It's always about the the will not just to power, but to domination.
From the guy in the subway blasting music and non-verbally daring anyone to object, to the shock troop footsoldiers of sociopathic politics, the behavior and purpose is easily recognizable.
From The Guardian, September 18:
In the 1970s, the radical leftwing German terrorist organisation may have spread fear through public acts of violence – but its inner workings were characterised by vanity and incompetence
In the summer of 1970, a group of aspirant revolutionaries arrived in Jordan from West Germany. They sought military training though they had barely handled weapons before. They sought a guerrilla war in the streets of Europe, but had never done anything more than light a fire in a deserted department store. They sought the spurious glamour that spending time with a Palestinian armed group could confer. Above all, they sought a safe place where they could hide and plan.
Some of the group had flown to Beirut on a direct flight from communist-run East Berlin. The better known members – Ulrike Meinhof, a prominent leftwing journalist, and two convicted arsonists called Gudrun Ensslin and Andreas Baader – had faced a more complicated journey. First, they’d had to cross into East Germany, then they took a train to Prague, where they boarded a plane to Lebanon. From Beirut, a taxi took them east across the mountains into Syria. Finally, they drove south from Damascus into Jordan.
They were not the first such visitors. Among the broad coalition of activists and protest groups known as the New Left, commitment to the Palestinian cause had become a test of one’s ideological credentials. Israel was no longer seen as a beleaguered outpost of progressive values surrounded by despotic regimes dedicated to its destruction. After its victory in the 1967 war and subsequent occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, Israel was now frequently described by leftists as a bellicose outpost of imperialism, capitalism and colonialism. At the same time, many intellectuals on the left had come to believe that the radical transformation they longed for would never begin in Europe, where the proletariat appeared more interested in foreign holidays and saving up for fridges or cars than manning the barricades. Instead, they believed, the coming revolution would originate in Asia or Africa or Latin America, where the masses were ready to rise up and fight.
The question was where to go. Unlike in Vietnam or Latin America, the Palestinian cause was one where direct involvement was both feasible and relatively risk-free. The Middle East was only a short flight or a cheap bus and boat trip away, and until the autumn of 1970, the worst that could be expected when one returned home would be some slightly difficult questions at border control.
So they came, and in increasing numbers. A single camp north of Amman run by Fatah, the largest of the Palestinian armed factions that were active at the time, welcomed between 150 and 200 young volunteers in 1969 and 1970. The biggest contingent was British, though most western European countries were represented, along with some eastern Europeans and several Indians. These were an ideologically eclectic bunch. When in February 1970 the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, one of the smaller armed factions, offered training and instruction to any “revolutionary and progressive forces” who wanted to build a “world front against imperialism, Zionism and reaction”, about 50 “militant Maoists, Trotskyites and members of … an extreme leftwing group in France” responded, according to the FBI. Most merely toured refugee camps, worked on farms, helped dig trenches and assisted at clinics. Some fired a few rounds from a Kalashnikov. Then “they picked up their [keffiyeh] headdress, several volumes of Palestinian poetry and went home souvenired and sun-tanned”, in the words of one foreign correspondent.
The group that arrived in Amman from West Berlin in June 1970 was an odd assortment of violent activists, polemicists, self-publicists, adventurers and intellectuals. Their leader, though not the loudest or best-known among them, was Gudrun Ensslin, the 30-year-old daughter of a Protestant pastor. Tall, fair and serious, she had been brought up in a small village in an environment of strict moralism. There was no sign of any rebellion in her youthful years, only of a fierce intelligence. She won a scholarship to Berlin’s Free University to study for a doctorate in literature. She campaigned for the moderately leftwing Social Democrat party (SPD) in elections in 1965 and, like many others, felt deeply betrayed when the party entered government in coalition with conservatives the following year.
Spoiled, arrogant and lazy but with a brooding, scruffy charm, Baader appealed to women, and some men too. He dressed fashionably and expensively, posed for erotic pictures for a gay men’s magazine, and occasionally wore makeup. Fast cars held a powerful appeal though obtaining a driving licence did not, resulting in a string of convictions for traffic offences. Baader was uninterested in politics and unmoved by progressive causes. He was attracted to Berlin primarily because residence there meant exemption from military service.
Many Berlin activists found Baader profoundly irritating. One described him as “impossible to talk to”, prone to sulking, a bully and a braggart. In April 1968, an accidental fire in a department store in Brussels killed more than 250 people. Baader boasted of his intention to bring about a similar conflagration, but it was Ensslin who organised a car, obtained the necessary equipment and selected a multistorey department store in Frankfurt as their target. After the attack, which caused substantial damage but no loss of life, she and Baader headed to a well-known leftist bar to celebrate loudly. This was an error. So too was leaving bomb components in the car and a list of ingredients in a coat pocket.
The mistakes made by Ensslin and Baader in Frankfurt led to their arrest within 36 hours. In October 1968, after six months in custody, they faced trial. In court, Ensslin, wearing a red leather jacket, waved a copy of Mao’s Little Red Book and claimed that the arson had been a protest against the failure of the German people to react to the horrors of the Vietnam war. Baader, wearing dark glasses, a T-shirt and Mao jacket, smoked a Cuban cigar in the dock and described students in Germany as the country’s equivalent of oppressed Black Americans. They each received three-year prison sentences but were released eight months later pending appeal.
A condition of their provisional liberty was that they devote it to worthy social causes, so the following months were spent working with teenagers in institutions in Frankfurt. Ensslin organised sessions to discuss Mao. Baader appropriated the youths’ financial allowance, took them to bars, drank and lectured them about the coming revolution.
When they heard that their appeal had been rejected, Baader and Ensslin fled rather than return to prison. They drove west to Paris where they stayed in the spectacular apartment of a radical French writer, enjoyed some lavish restaurant meals and photographed each other in cafes. When, after several weeks, the city’s charms palled, the couple drove to Italy. In Milan, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, the wealthy leftwing publisher, welcomed them to his home and laid out his collection of guns for their admiration. There were long conversations about the forthcoming armed struggle. When their car was stolen, Baader broke into an Alfa Romeo which they drove back to Berlin. In need of somewhere to stay, they sought out the journalist Ulrike Meinhof, whom they had met when she had reported on their trial....
....MUCH MORE
