Is there a global al qaeda some thoughts on the organisational limits of contemporary transnational terrorist movements (sofia, bulgaria, 2008

Such comparative juxtapositions, have namely stressed parallelisms – and this is perhaps unexpected – between contemporary Islamist terrorism, from the turn of the 20th to the 21st centu

IS THERE A GLOBAL AL QAEDA? SOME THOUGHTS ON THE

ORGANIZATIONAL LIMITS OF CONTEMPORARY TRANSNATIONAL

TERRORIST MOVEMENTS

Public lecture by

Prof Dr Armando Marques Guedes,

President of the Diplomatic Institute of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Portugal

It is my great pleasure and honor to be here Let me start by thanking my good friend, Professor Milan Milanov, who invited to come to both the country and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs; and let me extend my gratefulness, for obvious reasons, to Tanya Mihailova and Kamen Losev, my other hosts, for the wonderful hospitality that I received I would also like to thank the many Ambassadors present – and, if I may, very specially the Brazilian Ambassador, Paulo Valovski, a new friend, and the Portuguese Ambassador, Mário Santos, an old friend – all of whom honor

me with their presence It is a great delight to be in Sofia where, I must confess, I have been received and cared for with a magnificent elegance and grace I shall always cherish And it is fascinating to be again in the Eastern Balkans, a watershed between both East and West and North and South Bulgaria is, of course, both West and North, but it is also a hinge of sorts As you shall see, that which brings me today is not unconnected to all these coordinates which I just mapped out briefly

I am going to discuss terrorism with you this afternoon, This is unfortunately, very unfortunately,

a rather fashionable, even an à la page, theme; but I shall approach it in what I hope is an atypical manner I shall be doing it by looking at the organizational structures of the modern

terrorism and I shall engage in that effort, albeit lightly and cursorily, by drawing on what I think are useful and somewhat unexpected comparisons My aim is to try to bring to life – and to somehow partially circumscribe – some of the limits of the actual reach of terrorists’ networks, limits which constitute hinderances to their potential efficacy It is surely banal to state that the search in transnational terrorism – jihadist terrorism mostly, the one we see today – has centered mainly on al-Qaeda As it is trivial to underline the evidence that this has taken off on earnest after the rather abrupt end of the tense bipolar post-World War II international system Moreover, the fact that it has then started consolidating itself has given rise to preoccupations, comparisons and speculations of various sorts

I want to look at one of them Not rarely, a common set of comparisons has been, quite understandably as we shall see, a juxtaposition of contemporary jihadist terrorism with other terrorist waves of terror that preceeded it Interestingly, but quite understanbly, as we shall also see, a consciousness of these faint but significant echoes has arisen only in academic milieux Such comparative juxtapositions, have namely stressed parallelisms – and this is perhaps unexpected – between contemporary Islamist terrorism, from the turn of the 20th to the 21st century, and the terrorism carried out in the name of anarchism and anarcho-syndicalism at the end of the 19th century, its last two decades, and the beginning of 20th, in its first pair of decades

A number of analysts have actually written on this in the last year or so The application points

of such comparisons between, on the one hand, anarcho-syndicalism and anarchism, and, on the other, Islamist terrorism, have naturally fluctuated from author to author A quick map’ may be useful here, as it will allow for some focusing of my theme

Some of the authors who have underscored the usefulness of this improbable comparison have insisted that underneath obvious political ideological differences between anarcho-syndicalism and anarchism on the one hand and jihads on the other, they do coincide in the very ferocious critiques they formulate against what they see as the inexorable moral and political decadence of western societies Other authors have preferred to put in evidence the umbilical connections between the two waves of terrorism On the one hand, both terrorists of the jihadist sort and anarchist ones, it has been noted, use direct and violent forms of action – and, on the other hand, both have gone about it by resorting to political-organizational formats which are decentralized and not very hierarchical Yet other authors have insisted on making more open, let me call them that, parallels between anarchism and jihadism, and they have done so by focusing, for instance,

on the kin impacts and deeds of the violence carried out and on the similarities patent at the level

of the responses given by State entities to the political activities of what are essentially, rather violent and often brutal nongovernmental organizations Note the kernel of the comparisons has shifted here: instead of comparing the terrorist movements themselves, or their terrorist activities

as such, what this last grouping of analyst have stressed pertains to the legal, administrative, and political reactions of victims and thir representatives – State strucutures

Allow me to hasten to stress the obvious fact that, beneath such fascinating smilarities, what is perhaps more interesting are the enormous differences – which are also patently evident – between these two waves of terrorism that took place almost exactly on century apart from each other Let me enounce the perhaps most evident one: if one thinks for a second, arguably the

main characteristic of anarchism has been to fight against all forms of state power, its abhorence

of hierarchical political power; while jihadism has engaged in attack on Western forms of

political power – while it displays as one of its main aims, the reconstruction of the historical Caliphate, in other words, even as it fights for the re-creation of a very hierarchical polity, albeit one of a different, non-Western, sort Nevertheless, echoing this groups of contemporary political scientists and historians, I want to argue that, in both cases, some of the more important

consequences have however been surprisingly similar – mutatis mutandis, of course Besides the

parallels noted, the convergence, here, is the following: both anarchism and jihadism, with their

politics of violence, paradoxically reinforced repressive organs of the State and reinforced the

Westphalia international order they tried their different ways to fight – in both cases, the result was a very marked increase of repression and a rapid enhancement of ‘securitization’ measures Interesting, no doubt, but what does this all mean? What is the reach of all this? Well, I think it is only prudent to thred carefully, here It does not take much effort to realize that the very fact of being ready for carrying out this comparison between jihadism and anarchism (a promptness which seems to be common and even fashionable nowadays) the very readiness hides an underlying assumption The presupposition, or a soft variety of it, is that these two historical waves of direct and violent political action are connected to the extent that undrestanding one of tthem helps us understand the other – that is, we are faced with the notion that they are, somehow

mutually enlightening The hard version of this claim is that History is repeating itself as both a drama and a farce

If you again think for a second, I am quite sure you will realize this underlying conviction is absolutely nonsensical History is a largely linear process, and indeed perhaps even mostly a

cumulative one at that It does not, can not, actually repeat itself Fine, but then what do we do of

the many striking similarities noted? As we shall see, similarities are such, even within the context of differences, that we can perhaps talk about what Fernand Braudel, in France, in the

60s and 70s – this is almost two generations ago – called “la longue durée” – in other words that

convergences are a result of long-lasting structural continuities which we should kow how to bring to the fore if we are to ever understand both conjunctures and events To go back to my chosen example, between anarchist and jihadist terrorism there are fascinating parallels, many of them, I think, well worth looking into – if only for the analytical unveiling implications they bring out

I shall divide my presentation in three substantial segments and a conclusion As a first step, I will talk about anarchism and anarchical syndicalism, not jihadism I will do so deliberately, my intention being to cause a shock effect and to instigate, or provoke, the drawing of comparisons;

so, note, I will not discuss anarchism per se: I shall be discussing it with a rather precise

objective in mind – one which will unfold in my second and third sections; there, I will compare, putting them as if in resonance, first national and international reactions of States to these two waves separated by a century, and then those of choice State leaders, two North-American Presidents, Theodore Roosevelt and George W Bush I will conclude with some in-depth political considerations; these will, of course, not be political-ideological reflections at all, but rather light theoretical ones

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So let me start with segment one, a revision of what I call the authentic gallery of horrors that was displayed at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century This, of course, pre-announced the fall of the European so-called Central Empires, many of them right next door

to Bulgaria – a collapse which was to happen during the Great War and right after 1918 The list

is astounding In 1881 Alexander II, the famous liberal Tsar, was killed in Saint Petersburg by an

artesanal grenade, presumably thrown by either Russian, Polish, or Russian and Polish

revolutionaries In 1984, a mere three years later, an Italian anarchical syndicalist with a very improbable name, Sante Geronimo Caserio, assassinated with a knife the French President of the Republic: again, a man with the very improbable name of Marie François Sadi Carnot Only two and a half short years later, in 1897, another Italian anarchist, Luigi Lucheni, fatally stabbed in the chest the famous Austro–Hungarian Empress Elizabeth, the very famous Sissi we all learned

to love – then Empress of Austria and Queen of Hungary That very year, 1897, the Prime Minister of Spain, Antonio Canovas was killed by another anarchist called Michele Angiolillo as

he went outside his hotel to smoke a cigar in the terrace of the Hotel where he was staying Note that the scope, if not the scale, of this, is devastating, even when compared to what is happening now as we are victimized by jihadist thugs But these were not isolated cases In 1900

the turn of the beginning of the century, Umberto I, the Italian King, was brutally assassinated by another, once more an Italian, anarchist, Gaetano Bresci The very next year, 1901, a Polish-American anarchist Leon Frank Czolgosz killed the Polish-American President William McKinley, and did so, again, with a knife In 1903, the King of Serbia, Alexander I, and his consort, Queen Draga, were viciously assassinated – they were stabbed, mutilated and thrown out of a fourth

floor, while still barely alive – by local Crna Ruka (black hand) activists – a local insurgent

group with strong anarchist connections The Portuguese King D Carlos and his eldest son, Crown Prince D Luis Filipe, were shot and killed at close range, in 1908, in Lisboa, by two

‘Charbonnier’ anarchists, Alfredo Costa e Manuel Buiça In 1912, a second Spanish Prime-Minister, José Canalejas, was killed in Madrid, once more with a knife, by yet another anarchist, Manuel Pardiñas, as he was carelessly looking into a book shop window Alexandros Schinas was another anarchist, this time Greek, who in 1913, in Thessaloniki, brutally killed the King of Greece, George I And finally, in 1914, Emperor to be Franz Ferdinand and Sophie, Princess von Hohenberg, were killed right next ddor to Bulgaria, in Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina, by Gavrilo Princip, a Black Hand operative

A real gallery of horrors, I am sure you would agree It did not end here There were many failed attempts as well Let me list them very quickly King Alfonso XII of Spain, was shot at in 1878

by anarchists Kaiser Wilhelm I of Germany suffered two attempts on his life in the same year,

1878, one in June, and another one a short month before that, in May Henry Clay Frick, the business partner of Andrew Carnegie, the Scottish industrial who created US Steel, one of the biggest enterprises in world history, was attacked in Pittsburg, but to no avail, in 1892 A Serbian State Minister was attacked in Paris, in 1893 The king of Spain Anfonso XIII, the son of Alfonso XII, and his English bride, were shot at during their wedding party, in 1906, in Madrid; although they escaped unscathed, twenty of their guests were killed I could go on and on

As you can surely easily understand terrorism became a central preoccupation of policemen, journalists, politicians and novelists from Fiodor Dostoievsky to Joseph Conrad, or from Émile Zola to Henry James, including Isaac Babel, Henry de Montherlant, Jaroslav Hašek, Maurice Leblanc and Upton Sinclair, to just give a few examples of the many authors who wrote at that time about this anarchist wave of terrorism Public opinions, of course, became frantic So did politicians In 1908, for instance, American President Theodore Roosevelt, who had been Vice-President of W McKinley and succeeded him as Vice-President after the latter’s assassination, pronounced in speech to Congress: “when compared to this suppression of anarchy every other question fades into insignificance The anarchist is the enemy of humanity, the enemy of all mankind and he is a deeper degree of criminality than any other”

The killings of political leaders were by no means all that ocurred during this anarchist and anarcho-syndicalist wave of political violence Many other events surrounded this Let me just pinpoint a few very rapidly: the notorious Wall Street bombings on the 16th September 1920 killed thirty three people and wounded four hundred in the very famous Manhattan Financial

District The Haymarket Riot – I shall not go into it here – is probably the best known one,

because it gave rise to a famous massacre in which eight anarchists who were accused of killing

a policeman were arrested, seven of them were condemned to death and four were in fact executed; this, of course, is what gave rise to the 1st May as Labor Day worldwide, now recognized as preciselythat by the UN If we leave the United States and come to Europe, we

will realize that the same pattern was repeating itself in this very same period France, for

instance, had its own proud dynamitards, as they were known at that time

In 1892, a bomb was thrown in a restaurant in Paris, a fashionable place called Restaurant Véry; scores died A few months later, that very year, a mining consortium was attacked in France; six

policemen were killed and word ran wild that acid had been thrown in the local water supply, that churches would have been mined, and that there were anarchists snippers all over the outskirts of Paris, ready to shoot passers-by One year after that, in 1893, a young anarchist, Auguste Vaillant, who could not find a job, and thus could not feed his baby daughter or his lover, decided to make a bomb with lignite (using a frying pan and packing nails inside it), and

then threw it into the hemicycle of the French Chambre des Deputés Miraculously, nobody was

killed Although he was, himself: Vaillant was tried, convicted to death, and duly executed As a

result, another anarchist took revenge and attacked the Café Terminus in the Parisian Gare St.

Lazare: a man called Émile Henry killed a client and severely wounded nineteen others (many of them lost limbs) as they were listening to a jazz band For a generation or two, the pattern of these types of attack was repeated all over A monarchical parade was attacked in Firenze, in

1878, another ws thrown into a multitude in Pisa A German Princess barely survived, in 1883, a murder attempt carried out by an anarchist In 1892 a Spanish officer, General Martinez Campos,

was killed by an anarcho-syndicalist from Cataluña The faena continued In 1893, two bombs were thrown at the Teatro Liceo in Barcelona, at the beginning of the opera season and killed

twenty-two melomanes who were listening to the opening of the new opera season A French anarchist was arrested in Greenwich Park, in 1894, as he was carrying a bomb to the Greenwich Observatory and the engine accidentally exploded In 1896, six people participating in a religious procession were murdered by anarchists in Barcelona Again, there really is no point in continuing with this list Let us dig in, as it were, and ask a few questions, instead

Who were these anarchists? Well, an American researcher, Harvey Kushner, published an article

in 2003 and there he claimed, and I am quoting from him, that as far as the New World cases went: “[a]t the end of the 19th century most anarchists in the United States were recent immigrants from Europe” True enough, but we can surely go further than this, even as far as the

US goes And what about the Old World? Allow me break this down and look in further detail at the composition of anarchist and anarcho-synidicalist groups, since I believe this may be revealing for the al-Qaedacase It is, in fact, very interesting to note that there are significant regularities as concerns the social origins of their members Perhaps the first thimg that springs forward is the evidence that, usually anarchist activists were of very modest social origins – and given the nature of social hierarchies of the day they as a rule had very modest jobs as well But

this was not always the case Piotr Kropotkin, a Prince, and a few other aristocrats, were, significantly, members of anarchist cells, or at least their compagnons de route If one looks at

group composition again, now not from the point of view of social origin but rather from that of educational background, one quickly realizes that most of the anarchists were in fact pretty highly educated people, if compared with the rest of the population Thee is more Another regularity relates to nationality – or if you want to ethnic group many of the millitants were Russian, Polish, or Serbians, in other words, Slavs; many of them were, instead, Spanish, Italian, french, or Portuguese, that is, Latins Many of them were Jewish, mostly Central European Ashkenazi in terms of extraction In other words, the large majority of militants came from

recently empowered minorities in a European, or an American, stage, who made their voices heard in a world where they felt they were not given that chance

There is not much point on drawing more implicit parallels here – I believe the ones I suggested are sufficient for the limited purposes of this presentation So I shall move ahead as planned, trying to put into resonance, as I said, national as well as international reactions of States, and of choice State leaders, to the two waves of terrorism I elected to rather informally compare

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Interestingly, this serious anarchist and anarcho-syndicalist surge, this hecatomb, as I called it, had a part from this secularity of the deeds no real political impacts in the sense of they did not create new political communities, they did not destroy the political communities that were there, but this gave rise to a variety of responses that we should look at very attentively I would like to

go into t three very rapid examples: the Scotland Yard, the FBI and the Russian Okhrana , three

institutions which were erected because of this

The Scotland Yard – although it was there already for quite a while – saw itself transformed deeply as a reaction to the anarchist “threat” The FBI was first created by Theodore Roosevelt The germ of what was to become the FBI was called the Bureau of Investigation, BOI was its acronym; set up because of the ‘white slave trade’ then rampant in many US cities, the BOI was transformed a few years later into the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the FBI, with the ‘black

scare’ and then the ‘red scare’ as it main Leitmotifs It integrated scores of Special Agents trained

in wht we would now call ‘anti-subversion techniques’ The feared Russian Okhrana, of course,

was set up solely because of the attempted murders of Alexander II; it was created with the objective of avoiding anarchists’ and anarcho-syndicalists’ ‘insurrectionary’ moves (to employ the term contemporaries used) in their attempts to get rid of the Tsars and the Tsar’s families –

and thus make the Empire fall Like the FBI, the Okhrana was composed of a series well-trained Gendarmes It was organically located within the Imperial Ministry of Internal Affairs, the

famous MVD, but it had robust wings in Paris, throughout Europe, and in many places of the immense Russian Empire

There was also an international dimension to this reaction of States to the anarchist and anarcho-syndicalist perceived threat which is certainly worth mentioning To be sure, in order to understand this we should maybe root it in a cognitive dimension: the general conviction, in this

time of anarchist furor, was, in effect, the belief that the growth of national ‘police’ structures

was not enough Their cooperation beyond borders was needed because the anarchist movement,

or so it was fervently believed, was an international threat So strong and widely shared was this conviction that such international threat even had a name: it was called the ‘Black International’ (black was, of course, the color chosen by the anarchists, as red was the color chosen by the

Marxist communists) The idea was – or the feeling was – anarchism was a unitary movement;

or if it wasn’t unitary at least it was a full-bodied international network, highly organized, strongly cohesive, and very well synchronized Moreover, it exhibited – or so it was felt – a high degree of internationalization, or of ‘internationalist cosmopolitism’ Much seemed to support

these shared representations The social originsof these anarchists and anarcho-syndicalists, as I earlier underscoreded, were very homogeneous – and the tactics used had a notorious family resemblance that seemed to scream loudly to contemporary ears about dramatic learning processes that would be taaking place between them In a typical pattern that the 19th century left

as a legacy to the 20th and the 21st, intergovernmental coordination (as European Union bureaucrats will now call it) immediately rose as a response to this which was, of course, obvious

to virtually everyone This was almost pure wishful thinking, as it soon became clear to all, since most of what was planned never got to be realized

A pair of examples brings this out rather neatly In an ambitious ‘International Anarchist Conference’ (this was its official title) that took place in Rome on the 24th November 1894, at the graandiose Palacio Corsino – a meeting in which a grand total of twenty one States – one third of

the number of States then in existence –, decided, by unanimity, that anarchism was not a bona fide political doctrine; more than political acts, it was unanimously decided, what anarchist

militants were carrying out were bbetter classed as ‘criminal offences’ Anarchists should be killed or captured, and if the latter, should they be ‘foreign nationals’ they should then be quickly extradited, as criminals In practice this never happened, or rarely ever happened: in fifty years years the US Administration (the most committed to this extradition policy) merely managed the expulsion of three hundred and forty nine anarchists – Emma Goldmann was, of course, the most famous one So, very few expulsions, and even fewer extraditions What were, briefly, the reasons for such a surprising infrequency of extraditions?

Why was this so? In practice, no matter what politicians intentions may have been, de facto State

resistance to this intergovernmental coordination between police forces was, of course, huge A sort of ‘fast forward parenthesis’ here: that State ‘viscosity’, notice, did not change much today Anyway, at the beginning of the 20th century, a second attempt was made, on the 14th March

1904, in St Petersburg, to get a serious internationalization of police going efforts on its feet A famous St Petersburg Protocol was made ready to be signed, which tried to mount an ‘Interpol’ – an anti-anarchist entity in it inception; but Interpol was not created right away – two of the States gathered in the Russian Imperial capital refused that, although the ten other States present (States from Northern, Central and Eastern Europe) supported it: the two states that resisted it were Italy and the US – interestingly enough, States in which the anarchist threat was felt as particularly acute Stepping ahead of myself, as it were, let me give a rapid snapshot example of

how bad the de facto State resistance I am alluding to still is today: according to numbers I read

earlier this year in Time magazine, the annual budget of Interpol was, in 2007, slightly below the

weekly stipend of the New York Police Department; rather low, to say the very least.

It is interesting to notice that this incapacity, this organizational limit that made itself felt, was not only effective at the level of States and their desired intergovernmental coordination It was also true at the level of anarchist movements That would be trivial: for, surely, it is easy to

understand that sovereignism and a strong dose of a typical institutional inertia inhibited States

from collaborating with one another, no matter what the threat may be – after all, this is still one

of the greatest difficulties faced by most projects of international cooperation in all areas What

is perhaps more interesting is to notice that the same sort of ‘limit’ seems to have operated among the anarchists too Everything happened as if the limits of possible cosmopolitism, both

within States and outside them, was very clearly marked, very constraining, and rather evenly

set The truth is that within anarchist groups, no matter what politicians, public opinion, or they themselves thought about the Black International, there were no efficacious forms of planning or coordination at an international – as, now with hindsight, we can easily note the extent of the

‘cosmopolitan delusion’, if I may call it that, in which everyone seems to have lingered

As a matter of fact, things were indeed actually a bit more complicated than neorealists would perhaps prefer Not all limits met were really a question of simple ‘State egotism’ There were

obvious organizational deficits at play at the level of anarchist organizations, too: even nationally, a plane in which organizational density tended to be much thicker, anarchists and

anarchist attacks tended to be organized and carried out by small cliques and peer groups, very often kin They aggregated in small cells, entities that had largely been theorized and developed

by Louis Auguste Blanqui, a famous French ‘utopian socialist’, as Marxists called him There is not much need to point in explaining in detail the structure of cell organization here, as I am sure

we are all aware of how this works Very briefly: cells are small organizational entities in which

only one of each group’s members – the coordinator of that cell – knows anyone outside the cell,

and he only knows the handful of members of his own higher level cell, and, in that new higher order cell, only the coordinator is also a member of a yet another higher level cell; the same arrangement repeats itself upwards indefinitely, so the overall organizational structure is that of

what topologists call a “chain network” So there is only one link between cells; this was, of

course, developed as a protective reaction to infiltration and penetration by police and security forces – it was developed as a means to avoid detection and the cascade effect the sort of

‘decapitation’ which ‘malicious attacks’ engender in classical hierarchical structures Notice that while this form of organization presents obvious advantages, it nevertheless creates a kind special fragility in cell organizational structures: their defensively low level of connectedness

also means that internal and external communication – say, for example, tactical and strategic

decisions within and between entities – therefore becomes rarer, and more fragile, in cell structures than in hierarchies

Interestingly of course, there were, among anarchists and anarcho-syndicalists, a few communicational devices which somehow bridged that particular gap induced by communicational rarification A modicum of communication, I would argue, was insured by the

purposeful and fairly systematic creation of a sort of ‘epistemic community’ both within and between anarchist and anarchic syndicalists’ circles Doctrine did that, by and large I want to

give just a few examples of this, the fact that they largely shared the same discourse I shall focus

merely on what anarchists and then Marxists, following Blaqui, entitled mots d’ordre – although

there is much more to it than that, I shall stick to this one example as paradigmatic simply because this is precisely what gave States and common people (or even the anarchist militants themselves, in most cases, as I already pointed out) the impression that there was, indeed, an overall organization such as a ‘Black International’

So, with this in mind, allow me to bring out a few rapid examples of the use of anarchist mots d’ordre When, as I mentioned before, Sadi Carnot was killed by Sante Geronimo Caserio, the

latter, as he punctured the liver of the French President, shouted for everyone to hear “Vive la Revolution!”; and then, when he was condemned to death in the court, he cried out “Vive la Révolution sociale!”, qualifying this time, the kind of revolution he was killing and dying for The day after President Sadi Carnot died, his wife received a picture of Ravanchol, another

famous anarchist, a man who had been guillotined during Sadi Carnot’s ten-year presidence of

France: with the picture was a lletter which said “il est bien vengé” (he’s well revenged): the letter and picture, note, had been send by mail two days before the killing When young Auguste Vaillant threw his lignite bomb in a frying pan into the French Chambre des Deputés, he shouted into the hemicycle “La mort! Vive la Révolution!”; later, when he was guillotined, he shouted right before he died: “Vive l’anarchie! Ma mort sera vengée!” (long live anarchy! my death will

be avenged!) I could use many other examples and thicken theplot, as it were, but I believe my point is clear as it is Notice the regularities in the terminology used; moreover, when Vaillant was interviewed ny the press, before he was killed he explained that he wanted “to wake up the masses” and only one thing he regretted is that “no more people had died” Doctrine was in the making here, in this particular case a ‘public’ and well publicized defense of the famous anarchist “propaganda of the deed” – an important strategic message, no doubt

In fact, as I said earlier, the creation of an epistemic community via such rarified communicational means hid an enormous organizational deficiency of anarchist militants: as I

pointed out, tactical, and even strategic, cooperation, both within and between the very numerous

small anarchist groups was of a highly variable geometry Here and there, this community-building would be intense; but in the majority of cases it was diffuse, indirect, and often plainly inexistent Moreover, as one augmented inclusiveness of groups, a sort of steep ‘organizational thinning’ generally took place Connections between groups as a rule became smaller the bigger the groups you took into account were – as could of course be expected given that communicational, and thus coordination, limitations made themselves felt Although the idea that there was a major organized international plot this was not patently true: the assertion that it was

the case simply made part of the pragmatics of State political rhetoric; there was, in fact, no international planning in any meaningful sense

What emerged beyond that, indeed, was the communicational effect of a creation of an epistemic community, made possible by TSF, radio, telephones, newspapers, journals of all sorts, dailies and weeklies, all of which either were the invention of the epoch, or boomed in this interval This was the novelty and it was understandably interpreted as something else My claim is the following: what made anarchism feel to contemporary actors, State and private ones, like a major challenge, was undoubtedly connected to radical transformations felt at that time at the level of mobility and transports, communication, economics, politics and new techniques and technologies, many of them with an evident military potential – all things which the conquests of the Industrial Revolution started two or three decades earlier had actually given rise to There are many examples of new technological entities, non-military and then military ones, developed at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of 20th – besides things like telegraphy, then wireless telegraphy, daily newspapers of wide circulation, there were railways and trains, the first transoceanic ships, automobiles, zeppelin dirigibles, and airplanes, all innovations which came about in this interval To this we should add developments at the level of military technology Military technology, in the late 19th century surprised everyone with new (allow me

to use a contemporary term) ‘weapons of mass destruction’ Machine guns were invented almost exactly during the period we have been looking at; fortunately, machine guns were first used at the tail end of the American Civil War, Gatling machine guns – otherwise we can only imagine what the butchering would have been in a mechanized 2nd Generation conflict that was the American Civil War Dynamite and related products – lignite, nitroglycerine – nitroglycerine is,

in fact, the basic ingredient of dynamite, a compound invented by Alfred Nobel again precisely during that time interval – also appeared then; as did portable bombs, the easy-to-carry hand grenades Lethal, incapacitating, or paralyzing, gases were mostly developed during this period too – and infamously used during the World War I, in trench battles and elsewhere, with great impact and visibility At the time of anarchists and anarcho-syndicalists all these novelties either were terrifying instruments of destabilization and death

With this informal sort of comparison in mind, allow me to make a quick fast forward now, and look at the new technologies – both military and non-military ones – which arose during the period that coincides with the emergence of entities like al-Qaeda The parallels which may and should be drawn are obvious, below the very many superficial differences that are notorious In a few very brief snapshots: besides novel nuclear devices of unthinkable capacity for destruction and new devastating chemical and now biological weapons, we now have computers and the Internet, we now have ever more ‘agile’ mobile telephones, and we now have realtime texting, messaging, and even virtual chat rooms where large groups may gather and rapidly, and pretty anonimously, exchange ideas and give quick but precise instructions and commands Allow me

to stress, again, the new weapons of mass destruction – and by now we have real weapons of mass destruction which we can see as potentially threatening everyone And, note, there is a

plethora of them: nuclear weapons, biological weapons, chemical weapons, they come in families These are terrifying instruments of death that dwarf what happened one hundred years ago, made all the more frightening by the increased organizational capacities which the new communication technologies I mentioned offer to people and groups bent on political violence Quite understandably, modern jihadist terrorism has become a central preoccupation of policemen, politicians, the military, intelligence communities, and even diplomats, apart from journalists and news-casters of all stripes

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Is it really surprising that we are terrified now? Frankly, I myself am not taken back at all Political oratory, very often instrumental for the achievement of specific policy goals does not help, in the present atmosphere of international tensions and manifold conflicts Was it not Condoleezza Rice who said that “we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud” tomorrow? I think it quite understandable that many people are scared, for reasons parallel to those which frightened them in the turn of the 19th to the 20th century But, now as before, is this

feeling of terror really proportional to the actual organizational capacities of terrorists?

I would claim the answer should be “yes and no” What is al-Qaeda now? Well, it is more than Blanquist cells It is a network of networks that has an evanescent virtual reality within the Internet and perhaps outside it too, which is what makes it possible for many people to say, without so much as blinking, “well, it does not really matter if bin Laden is alive or not – he’s alive on the Internet!” The fact that people copycap what their ‘military’ do, is one of the oucomes which spell that, here and there, whoever they are, the jihadists are going through a fast

learning process This is because contemporary technology tends to promote decentralization,

while, traditionally, technological innovations instead promoted centralization I remember with glee a picture I saw of Lenin in the Winter Palace in St Petersburg, sitting on a table with two