Blood and Rage_ A Cultural History of Terrorism - Michael Burleigh [44]
A further crucial anarchist contribution to the matrix that comprised terrorism was prince Peter Kropotkin, the leading anarchist ideologue. Although Kropotkin was widely regarded as a figure of almost saintly virtue, who condemned the ‘mindless terror’ of chucking bombs into restaurants and theatres, he was nevertheless keen on the multiplier effects of force, in which one evil deed was repaid by another, setting in motion a spiral of violence that would duly undermine the most repressive of governments. Kropotkin was also a leading apologist for terrorism, justifying anything motivated by the structural violence bearing down on desperate people. ‘Individuals are not to blame,’ he wrote to a Danish anarchist friend, ‘they are driven mad by horrible conditions.’ What Kropotkin’s own apologists seem to be saying is that the prince was a more decent, honourable fellow than Bakunin, who as we saw in the previous chapter swam in the deceitful depths of the maniacal Nechaev.1
Kropotkin was a leading theoretician of anarchism, rather than of terrorism, which has a less involuted theoretical history of its own. The dubious honour of originator belonged to a German radical democrat who revised classical notions of tyrannicide so as to legitimise terrorism. Karl Heinzen was born near Düsseldorf in 1809, the son of a Prussian forestry official with radical political sympathies. He studied medicine at the University of Bonn, before being rusticated for idleness. Another legacy of that time were the nine duelling scars on his face; one, shaped like an inverted L, ran down beside his chin, and was still clearly visible in later life. Heinzen served briefly with the Dutch foreign legion in Java and Sumatra, before returning to the Prussian army. He fell in love with the widow of an officer, who died before Heinzen could marry her, although he would go on to wed the widow’s eldest daughter. Released to civilian life, he slogged his way up the hierarchy of the Prussian customs and excise service. This involved eight years of sheer drudgery, and his mounting alienation from the Prussian state. He was a petulant subordinate, frequently passed over for promotion, who resigned from the civil service in a sour mood.
Heinzen wrote a coruscating attack on the Prussian bureaucracy, so intemperate that he had to flee over the border to Holland to evade arrest. His radical republicanism deepened in exile in Belgium and Switzerland. In 1847 he made his first trip to America, where his various articles advocating republican revolution led to his being feted as ‘an authority on revolution’ in the German-language press. He became editor of New York’s Deutsche Schnellpost on the eve of the 1848 Revolutions which convulsed most of Europe, but he raced back to Germany to take part in the rising in Baden before standing, unsuccessfully, for election to the Frankfurt parliament. Inevitably an exponent of the most radical measures, he fell out with his more liberal-minded colleagues, and was obliged to flee as the forces of reaction regrouped.
During this turbulent period, Heinzen wrote ‘Murder’, an essay in which he claimed that ‘murder is the principal agent of historical progress’. The reasoning was simple enough. The state had introduced murder as a political practice, so revolutionaries were regretfully entitled to resort to the same tactic. Murder, Heinzen argued, would generate fear. There was something psychotic in the repetitive details:
The revolutionaries must try to bring about a situation where the barbarians are afraid for their lives every hour of the day and night. They must think that every drink of water,