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violent terror. The Ba'ader-Meinhof group is reminiscent, despite its
left-wing rhetoric, not of the traditional terrorism of anarchism, of the
far left but rather of a past terrorism from the far right, during and after
the seizure of power by the Nazis in 1933.
Despite these parallels, the world regards the German terrorists,
the Baader-Meinhof adherents and their sympathizers (whom
New
Yark Times
correspondent Flora Lewis estimates as marginal, even
though 20 percent of German students might fall into the category of
the militant leftist), as examples of left-wing extremism. Melvin
Lasky's article "Voyage among the 'Ugly Germans'" which is sym–
pathetic
to
the German government
(Encounter,
November 1977) is
typical. Lasky takes up the defense of the official Germany and uses the
fact of German terrorism, despite disclaimers by key liberals and leftists
of support of Baader-Meinhof, to castigate and discredit all those who
view the right and far right as the threats to German democracy and
who also condone the allegedly benign activity and attitudes of the left
toward the German government. For Lasky, the "neo-Marxian left," in
all its forms, is part of a direct continuum which leads to Baader–
Meinhof behavior. Indeed, it is certain that the terrorists present
themselves this way. But how, then, is the striking parallel with the
Nazis to be explained, if the terrorists' actions have pretensions to any
symbolic public meaning from their own point of view? After all, the
kidnapping and murder of two prominent members of Germany's
financial elite could be acts intended to dramatize and threaten monop–
oly capitalism. The answer lies in the fact that the German terrorists
act consciously as if there had been no German past, no history from
which they emerged. Unlike any other terrorists active today, the
German terrorist operates in an ideological and historical vacuum,
entirely in the present, without past and perhaps without future . The
Palestinian, the Irish, the Spanish, and the Puerto Rican terrorists all
operate from an interpretation of the past which contains some vision
of the future, however deranged, bizarre, or self-contradictory. As so
symbolically expressed in the scene, (if exaggerated, certainly plausi–
ble) in the Entebbe hijacking where a young German terrorist kept a
gun pointed at an innocent group of Jews, the German terrorists, given
their leftist pretenses, operate as if oblivious of their own national past
and its international significance. Unconsciously, despite the appear–
ance of left radicalism, the German terrorists replay the most frighten–
ing alienated behavior from their nationa l past, the behavior of the
Nazi elite, both of the S.A. and S.S. They reenact in 1977, with new
