By News Desk | 4 Comments | 
Print
Blood, Rage, and History:
The World’s First Terrorists
Carlo Carrà, Funeral of the Anarchist Galli (1911)
“Blood, Rage, and History: The World’s First Terrorists”
by Johann Hari
The Independent, October 12, 2009
Imagine it. A network of violent radicals is picking off the world’s leaders one by one. They have killed the American President, the Russian head of state, the French President, the Austrian head of state, and the Spanish Prime Minister.
Bomb attacks are ripping through the world’s richest cities: explosions devastate Wall Street, the London Underground, a theatre in Barcelona, cafés in Paris, parades in Moscow. The police profile of a typical bomber warns: “He walks to his death with courage and no regrets.” There is panic, and governments launch programmes of torture and deportation targeted at immigrant communities. Yet still the radicals wash defiantly across the world, killing as they go. They say they have “only one aim, one science: destruction.”
It sounds like a feverish novel about al-Qa’ida, set 30 years from now. But it has already happened. It is a story from our past. In the late 19th and early 20th century, anarchist bombers did all this. They were prepared to die for their beliefs. They lived in the same places as today’s Islamists – such as Whitechapel, in east London – and they struck the same targets, like lower Manhattan on a clear September morning.
In a new documentary – The Enemy Within, by Joe Bullman – young Islamists read the words of yesterday’s Jewish anarchists, from their writings and trial transcripts. While the societies they dream of building after the bombs are very different, their rage, their alienation, and their tactics are almost identical. The words fit so easily into their mouths that the Islamists say it is “creepy”.
Mark Twain said: “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.” Are there lessons buried in this ripple of rage spreading across a century? For decades, anarchist radicals seemed like an ineradicable force that would bleed Western societies forever. Within a generation, they were gone. So can the anarchists show us what makes young men attack their own societies – and what makes them stop? Can it tell us what tactics defeat an amorphous underground movement, and what only makes them stronger? From the nitroglycerine of the 19th century, is there a fuse that ends with the jihadists of 2009? . . . Read the whole article.
News Desk
Please contact the Editor if you have news items that you think are relevant to TOQ readers.
He ignores the Russian experiment. The Soviets were able to destroy anarchy and dissent through huge violent purges and a totalitarian regime. I suppose he doesn’t feel this is an option to consider, but precisely, it may very well be what they, the elite, whoever they may be, are considering.
Reading this article relayed to me just how out of the loop some journalists are. For example, Mr Hari neglects to acknowledge that the anarchists of the 19th century whom he features in this essay of his, were not moved by a hardcore theoracy and pathological drive to subjugate the whole planet under the rule of a 7th century tyrant.
No, Muslim extremists would not be entirely assuaged if the Infidel were to remove themselves from Dar el Islam. Hari appears to ignore the writings of the Koran which clearly states that the whole world MUST be forced under the rule of Sharia. This is why jihadists ( international religious anarchists) exist and will always exist unless radical action is taken against them and the belief system that drives their blood lust.
Appeasement is not the answer – to the contrary, it is an act of emboldenment upon them and a sign of weakness to be deeply despised.
The non-Muslim world must find its collective backbone once again or be forced to resort to nuclear war.
I think all religions are certainly social glue, keeping people together and working together, but also they are eugenic programs in many instances. They are cultural ways of conceptualizing what people should and should not do, and what should and should not be punished by drops in social standing, and penalities of law — including death. They are loosely based on a dim conceptualization of genetics, and therefore like alchemy was before chemistry they are sometimes dysgenic and dangerous. What most religions seem to be saying is that we need to eschew short-term and selfish pleasure or animal pursuits and really look beyond the here-and-now to assure the survival of our eternal selves (genes). To do this, we need to use our brains, and all the knowledge we can gather (enlightenment). We need to read the lessons of the universe written by the hand of the creator (science does this best). We need a modern translation of religions themselves, and also the imperfect religious impulses, of our primitive forebears. We need a real universal chemistry of religion, we need a periodic table, we need genetic knowledge as well as knowledge of the world. We need consensus on religion in an objective scientific sense. We need to take the reins of eugenics directly and pattern our world for the upward path to eliminate sin, and the destruction of the eternal that follows from it. I make this case in detail in my book The Textbook of the Universe: the Genetic Ascent to God.
Octalia: “No, Muslim extremists would not be entirely assuaged if the Infidel were to remove themselves from Dar el Islam.”
Delusions of grandeur. I think it was Rousseau who observed that a king can declare himself emperor of whatever given bit of land, but that is a separate thing from it being true practically.
“Appeasement is not the answer – to the contrary, it is an act of emboldenment upon them and a sign of weakness to be deeply despised.”
(No more wars for Israel.) Please, Muslims are by and large a collection of low IQ rabble that could be easily routed. The threat to the existence of our race is not the chimera of Islam but the demographic encroachment of racial aliens (some of whom are Muslims) into our living space. It was power that delivered them and it is power which shall return them from whence they came.
Steven E. Romer: “We need to take the reins of eugenics directly and pattern our world for the upward path to eliminate sin, and the destruction of the eternal that follows from it.”
There is naught that is eternal save matter, which is not exempt from entropy; no power imaginable will deliver us from the latter. And what you mean by “eliminate sin” is nothing but engineering out opposition – and the ability to desire to the contrary – to whatever program to whichever ideal you strive for, from the human condition.