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Articles

Anarchist or Antichrist?: Bakunin on fearing & invoking anarchy

David Limond on a name which once frightened children.

Every year, self-styled anarcho-punks in Germany celebrate ‘Chaos Day’. With much malice aforethought but little planning, they attack (in more or less equal measure) property and police. Christmas as we celebrate it in Britain today was a nineteenth century German import; is there any chance that this new German festival will come our way? The journal Class War regularly advocates comparable actions in Britain. The Germans may not want our mad cows, but in an ever more integrated Europe, will we end up with their mad anarchists? For that matter, what could possibly lie behind such a strange ritual as the organised disorder of Chaos Day and what does any of this have to do with Bakunin?

Once his was a name with which to frighten children. Though unwilling to sully his hands with the dirty work of practising much of what he preached and timid enough to repudiate all his crimes in a full confession written while in prison when asked to do so by the Tsar (he subsequently repudiated the repudiation) Bakunin was the archetype of the mad anarchist bomber, intent ever on finding an opportunity for his next outrage, scouting eagerly for a pretty young face into which vitriol might be thrown.

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