Engraving of the Haymarket Affair, 1886 In the U.S., “anarchist” was once a dirty word. Following the 1886 Haymarket Bombing in Chicago, in which 11 including seven policemen were killed by anonymous bombers, cartoons appeared nationwide of wild-eyed, suggestively Germanic anarchists blowing America to hell. Historians for a hundred years repeated the conventional wisdom that this was an exercise in pure hysteria. Now, however, we know that the 1886 bombing was indeed a cold-blooded, calculated anarchist plot against the police. Timothy Messer-Kruse showed this was the case in a meticulous 2011 book which however was insufficient to convince Wikipedia “gatekeepers” to amend their traditional exculpatory account of the bombers. In the early twentieth century, as the late historian Paul Avrich’s life work documented, Italian anarchism became a transnational crusade carried to the U.S. by immigrants, many of artisanal backgrounds, who—except for the propensity for anonymous bomb planting—were generally of the highest moral character. There also were the minor problems of deadly armed robberies (Sacco and Vanzetti, whose guilt is no longer in doubt except in the minds of the most credulous) and even an attempt in Chicago by Galleanist anarchist chef Nestor Dondoglio to lace soup with arsenic to poison some 100 elite banquet guests. (No doubt, the appetizers were tasty). Anarchists like Emma Goldman, deported to newly Bolshevik Russia after World War I, performed a useful function by warning that even a leftist revolutionary regime could abuse state power. Anarchists, however, were completely ineffectual in curbing that Bolshevik movement with which they had once collaborated. Starting with Warren Beatty’s mostly dramatic, partly documentary film, “Reds” (1981), the anarchist movement, often merged in memory with Greenwich Village cultural radicalism, has undergone a revival. With a sharper political edge, this trend culminated in the graphic novel and movie “V for Vendetta” ( 2006) that glorified and romanticized a tradition pictured as going back to Guy Fawkes who tried to blow up the Parliament House in 1605. In the case of terrorist bomber impresario V—who wears a Guy Fawkes’ mask—the target is of course the modern capitalist global order. Blow it up, and Rousseau’s vision of humanity freed from its chains will instantaneously be realized. Violence is both cool and salvific. Historically, Jews—many of them fascinating characters—were prominent both in the anarchist movement and in its suppression as victims, even more ruthlessly in the USSR than the U.S. One might think that Jews—if they learned from their own history—would be leaders in warning nihilist incendiaries in the streets of Ferguson that Bakunin’s doctrine, that “the passion for destruction” is “creative,” is a dangerous one to pursue. It’s also dangerous for Jews, as demonstrated by the anti-Semitic tinge of the extreme fringe of the Occupy Wall Street Movement of a few years ago as well as the blend of keffiyahs and Guy Fawkes masks among the firebrands who descended from around the country on Ferguson before leaving, unapprehended, with a firestorm in their wake. Yet the sad reality is that many Jews on the left seem to have learned nothing from history except how to repeat obsessive-compulsively their predecessors’ errors, at the expense both of fellow Jews and of other minorities who are being manipulated for fun-and-profit by a new generation of reverse racist demagogues. In the greatest travel book of the twentieth century, Dame Rebecca West’s “Black Lamb and Grey Falcon” (1939), she begins with a Sarajevo 1914 prelude focusing on the once nameless and faceless anarchists who “made history” in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century by assassinating European royalty. The Balkans often served as the incubator and nursery for anarcho-terrorism which sometimes had a nationalist tinge. She ironically characterized this trend as “giving voice to the voiceless” and empowering the powerless. Writing on the eve of World War II, West knew full well that those on the left who apologized for the trend were providing a trial run for those who argued that the Nazis and others on the right were performing a necessary function by re-empowering powerless Germans in the wake of Versailles Treaty “injustices.” As minnesingers in the Bruce Springsteen mold like to mouth, “what goes around comes around.” In a Bosnian immigrant suburb of St. Louis, 32 year-old Zemir Begic, on a drive with his new bride, was recently dragged from his car and bludgeoned to death by a hatchet-wielding mob. His brother lamented, “Zemir loved everybody.” There are no reports of Begic’s murderers wearing Guy Fawkes’ masks. The St. Louis police, however, have reassured us all that “this was not a hate crime.” There were no representatives of traumatized St. Louis Bosnians, or of predominately black burned-out storekeepers, at the White House’s post-Ferguson summit.