Defeating Jihad: Lessons from Anarchism


 Mark Twain once said that “history doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.” To many of us in the modern West, the wave of Islamist terrorism that we’ve endured in the two decades following the 1998 bombing of the World Trade Centers seems like a brand new phenomenon. Violent terrorists causing seemingly mindless destruction and claiming the lives of thousands of innocent civilians on a massive scale is something that many Americans would never have dreamed of a few decades ago. This wave of violent jihad seems to have come out of the woodwork, blindsiding an unprepared West with a kind of terror we hadn’t seen before. In reality though, the multitude of terror attacks we’ve experienced in the last two decades is strikingly similar to a terror wave the world suffered through more than a century ago. Then, the threat was anarchism. Now, it’s Islamic jihad. The parallels in tactics and motives though are blindingly obvious.

Anarchists throughout the 1880s and 1890s were responsible for a massive onslaught of bombings, high-profile assassinations, sabotage, and other attacks that shocked the world like never before. It was truly a global terrorist threat with attackers coming from all corners of Europe, Asia, and the Americas. Their motive, to destroy the established regimes of the world and bring about a new era of stateless anarchy, seemed incomprehensible to the average Westerner. Much like the current jihadist threat, the average American couldn’t possibly understand the reasons why a person would commit such heinous acts against governments and civilians. And, like with jihad, we tend to push aside notions that these terrorists could be acting rationally to achieve a real goal. Instead, we paint them as simply ‘evil people’ and attempt to respond to them as such.

But anarchists were not simply irrational evil people hellbent on indiscriminate destruction. They were in many ways acting exactly in accordance with their ideology. A bomb attack on a café wasn’t just a means to efficiently kill civilians, it was a way for anarchists to demonstrate to the public that they are not safe just because they are ‘civilians.’ In the mind of the anarchist, anyone who voluntarily takes part in the established order is directly complicit in its atrocities. A man sitting in a café eating a croissant is just as guilty of war crimes by his government as the soldier committing them. This is exactly the mindset that modern jihadists follow. Osama bin Laden justified the September 11th 2001 attacks on the World Trade Centers by claiming that all the regular run-of-the-mill Americans he killed were directly complicit in the supposed crimes of the American government. By choosing to remain an American citizen and participating in the American system, every single American citizen has made himself a legitimate target of jihadists.

So what can we learn from the defeat of anarchism, and how can we use those lessons to fight modern jihad? The wave of anarchism in the late 19th Century subsided due to a number of converging factors, including: the First World War distracting the world from anarchism; a major crackdown on anarchists by law enforcement and the limiting of anarchist immigration into America; and, the general realization among anarchists that the terrorist tactics they were using were not effective in advancing their goals. If the current wave of jihadist terrorism ends up following a similar pattern, we can expect the threat to fade out largely on its own. Because we hope to prevent another world war, we shan’t rely on something like that to distract the world from jihad. Our best bet to lessen the threat may be to increase law enforcement operations against Islamists, while also educating Muslims on the failings of terrorism as a strategy. Instead, giving fundamentalist Muslims a legitimate avenue to express their misgivings and opening up dialogue with their governments could help prevent more people from turning to terrorism in the future.

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