An anonymous coward writes:

"The Heroes of Hell"
Mike Davis Talks with Jon Wiener
Radical History Review 85(2003), 227-237

Jon Wiener: I've heard through the grapevine that you are working on a book about terrorism.

Mike Davis: My day job currently is a grassroots history of Los Angeles in the sixties ["Setting the Night on Fire"]. But I have also been busy on an extracurricular project entitled, after a poem in Mother Earth, "Heroes of Hell." It aims to be a world history of revolutionary terrorism from 1878 to 1932._Why did you choose those specific dates as bookends?_

Eighteen seventy-eight was the inception of the "classical" age of
terrorism: the half-century during which the bourgeois imaginary was
haunted by the infamous figure of the bomb-throwing nihilist or
anarchist. Beginning in 1878, in fact, Bakuninists of several
nationalities and their cousins, the Russian Narodniki, embraced
assassination as a potent, if last-ditch weapon in the struggle
against autocracy. The calendar of that year is extraordinary. In
January, Vera Zasulich wounds General Trepov, the sadistic jailer of
the Narodniki. In April, Alexander Solovev makes his attempt on the
czar, the beginning of the royal game hunt that will culminate in
Alexander II's assassination by Peoples' Will in 1881. In May and
June, there are the successive attacks on the aged kaiser in Berlin
by the anarchists Holding and Nobiling, which provide Bismarck with
his long-sought-after pretext for repressing the utterly innocent
German social democrats. In the fall, meanwhile, Moncasi tries to
kill Alfonso XII of Spain, and Giovanni Passanante, hiding a dagger
in a red flag, slashes at the king of Italy. The year ends with a
hysterical encyclical from Pope Leo XIII on the "deadly pestilence of
Communism."

The debut of modern terrorism, I should emphasize, followed in the
wake of defeated hopes for popular uprisings in Russia, Andalusia,
and the Mezzogiorno. [The Italian Bakuninists did briefly established
a Che-like guerrilla focoin the Matese mountains above Naples for a
few weeks in 1877.] Terrorism, in other words, was one response to
the double failure of old-style urban Blanquism and rural
Garibaldeanism. There is an obvious parallel with the contemporary
experience of the Irish Revolutionary Brotherhood: after the betrayal
and suppression of the great Fenian conspiracy, a secret cadre turned
from insurrection to individual assassination as well as the first
dynamite campaign against English cities.

_And 1932 as a finale?_

Nineteen thirty-two was the last in a series of desperate but
unsuccessful attempts by Italian anarchists, direct descendants of
Passanante, to assassinate Mussolini. Fascism and Stalinism
succeed-where previous regimes failed-in bringing anarchism, and in
Russia, the powerful social revolutionary movement, to the brink of
extinction. The classical attentat [assassination attempt] is
rendered powerless in face of the modern totalitarian state, although
members of the Spanish FAI (International of Anarchist Federations)
will persist through 1950s to help reignite "propaganda of the deed"
with a blaze in the 1960s. But that is the story for another volume.

_What put you on the track of Malatesta, Ravachol, and Durruti? Is
this a political and intellectual response to 9/11?_

Only after the fact. The real occasion of this project was reading
Pierre Broue's magnificent Histoire de l'internationale communiste
(1997). Like Victor Serge and Isaac Deutscher, Broue writes in the
almost extinct idiom of the left opposition. His history is a
passionate-at times almost unbearably poignant-engagement with the
Shakespearean tragedy of the revolutionary generation decimated by
Stalin and Hitler. He rescues the memory-the courage and moral
grandeur-of hundreds of extraordinary women and men.

Broue inspired me to look at an even more out-of-fashion and
politically incorrect group: the avenging angels who stalked kings
and robber barons with bomb or dagger in hand. They tend to be the
pariahs of the left, even to "respectable" anarchism, as well as
demons of the right. I want to understand the moral architecture of
their universe as well as the repercussions of their acts. In doing
so, of course, I am now unavoidably drawn into the periphery of
debates about that sinister catchall category: Terrorism.

_Are you hoping to revise previous historiography or is this breaking
new ground?_

Fortunately, I have giant shoulders to stand on. Anarchism-including
its violent denominations-has had superb national historians: Jean
Maitron (France), Paul Avrich (United States), and Osvaldo Bayer
(Argentina). Their work should be familiar to all radical historians,
although Maitron's History of the Anarchist Movement in France and
Bayer's Rebellion in Patagonia, like Broue's Comintern book, have
inexplicably failed to find English translations.

One must be extremely modest in face of such achievements. On the
other hand, there is not yet any synoptic account that encompasses
the world scope of anarchist and social-revolutionary terrorism. The
key actors were fervent internationalists-sometimes claiming
Esperanto as their first language!-who conceived themselves engaged
in common combat against capital and state. A popular slogan,
ascribed to a Russian who blew himself up in the Bois de Vincennes in
Paris, was "take revenge on the bourgeoisie wherever they are!"
Chinese and Japanese anarcho-terrorists, for example, were directly
inspired by Russian heroes, while veterans of the European
underground ended up planting bombs or doing bank jobs in the New
World. American anarchists, in turn, crossed the Atlantic to take
revenge on the despots of the Old World. My project is a global
audit, ranging from Chicago to Canton, Latvia to Patagonia. . . .

_[W]hat is the specific historical site of "classical terrorism"?_

In a word, the Mur des Federes. This is the infamous wall in Père
Lachaise cemetery against which the last Communards were executed. As
Eugène Pottier, the author of the Internationale, put it in a
contemporary poem: "Your history, bourgeoisie, is written on this
wall. It is not a difficult text to decipher." Thiers's slaughter of
30,000 working-class and bohemian Parisians, to the almost universal
approval of middle-class opinion, was the moral watershed in European
labor history. As Mayer emphasizes, it was essentially a colonial
massacre brought home to the metropolis. Together with other
subsequent atrocities-like the mass executions in Russia, the murder
of internationalists in Cádiz in 1873, the violent suppression of the
1877 strike wave, and the Haymarket hangings-it convinced many
revolutionaries that terror had to be fought with terror. If victory
seemed impossible, better then, vengeance.

If the escalation of class violence by republican as well as
absolutist rulers was the necessary condition for this new terrorism,
causal sufficiency, as I mentioned earlier, was provided by the
frustration of Bakuninist and Narodnik hopes for large-scale
uprisings in the Mediterranean and Russian countrysides. In the
generation from the death of the Commune to the first international
May Day in 1890, revolutionaries were vexed by the immaturity of
social conditions to sustain large-scale class struggle. The European
artisanate was in its final death agony from the Pale to Sicily, yet
the modern industrial proletariat, except in England, was not yet
fully born. Strikes were usually crushed or led to small violent
cataclysms like that depicted by Emile Zola in Germinal. Gains in
suffrage, meanwhile, were easily annulled by antisocialist laws or
confiscated by corruption as in Spain and the United States. In this
context, the social democratic strategy-Marx and Engels's counsel of
patient organizing and the slow accumulation of forces-seemed
maddeningly slow, especially for young artisans forced to choose
between starvation, emigration, or crime.

_Terrorism, then, was a pathology of structural transition, of
delayed modernization?_

It is tempting to simplify matters and say that the anarcho-terrorism
of the 1880- 1900 period was the ghost dance of the European
artisanate, with Ravachol as Wovoka or the Mahdi. Certainly this has
been a traditional approach to understanding the popular,
episodically violent, anarchism of Andalusia, yet as Temma Kaplan
demonstrated in a major revisionist study, the millenarian
interpretation collapses under careful scrutiny or, at least, yields
to a more rational-actor model.

Similarly, traditional attempts to portray anarchists as criminal
madmen or publicity-hungry meglomaniacs-beginning with the Italian
criminologist Lombroso in the 1890s-are disproved by the sober,
exemplary characters of such figures as Bresci [the assassin of King
Umberto] or Durruti [whose Robin Hood-like feats defy credulity].
Even Czolgoscz, the killer of McKinley, who has always been portrayed
as a lunatic' by historians, was quite sane, as well as
extraordinarily modest and dignified in bearing. As James Clarke has
shown, Czolgoscz was seeking revenge for the massacre several years
earlier of nineteen [some accounts say twenty-one] Slavic miners in
Latimer, Pennsylvania. [When some of the wounded had asked for water,
deputies replied, "We'll give you hell, not water, hunkies!"]

If the criminological approach is bankrupt in the study of anarchism,
this doesn't mean that there weren't significant overlaps between
terrorism and the late Victorian underworlds. But the violent
anarchists of the 1880s and early 1890s represent less a
criminalization of the labor movement than an unprecedented
politicalization of the criminal strata of the urban proletariat.
[There are interesting similarities to the Black Panthers'
orientation to the street proletariat in the late 1960s.] In
post-1871 Montmartre and Belleville, as Maitron and others have
shown, there was a fascinating continuum between anarchism, bohemia,
proletarian subculture, and criminality. In the 1890s, one of the
most popular songs in the cabarets was "La Ravachol": "Lady Dynamite,
that dances so fast, let us dance and sing... and dynamite!"

It was a very different articulation of class location and politics
than the Parisian lumpens whom Marx denounced as shock troops of
Bonapartism in 1848-50. The attentat-in the full sense that it was
used in Père Peinard and the underground press of the
period-encompassed both the act of revolutionary vengeance against
the class oppressor and routine expropriations that allowed Ravachol,
say, to wear new suits or purchase books. A common moral
economy-apparently embraced by a significant minority of the Parisian
working class-justified both assassination and theft on class grounds.

_But can you generalize from this Parisian instance?_

No, although it has fascinating counterparts in Berlin, Barcelona,
and Buenos Aires, especially in the 1920s. My research is structured
around a provisional typology and periodization. In my reading,
revolutionary terrorism is largely retributive, although sometimes
messianic. It is useful to distinguish four distinctive types of
elitist revolutionary violence. Moral-symbolic terrorism was
typically carried out by lone wolves [solitarios], like Ravachol or
Bresci, with the support of a few friends; or by autonomous cells
[groupuscules or grupitos] with never more than a score of members.
On this scale there was no capacity to sustain long campaigns, so the
terrorist sequence typically involved an act of revenge, the
execution of the avenger, then further revenge for his death.
Sometimes this cycle was repeated.

Thus in Paris in 1892, Ravachol avenges massacred workers in Fourmies
with a series of bombings of prosecutors and judges. After he is
executed, Meunier blows up the Restaurant Very, Leautheir stabs the
first bourgeois he meets on the street-it turns out to be the Serbian
minister-and Valliant bombs the chamber of deputies. When Valliant is
guillotined, he is avenged by Henry who blows up the Café Terminus
and a police station. Henry's arrest enrages the art critic Feneon,
who plants a bomb in the chic Café Foyot, which ironically only
wounds the anarchist Tailhade, who nonetheless approves of the
attack. Finally Caserio, claiming justice for Vaillant and Henry,
stabs to death the president of France, Sadi Carnot.

A similar cycle of vengeance-originally in response to the repression
of the Jerez uprising in 1892-took place simultaneously in Barcelona.
Both led to mass trials of anarchist sympathizers, including writers
and editors, and repressive legislation. In Barcelona, the defendants
were imprisoned in the infamous Montjuich fortress and hideously
tortured. This, of course, only supplied more fuel for an almost
infinite vicious circle of violence in Spain that, in some remote but
real sense, is continued today by ETA [Euskadi ta Askatasuna]. It is
key to remember, however, that state atrocities, which most recently
include a "death squad" campaign against Basque militants conducted
by the former Gonzales regime in Madrid, provide the oxygen without
which terrorism cannot combust for very long.

_This also sounds like the West Bank._

There are certainly similarities on the supply-and-demand side.
Indeed, from the 1890s, every ruling-class crime seems to summon a
"hero from hell" to avenge dead strikers or executed revolutionaries.
The relentless slogan of Russian anarchists was "smert za smert,"
death for death. Thus Frick was shot for Homestead; Canovas del
Castillo, the Spanish prime minister, was killed in revenge both for
dead anarchists and the executed Filipino patriot Rizal; King Umberto
was asssassinated for the women and children killed by his troops
during the 1898 bread riots; McKinley was killed for Latimer; the
prince of Wales was sniped at in Brussels in 1900-an anarchist
response to the deaths of thousands of Boer women and children;
likewise King Leopold was shot at in 1902 for his Congo atrocities;
ex-Idaho governor Stuenenberg was blown up for the Coeur d'Elene
outrages; a Spanish anarchist took aim at General Renard who
slaughtered 2,500 Chilean nitrate miners in 1907; Colonel Falcon, who
killed May Day demonstrators in Buenos Aires in 1909, was punctually
given an anarchist send-off as was, thirteen years later, General
Varela, the butcher of Patagonia; four New York anarchists blew
themselves up with the bomb they intended to use against Rockefeller
for the Ludlow massacre; Count Sturgkh was shot in Vienna [by the son
of a leading socialist] as an antiwar protest; Australian IWWs fought
conscription with arson, while the Galleanisti in the United States
used letter bombs; in 1920 Wall Street was bombed for the Palmer
raids; Petlura, the butcher of Ukranian Jews, fell before an
anarchist bullet in Paris in 1926; and a year later, the Bank of
Boston in Buenos Aires was blown up in retaliation for the
electrocution of Sacco and Vanzetti.

This is only a partial declension. Anarchists also killed the empress
of Austria, several more Spanish prime ministers, and made
innumerable attempts on other monarchs, including the Persian shah
and the Japanese mikado. In the Russian Empire, the eye-for-an-eye
spiral became almost uncountable. If tens of thousands of insurgents
were cut down by cossack sabers or died on the scaffold, then several
thousand czarist officials, from lowly policemen to grand dukes, were
shot, stabbed, or blown up in an estimated 20,000 separate terrorist
acts between 1902 and 1917. European and American anarchist terrorism
was craft work; Russian social- revolutionary terrorism was mass
production. But for this reason it clearly constitutes a separate
type.

_Please explain._

Strategic terrorism in Russia, which was also emulated by the Chinese
anarchists in 1907-12, sought to cripple the autocratic state: either
to force liberal reforms from the top down (the aim of Narodnaya
Volya in 1879-82) or to open a breach that could be stormed by
revolutionary peasants and workers [the goal of the SRs and their
splinter groups, as well as various Polish, Latvian, and Armenian
revolutionary formations, in 1902-1908]. Symbolic justice was an
integral dimension, but the true goal was the systematic decimation
of the human infrastructure of despotism. Although the struggle was
carried out by small cells, the ties to truly mass parties gave
Russian terrorism a formidable stamina that distinguished it from the
amateurish and episodic attentats of European and American
anarchists. On the other hand, as the Social Democrats constantly
pointed out, the SR's combat organization became the tail that wagged
the dog. Terrorism became an end unto itself: a veritable "theodicy
of violence," in the words of one historian.

_What were the other two types of classical terrorism?_

Expropriatory terrorism consisted of two subspecies. On one hand,
there were the celebrated bands of anarcho-outlaws like Jacob's
"Workers of the Night" and the Bonnot Gang, which included the young
Victor Serge, in Paris, and Severino Di Giovanni's desperados in
Buenos Aires. They thrived as much from notoriety as from loot and
self-consciously "performed" in the gaze of the popular press. The
Bonnot Gang added to their fame by pioneering the use of the
newfangled automobile in their heists. They preferred to die young in
a heroic blaze of gunfire than end up in Cayenne [Devil's Island],
the green hell that devoured generations of French anarchists.
Likewise the handsome Severino-the original "man in black" who was
sometimes compared to dead silent-screen idol Valentino-thrilled
Argentinians with his insouciance before a firing squad in 1931. [The
famous actor José Gomez, according to Bayer, had won admission to
Severino's last scene by pounding on the prison gates and demanding:
"Open up in the name of Art!"]

More anonymous, although no less legendary, were the groups who
robbed banks on behalf of their left-wing parties or unions. The most
famous example was the mixed cell of Lettish SRs, anarchists, and
Bolsheviks-under the leadership of the mysterious "Peter the
Painter"-who perpetrated the Tottenham Outrage in 1909, the
Houndsditch Murders' in 1910, and then blasted away with their
Mausers at Winston Churchill and the Scots Guards during the Sidney
Street Siege in 1911. But there were other notable instances: Russian
SRs and anarchists did bank jobs all over Europe, and Durruti and
Ascaso were Spanish anarchism's Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid as
they blazed a trail across Cuba, Mexico, and Argentina in the early
1920s.

Defensive terrorism arose in conditions of semi-civil war, when
employers and the state engaged in the systematic murder of union or
radical leaders while maintaining a facade of electoral democracy.
This was the situation in Barcelona from 1917 to 1921 and in parts of
Germany during 1919-23. Thus the pistoleros of the Catalan employers
were countered by Durruti, the Ascaso brothers, and other fearless
CNT [Confederacion Nacional de Trabajos, National Confederation of
Workers] justicieros; while in Saxony, Max Hoelz led a famous band of
anarcho-communist fighters-the Red Army of Vogtland-which robbed
banks, sacked noble estates, drove the paramilitary police out of
factories, kidnapped bosses, liberated political prisoners and,
finally, fought the Reichswehr from barricades during the
insurrectionary March Action. Similarly, there were instances, both
during the 1905 revolution and the civil war, when Jewish
revolutionaries-bundists, anarchists, and so on-used assassination or
a well-placed bomb to deter pogromists. [A sympathetic French jury,
incidentally, acquitted the Jewish anarchist Sholom Schwartzbard
after he shot Petlura, the ataman of the Ukranian Whites, outside a
Latin Quarter bistro in 1926.]

_This sounds very romantic, but surely the balance sheet of each of
these types of terrorism must be negative. Didn't every bomb and
bullet ultimately ricochet against the mass workers movements?_

As Debray pointed out years ago, "The revolution revolutionizes the
counterrevolution." Terrorism, by analogy, revolutionizes state
repression, and, indeed, in some cases was instigated by the secret
police for the express purpose of legitimizing a state of emergency.
The mass left, indeed the working class as a whole, was repeatedly
victimized for the "heroic" deeds of a few. And despite the
traditional disclaimers of its theoreticians, terror substitutes the
messianic role of the self- sacrificial individual-or the magical
totemism of the attentat-for the conscious movement of the masses.
This is why Lenin called the terrorism of the SRs the "opium of
intellectuals." Likewise, Trotsky-perhaps the first true sociologist
of the phenomenon-warned that terrorism was too "absolutist," too
messianic a form of struggle to coexist with the democratic workers'
movement.

Yet the classical socialist critique of anarchist and populist
terrorism was never simplistic or completely consistent. Marx, for
example, excoriated the Bakuninists, yet deeply admired Narodnaya
Volya [as did many European liberals] and believed that the
assassination of the czar might actually speed history in the right
direction. Lenin, despite the ferocity of his attacks on the SRs
[whom Kautsky, by the way, supported], was relentless in urging
social democrats to adopt terrorist methods to resist the pogroms and
cossack terror that followed the defeat of the Moscow insurrection in
December 1905. And Trotsky, while scornful of the "minister after
minister, monarch after monarch, Ivan after Ivan" agenda of the SRs,
argued that revenge was a powerful and positive revolutionary
emotion. "Whatever moral eunuchs and Pharisees may say," he wrote,
"the feeling of revenge has its right. The working class has greater
moral probity because it does not look with dull indifference at what
is happening in this, the best of all worlds."

Moreover, if one attempts to draw up a coolly objective balance
sheet, not all terrorist acts in the nineteenth and early twentieth
century end up in the debit column. Some historians of the first
Chinese revolution, for example, credit the anarchist Eastern
Assassination Corps, built on the model of the SR's combat
organization, with accelerating the decomposition of Qing power. In
the same period, the killing of the Portuguese king and crown prince
in Lisbon in 1908 by anarcho-republican Carbonari undoubtedly cleared
the path for the October Revolution of 1910. And the assassination of
notorious warmongers and murderers of the poor sometimes resonated
fully with popular demands for revolutionary justice: as in the
celebrated deeds of Zasulich, Bresci, Spiridonova, Radowitzy, Adler,
Durruti, and Schwartzbard. One might also regret that the Italian
anarchists did not succeed in killing Mussolini or that the KPD after
1933 was so dogmatically opposed to assassination.

The problem, of course, is that such methods are-forgive me-literally
"hit and miss" and most likely to boomerang against the revolutionary
groups that authorize their use. Consider the most "successful"
single terrorist action in European history: the bombing of the
Sveta-Nedeia Cathedral in Sophia in 1925. A joint team of communists
and left-wing agrarians managed to plant a bomb during the funeral
service for a general killed a few days before in an anarchist
ambush. Although King Boris did not attend, most of the Bulgarian
ruling class gathered in the cathedral. The huge explosion killed 11
generals as well as the mayor of Sophia, the chief of police, and 140
other eminent people. It was the only example of classical terrorism
I can think of that was carried out by a member party of the
Comintern. And its aftermath was debacle: a renewed reign of terror
that decimated the Bulgarian left.

_The examples you cite, even if forgotten today, all generated lurid
headlines in their time. I am sure they must add up to an impressive
pile of illustrious corpses. But how about more anonymous, less
reported forms of violence? Say, the murder of factory foremen? Were
the famous attentats just the tip of the iceberg-or its bulk?_

I think radical historians are more willing than in the past to focus
on popular retaliation and proletarian self-defense. There is a
growing recognition, for instance, that black folk in the Jim Crow
South fought back frequently, guns in hand, against racist terror,
and that not all the bodies in the bayou were African American.
Likewise, Chicano historians are beginning to appreciate the
importance of the Plan de San Diego and the insurrectionary tradition
of South Texas. But we are still a long away from understanding the
extent or role of working-class counterviolence in workplace
struggles. Certainly the intransigenti who considered Ravachol a holy
figure and subscribed to Galleani's bloodthirsty Cronaca Sovversiva
deemed killing the boss a highly admirable act. And during strikes,
American workers-especially-have hardly needed any ideological
instigation to shoot back at Pinkertons or the militia. But, not
surprisingly, we have few testimonies from the workers' side about
these illegal and violent aspects of the labor movement. This is
still largely terra incognita, although Paul Avrich's brilliant
excavation of the secret history of the American Galleanisti [Sacco
and Vanzetti: The Anarchist Background] is an inspiration.

_Where do you draw the line between revolutionary terrorism per se
and the various violent national liberation movements in contemporary
Ireland, the Balkans, East Asia?_

There is, of course, a considerable overlap in ideology and cadre, as
well as plentiful instances of practical collaboration. The Irish, to
be sure, were scarcely anarchists, but their expertise, courage, and
tenacity were admired from Catalonia to China. On the other hand, the
Armenian Dashnaki and Pilsudski's OSB [the Polish socialist combat
organization that could mobilize more than 5,000 fighters] are
clearly part of my story. Their nationalism, like that of the
revolutionary Letts and Finns, had not yet overridden their
anticapitalist politics. More difficult to arbitrate, because of
their ideological hetereodoxy, are such groups as the Portuguese
Carbonari, which seem to have alloyed Mazzinian republicanism with
elements of Spanish anarchism, the Bosnian terrorists who
assassinated Archduke Ferdinand, Serbian nationalism again spiced
with anarchism, and-most feared of all-the Macedonians. IMRO [the
Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization] is perhaps a sui
generis phenomenon, but repeatedly demonstrated its solidarity with
the Russian SRs and social democrats. No one built a better bomb, not
even the Irish.

_How big was the political base of classical terrorism? Do we have
any way of ascertaining the popularity of your "heroes of hell"?_

The anarchists themselves, not to mention the secret police, were
very interested in such a census and produced several estimates. In
Spain in the 1890s, for example, there were probably 25,000 active
anarchists and 50,000 sympathizers who occasionally attended a
meeting or subscribed to a newspaper. Almost all were in Catalonia,
Valencia, or Andalusia. Only 10 percent of these, according the
writer Gil Maestre, were actually anarquistas de accion, that is,
propagandists of the deed. There were probably a similar number in
Buenos Aires, the Barcelona of the southern hemisphere. In fin de
siècle Paris, meanwhile, connoisseurs of the attentat certainly
didn't number more than 500 in a score of groupuscules with perhaps
10,000 sympathizers. In North America, a few hundred violent
immigrant anarchists cut down whole forests as represented by the
newsprint devoted to their largely hypothetical "menace." On the
other hand, the terroristic Russian Socialist-Revolutionary Party in
1907 claimed 45,000 members and 300,000 serious sympathizers.

Beyond this it is hard to know how to measure contemporary
working-class opinion. Certainly the social democrats, and later the
anarcho-syndicalists, waged relentless propaganda warfare against
terrorism [although seldom to the repressive extremes of the
Communist and Socialist Parties in Western Europe in the 1970s].But I
wager that many of their members had emotional sympathies with the
terrorists, or, at least, agreed with Severine, the editor of Le cri
du peuple, when he declared-in the course of a bitter polemic with
the anarchist "pope" Jean Grave who had come to denounce
"revolutionary crime"-that he was "with the poor always, despite
their errors, despite their faults, despite their crimes."

[Mike Davis is the author of Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño,
Famines, and the Making of the Third World (2001) and the forthcoming
Dead Cities. He lives in San Diego.

Jon Wiener teaches history at the University of California, Irvine,
and he is a contributing editor of The Nation. He served as book
review editor of the Radical History Review from 1989 to 1996.]