The First War on Terror (2008)
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Anyone interested in political history or theory should visit Christie Books, the publishing house and anarchist archive run by Stuart Christie, would-be assassin of General Franco and author of the entertaining memoir My Granny Made Me an Anarchist. The site contains a great deal of audio and video, including a documentary I made for BBC Radio 3 in 2008 called The First War on Terror. It's about the anti-anarchist panic that gripped Europe in the late Victorian period, and the responses by writers (from pulp novelists to greats like Conrad and Chesterton) to the fears of a social order without gods or masters. Listen to the program here.
Posted on December 31st, 2009
Terrorism and Anarchism
I think its remarkable how much attitudes to Anarchism are shaped, not by the acts of that period, but by the fiction that it inspired.
Indeed several recent books on Islamist terrorism (e.g the dreadful effort by Meghdad Desai) feature quotes at the start of chapters from Conrad's novel. Others chip in with lines from Chesterton or Conrad, presumably because the fiction is more easily available that fact.
And yet - Anarchists have not killed anyone in Britain since 1911. If only some other ideologies could say the same.....
Regards,
Paul Stott.
Hackney.
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