Jon Wiener: I’ve heard through the grapevine that you are working on
a book about terrorism.
Mike Davis: My day job currently is a grassroots history of Los
Angeles in the sixties ["Setting the Night on Fire"]. But I have also
been busy on an extracurricular project entitled, after a poem in
Mother Earth, "Heroes of Hell." It aims to be a world history of
revolutionary terrorism from 1878 to 1932.
Why did you choose those specific dates as bookends?
Eighteen seventy-eight was the inception of the "classical" age of
terrorism: the half-century during which the bourgeois imaginary was
haunted by the infamous figure of the bomb-throwing nihilist or
anarchist. Beginning in 1878, in fact, Bakuninists of several
nationalities and their cousins, the Russian Narodniki, embraced
assassination as a potent, if last-ditch weapon in the struggle
against autocracy. The calendar of that year is extraordinary. In
January, Vera Zasulich wounds General Trepov, the sadistic jailer of
the Narodniki. In April, Alexander Solovev makes his attempt on the
czar, the beginning of the royal game hunt that will culminate in
Alexander II’s assassination by Peoples’ Will in 1881. In May and
June, there are the successive attacks on the aged kaiser in Berlin
by the anarchists Holding and Nobiling, which provide Bismarck with
his long-sought-after pretext for repressing the utterly innocent
German social democrats. In the fall, meanwhile, Moncasi tries to
kill Alfonso XII of Spain, and Giovanni Passanante, hiding a dagger
in a red flag, slashes at the king of Italy. The year ends with a
hysterical encyclical from Pope Leo XIII on the "deadly pestilence of
Communism."
The debut of modern terrorism, I should emphasize, followed in the
wake of defeated hopes for popular uprisings in Russia, Andalusia,
and the Mezzogiorno. [The Italian Bakuninists did briefly established
a Che-like guerrilla foco in the Matese mountains above Naples for a
few weeks in 1877.] Terrorism, in other words, was one response to
the double failure of old-style urban Blanquism and rural
Garibaldeanism. There is an obvious parallel with the contemporary
experience of the Irish Revolutionary Brotherhood: after the betrayal
and suppression of the great Fenian conspiracy, a secret cadre turned
from insurrection to individual assassination as well as the first
dynamite campaign against English cities.
And 1932 as a finale?
Nineteen thirty-two was the last in a series of desperate but
unsuccessful attempts by Italian anarchists, direct descendants of
Passanante, to assassinate Mussolini. Fascism and Stalinism
succeed-where previous regimes failed-in bringing anarchism, and in
Russia, the powerful social revolutionary movement, to the brink of
extinction. The classical attentat [assassination attempt] is
rendered powerless in face of the modern totalitarian state, although
members of the Spanish FAI (International of Anarchist Federations)
will persist through 1950s to help reignite "propaganda of the deed"
with a blaze in the 1960s. But that is the story for another volume.
Continued