Anarchism
Anarchism and anarchists and anything associated with the thinking, the people, or the history generally get a raw deal from the media and even mainstream historians. It is true that anarchism is profoundly anti-authoritarian, but its popular association with violence (wild-eyed bearded men throwing bombs) is exaggerated, even fictionalized by the very forces threatened by it, namely governments and the media with vested interests in things as they are.
As with any subversive political and economic movement, some proponents became impatient and felt justified in striking out in vengeance or justice. Thus you have Alexander Berkman and his attempted assassination of Pennsylvanian Henry Clay Frick in 1892 and Leon Czolgosz and his successful assassination of President William McKinley in 1901. Berkman, however, served his time in jail, wrote a deep and insightful account of his experience and went on to write more worthwhile books on the subject which possessed his life. (Czolgosz did not have that opportunity, being executed forty-five days after the death of his victim.)
Anarchism survived its dramatic beginnings in the 19th Century, however, and interested readers can find its articulate concern with agricultural reform, labor rights, and prophetic worries about the growth of the surveillance state in many excellent books. Here you will find books and a superb documentary on Sacco and Vanzetti (as well as Woody Guthrie's cd of his investigation into the miscarriage of justice). Here you will find histories, biographies, anthologies, memoirs, and fiction. It is a rich tradition, relevant to this day and to the future.
Sons of Night: Antoine Gimenez's Memories of the War in Spain
Sons of Night: Antoine Gimenez's Memories of the War in Spain
A fascinating memoir of the Spanish Civil War as well as a new approach to writing history, The Sons of Night is two books in one. First is Antoine Gimenez’s Memories of the War in Spain, a compelling and lyrical account of his experiences in the Spanish Civil War. The other is In Search of the Sons of Night by the Gimenologues, a group of friends who became historians over the twelve-year adventure of publishing Gimenez’s memoir. The second book, a profoundly innovative form of historiography, records the fascination Gimenez’s account held for the group and the many branching paths of inquiry it led them down. The latter begins with eighty-two "endnotes" to the memoir, each the equivalent of a chapter that follows a particular historical thread or explores a question raised by Gimenez's text. This is followed by the biographies of various people appearing in the memoir, many based on the friendships the historians formed with the now-elderly revolutionaries. The book closes with an Afterword discussing theoretical issues raised by the memoir and seven appendices. It also includes a foreword by Dolors Marín Silvestre.
Antoine Gimenez (the pseudonym of Bruno Salvadori) was born in 1910. He was an anarchist militant and a volunteer militiaman who fought in the Durruti Column during the Spanish Civil War. He died in Marseille in 1982.
The Gimenologues are a small group of friends who have become historians by dedicating themselves to the twelve-year process of publishing Memories of the Spanish War by Antoine Gimenez, first in French, now in English.