were tried, often with great vigour, at the end of the 19th century when the anarchist violence that terrified much of Europe and parts of America was at its zenith. As our report makes clear, governments had good reason to respond. Austria, France, Italy, Spain and the United States all lost an empress, king, president or prime minister to anarchist assassins. Such murders were so common that King Umberto of Italy, throwing himself aside to escape a stabbing, casually remarked, “These are the risks of the job.” (He was later shot dead.) Anarchists also killed lots of less exalted innocents.
Then, as now, governments responded to the clamour for action with measures to criminalise anyone preaching or condoning violence and, if they were foreign, to keep them out of the country. Spain brought in courts-martial for bombers, foreshadowing perhaps America’s military commissions for Guantánamo trials. Britain, with a tradition of tolerating dissent, became home to many continental radicals, such as those driven out of Germany after the two attempts on Kaiser Wilhelm I’s life in 1878. Britain, however, was not afflicted with bombings as other countries were. Spain, where every kind of retribution including the crudest of tortures were the standard response, suffered many more outrages. Yet few lessons seem to have been learnt. Several of the new measures announced on August 5th by Tony Blair, Britain’s prime minister, echo almost exactly those passed in France after a bomb had been lobbed into the French parliament in 1893.
In both Britain and America, new attacks are said to be inevitable. Yet every new attack is followed by new measures, as though such measures could have averted an inevitability had they been in place before. They could not, both logically and because terrorism cannot be defeated, as countries can be. That is the second lesson to be drawn from the anarchists.
The enduring allure of idealism and violence
Throughout history, men seized with a sense of injustice, or purpose, or hatred, or inadequacy, have resorted to bloodshed. The anarchists were not the first. They were merely particularly potent believers in violence in the furtherance of an idealistic, millenarian vision. Jihadists are too. Most anarchists, like most Islamists, were not violent. But, like the jihadists, they had their firebrands and, like the jihadists, they had an ideology that could be twisted to appeal to a certain kind of wounded utopian lacking all capacity for empathy.
Such people can be caught, sometimes before they have done anything terrible. That argues for excellent intelligence and police work. Perhaps their numbers can be reduced by ameliorating the grievances that lend them the justification for their attacks. That argues for political action. And certainly the public needs reassurance. That argues for honest explanation—that terrorism does not threaten any western government, that retribution, like police injustices committed in nervous haste, is likely to provoke more violence, that new restrictions are unlikely to bring new safety. Honest explanation, and simple history, also suggest that this wave of terror will pass, just as the anarchist wave passed, but that terrorism will not—not as long as strange men are captivated by strange ideas. The jihadists will go. Others will take the stage.
Lessons from anarchy
