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Nobody
before September 11, 2001 had ever razed
skyscrapers to kill thousands and make
an ideological point, but plots and terrorism
punctuate history.
The
Oklahoma City bombing of 1995 was still the
project of a lucidly nutty loner, an artisan
of horror like so many before him. The nerve
gas attack in the Tokyo subway system a few
weeks earlier required laboratory work and
a team of perpetrators, marking what may be
considered the incipient industrial phase of
terrorism.
The assault on the United States in a fine-tuned
conspiracy was prefigured in recent decades
by hijackings of passenger planes, kidnappings
and bombings by clandestine networks all over
the world.
The military industrial complexes of the major
powers, and of a few smaller ones too, meanwhile
kept testing nuclear, chemical and biological
weapons disregarding international treaties
banning them.
The role of religiously motivated volunteers
seeking death in the performance of violence
frightens us particularly. It isn't new either:
the regicides of the past were aware that they
had slim chances for escape and near certainty
to end up on the gallows, often after torture.
Francois Ravaillac, the Roman Catholic zealot
who stabbed King Henry IV of France to death
in 1610 was drawn and quartered.
What should scare us above all is the realization
of how vulnerable our technological civilization
has become, how easily public services and
facilities that we took for granted can be
wrecked, especially by suicide candidates.
The present mood in the West, characterized
by the anthrax panic, has some parallels to
the fear of anarchists in Europe and eventually
also in America at the end of the nineteenth
century and the beginning of the twentieth.
The Utopian and at times idealistic current
of anarchic thought since Pierre Joseph Proudhon
(1809-1865) had degenerated into a cult of
political-social violence for its own sake.
Its apostle, Mikhail Bakunin (1814-1876), occurred
around Europe in search of some, any, revolt
or revolution to latch organization, which
in reality consisted only of a handful of desperadoes.
Like Osama bin Laden he won sympathizers galore.
Bakunin had many open or clandestine followers
in Spain, Italy, the French speaking part of
Switzerland and Belgium. Karl Marx didn't want
to have anything to do with the anarchists
and threw Bakunin out of his International
Workingmen's Association.
In Russia the
violence-prone members of secret networks,
mostly students, were called Nihilists.
Anarchists advocating "direct action" assassinated
Czar Alexander II in 1881, the French President
Sadi Carnot (1894), Empress Elizabeth Astria-Hungary
(1897), King Umberto of Italy (1900), and President
McKinley of the United States (1901).
The fear o3ÿ &04%.s swept the 0èP.
The anarchism scare eventually subsided, political-ideological
fanaticism survived. Blended with religious
extremism it becomes lethal like pandemic.
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