The Bottled Wasp Pocket Diary 2019

THE BOTTLED WASP POCKET DIARY 2019 THE BOTTLED WASP POCKET DIARY 2019 Welcome to the 2019 Bottled Wasp Pocket Diary, a fundraising project in aid of the Anarchist Black Cross network and other groups involved in the prisoner support arena. All monies raised either go directly to prisoners themselves or to projects that of- fer them direct practical support. No funds make their way into lawyers’ pockets or get spent on court fees. Each year we uncover a new area of our hidden collective his- tory and in this edition, our seventh, we turn our attention to us – ordinary rank-and-file anarchists – those amongst us who don’t write best-selling theoretical works or gain notoriety from acts of bravado or good old-fashioned stupidity. Sadly it now looks like this will be the final edition of the Bot- tled Wasp. Each version requires a great deal of time and effort to properly research and then to lay out, and over the past few years it has become something of a one-person operation, despite on-going efforts to recruit new collaborators, and it is no longer feasible to continue in that fashion. However, you should keep your eyes open for two future projects – a Biographical Dictionary of Anarchists and a Bottled Wasp website, both based on the large database that we have built up in recent years. We dedicate this edition to our dear friend and fallen comrade Anna Campbell (b. 1991), who was killed in a Turkish air strike on Afrín in the Kurdish autonomous region of Rojava in northern Syria on March 18, 2018. Rest in Power Anna. “Anarchists are opposed to violence; everyone knows that. The main plank of anarchism is the removal of violence from human relations... We are therefore enemies of the State which is the coer- cive violent organisation of society.” - Errico Malatesta. The Escape Committee 2018 IF FOUND PLEASE RETURN THIS LOST WASP TO: THANKS TO OUR CONTRIBUTORS: Genea, Ted, Ewelina, Soja, Marko (Sto Citas), Jon ... & ESPECIALLY ALL THOSE WHO HAVE SUPPORTED THE BOTTLED WASP IN PAST YEARS. DESIGN, TEXTS & LAYOUT: Bra. IMAGE CREDITS: Berge Arabian; BBC; Sofía Bensadon; Ted Blackbrow; cartoliste; Contropiano; Corbis; Joan Cortadellas; Flavio Costantini; Jean-Claude Deutsch; Fővárosi Szabó Ervin Könyvtár; Helios Gómez; Guardian; KW Gullers; Gro Jarto; kinkyowl.pl; Yuri Kozyrev; Labadie Photo Collection, Ida Libby; Jean-Pierre Leloir; Library of Congress; Jacinta Lluch Valero; Magnum/ICP; Frank Martin; Christopher Michel; University of Michigan; Tracey Moberley; Jindřich Mynařík; nowness.com; César & Claudio Oiticica; Maisie Pryor; Benjamin Reed/AP; Graeme Robertson; Alfonso Romero; RTVOOG; Karley Sciortino; John Sharpe; Shutterstock, FUSION; Situation Press; spitalfieldslife. com; Stephane de Sakutin/AFP; Ronald Searle; Gerhard Seyfried; Toby Talbot; Bissera Videnova; Vollaert; Timothy Vollmer; Wikipedia; Żydowski Instytut Historyczny. A NOTE ON DATES: The continued use of the Julian Calendar in countries covered by the Russian & Ottoman Empire leads to some confusion over the dating of events. Most Catholic countries changed the Julian [Old System = O.S.] to the Gregorian [New System = N.S.] Calendar in 1582 (when a papal bull of February 1582 decreed that 10 days should be dropped from October 1582, so that October 15 should follow immediately after October 4). However, the change did not occur in Russia & the Soviet Union until 1918, & other late adopters included Albania (1912), Bulgaria (1916), Romania & Yugoslavia (1919), Greece (1924), and Turkey (1927). [see: http://www.webexhibits.org/calendars/year-countries.html ISBN 978-1-909798-55-7 Distributed by Brighton ABC & Active, Exchange, 72-73 Old Market, Bristol, BS2 0EJ. www.brightonabc.org.uk/bottledwasp.html www.facebook.com/bottledwasp [email protected] www.activedistribution.org Joseph Conrad has a lot to answer for. His portrayal of the cartoon- ishly unlikeable ‘anarchists’ in his 1907 novel ‘The Secret Agent’ was both malicious and, one has to say, wilfully ignorant – this despite Conrad’s claims to have researched his subject. Nor was it particularly original, in that he was following the well-established tradition of demonising “the other”, in this case the anarchist im- migrants with their unpalatable politics – be they ‘bombers’ or otherwise – who had arrived in Britain from Eastern Europe. This is somewhat ironic given that Conrad was himself an Eastern Eu- ropean immigrant, even if he had so successfully assimilated the language and culture as to have been said to have been “more English than the English”. The novel is doubly damaging, when one considers that it remains the likely source of many people’s first encounter with a depiction of anarchist ideology and practice. Conrad’s inspiration for the novel was an incident on February 15, 1894, when a French anarchist named Martial Bourdin blew himself up in Greenwich Park close to the Royal Observatory in London – believed by police to have been his intended target. In the novel, the central character, Adolf Verloc, an agent provocateur in the pay of Mr Vladimir, the First Secretary in the embassy of an unnamed Eastern European country, is tasked with carrying out a random act of terror in order to provoke a police crackdown on his country’s émigré anarchists. Verloc then tricks his disabled brother-in-law Stevie into carrying the bomb that, like Bourdin’s, explodes pre- maturely, killing him. Thus neither the organiser of the bombing nor the person blown up are in fact anarchists, whilst Conrad himself later claimed that the only “true anarchist” in the book was Verloc’s wife Winnie, as she is “the only character who performs a serious act of violence against another”, thereby illustrating Conrad’s total lack of understanding of anarchism and anarchists – this after his having spent time and effort researching the writings of Peter Kropotkin and Mikhail Bakunin prior to writing ‘The Secret Agent’. Even though the novel is based on real events, it still manages to repeat the then widespread conflation of a number of disparate political movements that spanned different continents and had, at one time or another, chosen the tactic of propaganda by deed and the use of the attentat (attack), though with very different ends in mind. Thus the Russian Narodniks1, such as Zemlya i Volya (Земля и Воля/Land and Liberty) and Narodnaya Volya (Народной Воли/Peo- ple’s Will), or the various Socialist-Revolutionary organisations, who were all regularly misidentified as being nihilists2, had their actions at various times misattributed and placed under the general catch- all of ‘anarchist’. Equally, nationalists such as Gavrilo Princip3, the Bosnian Serb assassin of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and Duchess Sophie Chotek of Austria in 1914, continue to be misidentified as being anarchist(s) for much the same reason. That is not to claim that propaganda by deed was not practiced as an insurrectionary tactic by some anarchists of the period. Indeed, the tactic had been adopted at the July 1881 International Revolution- ary Socialist Conference in London “to supplement spoken and writ- ten propaganda” in light of the widespread repression of the various revolutionary movements across the globe. In a feudal Russia, where widespread pogroms were forcing the mass movement of peoples to Western Europe and the New World, where all power lay in the hands of the Tsar, change was seen to be impossible by any other means. Europe, by contrast, had already witnessed the upheavals of the French Revolution and its rulers were still reeling from the events of the 1871 Paris Commune. However, with the continent still in the thrall of the powerful influence of the Church and much of its working population remaining illiterate, the attentat was seen to be the most effective form of propaganda then available. The United States was a different matter altogether: it remained Wild West-like, where its robber barons – worshippers at the new church of capital – sought to conquer the continent once more, this time in a battle against organised labour instead of its native peoples. There, all forms of dissent – be they anarchist, communist, socialist, trade union, etc. – were lumped together under one label, ‘Reds’, to be demonised and eradi- cated at all cost. On all three continents the weapon of insurrectionary change had long been the bullet and ‘regicide’ (of kings, presi- dents or prime ministers). However, through the actions of Santiago 1. Who Karl Yundt, the “old terrorist”, (as depicted on our cover) appears to represent. 2. The Professor’s politics are much closer to those of nihilism than anarchism. 3. Like Stevie, Princip was manipulated, in his case by Serbian army intelligence. Salvador, Ravachol, Auguste Vaillant, Émile Henry4 and others, the bomb had become an increasingly popular choice of insurrectionists. In Britain things were somewhat different. True, there was still the battle of vested interests against an increasingly organised work- force, and the fear of contagion from continental Europe was still very much at the forefront of the thinking of the political classes. Yet the threat of the so-called anarchist bomber was virtually nonexist- ent this side of the English Channel.5 That did not stop the Metropoli- tan Police’s Special Branch from inventing their own anarchist bomb plot. In 1892, Inspector William Melville used an agent provocateur, Auguste Coulon, to entrap six unsuspecting anarchists from Walsall in the West Midlands. They were charged with bomb-making and, in spite of evidence of their innocence, four were found guilty and sen- tenced to between six and ten years’ penal servitude. Coulon would later serve as a partial inspiration for Conrad’s Adolf Verloc, as would Melville for the novel’s Chief Inspector Heat character. As a final footnote to ‘The Secret Agent’, wannabe anarchist Ted Kac- zynski – aka the Unabomber – was obsessed with the book, idolising the Professor character.

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