Al-Qaeda, Victorian Style

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fascinating article....

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,1072-1721466,00.html

Al-Qaeda, Victorian style
Graham Stewart
A bomb on the Underground was only one of the anarchist outrages that shook Europe a century ago

AL-QAEDA’S international terror network is not unrivalled in history. A little over a century ago, anarchist cells, operating throughout the Western world, caused havoc. In the space of nine years between 1892 and 1901, anarchists assassinated the President of the United States, the President of France, the Prime Minister of Spain, the Empress of Austria and the King of Italy. As scalp hunting goes, this was an impressive collection.
In London, post offices were blown up and public figures were targeted. A bomb went off on an Underground train as it was passing from Farringdon into what was then the Aldersgate Tube station. The carriage was shredded. Miraculously only one man was killed. Bombs were lobbed from upper galleries on to the floors of the Paris stock exchange and the French Chamber of Deputies. Army barracks were attacked. A bomb was detonated in a café near the Gare Saint-Lazare. Another device was tossed into a Madrid theatre, killing 20 people.

These indiscriminate acts caused widespread alarm. Dark and shadowy bearded figures, with capes concealing orb-shaped bombs with fizzing fuses, stalked the popular imagination. The Times warned its readers of the “anarchist epidemic” and told the Home Secretary, Herbert Asquith, to quit his “masterly inactivity” and get a grip on the problem. For a brief moment in the mid-1890s, the Western world shook before this new enemy within. And yet, where is the anarchist terror network now? Are there lessons in its rise and fall for today’s war on terror?

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