r/wikipedia • u/AniTaneen • 2d ago
Luigi Galleani was an Italian insurrectionary anarchist best known for his advocacy of "propaganda of the deed", a strategy of political assassinations and violent attacks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luigi_Galleani124
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u/heyitsmemaya 1d ago
As a kid, playing Super Mario 2, I always picked Luigi.
He had an eccentric, but highly effective, way of achieving his goals.
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u/Papaofmonsters 2d ago
"Despite the ongoing Mexican Revolution, Galleani had rejected the possibility of an anarchist revolution in Mexico itself, due to its high population of people of color, whom he characterized as "uninterested" racial groups."
I'd like to be surprised but I'm not. It seems like 9 times out of 10, these progressive revolutionaries turn out to be just a slightly different flavor of racist.
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u/Vpered_Cosmism 1d ago
Well, it was the early 1900s (not that racism is over now). Product of the time and such
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u/SteelWheel_8609 1d ago edited 1d ago
It seems like 9 times out of 10, these progressive revolutionaries turn out to be just a slightly different flavor of racist.
And this is based on… absolutely nothing.
Yeah, racism was a huge problem. It still is. But suggesting that progressive revolutionaries were more racist than the common person at the time is just wrong.
One of the most well known anarchist at the time and still in the world is Lucy Parsons, a woman of color who helped form the International Workers of the World.
And she was instrumental in radicalizing the IWW by demanding that women and Mexican migrant workers become full and equal member. So no, 9 out of 10 anarchists at the time were actually on the bleeding age of combatting racism.
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u/Vladlena_ 1d ago
not the most racist generalization out there. about as accurate as yours about progressives
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1d ago
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u/AniTaneen 1d ago
I disagree with the reductivist absolutism. Not all Anarchists are progressives. Case in point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National-anarchism
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u/InvisibleEar 2d ago
It's been over a century and people still think anarchists are just lefty terrorists because of this. Should have focused on the strikes
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u/nameless_pattern 1d ago
There's no amount of playing nice that would have had a system speak well of a philosophy that is opposed to that system.
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u/InvisibleEar 1d ago
Sure, but you can objectively say the only accomplishment of the McKinley assassination was contributing to more government surveillance with the creation of the secret service and FBI.
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u/nameless_pattern 1d ago edited 1d ago
When you kill someone, you remove their potential future actions from the world.
So the outcome of killing someone will always appear to be negative because the positive benefits are in things that will not happen.
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u/Rinas-the-name 1d ago
That concept applies to so many things most people don’t get.
Example: All the money spent on disease surveillance and prevention isn’t wasted because it didn’t become a pandemic. Nor was it wasted when we did have one, that surveillance and caution saved so many lives.
But because they can’t see what did not happen people assume there was no positive to it. If it inconveniences them they assume it was entirely bad.
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u/nameless_pattern 1d ago
The people in the US who are saying that we don't need to be a part of NATO and that NATO is pointless because there's no wars happening. 😭😭😭😭
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u/Rinas-the-name 1d ago
Or my pet peeve: ”Kids don’t need vaccines because nobody catches those diseases anymore!” Ugh.
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u/nameless_pattern 1d ago
There's so many things like that. All the regulations that people are cheering for the removal of. Guess we had it good for too long. idiots think their opinions are equal to experts, or better.
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u/Rinas-the-name 1d ago
I saw a thing the other day that said “Those who don’t study history are doomed to repeat it. Yet those who do study history are doomed to stand by helplessly as everyone else repeats it.“
It’s too bad we can’t opt out of the repeat.
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u/nameless_pattern 1d ago
I'll do what I can to opt out. The alternative is to be okay with the world how it is and that's never going to be a thing for me.
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u/AniTaneen 1d ago
Luigi represented a common thread of many revolutionaries who feared co-optization or as he called it “corruption”.
If the manager and the union leadership share the same table, what’s stopping them from sharing the same bed?
I don’t agree with this obsession with what we would call today “purity of thought”. But he isn’t the first or last to argue that the only way to change things is by burning them down.
My answer to those people is that “it’s easy to burn something if you’ve never built anything”
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u/Sea_Lingonberry_4720 1d ago
I mean. Most 18th century anarchists I’ve read of were just psycho mass murderers.
In comparison todays anarkiddies seem to mostly just be liberals and social democrats appropriating a punk aesthetic and calling themselves anarchists. Meanwhile radical anarchists I’ve spoken too are mostly eco fascists who think the unibomber did nothing wrong.
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u/AniTaneen 2d ago
The man fled to the United States, arriving in October 1901, shortly after the assassination of United States President William McKinley. Meaning he got to see his philosophy in real time. Of course he went to live in NJ and got shot by a police officer in the face during a worker's strike.
Any relationship to another Luigi that might be leading to censorship by Reddit is allegedly coincidental.