Things I apparently need to bear in mind before reading Man who was Thursday

[jack]

* It's apparently more like a parody of pointlessness, not an endorsement thereof
* For "anarchist" read more like "terrorist", regardless of the truth, a type of people who the public are genuinely scared are going to be blowing stuff up
* Nefarious plans by subversive groups being run primarily by uncover policemen is ridiculous, not the norm.

This is more of a life lesson, but:

* If you're recruited as a police officer or agent, and there's a bunch of justification but not a giant pile of bureaucracy, it's probably some sort of scam.

Comments

[redbird]

At least in the U.S., if one member of your somewhat radical political or religious group is advocating violence, you've just found the undercover FBI agent. Also, at least from the 1950s to 1970s, the undercover FBI agents in the American Communist Party paid their dues much more reliably than the people who were there because they actually belied in Communism.

I've never read the book, but at least in the U.S. at that point, the "for 'anarchist' read 'terrorist'" parallel extended as far as "everyone will assume they're foreigners, and look at immigrants askance because of it."

[ghoti_mhic_uait]

I'm not sure that The Man Who Was Thursday maps brilliantly to 50s-70s America, at least from what you've said here - it was written in 1908 and set in London.

Chesterton himself said of it that it "was not intended to describe the real world as it was, or as I thought it was, even when my thoughts were considerably less settled than they are now. It was intended to describe the world of wild doubt and despair which the pessimists were generally describing at that date; with just a gleam of hope in some double meaning of the doubt, which even the pessimists felt in some fitful fashion"

It's one of those books where the feel is more important than the content in many ways? If you can stand Chesterton, it's worth reading, and if you can't, it's not a big loss, in my opinion.

[ptc24]

I'm reminded of the McLibel case, which ended up with a judge confirming many - but not all - of the activists' points about McDonalds, and one of the authors of the leaflet turned out much later to be an undercover cop.