Firebug

 At least if prosecutors are to be believed (never a certain proposition), it looks increasingly likely that last year's apocalyptic Palisades Fire in Los Angeles was deliberately set. Indeed, prosecutors allege that a specific individual went out to commit arson as an act of deliberate revolutionary terrorism against the rich. 

He did it, they say, because he was obsessed with another suspected populist terrorist—Luigi Mangione—and saw the fire as a form of vengeance against the indifferent rich. "We’re basically being enslaved by them," he allegedly said; and "Reddit let's kill all the billionaires," was reportedly one of his Google searches. 

The fact that someone may have intentionally started that LA fire does truly make its infernal scale seem all the more horrifying. I am reminded of that vividly creepy scene from an early section of John Dos Passos's Manhattan Transfer, when a character witnesses an apartment fire in town that onlookers begin to suspect was the product of arson: 

"At the corner a man was looking into the fire alarm box. As Thatcher brushed past him he caught a smell of coaloil from the man’s clothes. The man looked up into his face with a smile. He had tallowy sagging cheeks and bright popeyes. Thatcher’s hands and feet went suddenly cold. The firebug. The papers say they hang round like that to watch it." 

We really do seem to be living in a moment of violent populist terrorism. Mangione; the Palisades fire; the assassination attempt at the Press Gala. Last night, there was even another apparent shooting in D.C., in which the Secret Service exchanged gunfire with a nan near the vice presidential motorcade (though the motive there is so far unclear). 

Every one of these alleged shooters and firebugs has a grievance against the powers that be. Every one believes himself righteously justified. All I can reply is to continue to repeat Shelley's advice to the oppressed of the world: "do not thus when ye are strong." I say, with him, as he elsewhere added: no good ever came of taking "Cobbett's snuff—revenge."

But however ill-conceived the actions of individual violent anarchists and would-be revolutionaries, it is even more chilling when the state responds to them with lawless violence of its own. Viz. the disturbing reports yesterday that the government may be holding the suspect in the press gala assassination attempt in punitive solitary conditions as a form of retaliation. 

I am reminded of how Putin's government allowed the four suspects in a 2024 Moscow shooting to appear in court visibly beaten and bloodied from the manhandling of state agents—apparently in order to send a message to the world that the government would act extrajudicially to inflict lawless violence on anyone they suspected of terroristic acts.

That—as Joseph Conrad once wrote—is just anarchism of a second order; anarchism once removed—the "The ferocity and imbecility of an autocratic rule rejecting all legality," which "in fact bas[es] itself upon complete moral anarchism[.]" It is anarchistic terrorism committed behind the skirts of "the gore-dripping robes of authority" (Godwin). 

I return again to Anatole France's dual admonitions in The Well of Saint Clare: on the one hand, to the revolutionaries and terrorists and assassins, he said: "Ill betide the violent! for violence ever begets violence. Whosoever acts like you is sowing the earth with hate and fury [...] Ill betide you! for you have shed the blood of the unjust judge and the brutal soldier, and lo! you are become like the soldier and the judge yourself." 

We say the same to the Mangiones and firebugs and shooters and would-be assassins of our own political moment. 

At the same time, to the statists of the world, France had equally harsh words: "whatever is written on the tables of the Law, is written in letters of blood." 

The government of the rich—the government committing extrajudicial murder in the Caribbean and the Pacific right now; the government that proposes starving the poor and slashing food stamps in order to pay for its illegal war in the Middle East; the government that kidnaps people and renders them to secret torture prisons overseas— 

That government is practicing terrorism and violence and anarchism of its own. And so, it too begets violence and terrorism in return. 

"The ferocity and imbecility of an autocratic rule rejecting all legality and in fact basing itself upon complete moral anarchism provokes the no less imbecile and atrocious answer of a purely Utopian revolutionism encompassing destruction by the first means to hand"—to quote Conrad's passage in full. 

"These people," Conrad wrote (in his 1920 preface to Under Western Eyes) "are unable to see that all they can effect is merely a change of names."