Dan Snow's History Hit - Modern Terrorism

Episode Date: January 11, 2023

At the end of the 19th century, the world came to fear terrorism. In an era that simmered with political rage and social inequalities, anarchists and nationalists took to bombing cities and attacking lawmakers and leaders. With an outrage-hungry press peddling hysteria, conspiracy theories and fake news, readers began to think they were living through the end of days. Add social media to the mix and it all sounds a bit familiar.Dr James Crossland, Reader in International History at Liverpool John Moores University, joins Dan on the podcast to discuss the origins of modern terrorism, parallels with what we see today with groups from ISIS to the Proud Boys who stormed the Capitol in Washington DC in 2021 and how exactly terrorism works.Dr James Crossland's new book is called 'Rise of Devils'.Produced by Mariana Des Forges and James Hickmann. Edited by Dougal Patmore.If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe to History Hit today!Download the History Hit app from the Google Play store.Download the History Hit app from the Apple Store.

Welcome, everybody, to Dan Snow's History Hit. In the second half of the 20th century, one monitoring group claims that there were 11,245 acts of terror in Western Europe. Most of these, it says, were carried out by terrorist groups or non-state agents. What is terror? For someone like me who grew up in the 80s and 90s in Britain, the threat of Irish Republican terrorism was always present. There were cases of hate crimes, anti-gay terror in the 90s in London, and then the rise of Islamic terror, particularly 9-11 at the beginning of the 21st century. What is terrorism and where does it come from? How is it different from old-fashioned political violence? Hiring a mob

to go over and assassinate one of your key competitors? Well, to answer that question, I've got the very brilliant James Crossland. He's a reader in international history at Liverpool John Moores University. He's written a new book called The Rise of Devils, Fear and the Origins of Modern Terrorism. We're going to talk about terrorism in the 19th and early 20th century. A time of dynamite, bombing, anarchists and mass hysteria. It's fascinating stuff. Enjoy. T-minus 10. Atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

God save the king. No black-white unity till there is first and black unity. Never to go to war with one another again. And liftoff, and the shuttle has cleared the tower. James, good to have you on the podcast. Thank you for having me. What is terrorism? And is it a modern phenomenon? Why is the guy who went and assassinated the Duke of Buckingham at the beginning of the 17th century not a terrorist?

What is terrorism? Well, maybe he was. Terrorism is a tricky one. It can be defined in many different ways, and you kind of have to pick what definition you're using when you start to sit down to write a book about it. To my mind, the idea of using violence or the threat of violence to intimidate someone into affecting some kind of political outcome, that is as old as the hills. Humans have been doing that for millennia. What I was interested in was how this timeless practice had been enhanced, shall we say, by the arrival of mass media in the 19th century. And the reason why I think that's important is because terrorists need attention.

They need people to be talking about what they're doing so that their message gets out there. They need to be able to disseminate fear as widely as possible. And they also need to inspire emulators. They need to get people to join their campaign. And what happened in the mid-19th century is terrorists got an unprecedented chance to do that because you got the foundations for the global media of today being laid by things like telegraph cables, connecting consonants, exchanging information at relatively fast rates, newspaper restrictions are being lifted,

explosion of pamphlets, magazines, penny presses, the yellow press in the States, you know, tabloid news, that kind of stuff was all perfect for disseminating not just the fear of terrorism through sensational reportage, but also the details of terrorism themselves, because the reportage was very reckless. You got stuff about the political manifestos of terrorists, for example, were sometimes printed out. This is why I did this, and you should do the same. some technical magazines that reproduced details of the bombs that they used. And anyone could read this and go, well, okay, I'm going to go build my own bomb. So this all allowed for terrorism to go global. And is there something about, I'm being very cautious here because it also works in non very anti-democratic states, but is there something about a kind of democratic or proto-democratic citizenry who you can kind of, rather than just assassinating the boss, you can try and do an act of terror that kind of moves this strange thing called public opinion one way or another? Is that important as well? of devils is how the terrorists themselves become aware of this. They realize that they can use the media to sway things a certain way and grab a certain type of attention, present themselves

as righteous. For my money, when we're talking about the origins of modern terrorism, and I'll stress that this mass media to me is when we get modern terrorism, for want of a better term. to me, is when we get modern terrorism, for want of a better term. The starting point I always think of is with an attempt by an Italian nationalist named Felice Orsini to murder Emperor Napoleon III of France in 1858. The reason why I think this is a key starting point for modern terrorism is because Orsini, for one thing, he intended on regicide, but he also developed a unique improvised explosive device for this, which later became known as the Orsini bomb. This was a percussion detonated grenade. So percussion detonated, meaning you don't need to light a fuse, grab attention. Instead, you can just throw it at a hard surface, like for example,

the pavement underneath a Royal carriage. It detonates and kills your target. It also, however, had a shrapnel effect. And Orsini and his team of bombers threw three of these devices at Napoleon's carriage at a time when he was pulling up to the Paris Opera House and there were hundreds of people around. So they did this knowing full well that they would harm bystanders. So this was more than an attempt to regicide. Napoleon, of course, survived. His hat got a little bit damaged. That was basically the main thing that happened to him. But eight innocent bystanders died, and over 100 people were wounded. And this grabbed headlines all over the world. Orsini

was talked about everywhere from Australia to the United States. By design, he was trying to grab attention. He knew that he could get attention in this way. Instead of just simply trying to respect of his target being killed, but he did grab a lot of media attention. He became raised up by a lot of violent radicals of the era as an exemplar of how you should do terrorism. His bomb became lauded. It became a terrorist super weapon. It was coveted by everyone from Russian nihilists to the Fenians. The men who joined John Brown on his raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859. They were interested in the Orsini bomb. So he set this template for how to grab media attention, spread fear, and also spread terrorist knowledge. And the idea is you do violent spectaculars that not only hopefully kill the principal that you're trying to kill, but also move the dial politically as well. Yeah. Orsini's bombing had a, in a roundabout way,

it had a really significant political outcome. It was one factor in Napoleon going to war in Italy with Emperor Franz Joseph. It was also a means of conveying this message, which was at the heart of what Orsini and like-minded revolutionaries of the era wanted, which was to bring down the conservative order of Europe that had been established after the Congress of Vienna in 1815, and to send this message that we can do this. Three men with bombs can make an emperor afraid. And that was a very powerful message. And as I say, it's the message that really cut through to people like the nihilists whose task was to try to kill the Tsar. You mentioned the bombs. Again, when you repeat

the bombs, it made me think, are bombs important? Because you go from a period in history where someone's got a knife, a blade, an axe, and then a single shot firearm, individuals start to get quite a lot of firepower. And that's why more recently we had the nightmare of a dirty bomber, a terrorist attack, or a biological terrorist attack, where one individual can kill thousands, millions of people. Is that also part of this story, that it's the enhanced firepower that technology is giving the individual as points. So, you know, a guy with a bomb is a scary thing, whereas a peasant with a longbow or a blade is less terrifying or less strategic. Yes, that's definitely a big part of it.

During this period in the late 19th century, there were still plenty of shootings, stabbings perpetrated as part of terrorist attacks. But you're right, the bomb was coveted. And this was something that was written about by a veteran of the revolutions of 1848, a man by the name of Karl Heinz. And he wrote about this in the 1850s saying that what we need to do for the next revolution is we need to level the playing field with the states who have standing armies. And the way we do that is through scientific warfare. And that term was used throughout this period as a kind of code for terrorism, or not even a code,

it was just a euphemism for terrorism, scientific warfare, the art of building bombs, and using poisons and using asymmetrical forms of warfare that were both unconventional, but also quite fear-inducing. For example, it's not just the Orsini bomb. When dynamite is invented in the 1860s, that becomes lauded by terrorists the world over. It is praised. There are songs written about it because it is, as one notable terrorist of the era or terrorist preacher, let's say, of the era said, it's the proletariat's artillery. It's the means by which we can strike back. So yeah, there's kind of mythos that grows around these weapons as well. And you're right, the fact that dynamite, for

example, could just be lifted from a construction site, mining operation, and turned into a deadly weapon. Tsar Alexander II is murdered by a suicide bomber with dynamite clutched to his chest. Talk to me more about, well, Russia, of course, but just the kind of these anarchist terrorist attacks that many people today will think of terrorism as a recent phenomenon, perhaps in Ireland, around Middle East, radical Islam, whatever it might be. Talk to me about the late 19th century and the kind of terrorism we read about in Conrad and how large it loomed in the minds of the late 19th century reader of newspapers and novels. Well, it loomed very large. And if we're talking about, I guess, the first big evil of the

terrorists, the one that really grabs attention post-Orsini, it's the group that is arguably the first proper terrorist organization. They were Russian nihilists by the name of Narodna Volya, or People's Will. And their mission was to kill the Tsar. And they started their campaign in 1879 by issuing a public declaration saying the Tsar is already dead. He's already dead. He just doesn't realize it yet, which itself was a form of terrorism, a form of psychological warfare. And they went from there to attempt, it was over a dozen attempts, I think, to try to kill him using timed explosive devices, which added an extra layer of terror. They actually smuggled a time bomb into the Winter Palace. And the agent from People's

Will was able to get himself out of there before it detonated. And when they finally got their man in 1881, it was the spectacular of the age. It was covered worldwide. The New York Times ran a very telling article calling for a war on terrorism. Slightly more accurate verbiage than George W. Bush, but it was the same basic principle of saying, we must fight back against these people. And Notodnovolya became the next exemplar after Orsini, the group that others wanted to emulate. Anarchist terrorism started flourishing around about the same time, sort of mid-1880s and into the 1890s.

Anarchists were not as well organized. They didn't have vast conspiracies. They didn't have tight-knit groups. Most of the time, they tended to be more what today we might call lone wolves self-radicalized but that in itself made them more terrifying because they were very difficult to detect they could just be anyone getting hold of dynamite turning up in a public place detonating it or if they were sophisticated enough setting a time device and then getting out of there as well. So this is all stuff that's very resonant today. This is how we think of

terrorism today. But you have to put yourself in the context of the time. For the peoples of Europe, the United States, where this was really starting anarchist terrorism in the 1880s, 1890s, this was all very new. I mean, today, sadly, we know what it is. We know what it looks like. But this was a pretty new phenomenon, the idea that just anyone could turn up somewhere with an IED and detonate it. You listen to Dan Snow's History, talking about terrorism and its roots. More coming up. talking about terrorism and its roots. More coming up.

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Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. Were there any examples of terrorism working? The one example from my lifetime I think about is the Madrid train bombing and Spain withdrew its support for the Coalition of the Willing, or whatever it was called. George Bush's Iraq War just afterwards. Are there examples in the 19th century of actually some of these people getting their way? Or do we have to start looking towards the

second decade of the 20th century, particularly famous attack there? Were there examples of terrorist successes? In a word, I would say no. There were instances where terrorists achieved their tactical goals. So the killing of the Tsar in 1881 by people's will, that's a good example. In 1882, a Fenian splinter group called the Invincibles stabbed to death the chief secretary for Ireland and his permanent undersecretary in Phoenix Park in Dublin. It's quite a spectacular set of targeted killings. At the same time, bombers from elsewhere in the Fenian movement were successfully detonating dynamite devices on the London underground at Westminster and even outside the headquarters of Scotland Yard. That was blown up in 1884.

These attacks were part of the so-called Dynamite War of the 1880s, which was the first concerted terrorist campaign to be conducted on British soil, comprised of about 15 or so bombings across the country. The anarchists of the 1890s, they also successfully bombed a theater in Barcelona, cafes in Paris. They carried out a number of high-profile assassinations in Europe and the United States, but none of these attacks achieved the perpetrators' political goals. So the Tsar's murder didn't lead to the end of Tsardom. That would take another few decades and a revolution. Arguably, Fenian attacks in the 1880s played a part in bringing the question of Irish home rule before Parliament, but as we know, that was only the start of a long political process. The anarchist terrorists certainly

never got their revolution. In fact, the bombings and shootings they carried out led to schisms within the movement. So by the late 1890s, several anarchist thinkers were openly denouncing individual terrorism because in addition to it not bringing down governments, kings, capital, etc., the violence was starting to damage the reputation of their ideology. It was making anarchism, to the minds of the press and the public, synonymous with violence. So no, the achievements of political goals via terrorism were pretty thin on the ground in this period. However, what I tried to get across in Rise of Devils is the extent to which the terrorists of

late 19th century provided proof of concept for terrorists of the 20th century, and indeed right up to our own time. So they achieved something in developing terrorist doctrine, but not a whole lot in terms of political outcomes. Another aspect of terrorism that is not new is this idea of hate preachers and the controversy around these figures. Tell me about some of them. So the hate preachers, and as I like to call them, the dynamite grifters, really flourished during this era. And these were people who, just like today, were trying to exploit extremism, hate, radicalization to make some money. I should

also say that much like today, it's hard to tell at what point they believed in this stuff and at what point they wanted to just make some dosh. Somewhere in the gray area between the two is where these people existed. And one of my favorite characters, and I use that term loosely, who I came across in this respect was a fellow by the name of Professor Mezarov, who was neither a professor, nor as his name indicates, a Russian. He was a bartender, Scottish immigrant to the United States. His name was Richard Rogers. And he was just an ordinary fellow who in the early 1880s, again, the 1880s, terrorism is in the news. It's all over the place. The murder of the Tsar in particular is at the forefront of press coverage. And he emerges in New York claiming to be this fellow called Professor Mezorov, who is allegedly connected to people's will. And not just people's will, he's connected to revolutionary conspiracies across Europe, so he claims. He gives interviews to journalists who

lap all this up where he's talking about how he can turn anything underneath a kitchen sink into an explosive device. He's talking about how he likes to wander down Wall Street of an afternoon with grenades in his pockets in case there's any bankers he wants to murder. He's glamorizing terrorism and he's obviously projecting out this image to the world of being some sort of bomb mastermind. He's charging 30 cents, I think it is, per lecture to come and hear him talk about how to build bombs. He establishes a so-called dynamite school in Brooklyn, where he trains some of the Fenians I mentioned before, who come across to Britain, as well as anarchists.

It should be noted, none of his bombs were particularly good. He wasn't all that great at the craft he claimed to be skilled in, but he was great at promoting the idea of terrorism as something that was a means of salvation for anyone who felt downtrodden or smited, which was a lot of people in the 1880s. So he's a really interesting character in this respect because he could exist today, exploiting people's anxieties, exploiting people's fears, exploiting people's hatred, making money off it. A funny epilogue to his story, he ends up being accused by one of his former students at the dynamite school of being a police spy which he might well have been i would not have been surprised if he was and shortly after that he kind of disappears off the radar and one of the last

mentions i found of him was him deciding to get into the synthetic butter business so he moves from explosives to peddling synthetic butter. Well, he would have had a decent market in World War I Germany. But anyway, the flip side of these weird sort of hate preachers, presumably they're sort of admiring journalists and the authors. I mean, I'm thinking like, even today, lots of the steampunk Sherlock Holmes-y kind of vibes all show these terrorist masterminds and using new technology and comsy kind of vibes all show these terrorist masterminds and using new technology and holding politicians to ransom. Is that a lesson that we've learned from now 150, 200 years of terrorism that we've got to stop kind of giving them airtime and eulogizing them?

I think we're certainly better at it, certainly better than we were back in the late 19th century. But it is always difficult. It's difficult to walk that line where you want to explain why this terrorist attack has occurred, but you don't want to necessarily glamorize it or, worst case scenario, popularize the politics behind it. That's when you get into the danger of inspiring emulators. A case in point from this period of how not to do it, and one which involved the deployment of fake news, was a French anarchist who went by the name of Ravachol. Now, this is in 1892. It's a pretty fissile time in France. You've got labor disputes, you've got riots, And this is at the height of anarchist terrorism across Europe. And in the midst of all this, this fellow called Ravachol detonates two bombs

in Paris. They don't kill anyone. They do some damage to some buildings, but he doesn't kill anyone. But he is seized on by the press as some kind of terrorist mastermind. And there are news stories printed about how he has this vast army of anarchists under his command, how they're wiring up the sewers underneath the posh suburbs of Paris to kill the rich the end result is that when he's apprehended and executed, he becomes more myth than man. He becomes a martyr for the anarchist cause. And the cafe where he's arrested, that gets bombed a few days later. There are other bombings that occur in Paris by anarchists who say that they are doing this for Ravachol. The French president, Sadi Carnot, he's shot dead as a means of revenge against the French state for executing Ravachol. And I can't help but think when I look at the coverage of this guy who, for a hot minute there, he was the Osama bin Laden of

the 1890s. He was the big evil. There were newspapers in Los Angeles talking about how he's terrifying the Parisians and all this stuff. And the impact of that was that it made him seem like someone who could not just be allowed to fade into memory to the minds of anarchists. He had to be avenged. And that perpetuates a cycle of terrorism. that today? I think so. But it's still a dangerous line to walk when it comes to reportage. And it's particularly difficult today, obviously, because of social media and the fact that you can't stop people from eulogizing or praising these people. I'm very struck by the fact that assassination, political violence, terrorism in the late 19th, 30th, 20th century, I mean, it was an incredibly dangerous time to be in a position of leadership. I mean, you've mentioned several czars, presidents killed. Queen Victoria survived several attempts.

You've got Lincoln in 1865, Garfield and McKinley, both in the next sort of 40 or 50 years, American presidents. I mean, Eastern Europe's like a sort of gigantic Gotten Dammerung for anyone who's royal or in high political office. Famously, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, but his auntie, the Empress. Anyway, so it's just chaos, Phil. And is that

one of the reasons that we now live in this kind of security industrial state of the beast and gigantic police forces and armed police officers every time? Government is a lot further away from us than it once was. Is this why? I think it plays a role in it. You mentioned Empress Elizabeth of Austria there. Her murder is an interesting one because she is killed by an anarchist on the shores of late Geneva in 1898. So this is an Austrian monarch being killed in Switzerland by an Italian anarchist. So we have a genuine international terrorist incident here. And what's interesting about this particular murder is that it prompts the first real concerted attempt at international cooperation during this

period by police to try and get the terrorism problem under control. Now, there'd been attempts before, most notably in the aftermath of the Paris Commune of 1871 to try to coordinate police efforts, but they never really worked. What happens in 1898 is you get a bunch of police and diplomats meeting in Rome for what they call the Anti-Anarchist Congress, which is interesting in and of itself because it's not the Anti-Terrorist Congress, it's the Anti-Anarchist Congress because at this point, again, a lot because of the way the media has portrayed them, anarchism is basically synonymous with terrorism to the minds of a lot of the public and indeed the police, which was a sweeping generalization. But anyway, what comes out of the Rome Congress is this idea

of the need for more security for heads of state, the need for more sharing of intelligence, and the need for just a general, more cooperative attitude between states, even states that have different justice systems and so forth to try to get this thing under wraps. So it does have this outcome, this first great wave of terrorism, of setting us on the path to international policing. And regards to guarding heads of state and the distance between them, interesting thing about the McKinley killing in 1901 when President McKinley is shot by an anarchist. It's at a public gathering in Buffalo, New York. He's got secret service people there. But again, they're not the secret service

people of today. They're not trained to spot a possible attack. They can't anticipate this stuff. So when it happens, it does start this thinking process in America about how we need to guard presidents more effectively, which leads us to today where they travel with helicopters flying overhead and a full-armed motorcade. Amazing. Theodore Roosevelt narrowly survived assassination attempt, but I guess not by terrorists, but someone of unsound mind, an assassin more, who took over from McKinley. So two persons on the bounce almost got killed. Roosevelt delivered his speech, his blood all over the speech. And before he went to hospital, I love that story.

What does all your studies make of the future? Just as technological change, media change, access to reliable firearms, dynamite, led to a kind of upsurge of terrorism in this period we're talking about, are you worried and scared about the next turn of the technological wheel and what it all might mean? I wouldn't go so far as to say worried. When we're talking about things like fissile material, drones, and the like, this is always going to be an issue when new things are invented. And this goes back to, as I say, stuff that Karl Heinzen was writing about in the 1850s. When new means of destruction, let's call them that, are invented, there is always going to be room for innovation. And during the late 19th century, this was a time of very rapid weapons innovation. And so you get these moments where the new stuff comes around,

people can get access to it, and they develop. Now, back in the late 19th century, the police, as I say, were not necessarily on top of this. This was all very new. They were on a learning curve too, and they didn't really start to figure out terrorism, I would say, until the early 1900s, and that's possibly being generous. These days, we've got over a century or more of experience. We can tap into a memory of the patterns of how terrorism works, the patterns that were established of active political violence occurs. There's a reaction, there's emulation, there's reportage. These cycles were established back in the 19th century, and they're pretty much the same today. It's just that today, there is a bit more knowledge there to try and break these cycles.

But there are still challenges. I mentioned before the problem police in the late 19th century had of thwarting the lone wolf, a self-radicalized individual. That's still a problem today. Even with the capability to monitor people's social media, things like that, stuff that was not available, obviously, in the late 19th century, it's still a problem. So there are still these issues, but the knowledge of the years gone by does help in that respect. James Crosland, thank you very much for coming to the podcast. What's the book called? The Rise of Devil's Fear and the Origins of Modern Terrorism. So interesting. Well, thank you very much for coming on.

Thank you for having me, Dan. Been a pleasure.