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anarchism: a beginner’s guide
for their achievement of their objectives’. Anarchists must also be prepared
to defend themselves ‘physically against these people’. 79
Anarchists and observers of anarchism tend to be less divided in
their explanations of violence than in their attitude towards its justification.
The leading argument is that violence is motivated by noble
intentions – this is the ‘good terrorist’ argument (after Doris
Lessing’s novel). Individuals commit violence largely because they
feel compelled to do something about the oppression and exploitation
they see around them. In 1969 Bruce McSheehy argued that
the commitment to violent action – which he believed endemic to
anarchism – was intimately connected to the anarchists’ desire to
remove those fetters that inhibited the masses from expressing their
innate capacity for self-government. 80 In 1971 Michael Lerner
advanced a similar case: violence was central to American countercultural
anarchism; it was an expression of the anarchists’ identification
with outcasts and criminals and a reflection of their desire to
recover ‘the capacity for love’. 81 Militants do not always cast themselves
as latter-day outlaws or idealists. Nevertheless, they sometimes
explain their adoption of violence with reference to the state’s
oppression. Similarly Stuart Christie writes:
My conscious choice about the manner of my involvement in the
anti-Francoist resistance was as a fighter – as opposed to being a
helper of Franco’s victims. To do otherwise would have felt like
running away, psychologically and intellectually. I would have felt
hypocritical choosing the easy and safe – but useless and ineffective
– options of demonstrations, picketing and leafleting and not
challenging Franco head on, as it were.
Feeling as strongly as I did about his regime, [how could I] claim
exemption from the struggle and stand aside from the moral
imperative of challenging that which I strongly felt to be wrong?
Seeing someone injured and doing nothing to help is to act
negatively; as granny said, ‘we are not bystanders to life’. 82
Marxist critics sometimes argue that these explanations suggest
that anarchists are damaged, deluded characters, tilting at windmills
and driven by emotion rather than rationality. For the historian Eric
Hobsbawm, it is no coincidence that Spain, the land of Don
Quixote, was an anarchist stronghold. Yet at the heart of the
good terrorist explanation is an idea of responsibility and private
judgement. Rather than seeing individuals as, for example, bearers