Sounding dissent: rebel songs, resistance and Irish republicanism

Abstract

sections is on sabotage, extraordinarily neglected by most historians of violence. Given the ever-growing complexity of modern economies – pointed out acutely by the suffragette leader Emmeline Pankhurst before the Great War – systematic sabotage would appear to offer immense opportunities for those engaging in violent action against the state. Indeed the IRA embarked on such a campaign in the late 1930s (a campaign which generated Britain’s first anti-terrorist law). It proved too ambitious for the organisation’s meagre resources, but also fell victim to simple lack of competence. After that, sabotage went out of fashion amongst terrorists; Wilson notes that the Provisional IRA only began to come up with anything like a systematic sabotage strategy after two decades. This blind spot, shared by other terrorist groups, is hard to explain; Dr Wilson admits that the neglect of energy targets in particular remains puzzling. After all, it is surely a dramatic shift in targeting which marks terrorism as becoming ‘modern’. As we see here, what Wilson calls the ‘frictions of local intimacy’ which produced most premodern violence was superseded by what WB Yeats called ‘abstract hatred’. This shift towards depersonalised killing ‘remains’, as Wilson says, ‘one of the least explained features of the broader transformation of western societies into late modernity’. Alongside the anonymity marking these ‘societies of strangers’ came the capacity to label whole categories of people – from the ‘aristocrats’ of the French Revolution (few of them actual aristocrats) to the ‘bourgeoisie’ of the anarchists as legitimate targets. But modernity itself has turned out to be more complicated than early modernisation theorists assumed; sharp-eyed studies like this book will be needed to understand its nuances.