An interesting 1973 BBC doc on The Angry Brigade, a group of militant anarchists who were responsible for 25 bombings around Britain in the early 1970s. (This continues my fascination with internal militant groups operating within Western societies in the early ’70s — Baader-Meinhof in Germany, the FLQ in Quebec, the Red Brigades in Italy, the Weathermen, and the most creatively named, Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers [The Motherfuckers for short] in New York. It’s so strange to think of a time so relatively recent where (a) anarchists were a quasi-vibrant political force, (b) terrorism hadn’t become so “branded” as a developing-world-based idea, (c) college kids were blowing things up, (d) countries we think of as modern and democratic like Spain and Portugal were fascist dictatorships exporting terror, and (e) what we now think of as the broad, stable, post-WWII world order seemed very much up for grabs.)

17 February 2008

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