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.