Disloyal Opposition

The World That Never Was

Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, 1917

A True Story of Dreamers, Schemers, Anarchists
and Secret Agents
by Alex Butterworth
Pantheon, 528 pp., $30

Entering the world of idealists, lunatics, killers, double agents, triple agents, and religious fanatics who populate Alex Butterworth’s book is a bewildering experience, not least because an ordinary reader will likely get lost in the maze of plots, counterplots, and speculation, some of it plausible and some of it unprovable. An account of the frenetic and fractious world of anarchism from the suppression of the Paris Commune in 1871 to the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, this long and often jumbled book both entertains and infuriates.

Butterworth’s major theme is that the first war on terror was that directed against anarchists from the days of the Paris Commune to the Bolshevik Revolution because of the threat they were perceived to pose to European civilization. Anarchism has always had two faces. Many of its idealistic, scientific leaders envisioned an earthly paradise and a peaceful, cooperative world, based on human beings’ natural inclination to cooperate with each other. Along with this picture of a Garden of Eden, however, there were the hundreds of its practitioners, motivated sometimes by anger at the repression and violence used by government authorities, and other times by a zealous belief that striking down symbols of authority would convince the masses that the world could be organized anew—the so-called propaganda of the deed—who carried out shocking acts of murder and terror.