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ents,
THE FATHER OF TERRORISM 7
worshiping Satan and preaching
ideas of destruction
that comprehended Cosmos itself, should have performed
in the world a unique and never-to-be-forgotten
role. It was inevitable that he should have stood out
among the men of his time as a strange, bewildering figure.
To his very matter-of-fact and much annoyed antagonist,
Karl Marx, he was little more than a buffoon,
the "amorphous pan-destroyer, who has succeeded in uniting
in one person Rodolphe, Monte Cristo, Karl Moor,
and Robert Macaire." (11) On the other hand, to his
circle of worshipers he was a mental giant, a flaming
titan, a Russian Siegfried, holding out to all the powers
of heaven and earth a perpetual challenge to combat.
And, in truth, Bakouuin's ideas and imagination covered
a field that is not exhausted by the range of mythology.
He juggled with universal abstractions as an alchemist
with the elements of the earth or an astrologist with the
celestial spheres. His workshop was the universe, his
peculiar
task the refashioning
of Cosmos, and he began
by declaring war upon the Almighty himself and every
institution among men fashioned after what he considered
to be the absolutism of the Infinite.
It is, then, with no ordinary human being that we must
deal in treating
of him who is known as the father of
terrorism. Yet, as he lived in this world and fought
with his faithful circle to lay down the principles of universal
revolution, we find him very human indeed. Of
contradictions, for instance, there seems to be no end.
Although an atheist, he had an idol, Satan. Although an
eternal enemy of absolutism, he pleaded with Alexander
to become the Czar of the people. And, although he
fought passionately and superbly to destroy what he
called the "authoritarian hierarchy" in the organization
of the International, he planned for his own purpose