The World That Never Was: A True Story of Dreamers, Schemers, Anarchists, and Secret Agents [Hardcover]

Alex Butterworth (Author)

Book Description

Release date: June 15, 2010

A thrilling history of the rise of anarchism, told through the stories of a number of prominent revolutionaries and the agents of the secret police who pursued them.
 
In the late nineteenth century, nations the world over were mired in economic recession and beset by social unrest, their leaders increasingly threatened by acts of terrorism and assassination from anarchist extremists. In this riveting history of that tumultuous period, Alex Butterworth follows the rise of these revolutionaries from the failed Paris Commune of 1871 to the 1905 Russian Revolution and beyond. Through the interwoven stories of several key anarchists and the secret police who tracked and manipulated them, Butterworth explores how the anarchists were led to increasingly desperate acts of terrorism and murder.
 
Rich in anecdote and with a fascinating array of supporting characters, The World That Never Was is a masterly exploration of the strange twists and turns of history, taking readers on a journey that spans five continents, from the capitals of Europe to a South Pacific penal colony to the heartland of America. It tells the story of a generation that saw its utopian dreams crumble into dangerous desperation and offers a revelatory portrait of an era with uncanny echoes of our own.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Historian Butterworth (Pompeii: The Living City) makes a first-rate addition to the growing list of books dealing with terrorism's origins and history. His focus is the alienated young men and women who, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, turned to anarchist and nihilist terrorism. This gripping and unsettling account depicts the movement's rise from the failed Paris Commune of 1871 through the abortive 1905 Russian revolution and its decline into the 1930s. Alternating among Russia, Europe, and America, the author produces a narrative packed with colorful figures, plots, assassinations, and bombings, betrayals, persecution, heroism, and martyrdom. Despite inflicting great damage (including assassinating a czar, an American president, and many European leaders), it failed. Successful attacks produced only more oppression. However, the first war on terror also failed. Police wreaked havoc among plotters (and many innocents), but the terror declined only after WWI, when rising communism and fascism attracted a new generation of disaffected idealists. Delivering a virtuoso performance, Butterworth adds the hope that history will not repeat itself and that a successful new bloody ideology will not create the next scourge. 8 pages of b&w illus. (Apr. 20)
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From Booklist

*Starred Review* Reports that al-Qaeda operatives were studying Bakunin have encouraged journalists to explain twenty-first-cenutry Jihadists by quoting nineteenth-century anarchists. Butterworth fears that ignorance of anarchist principles often makes these explanations misleading. And it is genuine understanding of this forgotten tradition that he here offers. Readers learn of the piquant personalities of prominent anarchists (including the volatile Bakunin, the passionate Kropotkin, and the peripatetic Rochefort) and of the diverse settings (from the steppes of Russia to the stockyards of Chicago) in which they pursued their political dreams. But it is finally ideas that trump character and geography. Very far from the religious principles of Jihadists, these ideas promise a secular world of free individuals finding social justice without institutional coercion. Though Butterworth represents these hopes sympathetically, we witness their dark transformation, as frustrated idealists turn to violence and terrorism. We also detect an even more troubling metamorphosis in the government agents charged with ferreting out these subversives. Okhrana officers serving the czar set the tone, but soon police commissioned by Western democracies follow suit, trampling on the rights of ordinary citizens in the name of the law. Butterworth urges his readers to recognize the alarming contemporary parallels. A narrative taut with intrigue and freighted with contemporary significance. --Bryce Christensen

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 528 pages
• Publisher: Pantheon; 1St Edition edition (June 15, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 037542511X
• ISBN-13: 978-0375425110
• Product Dimensions: 6.4 x 1.6 x 9.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #881,671 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars Interesting Period, Bad Writing November 22, 2010

By W. Speers

Format:Hardcover

The Paris Commune is a fascinating topic, and Butterworth gives it several chapters. Then he goes through the next fifty years, ending with 1932, when Hitler and Roosevelt came into power, almost glossing over the period in the nearly 400 pages left. Cons: he introduces a new person about every three paragraphs, then spends little time filling out the details on most of them; anarchists (and those who were called anarchists) during this period committed many notable crimes that are mileposts of recent history, but does Butterworth spend any time building anticipation for and understanding of the significance of the these acts? No. Where is the discussion of the ideals and philosophy of anarchism and socialism? Where are the Internationals? He talks about them a little, not much. Where's the elder Ulyanov brother and the attempts on the life of Alexander III? He and they are mentioned in passing. There's almost no discussion of the idealism of anarchism, namely, the assumption that people are Rousseauvian, capable of attaining socio/political paradise, and not much discussion of the reaction to anarchistic plots to blow people up. There are occasional morsels of moral philosophy as the foundation for anarchism and anarchistic violence, but very little, just enough to whet your appetite then leave you unrewarded. Butterworth talks about explosives as the anarchists became acquainted with them, but he doesn't say much about them, although he starts to as he discusses more and more explosive substances, so he neither avoids that subject nor deals with it in any detail, so there's not much to the nuts and bolts of the bomb-throwing aspect of anarchism. Some important moments in anarchism are neglected: Haymarket is quickly glossed over; where's the Siege of Sidney Street? Where are the great strikes? Homestead is in the book, but there are no conclusions drawn, historical, philosophical, political, or otherwise. There's nothing about the IWW or the Lawrence and Paterson anarchosyndicalist strikes. Henry Frick is there, but very little about his role in the history of the American labor movement. Butterworth talks a bit about the narodniki, but he doesn't say much about what their ideas were or their motivation to assassinate the tsar, although he talks about the frustration following the emancipation of the serfs. And the book is so densely written (not in any good sense, be advised) that it's a struggle to read through it. You would think that a book that deals with a multitude of vivid personalities and their high-profile crimes, carried out with alleged high ideals in mind would tell one engrossing story after another. Afraid not; the book clanks with long, convoluted, compound sentences that require more than one reading in many cases, but fails to provide the reader with a motivation to read them more than once. Pluses: the book deals with the shadows thrown in the dark corners of the Gilded Age and it talks in interesting detail about the Paris Commune, although once you've finished the book, if you didn't know what happened, you'd never know that the Prussians invaded France in 1870. There's a bit of interesting information about socialist communes in Kansas in the 1870s and anarchist exile in French New Caledonia; you get to know a bit more about some of the famous anarchists such as Kropotkin, Bakunin, Louis Lingg, and so on. But Butterworth spends an inordinate amount on the police infiltrators. Poor Louise Michel, with that bullet in her head. But where are Emma Goldman (given short shrift), Louise Bryant, Mother Jones, the founders of the IWW before they were the IWW, Big Bill Haywood, Daniel DeLeon? Where are the famous English anarchists? No Fabians discussed? Not much to see of them. Where's Edouard Bernstein? Lenin, Leibknecht, Rosa Luxemburg? Look for them in vain.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars An informative read. August 14, 2010

By Nasty Nauseous Nick

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

I not only enjoyed reading this book but it has led me to again read the works of Joseph Conrad in light of the historical era they were written in.
Secondly I was also enlightened of the role in which police agencies steered the nihilistic/anarchist movements into crafted roles of violence and public's forming a false concept of these movements through state sponsored propaganda and the infiltration of the movement's newspapers.
It was of interest that the views of Marx and Engels were in conflict with the majority of anarchists, that there was a struggle for dominance within the movement and were in fact supported by those same police agencies in order to keep the movement divided and manipulated. Thus the birth of the Communist Party that shaped world politics and policies in the twentieth century was actually and secretly supported police organizations within Tsarist Russia.
Lastly that the police agencies involved with protecting the various governments were artificially creating a need/demand for their services. Job security.

10 of 13 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Holy Anarchy Batman? We Are But A Means To Powers Sinister Ends! July 16, 2010

By R. A. Barricklow VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

The author's pen cuts precisely and deftly as a fine blade across the page, focused with purpose, as if Sabatini's Revolutinary Scaramouche himself wanted assurance to effect revenge on those who have wrongly savaged innocence without remorse.
Emile Henry wrote just before the Cafe Terminus bombing/Are those children who die slowly of anemia in the slums, for want of bread in their home, not victims too; those women ground down by exhaustion in your workshops for 40 centines a day, whose happiness is that they have not been driven into prostitution; those old men turned into machines so you could work them their whole lives and cast them out in the street as empty husks? Emile's final speech was/You hanged us in chicago, beheaded us in Germany, garotted us in Jezez, shot us in Barcelona, guillontined us in Montbrison and Paris, but anarchy itself you cannot destroy. It's roots are deep: it grows from the heart of a corrupt society that is falling apart, it is a violent reaction to the established order, it represents the aspirations to freedom & equality that struggles against all current authority. It is everywhere, which means it cannot be beaten, and ultimately it will defeat you and destroy you.
The author writes about the obsceene discrepancies of wealth between the rich & poor, the industrial exploitation of labor and the greed of the few generateing social injustice and economic instabilty. He writes of the unwillingness of the politicians to confront those guilty corporations and financial powers that exacerbated the very condtions that were purposely destroying democracies. He not only juxtapozed these conditions with our times, but brings to bear questions of a secret clockwork of intriques and manipulations that were in operation then, and now, to protect the status quo/then as now, the risks are unforseen and NOT to be underestimated.
One of the anarchist of the Gilded Age, Peter Kropotkin, asserted an evolutionary agrument that cooperation rather than competition was the natural state of human relations, and it has has recently received support from recent discoveries in the field of genetics. He also stated that all war amounted to was the ultimate betrayal of the individual, by the state, and by capitalism - in search of profit.
The anarchist movement left itself defenceless, as if on principle itself, against both malicious infiltration and co-option by those who sought to use political idealism as cover for criminal intent. Those government provocateurs are now, not only well armed, but equipped with electronics and laws that virtually assure violence - without any fingerprints but that of the dumbed-downed patsies.
The view of Loise Michel is echoed by Malatesa in a critical essay that obseved/...with any number of bombs and any number of blows of the knife, the bourgeois society cannot be overthrown, being built as it is on an enormous mass of private interests and prejudices and sustained, more than by it is by force of arms, than by the inertia of the masses and their habits of submission.
In the end, the establishment has infiltrated in every which way imaginable. Those on the establishment side wouldn't know that there were two other agents were within a particular anarchist sect. The govt/spies would be spying on other govt/spies. When the anarchist wanted to stage peacefull demonstrations, the government provocatuers would do the violence themselves, and then catch the so-called perpatrators. There would subsequently follow promotions and substantial rewards - all around! So peace wasn't profitable for the status-quo in this game of violence, the goverment owns a monopoly -a sure bet to be paid-off to the agents that either supplied the bombs or, at times, set them off in false-flag operations.
It is all here.
Of course, I have barely scratched the surface of this deep & profond scholarly work. I enjoyed the hell-out-of-it! I was very sorry to turn the last page. It is tremendous entertainment AND it is all true!
The work foreshadows our world today as it moves into a second guilded age, surpassing the first, in the obscene disparities between rich & poor, both in persons & countries. The violence is soon approaching industrial strength and unless the people can once again balance peoples' poltical captital vs. the private economic captital/then the people are squarely in Capital'$ cro$$hair$/ where the middle class is history/and serfdom is coming back with an electronic/technological vengence!

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED !!!!!!!

P.S. For more on government's responces in today's world -
google: Guns and Butter Archives.
July 14th 2010, Peter Dale Scott, Continuity of Government.
As you may know, July 14th is Bastille Day!

P.P.S. Google: enlightened films understanding deep politics.