Dynamite, Treason and Plot E-Book

Simon Webb

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

In the years since the 7/7 attacks on the London transport system, many people in Britain seem to have become convinced that we live in uniquely dangerous times and that the threat from terrorism has never been greater. In fact, terrorist attacks have been a feature of life in London for many years. The worst terrorist bombing in the capital before 7/7 took place in 1867, when twelve people were killed in an explosion in Clerkenwell. The first person to be killed by a bombing on the Tube died in 1897. From the deadly Fenian campaign against high-profile targets in the capital to the Anarchist bombing of the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century London saw a constant succession of terrorist threats. This book details the emergence of modern terrorism, a phenomenon which has its roots in Victorian London.

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Title

Introduction

1

The Roots of Modern Terrorism

2

The Anarchist Terror

3

The Clerkenwell Outrage

4

The First Modern Terrorist Campaign

5

Fighting Back: the Political Police in Britain

6

The Tottenham Outrage

7

The Houndsditch Murders and the Battle of Stepney

8

Three Trials

9

The India House

10

The Terrorists of the Suffragette Movement

Appendix 1

A Walk through Radical Clerkenwell

Appendix 2

In the Footsteps of Peter the Painter

Epilogue

Bibliography

Copyright

INTRODUCTION

There is in this country a widespread, but wholly mistaken, perception that terrorism in Britain is a relatively new phenomenon, dating back no further than the IRA bombing campaigns of the mid-1970s. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, taking any random twenty or thirty year period over the last couple of centuries will reveal terrorist activity in Britain, focused in most cases upon the capital. The IRA were not the first to realise that one bomb in London is worth ten in the provinces. Terrorism has been an intermittent feature of life here since at least the mid-Victorian era. The bomb explosions on the underground which took place on 7 July 2005 were not the first attacks of this sort to be made on London tube trains. As early as 1883, a series of terrorist bombs exploded in the tunnels of the underground and the first person to be killed in such an attack died not in 2005, but in 1897. The worst loss of life in a terrorist attack in London prior to the 7/7 attacks took place not, as one would expect, during the IRA bombing campaign of the 1970s and 1980s, but as long ago as 1867, when twelve people were killed by an explosion in Clerkenwell.

Many of the features of everyday life that we vaguely suppose to be manifestations of a modern emergency have actually been around for well over a century. In the closing years of Victoria’s reign people were writing to the newspapers complaining about having to queue up in order to have their bags searched before being allowed into museums. Bodyguards for politicians, security measures for public buildings, letter bombs and suicide bombers were all around before the First World War.

Today, many people in Britain are concerned about what they see as dangerous subversives and potential terrorists embedded in alien communities which have established themselves in the larger British cities. In the past, as now, such fears were often inextricably bound up with unease about immigration and fears that foreigners were taking jobs away from the people who were born in this country. There is talk of ‘Londanistan’, the idea that a separate community of potentially dangerous Muslim outsiders has made its home in the capital and lives next to but separately from us. Such fears are not new. They are simply the latest manifestation of a very British phenomenon. Over the last couple of centuries, there have been periodic scares of this sort, featuring the same anxieties and demands for precisely similar action on the part of the authorities. Emergency legislation to tackle extremism or combat terrorism, the suspension of habeas corpus, identity cards, new controls over immigration – all these have been recurring themes since at least the 1860s.

The focus of fears about terrorism has varied from decade to decade. At one time it was Indians and Irishmen, at others women or Jews. Frequently, uneasiness about terrorism is bound up with a general feeling amongst ordinary citizens that there is a crisis involving immigration, combined with rapid and unwelcome changes in society. Such fears seem as fresh as today’s newspaper headlines, with our own era’s obsession with Islam and worries about uncontrolled immigration as a result of our ‘porous’ borders. Many of the incidents at which we shall be looking have an eerily modern feel about them. An armed robbery by asylum seekers in a London suburb goes disastrously wrong and a policeman is shot dead. Two years later, three police officers are shot dead by another group of foreign terrorists; the army is called in to help when a siege subsequently develops, with which the police are unable to deal. Bombs planted at the Tower of London and Scotland Yard, explosions on the underground, calls for the routine arming of the police in order to deal with the unprecedented threat to security – all these events took place over a hundred years ago. Yet, they have somehow been forgotten. Each generation feels that the threats of this sort facing them are uniquely terrible and far more dangerous than any seen previously in this country.

The latest menace of this kind with which we in Britain are allegedly confronted – that of Islamic terrorists being sheltered in closed communities, seemingly having little in common with the rest of us – is nothing new. In this book we shall try to place such concerns in context and look at the broader historical picture. We shall be looking at many of the familiar figures from the modern debates on immigration and terrorism. Eastern Europeans who are taking jobs away from those born in this country, asylum seekers who end up shooting at our unarmed police officers, radicalised Asian youths who have fallen under the influence of preachers of hatred – all these were regularly featured in the newspapers of a hundred years ago.

Consider the exchanges in Parliament with a Home Secretary, in this case Winston Churchill, trying desperately to defend the government’s record on immigration. This was in the aftermath of the use of troops to tackle foreign terrorists in London who had shot dead three unarmed police officers. On 8 February 1911 the Home Secretary faced some hard questioning in the House of Commons. The exchanges between Winston Churchill and various MPs could have been lifted straight from a debate this week in Parliament. An MP called Croft called upon the Home Secretary to tell the House how many foreigners had entered the country over the course of the last year. The answer was an astonishing 600,000 in 1910 alone; over half a million in just one year. Even by today’s standards, this was an incredibly large influx. Nevertheless, Churchill then tried to calm fears by insisting that the net increase in foreigners had to be balanced against the number also leaving the country over the same period.

Another MP then asked the Home Secretary if it was true that the crime rate had fallen during the years towards the end of the nineteenth century and was now rising due to the presence of large numbers of foreign criminals. Churchill denied this. Another question dealt with people trafficking. The Home Secretary mentioned that this had become a problem, as large groups of people were being smuggled into the country, but that he felt this was now under control. There was also a suggestion that foreigners were entering the country to obtain medical treatment.

It is hard not to come to the conclusion that Winston Churchill, back in 1911, was facing precisely the same kinds of searching questions about terrorism and its possible connection with immigration and asylum seekers as present-day home secretaries regularly find themselves having to deal with. In the spring of 1911, new controls on immigration were promised in the form of an amendment to the 1905 Aliens Act.

Another curious resonance with the past is the way in which famous London landmarks like St Paul’s Cathedral, Big Ben and Westminster Abbey have supposedly been in the sights of terrorists since the 1860s. The clock tower of the palace of Westminster known popularly as Big Ben, for instance, is apparently under threat today from terrorists. Those who carried out the 7/7 bombings had, we are told, plans to attack Big Ben and, in December 2010, the police announced the uncovering of another plot involving this internationally known tourist attraction. The image of Big Ben may be seen as symbol of ‘Britishness’ or social and political stability. As such, the fear of its destruction has cropped up regularly over the years. In Plate 2 we see how this anxiety was expressed in the 1890s. In the aftermath of the Irish attack on Clerkenwell Prison in 1867, rumours circulated that both Big Ben and St Paul’s Cathedral would be blown up by terrorists and, as we shall see, St Paul’s Cathedral and Westminster Abbey had bombs planted in them a year before the First World War.

To make sense of the history of terrorism in this country, it will first be necessary to look at the special attraction that this country held for refugees and asylum seekers during the reign of Queen Victoria.

1

THE ROOTS OF MODERN TERRORISM

The origin of terrorism, as it is currently practised throughout the modern world, is to be found in late nineteenth-century London. This is not say that terrorism started in London or that before 1890 there was no such thing as terrorism; rather that the very idea of terrorism before that time was formless and vague. It was in London during the 1870s and 1880s that the theoretical basis for terrorist activity was formulated and it came to be seen as a legitimate form of political action for those who had no other recourse in their struggle against a repressive or authoritarian state. Why should it have been in London that these theories first began circulating? The reason is simple. In many European countries, activists, agitators and subversives were constantly hounded by the police and imprisoned or driven into exile.

The British were generally happy for anybody to come to their country and, so long as they lived respectably and did not make a nuisance of themselves, they could say or write what they pleased. There were, at least until 1905, no restrictions at all on immigration in this country. Once they were here, there were no identity cards, demands for papers, harassment by secret police, arbitrary imprisonment or the threat of deportation. Under such conditions, foreign intellectuals, writers and left-wing thinkers found that they had the leisure to think and freedom to publish their thoughts whenever they felt like it, within certain limits. We shall see later what these limits were and what the consequences were for those who exceeded them.

So it was that London became the refuge for political thinkers, particularly those on the left, who needed peace and quiet in order to think through their ideas, draw up manifestos, write books and, in some cases, plan revolutions. Karl Marx naturally gravitated to London in 1849 and remained there until his death thirty-three years later. Lenin too found a safe haven in London, where he lived and worked for some time while publishing his revolutionary newspaper Iskra, the Spark. Stalin and Trotsky too spent time in London, plotting revolution. Other foreign-born radicals who settled in the capital are less well known. Johann Most, the German anarchist, and Prince Peter Kropotkin, a Russian, are among those whose names may not be immediately familiar to most people. Their writings and speeches in London, however, laid the foundations for every modern terrorist campaign from the IRA to Al-Qaeda.

Before we go any further, it might be a good idea to ask ourselves just what we mean by the word ‘terrorism’. The British Government defines terrorism as ‘the use or threat, for the purpose of advancing a political, religious or ideological course of action, of serious violence against any person or property’. This is sufficiently vague as to include everything from crowds of student demonstrators all the way up to the invasion of Iraq. The usually accepted view of terrorism is that it is limited to acts of violence carried out by a non-governmental agency. In order to qualify as terrorism, such acts really need to be of such a nature as to cause, or be likely to cause, serious injury or death. In practice, this means the use of guns and explosives.

Now there have always been groups of people prepared to advance their cause by setting off explosions and shooting people. This practice certainly did not originate during Victoria’s reign. There is a sharp difference, though, between the practice of terrorism before this time and its later use. The most chilling aspect of terrorist campaigns as they are currently conducted is that any one of us may become a victim. This creates a general fear or apprehension, which is, of course, precisely the aim of modern-day acts of terrorism. It is this, the essentially random nature of the injuries and deaths produced, which was unknown before the mid-nineteenth century.

What was called ‘terrorism’ throughout much of history has really consisted of targeted attacks on particular groups or individuals. These might be pogroms directed against Jews or Catholics, or perhaps the assassination of government leaders. In many cases, it was a matter of pride for those carrying out these attacks that nobody but the specific target of their attack should suffer any injury or harm. The perpetrators of such actions have been described as ‘good terrorists’. This type of terrorist was epitomised by Ivan Kalyayev. A member of a revolutionary group in Russia during the rule of the tsars, Kalyayev decided to assassinate Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovitch, General-Governor of Moscow and uncle of the tsar. Kalyayev prepared a bomb and waited for the Grand Duke’s carriage to pass. When it did, he saw to his horror that the duke’s wife was also in the carriage, along with a group of young nephews. He refused to kill any innocent victims and so abandoned his plan. He later threw a bomb at the duke, killing him, when he was travelling alone.

Principled behaviour of alleged terrorists was very common in nineteenth-century Russia. These people, members of groups such as the Narodnaya Volya (People’s Will), were almost fanatically careful not to harm any bystanders when carrying out assassinations. This tactic, the so-called ‘blow at the centre’, proved useless in the long run. There was no shortage of new men prepared to step into the shoes of some murdered police chief or city governor. The ordinary citizens remained apathetic, viewing the assassinations and executions almost as some species of private quarrel that didn’t really concern them. It was this indifference of the general public that caused some political thinkers to decide that a more effective way of using bombs would be to aim them at the general population. This, if anything, would be guaranteed to shake them out of their complacency. These theoreticians were aided by scientific discoveries being made at that time in the field of chemistry.

In 1847 Ascanio Sobrero, an Italian, was studying chemistry at Turin University under the tutorship of a Professor Pelouze. Sobrero was experimenting with a mixture of sulphuric and nitric acid, which he had combined with glycerine. He was actually trying to devise new medicines when he made the mistake of heating this deadly mixture in a test tube. Fortunately, the test tube contained only a small quantity of the ingredients, because as soon as it was held over a flame, there was a loud crack and the test tube exploded. Sobrero was injured by fragments of glass, but he had really got off very lightly indeed. The oily liquid which he had produced was nitroglycerine.

Sobrero was shaken by the experience, but continued his work with this dangerous new compound. He fed some to a dog, which promptly died. While dissecting the unfortunate creature’s body though, Ascanio Sobrero made a very important discovery. The blood vessels in the dog’s heart were hugely dilated. It at once occurred to him that here could be a remedy for angina and other problems of the circulatory system. Today, nitroglycerine is still the most widely used treatment for circulatory problems involving the heart.

Sobrero realised at once that there was another and more dangerous side to this new drug. In larger quantities, it had the potential to be used as a weapon of war. The only explosive known at that time was gunpowder: a compound of charcoal, sulphur and saltpetre which had been in use for a thousand years or so. However, as a matter of fact, gunpowder is not really an explosive at all. It is simply a substance which will burn very fast indeed. It only explodes if it can be enclosed in a container such as a gun barrel or bomb casing.

If one fills a saucer with gunpowder and then touches it with a red hot needle there will be no explosion. The powder will flare up very quickly and if you are not careful, you might end up singeing your eyebrows. Try the same trick with a saucer of nitroglycerine and you will probably blow off your hand. It will explode at once, whether or not it is enclosed in a container. It is, in the jargon of the trade, a high explosive; in contrast to gunpowder, which is a low explosive.

The new explosive was in great demand, but it suffered from one quite literally fatal defect. It was so sensitive that it was liable to explode if banged, splashed, dropped or even shaken too hard. It also deteriorated over time into unstable compounds, which could explode spontaneously without any warning. A fortune awaited the man or woman who found a way to make the new compound stable enough for general commercial use. This fortune was duly made by Alfred Nobel from Sweden, who was, coincidentally, another former pupil of Professor Pelouze of Turin. Nobel found a way of absorbing nitroglycerine into a type of clay called Kieselguhr, so that it became safe to handle. In 1867 he patented this process and the resulting product became known by the trademark of ‘dynamite’.

Nitroglycerine revolutionised warfare in the nineteenth century through a range of new explosives, but its potential for conventional armies was not the end of the story. Gunpowder was never really a convenient substance for producing bombs or grenades; it is simply not powerful enough. It is also very hard to manufacture to the right quality, unless you happen to be running a factory. A few sticks of dynamite, though, made the perfect bomb to throw. Even if one had no access to commercial explosives, it was possible, although hideously dangerous, to synthesise nitroglycerine at home out of the basic ingredients of sulphuric and nitric acid, added to glycerine in the right proportions. Dynamite became known as ‘the poor man’s artillery’. It was the perfect tool for what was becoming known as ‘propaganda by the deed’.

The expression ‘propaganda by the deed’ originated with the anarchist movement that was active in the 1880s in both Europe and North America. The idea was simple. Instead of writing long, convoluted pamphlets and tracts that no ordinary person would read anyway, why not capture the attention of the public by acts of terrorism? Many people had become accustomed to the idea of a president or police chief being assassinated and so to seize their interest it was necessary to make these terrorist acts outrageous and a threat to ordinary people. Thus was born the classic strategy of urban terrorism that we see today. Every modern terrorist group follows the pattern first set out by anarchists living and writing in London around 1880.

In 1881 Johann Most, a Bavarian anarchist who had been imprisoned in his own country and subsequently sought asylum in Britain, published a booklet called The Philosophy of the Bomb. In it, he formulated the strategy which terrorists follow today. First, it is necessary to attract the attention of the public by acts of violence that are likely to affect them personally. It is no good simply killing some soldier or policeman. As we saw in Russia, after a while people lose interest in such activities. This type of action, propaganda by the deed, would awaken the population to political issues in a way that mere words could never do. Once violence of this sort became frequent enough, the next stage would be reached. The state would react with repression, aimed at the bombers and assassins but likely to affect the general public. This would have the effect of alienating ordinary people and making them hostile to towards the government and their agents, the army and police. This cycle, acts of terrorism by individuals and reprisals by the state, would escalate into a spiral of violence. Ordinary citizens would inevitably be drawn into this conflict. The endgame would see the masses angry and disillusioned with the forces of law and order and driven into the arms of the terrorists, whom they would have finally realised had the same aims and values as they did themselves. All this was very well in theory, but in practice it often did not work out according to plan. This was especially so in Britain, a country long noted for its tolerance towards minorities and dissidents.

The whole practical aim of all terrorism in the twenty-first century is firmly based upon the ideas expressed by Most, Kropotkin and Errico Malatesta, an Italian anarchist who was also living in London during the 1880s. It has, however, proved notoriously hard to provoke the state in this country into savage repression of the kind necessary to kick-start a revolution or popular uprising. This is because instead of relying upon all the paraphernalia of dictatorships – the identity cards, secret police, arrest and imprisonment without trial and suchlike – the British have always relied upon a far simpler method for combating extremism. It is, almost invariably, done not by the apparatus of the totalitarian state, but by the simple use of informers and double agents.

This has been the tradition in this country since long before the nineteenth century, but it was with the beginning of the Industrial Revolution that the paid informer really came into his own. The problem is that there is often a very fine line dividing the informer from the agent provocateur; between the man or woman who just tells the authorities what is going on and the person who actively encourages and incites others to illegal activities. This is a line that has been regularly crossed in this country and never more so than during the attempt to deal with the European terrorists who found refuge here during the closing years of Queen Victoria’s reign.

Just as the police today seem to be able to nip the majority of terrorist conspiracies in the bud, so too did their nineteenth century counterparts. Informers ran anarchist magazines, rose to important positions in the Irish Fenian movement and seemed to have a hand in most of the plots which were uncovered. In many cases, it looked suspiciously as though they were themselves the instigators of the plots that they revealed to their police handlers. The problem with using paid informers is, of course, that they need to keep coming up with dangerous conspiracies in order to justify their very existence. Some double agents of this sort rely upon the money which they make from their activities and so of course a thriving terrorist network is vital for their livelihood. No police force is going to bother recruiting and financing agents who are just keeping an eye on men who write books or give speeches. It is essential that threats to public order and safety are regularly discovered. This all too often results in the actual creation of such threats that otherwise would not have existed. This theme, that of the agent who actually precipitates terrorism where none would otherwise have occurred, is explored in detail in two books published only a few months apart in 1907 and 1908.

In the next chapter we shall look at how the threat from terrorism was reflected in popular literature around the turn of the century, but I wish to examine first The Secret Agent, by Joseph Conrad, and The Man who was Thursday, by G.K. Chesterton. The central theme of both these works is the role of police agents in encouraging terrorist activity in Britain. As this is something of a leitmotif in police actions against terrorist groups in this country, right up to the present day, I think it is worth looking in detail at some of the ideas behind this way of combating the threat of terrorism.

TheSecretAgent is loosely based upon an actual incident, when an anarchist attempting to plant a bomb at the Greenwich Observatory was killed when his bomb detonated prematurely. In the book, the double agent uses his brother-in-law as a dupe to carry the bomb to its intended target. The brother-in-law of the man actually killed in the attempted bombing of Greenwich Observatory was in real life a police agent who was also the editor of the anarchist magazine Commonweal. The suspicion was that he had actually persuaded his impressionable young brother-in-law to carry out the attack on Greenwich, exactly as Conrad describes in the fictionalised account given in TheSecretAgent. This book is fascinating for the exposition that it gives of the role of the informer and how he could be manipulated by unscrupulous paymasters into working to their agenda.

Mr Vladimir, an official at the Russian embassy, explains to Verloc, the eponymous secret agent, why it is imperative that a bomb attack take place in London. Verloc is a member of an anarchist gang and Vladimir wishes him to stage what we would today call a ‘spectacular’ in order that Britain should be ‘brought in line’, as he calls it. At the time that the novel is set, the British habit of allowing anybody to come to their country and promulgate any political view was beginning to irritate other European countries. As Vladimir says: ‘England lags. This country is absurd with its sentimental regard for individual liberty … England must be brought into line. The imbecile bourgeoisie of this country make themselves the accomplices of the very people whose aim is to drive them out of their houses to starve in ditches.’

Vladimir proposes that the double agent instigates a completely mad and pointless terrorist explosion at Greenwich Observatory. This would have the effect of causing the British Government to ‘come into line’ and crack down on anarchism in the same way that other European countries were doing at that time. This sort of repression was, of course, precisely what the terrorists themselves were trying to provoke. In other words, the aims of the terrorists and also those who were opposed to them often actually coincided. Both sought the same end. We will see this time and again in the cases at which we shall be looking. It is frequently impossible to distinguish those plots that were actually started by double agents and informers from others where they simply observed and passed on information. Like the secret agent Verloc in Conrad’s novel, these men relied upon a constant stream of conspiracies and outrages for their living. It is hard not to draw comparisons with police and MI5 activity against Islamic terrorists today. Those whom they pay are under pressure to justify their existence and it is possible that some of the plots of which we hear would not have come into existence except for the actions of the informers themselves.

In G.K. Chesterton’s novel TheManwhowasThursday, this close identification of the hunter with the prey is taken to its logical and absurd conclusion. The protagonist, whose code name is Thursday, is a police agent who is trying to infiltrate the central committee of the anarchists. He eventually manages to do so, only to find that all the other members of this group are, like him, police agents. In other words, the anarchist movement is being run and co-ordinated by the police themselves. This idea comes pretty close to the truth in some counter-terrorist work and is not as farcical as it might at first appear. The extreme left-wing magazine Commonweal, mentioned above, had not one but two police informers on its editorial board.

Of course, it is not only informers who need to keep uncovering new conspiracies in order to justify their existence. The same applies to police departments and intelligence agencies tackling subversion. If there are no revolutionaries or terrorists in town, then these people would be out of a job. This gives such units an interest in the continued existence of a terrorist threat. In Victorian London, it was hard to tell which of the plots and conspiracies were being detected and deterred by the police and which they had started themselves. There is even a strong suspicion that the police were involved in a plan to assassinate Queen Victoria and the entire Cabinet.

So how did the British tackle extremism during the Victorian and Edwardian periods? None of the extreme measures advocated by those who regarded anarchism and Fenianism as deadly threats to the nation were ever adopted. Just as in our own day, milder and more restrained methods were generally found to be effective. We have seen in the last decade or so that attempts have been made to introduce identity cards and detention without trial in order to deal with the unprecedented threat that the nation faces. The same tools were demanded by those fighting terrorism a century ago. Then, as now, common sense prevailed.

The best way of dealing with the threat of terrorism has always been not to play into the hands of the terrorists by passing ferocious new laws, but rather to use existing legislation to tackle the situation. Johann Most was surely one of the most bloodthirsty and hot-headed anarchists living in London in the 1880s, but he was not persecuted by the police or driven into exile. He was watched, though, and when he overstepped the mark, the ordinary law was found to be quite sufficient to deal with him.

When Most settled in London, he started a newspaper called Freiheit, which advocated revolution and individual acts of resistance to the state. Some of what Most wrote in this paper sailed pretty close to the wind and, even today, one might run into difficulties if one started encouraging readers to ‘shoot, burn, poison, stab and bomb’ as Most did. Following Tsar Alexander II’s assassination on 1 March 1881, Most allowed himself to get carried away and published a fulsome congratulation to the tsar’s killers. He headed the piece with ‘Triumph, Triumph’ and went on to call for the murder of one monarch every month. This really was a bit much, even in a liberal democracy like the UK, and Johann Most found himself in the dock, charged with seditious libel. Today, we would probably describe this sort of thing as ‘glorifying terrorism’. He was sent to prison for sixteen months and, when he was released, decided to move to the USA.

Most’s story shows very clearly how the British have, in the past, and indeed still do, meet the danger of terrorist agitators. Not by ferocious punishments and the midnight knock on the door, but rather by giving such people plenty of leeway and then using the existing law if they stray too far in the direction of inciting violence.

It is time now to examine in detail some of the terrorist campaigns that were conducted from the 1860s onwards. To begin with, we will be looking at an international conspiracy whose members embraced an ideology and belief system quite alien to those in Western Europe or America. They loathed our very way of life and wished to smash it to pieces. These people were utterly merciless and quite prepared to sacrifice their own lives to the cause in which they believed. They planted bombs in European cities, heedless of the casualties they might cause. They even bombed the London Underground. The Special Branch in this country was constantly discovering new plots and raiding bomb factories set up by these people, who were associated with the communities of foreigners who seemed to have taken root in our big cities – a consequence of our porous borders. I am, of course, referring not to Islamic terrorists such as Al-Qaeda, but to the anarchist movement that flourished at the end of the nineteenth century.