Abstract
In the final days of the Paris Commune, the “bloody week” beginning May 21, 1871, it appeared that the city was burning to the ground. As government troops recaptured Paris street by street from the Communard rebels, ashes rained on the nearby hilltops, mixed with bits of charred paper from the Ministry of Finance and the Louvre library. The classically minded poet Leconte de Lisle accused the Communards of following the example of Herostratos, a lunatic who burned down the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus—one of the wonders of the ancient world—simply to ensure his eternal fame. The French government, headquartered at Versailles, and the international press joined in a chorus of condemnation of the “reds” and their insult to art and civilization. Once the smoke cleared, inconvenient facts began to emerge: The fire damage was not very extensive (casting doubt on any theory of a long-premeditated arson plot), and the Ministry of Finance had been burned not by Communard kerosene bombs but by the incendiary shells shot by the government’s own artillery. The rich vaults of the Bank of France remained unplundered after two months of Communard rule. None of this stopped French conservatives from cultivating the myth that the Paris Commune was a takeover by criminals and prostitutes who first looted the city and then torched it.1
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Notes
Stewart Edwards, The Paris Commune, 1871 (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1971), 249; Gay L. Gullickson, Unruly Women of Paris: Images of the Commune (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), 159–190.
Allan Pinkerton, Strikers, Communists, Tramps, and Detectives (New York: G.W. Carleton, 1900), 18. This book was first published immediately after the railroad strike, in 1878.
Ibid., 85.
Timothy Naftali, Blind Spot: The Secret History of American Counterterrorism (New York: Basic Books, 2005), 33; David C. Wills, The First War on Terrorism: Counter-Terrorism Policy during the Reagan Administration (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003).
A chronology followed in Walter Laqueur’s works, such as A History of Terrorism (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2001); in Dominique Venner, Histoire du Terrorisme (Paris: Pygmalion, 2002); and in Matthew Carr, The Infernal Machine: A History of Terrorism from the Assassination of Tsar Alexander II to Al-Qaeda (New York: New Press, 2006).
Walter Laqueur, The New Terrorism: Fanaticism and the Arms of Mass Destruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 79; Walter Laqueur, No End to War: Terrorism in the Twenty-first Century (New York: Continuum, 2003), 232–233.
William Meacham Murrell, Cruise of the Frigate Columbia (Boston: Benjamin B. Mussey, 1840), 111–115. The Columbia was the first U.S. Navy vessel to circumnavigate the globe; for this reason, a reconstructed, full-scale version of Murrell’s ship is an attraction at Disney World in Orlando, Florida.
Sven Lindqvist, Exterminate All the Brutes: One Man’s Odyssey into the Heart of Darkness and the Origins of European Genocide (New York: New Press, 1996); Lindqvist, A History of Bombing (New York: New Press, 2001); Gerry Kearns, “Bare Life, Political Violence and the Territorial Structure of Britain and Ireland,” in Violent Geographies: Fear, Terror and Political Violence, ed. Derek Gregory and Allan Pred (New York: Routledge, 2006), 9–34.
“A Return to Barbarism,” New York Times, May 1, 1892.
Wall Street Journal, October 9, 2001.
Contrast, for example, Paul Berman, Terror and Liberalism (New York: Norton, 2003); and John Gray, Al Qaeda and What It Means to Be Modern (New York: Free Press, 2003).
Alfred P. Rubin, The Law of Piracy (Newport, RI: Naval War College Press, 1988).
Jane Mayer, “Outsourcing Torture: The Secret History of America’s ‘Extraordinary Rendition’ Program,” New Yorker, February 7, 2005.
Debora L. Spar, Ruling the Waves: Cycles of Discovery, Chaos, and Wealth from the Compass to the Internet (New York: Harcourt, 2001).
Gwen Shaffer, “Force Multiplier,” New Republic, August 2, 2004, 19–21; New York Times, “Police Infiltrate Protests, Videotapes Show,” December 22, 2005; New York Times, “City’s Police Spied Broadly before G.O.P. Convention,” March 25, 2007. This police conduct bears comparison with that discussed in Wolfgang J. Mommsen and Gerhard Hirschfeld, eds., Social Protest, Violence, and Terror in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Europe (New York: St. Martin’s, 1982).
CNN, “‘Enemies of Humanity’ Quote Raises Iraq PR Questions,” July 24, 2005, http://www.cnn.com2005/WORLD/meast/07/24/military.release/index.html.
Interview with Walter Isaacson for GQ magazine, September 11, 2007, http://men.style.comgq/features/landing?id=content_5900.
Greg Grandin, The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 173.
For examples, see Tina Rosenberg, Children of Cain: Violence and the Violent in Latin America (New York: William Morrow, 1991); Philip Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1998); John Edwards, speech to the Council on Foreign Relations, May 23, 2007, quoted in Council on Foreign Relations, “The Candidates on the War on Terror.” http://www.cfr.orgpublication/13672/ (accessed September 8, 2007).
Ruth Scurr, Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006), 245.
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© 2008 Isaac Land
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Land, I. (2008). Introduction. In: Land, I. (eds) Enemies of Humanity. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230612549_1
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