Group 3 is smaller than the other group so there is no designated blogger for this week. I have added this space for anyone to add their thoughts and reflections in the comments below.
Any comments will contribute to your engagement grade, but I will not penalise anyone for not contributing this week.
What do you make of these readings? Were they all very different? Were there common ideas/themes?
Violence and Community Sven Reichardt – James C.
Reichardt’s article tells us that the SA’S ‘sturm 33’ was particularly known for street fighting in Germany. The methods employed by them meant that in cases of attacks there was no doubt as to who was responsible for it. The members all shared the same aims, and that the SA became a way of life for its members. The article talks of ‘comradeship’ which I think is an interesting choice of word as it suggests unity among them. The unity in this case links to the glorification of violence. The SA is united in its hate for Communists, Social Democrats, and Jewish people. The strategy of violence was successful the bloodshed experienced brough publicity that gave the Nazis a platform to further their ambitions. The SA troops were male dominated, young, and uncompromising. The marches they had gave them the character of an anti-socialist workers movement. Every unit was led by a Sturmfuher a chosen Nazi leader. The leader was a man of the people with particular allegiance towards them. To ensure the leaders survival there had to be what Reichardt says as a ‘rigid and loose power relationship with the followers.’ In the case of the SA-Sturm 33 their Leader Hahn felt a special affinity to the military and had joined an anti-Semitic organisation prior to becoming leader of the SA-Strum 33. This shows that Hahn was a proper candidate to lead this SA group as he was experienced and had paramilitary experience. The article discusses reasons why young men joined the SA. It was often linked to unemployment. The great depression had left a lasting effect on Germany and many SA agents signed up because they were unemployed. This connection as made by a Social Democrat Newspaper who states the connection was a ‘self-evident mechanism.’ Unemployment within the SA was often high and conveys the idea that the SA was a poor underfunded organisation. The movement was attractive to the young men as their slogans suggested there could be radical change and that this could be achieved through demonstrations etc. Reichardt states that a descending social trajectory was responsible for an increase in membership of the Charlottenburg SA. They often felt they did not belong to a particular group and found solace in the SA. The SA offered a network of contacts that removed the feeling of social isolationism. It envisaged men to have a better future. The groups attacks were often linked to violent outbursts due to excessive alcohol consumption. They often carried out attacks so they could get praise from the Sturmfuhrer and respect among their comrades. This was how physical violence became an acceptance within the group.
Chris Millington ‘Street fighting men: Political Violence in Inter-War France’ by Robert Canth
In his article “Street Fighting men” Chris Millington argues that the prevalence of violence in the inter-war third republican France is often over-looked and not sufficiently analysed, compared to its European contemporaries of belligerence, such as Germany and Britain. He narrates how the nature of the violence was different and highly symbolic due to inherently democratic political circumstances in France; referring to the ‘highly influential’ thesis of Serge Berstein. Statistically, France seemed to have been less violent to other European states under political upheaval, even though the concerned groups made constant threats in the press. However, Millington argues that mere numbers alone can not elaborate the violent nature of society at the time. What interests me, is why Millington does not mention how the outcome of the war might have affected the prevalence of such violence, for while the war had been bitter and devastating for all, the amount of humiliation and the eventual search for the culprits in Germany surely played its part.
Millington discusses how the ‘legitimate and illegitimate violence’ by the notions of ‘manliness’ were manifestations of a ‘bitter struggle’ between the right and the left. He refers to how the different parliamentary entities – some of which had turned totalitarian, conducted themselves in the struggle for political dominance in the 1920 and how France saw the emergence of the Extreme right, while the left under the left-wing Cartel Des Gauches eventually failed to topple the government. While talking about how ‘the Communist Party had abandoned the idea of using a proletarian militia’ by the late 1920s, the article points out how later the worldwide economic depression also affected the rise of the far-right in groups such as Solidarité Française (SF) and Croix de Feu (CF). Millington describes how such tensions led to an escalation in 1934, when the nationalist riot against government corruption took place claiming multiple casualties.
The article emphasizes how the public encounters between the groups was an important aspect to assert dominance and Millington proceeds to describe them in detail, for example how the weaponry consisted mainly of items suited for hand to hand combat such as knuckledusters and knives. He also argues that the leagues and the communists made sure to recruit the right calibre of men to their shock-troop and defence sections.
After describing vividly the events of the turbulent 1920s and 1930s the article concludes on how the enemies of the republic failed to seize control like in Italy and Germany. The article does not point out how the result of the German invasion could have been unifying in terms of how the political violence ended, par the left wing attacks on the German forces and the eventual executions of 10 000 collaborators.
Bach Jensen: ‘Daggers, Rifles and Dynamite’
In this article Bach Jensen summarises the dynamics of terrorism in Europe in the late nineteenth century, which he depicts as constituting a relatively coherent wave. There were isolated attacks in the 1880 in countries like Germany, and these became more severe and more successful in the 1890s, as well as shifting to countries like Spain, Italy and France.
He describes a range of factors that led to this wave of anarchism, including ideology, repression, economic problems and technological innovation (e.g. dynamite). The principle of ‘Propaganda by the Deed’ emerged in the 1870s in a context of failure and defeat for revolutionary groups, and seized on the alleged revolutionary potential of dynamite. On the role of ideology, given his later scepticism at the centrality of anarchism to this terrorism, it is not clear why such an emphasis on ideology and the background to the anarchist movement is useful here. I also find the economic backdrop to be less convincing, at least in terms of it is described here. The 1870s are important context, but how do they describe the 1890s? Don’t these factors need to be related much more closely to individual attacks?
Bach Jensen emphasises the importance of the media. The sensationalist press whipped up fears around anarchism and contributed to a situation of ‘mass hysteria’. The role of the media was important, perhaps, in elevating the symbolic role of dynamite as a potent weapon, given that this technological innovation was not infallible. While emphasising the media, he does fail to analyse one particular point in sufficient detail, however. He fails to explain why attacks proliferated in Spain and Italy given that literacy was lower and a mass media less developed in these countries (p. 142).
On the whole, Bach Jensen is sceptical regarding the role of anarchism in this wave of terrorism. Anarchists and terrorists were not one and the same. Few anarchist thinkers ‘sympathised’ with the attackers, but they did often apologise for them, particularly given the response of the state to terrorism. This meant that anarchists appeared to associate themselves with terrorism. Nevertheless, he argues, quite convincingly, that attacks were planned and executed by individuals or small groups. (Although I’m doubtful personally that there was anything approximating a coherent transnational anarchist movement at this time anyway.)
Morrissey, ‘Terrorism and Ressentiment’
Morrissey adopts a very different approach to terrorism compared to Bach Jensen. She focuses on Russia in the early twentieth century and examines the texts and testimonies produced by attackers or those sympathetic to them. She interrogates the tone, emotions and language of these texts in order to understand the narrative “framing” of terrorism. What others have dismissed as emotive rhetoric, she examines. She argues that vengeance was central to the dynamics of terrorism and that we need to understand the violence of individuals in the context of violence by the state. Terrorism was, she argues, an act of ‘popular sovereignty’, a means of claiming rights, dignity and a voice; it was an act of ‘self-defence and self-affirmation’, and perhaps by extension of declaring oneself to be a citizen.
Terrorists constructed their acts as fundamentally moral. They saw themselves as ‘heroic, virtuous individuals [battling] the arbitrary, violent state’. Individuals linked their own experience of state violence to other episodes and a wider understanding of the political, social and economic context in Russia. Gender is also mentioned – perhaps too briefly? State violence was on occasion understood as the ‘rape’ of the ‘(feminine) body of the Russian nation’.
Morrissey shows us that Russia experienced a large number of attacks – into the thousands – in the first decade of the twentieth century. It is not clear, however, how thousands of small scale attacks constituted terrorism as opposed to acts of politically motivated violence. In other words, what is terroristic about these attacks, particularly if they were quite isolated (p. 133)? These attacks seem quite different to what Bach Jensen is describing.
In addition, the definition of terrorism could be clearer. She opens with a comment on the importance of ‘spectacle’ to terrorism. But there is not much here on the actual ‘spectacle’ of terrorism itself.
I think it can be useful to bring state violence into dialogue with terrorism, but I wonder if this objective is achieved successfully here. The emphasis is solely on attackers’ narratives of themselves; does this mean that her analysis is incomplete – and also problematic?
Summary Comment
These two readings offer contrasting approaches to terrorism, which is perhaps a result of their different primary sources. Bach Jensen is sceptical of the relationship of anarchist politics to violence and does not centre his analysis on the role of the state in the same way. Morrissey places much more emphasis on the thoughts and ideas of attackers themselves. They also define terrorism differently. Yet there is, I think, a common understanding of the importance of the media and public communication that underpins both articles and of escalating dynamics of terroristic violence in Europe between 1890 and 1914.