Hari Kunzru: My Revolutions

I get into the car and head toward the autoroute . Behind me, the tower rises up like an amputated limb.

Because legality is just the name for everything that’s not

dangerous for the ruling order, because the poor starve while the rich play, because the flickering system of signs is enticing us to give up our precious interiority and join the dance and because just round the corner an insect world is waiting, so saying we must love one another or die isn’t enough, not by a long way, because there’ll come a time when any amount of love will be too late. But it’s something, love, not nothing, and that’s why I pull over and find a phone booth in a rest area and punch a number into the phone. Miranda picks up on the third ring.

“It’s me.”

“Oh, God. Mike? Where are you?”

“Chris,” I tell her. “My name’s Chris.”

Historical Note

Certain things are always erased or distorted in a novel and this is no exception. It seems worth saying that it is not a representation of the politics or personalities of the Angry Brigade, who carried out a series of bomb attacks on targets including the Police National Computer and the Employment Secretary’s house in the early seventies.

The British revolutionary underground has attracted less attention than its counterparts in the United States, Italy, and Germany. Many people, even in the U.K., have forgotten the Angry Brigade, whose notoriety peaked at the time of the “Stoke Newington Eight” trial in 1972, at the end of which four defendants received long prison sentences. There are several reasons for the AB’s disappearance from history. In part it is simply a question of intensity. The armed struggle that engulfed Italy and Germany had no counterpart in the U.K., where the actions of young revolutionaries were eclipsed in scale and brutality by the civil war in Northern Ireland. The Provisional IRA’s murderous mainland bombing campaign in 1974 left forty-six people dead and drained away countercultural support for terrorist tactics at a time when elsewhere in Europe a certain glamour was still attached to the idea of political violence.

According to veterans, the AB was never a formally constituted organization with a central command and a cell structure. Rather it was a name (like “Marion Delgado,” a tag adopted by some members of the Weather Underground, or “Luther Blissett,” more recently popular in Italian leftist circles) that could be used to “sign” actions committed by a variety of groups and individuals who broadly described themselves as “libertarian socialists.” In the early seventies London was a haven for Greek, Portuguese, and Spanish

exiles working to overthrow the Fascist dictatorships in their home countries. Numerous attacks against embassies, airline offices, and other targets took place. Many incidents were not reported in the British press, who at the time maintained a cozy relationship with the rest of what used to be called “the Establishment.” The AB received both inspiration and (it is usually assumed) material support from these networks, and many of its actions were cloaked in the same media silence.

Readers who want information about the Angry Brigade are directed to the papers of the Stoke Newington Eight Defence Group and writings by Gordon Carr, Jean Weir. John Barker, and Stuart Christie. I am grateful to the librarians at the London School of Economics for use of their archive. Thanks to Andy Davies for information about police procedure. Quotations from the Dhammapadda are adapted from translations by Joan Mascaró and Ninian Smart. Mistakes in the translation or interpretation of the Pali Canon are my own. I have drawn on Ron Bailey’s account of actions by London Squatters and Chris Faiers’s account of the occupation of 144 Piccadilly by the London Street Commune, among many other sources. Contemporary respect is due to Dr. J. J. King and all former denizens of The Mitre and The Bart Wells.

The Post Office tower was bombed on October 31, 1971. No claim of responsibility was made.