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“I mean, say what you like about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least it's an ethos.”
Which was more common—deciding that the system was flawed, and ought to be removed? Or that the old times were better, and we need to go back? I suspect that nationalism was more common among workers than anarchy ever was. Easier to say the government should be the right guys than no guys, at least when you still have a family to support. Maybe I’m wrong and the vast increases in state capacity by 1800 were impossible to ignore.
Regardless, the “golden age of assassination” probably has more to do with the industrialization of weapons. Bigger explosives and semi-automatic personal weapons in particular. Revolvers and repeating rifles.
Recent events in Japan call this into question -- one successful assassination at the highest level using a homemade shotgun, and just now a pretty close brush with some sort of IED. Almost certainly much crappier than the actual dynamite and shitty revolvers favoured around the fin de siecle.
These people in Japan are (probably?) not anarchists per se, but I think it points in the direction that it's simply that the will is no longer there in the West.
I think it's more the sort of "general weapons level"--I assume many European nations used to (and some still do) have meaningful gun ownership (you used to be able to just buy a handgun in Britain, for example--the Pistol Act, which introduced a relatively-mild form of hangun control via requiring more paperwork from retailers, was enacted only after like the first Boer War, I think). Japan, meanwhile, confiscated swords before the Meiji era and the modern Japanese state limits you to shotguns and air rifles that have further regulations regarding ownership thereof. There was also that time in like the 60's when a left-wing politician was ran through with a freaking short sword during a public appearance.
More like much better VIP security, the rich and powerful do not longer believe they are "god chosen" an no common peon can harm them.
Times when empress was just walking the street without any security and precautions are gone.
You can still minecraft you town mayor or council, but it is not so glamorous, so fewer people bother.
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Call what into question?
I'm saying that the Golden Age, specifically, saw more high-profile assassinations because of new weapons. Japan doesn't really have an equivalent scenario.
The link between the improved weapons and the anarchist assassinations -- McKinley could just as well have been shot with a duelling pistol. (or a homemade shotgun)
Bombs of course have been an available method of expressing discontent at least since 5 November, 1605 -- it's just a matter of how many people are willing to take up the gauntlet.
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Nationalism, at least as anything more developed than "don't like foreigners, simple as" was probably more of a middle class phenomenon in the 19th and early 20th centuries than a working class one. You may be right about anarchism in particular but revolutionary ideas in general maybe not. In Spain I think anarchism probably was more popular with the workers than nationalism.
My knowledge of Spanish anarchy is fueled largely by Hearts of Iron, so I’ll have to take your word for it.
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I assume the latter was more common too, or at least a variety of nationalism that was also promised cool stuff you didn't have in the past. On the other hand, it didn't win everywhere just by having greater numbers; the Bolsheviks probably only really had a small chunk of the population personally backing them (as opposed to backing replacing the Czar with whatever) and they came to power, and then everyone was a Bolshevik. I guess I'm just interested how anarchism fizzled out where other movements grew. There doesn't really need to be a more dramatic answer than other stuff being more compelling or the anarchists losing on the battlefield, I think this post is more driven by my interest that this was such a crazy phenomenon and barely gets talked about these days. Not like there was a shortage of more crazy movements in that era to get distracted by though.
Definitely partially true, though a lot of the weapons were kinda primitive. Of course, weaponry is even more sophisticated nowadays and yet we have less of this, and the Wall Street Bombing for instance was carried out with dynamite, which had been around for half a century without being used for domestic terrorism. I assume there was sort of an overlapping time where 1. improved weapons were at hand, 2. it occurred to radicals and terrorists they could actually use them, and 3. it hadn't occurred to Presidential staff how really vulnerable they were before modern security forces.
Yeah, I originally included a paragraph about how Guy Fawkes needed a dozen conspirators and 36 barrels of gunpowder, while Timothy McVeigh did his dirty work with much less. Then I checked, and apparently he had…a couple dozen 55-gallon drums. Oh. He just had the advantage of a personal truck. I guess things didn’t change as much as I thought.
Seriously, though, the revolver was such an outrageous step up from its predecessors. Five or six rounds in a pocket. And they only became more readily available over the course of the 1800s. You see a similar thing happen in 1900s China with the proliferation of cheap Webley copies and autoloaders.
True and probably something I don't appreciate enough. I remember reading an interesting piece about how much radically (and unsurprisingly) colonialism had to change after accounting for the small arms released throughout the colonies by the new arrivals themselves.
If you find it, send me a link?
Definitely will
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