Rape of a Muse
NOMAD, MAX
Rape of a Muse THE ANARCHISTS Edited by Irving L. Horowitz Dell. 640 pp. 95 cents. Reviewed by MAX NOMAD Author, "Rebels and Renegades," "Dreamers, Dynamiters, and Demagogues" There are...
...next to Bakunin the most famous champion of anarchism...
...It is definitely easier to write with one's fingers than with one's head—if I may plagiarize a venomous remark perpetrated exactly 70 years ago by Plekhanov at the expense of the lovable, learned, but not very clever Kropotkin...
...As the author of a biography of the great rebel, I always thought that he died in Berne, Switzerland...
...Some of these extracts are interesting...
...Nestor Makhno, the heroic leader of the Ukrainian anarchist peasant revolt against the Whites and the Reds, is referred to in one line without any indication as to what his movement was all about...
...That wrong spelling appears twice in Kropotkin's article, so it was not a mere misprint...
...even though the anarchists were in the forefront of the fighters against Franco...
...The author calls Saint-Simon a "utilitarian anarchist" (whatever that means), while in reality SaintSimon and his followers were precursors of elitist totalitarian managerialism...
...My first discovery was that Bakunin, the father of revolutionary anarchism, died and was buried in Rome...
...The book is full of extracts from the works of various anarchist, near-anarchist, quasi-anarchist and non-anarchist writers...
...He would certainly have ignored this volume were it not for the fact that anarchism, its ostensible subject, though dead as a movement everywhere except in Spain, is now beginning to arouse some new interest among the intellectuals—apparently as a reaction to the moral bankruptcy of Communism...
...Louis, Missouri...
...About him I am told that he returned to Russia after the Revolution of 1905...
...A case in point is an enormous original paperback volume entitled The Anarchists, edited by an associate professor of sociology at Washington University, St...
...Misstatements of this kind are legion...
...Reviewed by MAX NOMAD Author, "Rebels and Renegades," "Dreamers, Dynamiters, and Demagogues" There are books whose only merit is their index...
...Now that Czech mystic was neither a Hussite nor was his name Chojecki (an abominable obscenity in all Slavic languages of which the virtuous Kropotkin was apparently unaware) but Chelcicky...
...Nor is there any mention of the Scottish-German poet John Henry Mackay, the biographer and champion of Max Stirner...
...So here is where the index comes in...
...Moreover, the editor calls Kropotkin a champion of "collectivist anarchism" along with Bakunin, while Malatesta was in his opinion "unquestionably" the "leading exponent of communist anarchism...
...The editor also speaks of the "classical anarchists, Bakunin, Malatesta, Sorel, Kropotkin," even though the author of the Reflections on Violence never considered himself an anarchist and was never considered as such either by anarchists or by anybody else familiar with Sorel's writings...
...The professor apparently never read any of Kropotkin's works, except an article about anarchism in the Encyclopaedia Britannica (11th edition) from which he took many of the names testifying to his erudition...
...The few pages at the end of a book are the best time-saving device writers and publishers have ever invented—at times, to their own detriment...
...The writer of this review is a very, very old man who has been interested in the international anarchist movement since the turn of the century...
...Hence he cannot afford to waste what little time is left him on reading all the printed matter that lands on his desk...
...Associate professors naturally have the ambition to become full professors, an aim frequently realized by the compilation of a voluminous book proving the author's great scholarship—even if he has only the haziest idea of what he is writing about...
...Just as characteristic of the book are its omissions...
...He actually went back after the Revolution of 1917...
...There is no mention of Luigi Galleani, the theoretician of the Italian "anti-organization" individualists...
...But they are certainly no excuse for the rape the author has committed on the Muse of History...
...Then I looked up Peter Kropotkin...
...He even uncritically misspelled the name of the first "Tolstoyan," as it were, a 15th-century mystic whom he calls "Chojecki, the Hussite" (footnote, page 332...
...Remembering Oscar Wilde's remark that one does not have to drink an entire barrel to know that the whisky is bad, I looked up some of the names familiar to all who know something about the history of anarchism...
...There must be a reason...
...The fact, known to every student of anarchism, is that Kropotkin was to communist anarchism what Lenin was to Bolshevism, while Malatesta was his collaborator and most famous disciple...
...And there is no reference to the bloody suppression of the Spanish anarchists by the Russian-led Communists during the Spanish Civil War...
Vol. 47 • December 1964 • No. 26
