AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM:

A german scandal, a killer spy (Robert Fulford, 6/06/09, National Post)

The accepted history of violent left-wing radicalism in 1970s Germany suggests that it began, like the First World War, with a single killing. On June 2, 1967, during a demonstration against the Shah of Iran’s visit to West Berlin, a policeman named Karl-Heinz Kurras, supposedly a right-wing gun collector, shot an unarmed student. Supported by his union and much of the press, Kurras successfully claimed self-defence. He rose to detective chief inspector before retiring in 1987.

To many Germans this was an obvious case of gross official injustice. It blossomed into a myth that fascism controlled the Federal Republic of Germany, a myth that later became the political background music for the New German Cinema of the 1970s, particularly Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s films. German students adopted this German cause while campaigning against the Vietnam war. East Germany, a police state itself, did all it could to publicize neo-Nazi strains in the West.

But now, two generations later, Germans have awakened to a startling reality: The files of the East German secret police, the Stasi, reveal that Kurras was on their payroll as a spy. Does this mean he killed on assignment? Was he part of a communist plot to destabilize West Germany? One early terrorist group, the Second of June Movement, took its name from the date of the killing. Stefan Aust’s recent book, Baader-Meinhof: The Inside Story of the R.A.F. (Oxford), describes what came next — dozens of murders, many bank robberies and the bombing of police stations, department stores and American bases.

The main terrorist gang named itself the Red Army Faction but the newspapers preferred “Baader-Meinhof gang,” after Andreas Baader, a drug-addicted sociopath with a record in petty crime, and Ulrike Meinhof, an intellectual who dreamt up class-struggle jargon (a bank robbery was an “expropriation action”). Privately she apologized to fellow terrorists for her middle-class origins and, during a Maoist exercise in self-criticism, called herself a “hypocritical bourgeois bitch.”

Like the Black Panthers in America, the German terrorists appealed to romantic leftists.

Meanwhile, when the American Left realized how overwhelmingly the public supported authorities gunning down the radicals it effectively ended the movement.

Posted by Orrin Judd at June 6, 2009 3:50 PM