Britain's Oliver Kamm demonstrates admirable skill in research, writing, and moral fortitude on his site today, taking the time and effort to demolish "the stupidest blogger alive" for a tortuous and ugly defense of the infamous Baader-Meinhof Gang, some of the vilest 1970s Euro-terrorists. Visit Kamm's site and be both impressed and educated. His conclusion:
The Federal Republic of Germany - a country whose political culture I enormously admire, and not only in comparison with the cess-pit that preceded it - came into being in 1949 founded on the principles of 'militant democracy' and 'antitotalitarian consensus', shared by conservatives, liberals and social democrats. The polity that grew up on that shared understanding was intent on defending democratic politics from both Nazism and Communist totalitarian expansionism.Posted by Alan at August 16, 2003 12:24 PMThis free and liberal society was what the Baader-Meinhof gang was attacking. There is no such thing as distinguishing the aims of the group from its methods. A movement dedicated to overthrowing constitutional democracy is already a violator of principles of justice, for there is no greater injustice than ordering the lives of adult human beings without their consent. Having dedicated themselves to that end, the Baader Meinhof gang and their fellow-terrorists, of course and inevitably, also arranged the deaths of adult human beings. Many of those deaths were random and vicious. Where they became systematic was in what the terrorists dressed up as the cause of liberation of an oppressed people - in fact the annihilation of the Jewish state. The world saw this horror at the Munich Olympics in 1972, when the new Germany proved utterly ineffectual in preventing the murder of Israeli athletes by Arab terrorists and thereby betrayed the democratic principles that in many respects it had previously bravely defended. The cause of attacking Jews, Israel and democracy itself was well-established.
Then at Entebbe airport in 1976 the assault on West German democracy joined seamlessly with traditional antisemitism. For this time it was German terrorists who were intent on the destruction of the Jews - the ghost of what Germany had been, arising to identify and destroy its victims once more.
But this time our side, the democratic side, was ready. May it ever be so.