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Tag Archives: anarchism
Revolutionary Bandits
A new history of the revolutionary criminals who rejected any possibility of revolution coming from the degraded masses—and turned their revolt into an individualistic one.
Read MoreThe Uncivil Servant: Revolutionary Bandits
by Mitchell Abidor Discussed in this essay: Ballad of the Anarchist Bandits: The Crime Spree that Gripped Belle Epoque Paris, by John Merriman. Nation Books, 2017, 327 pages. FRENCH ANARCHISM, so important in the history of leftwing politics, giving the world Louise Michel and Sébastien Faure and providing a home to so many exiles, was […]
Read MoreEmma Goldman’s Ice Cream Shop
by Zachary Solomon IT WAS JOHANN MOST, the anarchist who popularized the phrase “propaganda of the deed” to describe leftwing terrorism, who helped inspire Emma Goldman and Alexander (“Sasha”) Berkman in their attempt to assassinate steel magnate Henry Clay Frick in 1892. Yet by the time the attack would become news (and Berkman would spend fourteen years in prison for it), Most was its outspoken critic, […]
Read MoreThe Jewish Chicken Farmers of Petaluma: Why Remember?
Part One by Kenneth Kann FIRST, ASTONISHMENT. Then outrage. Mine. I was viewing “California Dreaming,” a 2013 exhibit on Bay Area Jewish history at San Francisco’s eminent Contemporary Jewish Museum. The exhibit included the story of an extraordinary Jewish chicken ranching community in Petaluma, thirty-five miles north of San Francisco. This museum exhibit was false: […]
Read MoreFirst Anti-Trump Protestors Acquitted, But Challenges Remain
by Mike Isaacson ENDING A YEAR of legal proceedings, the prosecution of a group of Trump inauguration-day protesters concluded last week with the acquittal of all the accused. Six of the 194 defendants faced upwards of sixty years in prison for attending a January 20th inauguration-day anti-Trump march. The stakes of the “J20” trial were immense. […]
Read MoreThe Uncivil Servant: Fighting Fascism in Italy
by Mitchell Abidor Discussed in this essay: A Bold and Dangerous Family by Caroline Moorehead. Harper Collins, 2017, 432 pages. IN THE MONSTROUS hecatomb that was Europe from the 1930s through 1945, the murder of the Italian anti-fascists Carlo and Nello Rosselli can and does pass unnoticed in histories of the era. So we owe […]
Read MoreFascism: What It Isn’t and How Not To Fight It
by Mitchell Abidor Discussed in this essay: Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook by Mark Bray. Melville House, 2017, 259 pages. MARK BRAY’S Antifa can perhaps be considered the definitive statement of the movement that leapt to the front page after the events in Charlottesville. Widely though not deeply researched, Bray’s book clearly lays out the historical […]
Read More“American Anarchist” Breaks the Wrong Rules
by Alessio Franko EVERYTHING I KNOW about documentary film, I learned from Judy Hoffman at the University of Chicago. Her course was possibly the most information-rich I’ve ever taken, as she regaled us with insights from her prolific career in documentary, cinéma vérité, experimental video, and more. In a class session on shot composition for […]
Read MoreWhy Berkman Shot Frick
Nine steelworkers and at least one Pinkerton guard were killed in battles that raged on this date in 1892 at Andrew Carnegie’s Homestead Steel Works in Pittsburgh. The Pinkertons had been brought in to protect scabs imported to replace striking workers; the conflict involved guns and a homemade cannon forged by the strikers. The strike would last for months until the courts crushed the […]
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