The Care of Time Read Online Free PDF Page B

that much of the memoir and most of the commentary existed so far only as disjointed fragments. In other words, the book is at present little more than an idea.’
    He chuckled. ‘I hear the voice of bitter experience. But not, it’s by no means as bad as that.’ He opened the file and from then on referred to it steadily. ‘Have you ever heard of a nineteenth-century terrorist by the name of Nechayev? Sergei Gennadiyevich Nechayev?’
    ‘I’ve heard of an anarchist of that name.’
    ‘You’ve probably heard of him as such because he was the anarchist who gave anarchy a bad name. I know it’s true to say that classical anarchism believed in the possibility of changing society for the better by demolishing centralized government, but it also held that man was essentially a reasonable being who could be improved by means of peaceful persuasion. The early anarchists were cranks, but they were idealistic cranks. It was Nechayev who hung the label of terrorism on the movement and handed to nineteenth-century cartoonists that symbol of anarchism that has lasted right into our own time – that round, black, sinister-looking bomb with a burning fuse sticking out of it. As for the man himself, he was a crook as well as a fanatic, a thief, a liar and a murderer. Nowadays, I dare say, we’d call him a criminal psychopath.’ He glanced at his file. ‘However, it is his relationship with Michael Bakunin of which I must now remind you. If you’ve heard of Nechayev, I don’t suppose you need telling about Bakunin, eh?’
    ‘I think I’d better hear what your brief there has to say.’
    He smiled approval of my caution and then began to read directly from the top paper in the file.
    ‘From eighteen-sixty-five, after the death of Proudhon, Bakunin was the foremost anarchist thinker and writer. Like Herzen before him, he chose Geneva as his first place of exile. Unlike Herzen, though, he was an activist as well as a thinker, a militant and also something of a romantic. He was, for example, a friend of Garibaldi. So, he became the rallying point not only for exiled Russian intellectuals but also for adventurers with intellectual pretensions. The judgements he made were often too hasty. You can’t really blame him. In Switzerland at the time there was always a steady flow of refugees from Czarist prisons and the Czarist police. In eighteen-sixty-nine Nechayev arrived.’
    McGuire’s beaky mouth pouted his distaste for the event and he slapped the file irritably as he looked up.
    ‘You can see how it was, Mr Halliday, eh? Nechayevmust have been the archetypical brooding boy-wonder revolutionary. With his con-man tales of secret rebel networks back in the old country, his fanaticism and his flatteries, he soon had the great man in his pocket. While still in Russia the boy-wonder had collaborated in the writing of a frightening Revolutionary Catechism which Bakunin admired, and now they worked together on a series of manifestos putting forward what was in effect Nechayev’s own programme of revolution through terror. You see, Nechayev believed in violence for its own sake.’
    ‘And the great man went along with him?’
    ‘Until he saw where the manifestos were really taking him and came to his senses, yes. Then he tried to dig in his heels. He said that passion must be allied to reason and complained that Nechayev was like a man in a dream. But what a dream! It was Nechayev who invented the modern terrorist doctrine of “propaganda by deed”. Not that anything that Bakunin said could have made any difference by then. It was all too late. In a movement like that there will always be the lunatic few who have been waiting for,
longing
for, violence. And without even knowing it. No matter what anyone says, the hopeless cases will always respond. Michael Bakunin and Professor Marcuse may have had their second thoughts, but it was too late for both of them. It’s always the same. When that sort of damage has been done, it