Yousef’s uncle Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, an engineer by training, completed what he had started: the twin towers’ destruction. Mohammed is now known as the chief architect of the 9/11 attacks. But it was his nephew who first gave modern terrorism its passion for grandiosity. Denouncing the United States at his trial, Yousef anticipated McVeigh’s justifications for his crime:
You killed civilians and innocent people – not soldiers – innocent people [in] every single war … You went to more wars than any country in this century, and then you have the nerve to talk about killing innocent people. Yes, I am a terrorist, and I am proud of it. And I support terrorism so long as it was against the United States Government and against Israel … You are butchers, liars and hypocrites.
The points of contact between radical Islamists and McVeigh may seem accidental. Yousef happened to be in a cell adjacent to McVeigh’s at their Supermax prison. But such chance encounters and coincidences have defined the global political arena since the 1840s; they constituted a kind of globalization from below, long before Osama bin Laden started to organize his band of African, Asian, European, Australian and American militants in Afghanistan in the late 1980s.
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Foreign radicals made up a large number of the radical Communards in Paris in 1871; the Indian Mutiny, French depredations in Algeria, the freeing of slaves and serfs in North America and Russia, and revolts in Ireland, Hungary and Poland were just some of the subjects discussed during the heady days of the Commune. The Communards were brutally crushed after a mere two months in power, but they portended a radical new attempt to rethink the fundaments of politics and culture on both local and global levels – one that would reach its apotheosis in the fin de siècle.
As the nineteenth century ended, more regions and regional causes were linked by the intensified circulation of capital, commodities and labour, as well as such modern infrastructure as railway networks, ports, canals (Suez and Panama in particular), steamship and telegraph lines, and financial services. This was the great age of immigration, which remains unparalleled to this day: Italy alone sent out an estimated fourteen million labourers between 1870 and 1914. Recently invented media everywhere – newspapers, periodicals and postal services – facilitated the flow of ideas challenging the inequalities and exploitations of the global economy. International radicalism entered the world conjoined with globalization. Then as now, it bore angriest witness to the latter’s crises.
In a globalized world there was something inescapably transnational to discussions about wealth redistribution, workers’ rights, mass education and the broader question of social justice. The tracks of Germans, Irish, Russians, Poles, Hungarians and Italians escaping political or intellectual oppression in their homelands crisscrossed Europe and the Americas; they were later joined by Japanese, Indians, Egyptians, Chinese and many peoples from colonized lands in Asia and Africa. The communist ‘Internationals’ were specifically aimed at fulfilling Marx’s programme of revolution across Europe. But the radical current that reached far outside Europe, deep into South America and Asia, and brought several diverse communities together in the late nineteenth century, was anarchism.
Errico Malatesta, the Italian disciple of Bakunin, joined Egyptian nationalists in their revolt against British imperialists in 1882. Syrian immigrants exposed to anarchist ideas in Brazil transmitted them to readers of the major Arabic magazines, al-Muqtataf and al-Hilāl. The date of 1 May, an international holiday, still commemorates the execution of immigrant anarchists in the US in 1886. In a remarkable instance of transnational solidarity in the 1890s, the ‘decade of regicide’, Italian anarchists avenged their martyred French and Spanish comrades by killing the French president (Carnot) and the Spanish prime minister (Canovas). The activist Li Shizeng formed a network of Chinese and European anarchists through his close friendship with the family of a famous French Communard, élisée Reclus. The 1909 trial and execution of Francisco Ferrer, a Spanish anarchist, was turned, just weeks later, into a rousing play in Beirut.
Loosely defined, with only the hatred of authority at its basis, anarchism was more mindset than movement or consistent doctrine; it offered something to everyone, especially migrant labour in the first age of globalization. The anarchist idea of mutual aid was especially attractive among the labouring classes and immigrants as a counter to the pitiless Social Darwinism rampant among elites. And anarchists, unlike many European socialists and Marxists, did not condescend to anti-colonial activists from small countries.
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Back in the late nineteenth century, intellectual circles quickly formed around journals, reading rooms and cafés. As the Italian novelist Enrico Pea, confrere of anarchists in Alexandria, wrote, the city’s restaurants and libraries were ‘frequented by excommunicated and subversive people from all parts of the world, who would meet there with their discourses in rebellion from God and society’. The possibilities of such transnational networks could only multiply with the rise of mass air travel. In 1970 German members of the Baader-Meinhof gang travelled to Jordan to receive military training from the Palestinian militant organization al-Fatah before launching their long career in terrorism.
In the age of the internet, people with diverse historical and political backgrounds only have to exchange Snapchat videos in order to initiate new journeys: using online outreach the cyber-propagandists of ISIS have managed to seduce thousands of foreign novices into making a perilous journey to the Middle East and North Africa. The Norwegian Anders Behring Breivik, the first of the mass murderers spawned by the internet, sought a common front with Hindu fanatics, among many others, in his worldwide campaign against multiculturalist governments; he in turn inspired the German-Iranian teenager who shot dead nine people in Munich in July 2016. Anwar al-Awlaki did not kill anyone but managed to provoke terrorist attacks in Boston and Paris with his internet sermons alone.
Compared to such virtual meeting places as Instagram, there is something drably nineteenth century about the Supermax prison in Colorado that hosted an encounter between two like-minded people with vastly different histories. There seems to have been an immediate recognition of spiritual and political affinity between the atheistic American and the Muslim radical. Yousef said after McVeigh’s execution: ‘I never have [known] anyone in my life who has so similar a personality to my own as his.’