Trust-fund terrorist

Born in 1969, Lori Berenson grew up in New York City, the adored, privileged daughter of two college professors. Her tendency to be a “social justice” nag manifested itself early. In her freshman year at MIT, when a dryer broke down, “she was adamant that the replacement shouldn’t be from General Electric because of the company’s involvement in producing nuclear weapons.” Around that time, she traveled with an all-female group of Quakers, apparently pro-Sandinista radicals, to Nicaragua, which was then experiencing a civil war. She also made a couple of visits to El Salvador, which was also, at the time, torn by civil war, and where, she later said, “I got a sense that the world was much bigger and the suffering was much worse than I had thought.”

Soon Berenson had dropped out of MIT in order to work full time for a Communist-linked Salvadoran “liberation front” while living off the $50,000 trust fund her parents had set up for her education. Dad and Mom raised no protest. “You had to see Lori and her enthusiasm, her concern,” Mom later explained. “Look, we’re academics. Education is very important to us. But Lori thought, `How can I be here reading a book when there are people who need help?’ What can you say?”

Soon after relocating to El Salvador, Berenson wed her first husband. But the marriage disintegrated within a few months, as did her passion for continuing work in El Salvador. You see, the violence ended, and her “liberation front” signed a peace accord with the government. “She had such huge hopes, but then after the accords, it became clear that they weren’t going to be fulfilled,” husband #1 later told the Village Voice. Get it? Berenson claimed to be working for peace, but when peace actually was achieved she was disappointed. She wanted to be where the action was.

So she moved on to another place where there was still terrorist violence – Peru. By the time she’d settled in Lima, the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA) had already run up a long rap sheet of terrorist acts, from kidnappings to bank robberies to assassinations. Berenson didn’t just sign up with the MRTA: she rented a mansion in a prosperous Lima neighborhood that her fellow terrorists used as a safe house and as a storage depot for weapons and ammunition.

Over two decades later, Berenson offered this explanation as to why she’d exchanged MIT for MRTA:

I decided that I was not in agreement with the type of academia work I’d be able—you know, you could, yeah, get a degree, and then you become part of the system. And I thought that becoming part of the system somehow—you know, I mean, other people are able to use that to—and to use it very well to the benefit of social justice, but others tend to be absorbed by the system. And I didn’t want to be part of—absorbed by the system. I also, you know, had a very different—at the time, I sort of started seeing that the world has a lot less to do with what you learn in school than what you learn in life, and that the meaning of degrees is—shouldn’t be that. So it was—in part, it was my way of saying, you know, I don’t believe in this type of system.

Once enrolled in MRTA, Berenson posed as a journalist to gain access to the Peruvian Congress, where her “photographer,” actually a fellow MRTA member, gathered information about the building layout and security as part of a plan to storm the building, take members of Congress hostage, and exchange them for MRTA prisoners. But Berenson and her new comrades never had a chance to pull off this caper: in November 1995, she was arrested and charged with terrorism; in a police raid on the safe house, three MRTA members and one police officer were killed.

In the wake of Berenson’s arrest, then Peruvian president Alberto Fujimori described her on TV as “la gringa terrorista” – a name that has stuck ever since. She was tried by a secret military court – her absurd defense was that she hadn’t known that the people living in her house were members of the MRTA or that they were stockpiling weapons there – and was sentenced her to life in prison.

berenson1996 — Berenson haranguing the press, 1996

After her sentencing, Berenson appeared at a press conference that is now famous in Peru. One report described her as “looking feral, her hair wild and her eyes possessed,” and says that she went “berserk on camera.” Another account put it this way: “her face twisted with anger, she marched onstage screaming.” Screeching at journalists about “hunger” and “misery” and “injustice” and “institutional violence” in Peru, Berenson insisted that the MRTA was not a gang of “criminal terrorists” but “a revolutionary movement.”

This image of Berenson as a savage, shrieking wackjob has stuck in the minds of Peruvians ever since. In the years that followed her incarceration, Berenson’s mother repeatedly insisted that this wasn’t the real Lori – that her daughter had been abused and traumatized in prison and was temporarily discombobulated. But a woman who had known Berenson back at MIT saw a picture of Berenson ranting at the media and said she immediately “recognized the expression on her face.”

More tomorrow.

Posted on November 2, 2016November 3, 2016 by usefulstooges 1

Baader-Meinhof: The legacy

The Baader Meinhof Group, also known as the Red Army Faction (RAF), officially disbanded in 1998, after many years of relative inactivity. But it has never really gone away.

We’ve already mentioned the massive scale of support that the group enjoyed in its day among young West Germans. RAF members were also, as Michael Burleigh has put it, “the darlings of Germany’s left-wing cultural elite.” Among those who defended them publicly were such internationally famous writers as Jean-Paul Sartre and Heinrich Böll. When RAF leaders Gudrun Ensslin and Andreas Baader fled for a time to France and Italy, Tennessee Williams reportedly played host to them. Marianne Faithfull’s 1979 song “Broken English” was inspired by the group.

Then there’s Brian Eno’s 1978 song “RAF,” which incorporates “sound elements from a Baader Meinhof ransom message made by public telephone at the time of the Lufthansa Flight 181 hijacking.” Adorable.

In more recent years RAF has not only been remembered in films (as we saw yesterday) but also celebrated in song and story – and T-shirt.

Aside from Che Guevara T-shirts, the “Prada Meinhof” T-shirt is perhaps the famous sartorial example of what has been called “terrorist chic.” A 2005 exhibit at the Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin drew widespread criticism. “The RAF’s terrorism is downplayed, if not even glorified,” Friedbert Pflueger, a member of the German Parliament, told the Washington Post after viewing the exhibit, adding that it made “no distinction between culprits and victims.” Another source has noted that “photographs of Baader, Ensslin and Meinhof’s suicides feature in New York’s Museum Of Modern Art’s permanent collection.” Ulrike Meinhof’s story, moreover, has figured in the work of Nobel Prize-winning authors Günter Grass and Elfriede Jelinek.

If the RAF’s members were outraged that many former Nazis remained ensconced in the West German government of the 1970s, today’s Germans have reason to be outraged that their current cultural, media, and political elite is packed with people who, in their youth, cheered on the RAF. As a 2009 article observed, “many people from the protest movement went into German institutions as judges, lawyers, journalists and politicians, and…had far more impact than Baader-Meinhof’s violence.”

In 2001, for example, Bettina Röhl unearthed an archival film clip in which Joschka Fischer, who at the time was German Foreign Minister, could be seen beating up a cop in 1973, when he belonged to a Marxist group called the Cleaning Brigade. Röhl also claimed to possess taped witness accounts attesting that Fischer, back in the 1970s, had been a leading figure among far-left militants in Frankfurt, had advocated the use of Molotov cocktails, and had led a gang of bullies “who would come in and beat up his opponents or anyone standing in his way.” Other sources, meanwhile, alleged that Fischer had hidden RAF terrorist Margrit Schiller in his flat.

BRU102 - 20021025 - BRUSSELS, BELGIUM : German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer pictured during a news conference prior to the second working session at the European Council building in Brussels, 25 October 2002, the second day of the European Summit of Heads of State and Government, due to prepare the financing of the enlargement. EPA PHOTO BELGA/ BENOIT DOPPAGNE — Joschka Fischer

But Fischer wasn’t alone. As Röhl put it, he was just one of many Germans of his generation who suffered from the “Baader-Meinhof complex” – meaning that they were “traumatised by the roles they played during the student demonstrations” and “horrified by the recognition that they enjoyed the violence and are somehow nostalgic for it.” Röhl noted that in an interview with her years earlier, Fischer had bragged about the non-violent activity of his youth, clearly wanting her had “to see him as a hero of the 70s.” Such, indeed, is the mentality of many members of today’s German establishment.

Posted on September 30, 2016September 26, 2016 by usefulstooges 1

Baader-Meinhof in film: celebration or indictment?

The 2008 movie The Baader Meinhof Complex runs two and a half hours, and it is as ambitious as it is long. It seeks to tell the history of the Baader-Meinhof Group, or Red Army Faction (RAF), as fully as possible – to include every act of terrorism and every important RAF personage. The production is fastidious: the filmmakers reportedly went out of their way to re-create events, whenever possible, in the very spots where they had taken place. The attention to period detail, and to other particulars, is remarkable, as is the effort to create rich, rounded portraits of the major figures of (at least) the RAF’s first generation.

The film – directed by Uli Edel from a script by himself and Bernd Eichinger, which is based on a book by Stefan Aust – was a huge hit in Germany. It was a nominee for the Oscar for Best Foreign Film. There was, however, much debate as to whether or not it romanticized the terrorists. Some felt it portrayed RAF members as “Bonnie and Clyde-style heroes.” One film critic objected that Edel had given Andreas Baader “what he always wanted. Posthumously he has become the hero of a real action film.” Bettina Röhl called the film “the worst-case scenario – it would not be possible to top its hero worship.” The widow of banker Jurgen Ponto, who’d been assassinated by the RAF, protested the government’s financial support of the film by returning a Federal Cross of Merit. Michael Buback, son of a murdered federal prosecutor, complained that Edel had shown “little consideration…towards the family members” of the RAF’s victims.

Christopher Hitchens, however, praised the movie for not romanticizing the RAF. As he saw it, the film “interrogates and ultimately indicts (and convicts) the West German terrorists rather than the state and society which they sought to overthrow.” And Jorg Schleyer, son of another RAF victim, affirmed with admiration that Edel showed the RAF to be a “wantonly brutal band of murderers.”

BODY OF EVIDENCE, director Uli Edel, on set, 1993. ©MGM — Uli Edel

Well, which is it? On the one hand, the movie doesn’t stint on spelling out the main characters’ many flaws (including the fact that they’re cold-blooded killers). On the other hand, its use of cutaways to stock footage of the Vietnam War – bombings, terrified natives, etc. – seems to impute legitimacy to the RAF’s view of America as a cruel imperialist power. This impression is enhanced by the film’s almost total failure to remind the viewer that America was, in fact, at war with Communism, thanks to which East Germans were living under a totalitarian government under the thumb of the Kremlin. In the end, whether a particular viewer considers the characters in The Baader-Meinhof Complex sympathetic may depend mostly on that viewer’s own politics.

But the movie fails in at least one important, indisputable way: for whatever reason, it essentially omits the role of the Stasi in the history of the RAF. And without the Stasi, the film’s story, however crowded with accurate specifics, becomes a lie.

By contrast, consider Volker Schlöndorff’s 2000 movie The Legend of Rita. It’s the story of a well-off young West German woman, Rita Vogt (based in part on RAF member Inga Viett), who becomes involved in a RAF-like group because, as she puts it, “Riding horses, playing tennis or guzzling down salmon doesn’t interest me.” After she makes the front pages by killing a cop in France, she flees to East Germany. The Stasi’s RAF links are made clear from the start, and it’s the Stasi that gives her a new identity (and then yet another identity after the first one is blown).

There’s no doubt what Schlöndorff’s film wants us to make of Rita: she’s an oddball, as perversely happy with her new life in grim, oppressive East Germany than she was unhappy as an affluent citizen of the West. In the East, she’s grinning like a fool while everyone else is miserable. Ideology, clearly, is realer to her than reality. She doesn’t understand their attraction to the West: “Why do so many people want to leave here?” For their part, they mock the naïvete with which she contributes to a Sandinista solidarity fund: doesn’t she realize it’s a government scam?

When the Wall comes down, her colleagues’ newfound joy enrages her, and she lectures them about the value of what they’re losing: “This here was a great attempt at a revolution!” At the end, there’s no doubt about her utter foolishness. As a portrait of the RAF mentality, The Legend of Rita is shorter on documentary fact than The Baader Meinhof Complex, but scores far higher on moral clarity. Alas, one hesitates to say the same thing about its portrait of the Stasi mentality; to anyone familiar with the real Stasi, the consistent kindness of Rita’s Stasi contact is beyond improbable.

A third film merits mention here. Germany in Autumn (1978), the work of ten high-profile German directors, including Schlöndorff and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, is a bizarre mishmash of images, staged scenes, documentary footage, and impromptu monologues and arguments, all directly or indirectly about the RAF; it concludes with the October 1977 funeral of Baader, Enslin, and gang member Jan-Carl Raspe, at which dozens of mourners raised their fists and screamed “Murderers!” at cops. The filmmakers obviously felt they were paying some sort of tribute to the RAF, or at least doing them the honor of tackling the issues they’d raised, but today the film serves mainly as a document in 1970s-era useful stoogery in West Germany, where for many members of the cultural elite democracy was fascism and Communism was liberation.

Posted on September 29, 2016September 26, 2016 by usefulstooges 2

Baader-Meinhof: The Stasi connection

The Baader-Meinhof Group, otherwise known as the Red Army Faction (RAF), represented itself as a small, independent group of heroes taking on not only West Germany but the entire American Empire. In fact – as has been increasingly well documented in the years since the fall of the Iron Curtain – they were far from independent.

After German reunification in 1990, massive East German archives were opened and discoveries began to be made. One of those discoveries, made in 1991, was that a 1981 RAF attack on a U.S. Army base, which included a failed attempt to kill U.S. General Frederick Kroesen, commander of American forces in Europe, was in fact a joint operation with Stasi, East Germany’s brutal secret police. Stasi officers, it turned out, had trained RAF members to use anti-tank grenades and had also supplied them with the grenades. Later information showed that the Stasi also trained RAF members responsible for the 1981 bombing of the U.S. air base at Ramstein, which wounded 17 people.

These revelations severely damaged the RAF’s reputation among its many West German fans. But they were just the beginning.

Bettina_Roehl_in_Hamburg_an_der_Alster — Bettina Röhl

As we noted yesterday, one of Ulrike Meinhof‘s daughters, Bettina Röhl, went on to become a journalist herself – and a fierce critic of the RAF. Röhl, who was ten years old when Meinhof was captured and incarcerated, and fourteen when she committed suicide in prison, published a book in 2006 about the RAF that was sardonically entitled Making Communism Fun.

Among Röhl’s revelations, based on archival research, was that konkret, the far-left magazine that was published by her father and edited by her mother, was for many years wholly financed and directly controlled by the East German government. Far from being a free voice of dissent, in other words, it was, at least in the early 1960s, an out-and-out East German propaganda organ, and Röhl’s father was, in Bettina’s own words, a bought-and-paid-for “useful idiot” who accepted 40,000 deutsche marks per issue for following the Honecker regime’s orders. Later, Röhl was able to document the regular transfer of funds from the East German government to the RAF.

BennoOhnesorg_1 — 1967: death of Benno Ohnesorg

In 2009, further archival studies forced a total rewrite of the event originally cited by the RAF as having triggered its founding. In 1967, the shooting by a police officer of university student Benno Ohnesorg at a demonstration against the visiting Shah of Iran outside the opera house in West Berlin had solidified young West German leftists’ hostility toward their government – and had intensified their belief that things were better on the other side of the Iron Curtain. The 2009 revelations, however, showed that Karl-Heinz Kurras, the cop who killed Ohnesorg, was in fact a Stasi spy and a member of the East German Communist Party. There’s no definitive evidence as to motive, but as at least one observer has pointed out, the likely reason for Ohnesorg’s murder is that “Kurras on his own or under orders from the Stasi decided to give the left wing a matryr to mobilize them.”

ARCHIV: Der angeklagte Rechtsextremist Horst Mahler wartet vor dem Landgericht Muenchen (Bayern) auf den Beginn seines Prozesses wegen Volksverhetzung (Foto vom 12.01.09). Der Rechtsextremist und fruehere NPD-Anwalt Horst Mahler ist vom Landgericht Muenchen wegen Volksverhetzung zu einer sechsjaehrigen Haftstrafe verurteilt worden. Der Vorsitzende Richter Martin Rieder begruendete am Mittwoch (25.02.09) das hohe Strafmass damit, dass der Angeklagte "voellig uneinsichtig und unbelehrbar" sei. Zudem koenne das umfangreiche Gestaendnis Mahlers zu Beginn der Verhandlung nicht strafmildernd gewertet werden, da er keinerlei Reue erkennen lasse. Zu seinen Gunsten koenne lediglich das Alter des 73-Jaehrigen angefuehrt werden. "Der Angeklagte ist sogar stolz auf seine Taten", sagte Rieder. (zu ddp-Text) Foto: Joerg Koch/ddp — Horst Mahler

In 2011, the Guardian reported that Horst Mahler, one of the RAF’s founders, had reportedly been a paid Stasi informant until 1970. (By the way, in what may be regarded as a reflection of the ideological confusions that marked most of the RAF’s high-profile members, Mahler later became a neo-Nazi and Holocaust denier.)

Over the years, the picture has come ever more sharply into focus – and the role of the Stasi in the story of RAF has loomed larger and larger. It was, for example, the Stasi that smuggled RAF leaders Gudrun Ensslin and Andreas Baader back into West Berlin after they’d spent some time laying low in France and Italy, waiting for things to cool down back home.

raf2 — A wanted poster showing RAF members

The Stasi’s involvement grew with the rise of the so-called second and third generation of the RAF, who came to the fore after the first generation were sent to prison (and the top names committed suicide). Thanks to Stasi training, this new wave of RAF members were able to carry out more professional-quality acts of terrorism. Many of these later RAF members eventually retired in East Germany, where they were given new identities and rewarded with lifestyles that ordinary East Germans could only dream about – only to be arrested, tried, and imprisoned after German reunification.

In short, it’s clear by now that the RAF was, when you come right down to it, a Stasi operation. But this aspect of the RAF story is still often overlooked – for example, in the 2008 German movie The Baader Meinhof Complex. We’ll get around to the movie tomorrow.

Posted on September 28, 2016October 29, 2016 by usefulstooges 5

Theory into action: Baader-Meinhof’s depredations

Kaufhaus21968 — 1968: Baader and Ensslin explode a department store in Frankfurt

All told, they’re considered to have been responsible for thirty-four deaths and scores of injuries. At their height in the 1970s, they bombed several U.S. Army installations, a police station, a judge’s car, the headquarters of the Alex Springer publishing house, and the West German embassy in Stockholm. They assassinated several bigwigs and, in doing so, also took the lives of a number of policemen, chauffeurs, and other bystanders. The worst year of all was 1977, when, during the so-called “German Autumn,” they murdered West Germany’s chief federal prosecutor, kidnapped and killed its leading industrialist, and, in collaboration with a Palestinian terrorist group, hijacked a Lufthansa commercial flight.

1972MunichBKABomb — 1972: car bomb in Munich

Why did they do all of this? Much has been said and written about the impact of Nazism and the Holocaust upon the first postwar generation of West Germans. They felt rage at their parents for not standing up to Hitler. They felt guilt over the Nazi era, which they tried to relieve by casting America as the new fascist empire and themselves as its virtuous anti-fascist opponents. That they could look at the free countries of the West and see a continuation of Nazi tyranny, while looking with indifference, or even a degree of admiration, upon the truly tyrannical regimes just across the border in the Soviet bloc, is only a measure of just how twisted a psychological impact the shadow of Nazism had upon many young West Germans of the 1960s and 70s.

buback — 1977: Federal prosecutor Siegfried Buback assassinated

But the members of the Baader-Meinhof Group, which called itself the Red Army Faction (RAF), weren’t content just to sit in their college dormitories, rant about the evils of America and capitalism and their parents’ generation, and attend the occasional far-left demo. They convinced themselves that the evils of America and its puppets in Bonn justified the most extreme kind of violence. After all, America was killing people in Vietnam. Many West German leaders were ex-Nazis. As far as the RAF was concerned, killing soldiers, bankers, jurists, executives, and police officers was a matter of an eye for an eye. Somehow it didn’t seem to occur to them that their view of these victims as subhumans deserving of coldblooded extinction was altogether too reminiscent of the Nazi ideology that they professed to despise.

Like many far-left European youths of their day, the RAF’s founders identified with obscure radical groups in distant corners of the globe. “Their role models,” as one observer has noted, “were the Tupamaros – the Movimiento de Liberación Nacional in Uruguay – which since the late 1960s had resorted to kidnappings and assassinations in its fight for social justice.”

22. Bundesparteitag der CDU in Hamburg (Hanns-Martin Schleyer) 18.-20.11.1973 — 1978: Hanns-Martin Schleyer kidnapped and killed

Nobody played a greater role in formulating the RAF philosophy than Ulrike Meinhof. Prior to joining the group, Meinhof had been a prominent journalist and editor for a left-wing monthly, konkret, to which she contributed endless theoretical justifications for radical violence. She was, perhaps, the group’s most puzzling figure. Though an active member of West Germany’s illegal Communist Party, she also led a relatively bourgeois life, marrying Klaus Rainer Röhl, the publisher of konkret, and having twin daughters with him.

Not long after divorcing Röhl in 1968, however, she met various members of the RAF, and allowed herself to be drawn into a plot to spring Andreas Baader, who was then behind bars. As a credentialed writer, she managed to persuade a court to let Baader be escorted from his prison to an institute for social research where she could talk to him in connection with a book project. The two met up as planned, and three group operatives broke into the institute, shot a librarian, and left with Baader through a window. Meinhof, who had supposedly planned to stay behind and profess no involvement in the conspiracy, apparently changed her mind at the last minute, following her new confederates out the window.

rohlmeinhof — Klaus Rainer Röhl and Ulrike Meinhof

Although she sought to represent herself, in her countless articles, as a profound student of radical political theory who’d done a great deal of deep thinking about how to translate theory into practice – Meinhof seems to have been, at best, something of a flibbertigibbit. After leaping out that window, she phoned a friend to pick up her daughters at school. Later, she arranged to have them kidnapped and sent to a camp for Palestinian orphans, but the girls were rescued and returned to their father. One of Meinhof’s daughters, Bettina Röhl, grew up to be a journalist herself – and an uncompromising critic of her mother’s cockeyed ideology, terrorist activities, and horrible parenting. We’ll look into that tomorrow.

Posted on September 27, 2016September 26, 2016 by usefulstooges 1

The deadly stoogery of Baader-Meinhof

It was a blast from the past. And boy, did these people know about blasts.

“Three veteran members of the Baader-Meinhof Gang, Germany’s most notorious homegrown terrorist organisation,” reported Justin Huggler in the Telegraph last May, “may have emerged from years in hiding to execute a series of armed robberies.” These crooks, who walked off with several hundred thousands of dollars, were part of the gang’s “third generation,” which had been notorious for act of terrorism back in the 1980s and 90s.

How to sum up the long, eventful story of the Baader-Meinhof Gang (a.k.a. Baader-Meinhof Group), whose large cast of characters dominated headlines in 1970s West Germany with their seemingly random and meaningless acts of violence? Known by the names of two of its founders, Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof, it actually called itself the Red Army Faction (RAF). Its members, most of them university students or former university students who had grown up in the years immediately following World War II, were young and angry. And extremely confused. For them, the Bonn government was little more than a continuation of the Nazi regime, and a tool of America – which, in their view, had inherited the Nazis’ role as the major worldwide force of fascist imperialism.

One might ask how they managed not to recognize the rather significant difference between Hitler’s Germany and the West Germany in which they lived. One might further ask how a group of people who lived right next door to the Soviet bloc were so fiercely exercised over America’s supposedly imperial actions in far-flung places like Vietnam and Chile while showing nothing but fondness for the Moscow regime that subjugated Eastern Europe, ran the Gulag, and had built the wall around West Berlin, where many of them lived and operated.

But then, any American who encountered political-minded West German university students in those days can attest to the fierce anti-establishment and anti-American attitudes that ran rampant among them. Not all of them sympathized with the USSR, but even those who did not seemed to view it almost as an implacable fact of nature and appeared to see no point in criticizing its philosophy and policies.

As writer Michael Burleigh has put it, they were a generation of “spoiled middle-class kids [who] revolted against parents who had arduously rebuilt the country from wartime rubble” – and the RAF was “the lethal face of [that] radical generation.” (Indeed, Stefan Aust noted in his 1985 history The Baader-Meinhof Complex that while violent New Left radicals such as the Weather Underground were never popular in the U.S., fully a quarter of West Germans under forty actually felt sympathy for the Baader-Meinhof Group, with one out of ten saying they’d hide a member of the group from the police.)

But if RAF were their generation’s “lethal face,” they were hardly disciplined. Far from being worthy of the name “army” – theoretically coherent, strategically focused, tactically organized – the first generation of RAF members differed from the majority of their West German agemates largely by being bigger slobs, bigger screw-ups, and bigger screwballs: they lived, in Burleigh’s account, “a life of sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll amid overflowing ashtrays, posters and fetid sheets.”

**ARCHIV** Andreas Baader, links, und Gudrun Ensslin in der Anklagebank vor der Urteilsverkuendung im Brandstifter-Prozess in Frankfurt am 31. Oktober 1968. Die zwei Angeklagten erhielten je Drei Jahre Zuchthaus. Vor 40 Jahren - in der Nacht zum 3. April 1968 - zuendeten die spaeteren RAF-Terroristen Andreas Baader und Gudrun Ensslin ihre ersten Brandsaetze. Im Kaufhaus Schneider auf der Frankfurter Zeil setzte ein verstecktes Schwefel-Phosphor-Paeckchen eine altdeutsche Schrankwand und im benachbarten Kaufhof Betten und Spielwaren in Flammen. Was auch manche Zeitgenossen als Happening von Bekifften ansahen, war der Beginn einer beispiellosen Terrorwelle, der in den naechsten drei Jahrzehnten mehr als 30 Menschen zum Opfer fielen. Auch viele Mitglieder der Terrorgruppe kamen ums Leben, bis sie sich 1998 für aufgeloest erklärte. Zunaechst als Baader-Meinhof-Gruppe oder Baader-Meinhof-Bande bekannt, nannte sie sich selbst Rote-Armee-Fraktion. (AP-Photo/fls) Andreas Baader, left, is seen together with Gudrun Ensslin during the proclamation of their sentence in their department store arson trial in Frankfurt/Main, Western Germany, on October 31, 1968. Baader was later one of the founders of the Western German terrorist group RAF (Red Army Faction). (AP Photo/fls) — Gudrun Ensslin

RAF co-founder Gudrun Ensslin, notes Burleigh, was “a dope-smoking anti-nuclear protester with serial boyfriends who had given away an illegitimate child for adoption” and who “had already starred in a soft porn movie when she fell under the spell of Andreas Baader.” As for Baader, he’d “been thrown out of school and failed at a succession of jobs; he had eked out a living as a male model, supplemented by robbing customers in the lavatories of gay bars and stealing cars. Like Ensslin, he too had an illegitimate daughter – and was also a drug-fuelled fantasist.”

More than one observer has dismissed them as “psychopaths.” Christopher Hitchens wrote in 2009 that he’d been convinced since the late 1970s “that the Baader Meinhof phenomenon actually was a form of psychosis.” A principal recruiting ground for the RAF, he noted, “was an institution at the University of Heidelberg called the Sozialistisches Patienten Kollektiv, or Socialist Patients Collective, an outfit that sought to persuade the pitifully insane that they needed no treatment save social revolution.” When the RAF ran low on members and needed to replenish its numbers, it proselytized at the SPK.

In any event, the RAF unequivocally admired the Communist world. If West Germany was the Third Reich’s successor state, East Germany preserved the ideals of the anti-fascist forces, led by Moscow, that had defeated it. They loved Mao. They identified with Che Guevara. Like many members of the New Left throughout Western Europe and North America, they were steeped in the writings of the Frankfurt school and other Marxists, devouring, and frequently consulting and quoting, writers like Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) and German-American theoretician Herbert Marcuse (1989-1979).

But theory wasn’t enough for the RAF. Above all, they were devoted to translating theory into action. More about that action tomorrow.

Posted on September 26, 2016September 26, 2016 by usefulstooges 6

Smearing Elie Wiesel

Imagine the pride of a father who – having made a career as an unscrupulous world-class professional creep – lives to see his son, at a still relatively tender age, surpass his own monumental record for moral iniquity.

Whom else could we be talking about here but the execrable Sidney Blumenthal and his evil spawn, Max?

We’ve already looked in on Max a couple of times in the last year or so, noting the breathtaking rapidity with which he rose to the very top of the list of American Jews who make a career out of vilifying Israel (and, as a corollary, defending and justifying Islamic terror). His 2013 book Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel was so repulsive that even Eric Alterman, hardly an apologist for Israel, wrote that it “could have been published by the Hamas Book-of-the-Month Club (if it existed).” Max supports the BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions) movement; he’s repeatedly accused Israel of apartheid and equated it with Nazi Germany; he’s even gone so far as to cheer, in a talk at the London School of Economics, a massacre of IDF soldiers in 2014 by members of Hamas.

No one should have been surprised, then, by Max’s disgusting response to the death, on July 2, at age 87, of Elie Wiesel – the Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace Prize winner who provided, in his 1960 memoir Night, an indelible account of the experience of Auschwitz, and who over the decades became an internationally respected prophet of decency and humanity, an eloquent critic of anti-Semitism, racism, and other forms of prejudice who, at one moment of crisis after another, reminded the world where its moral duty lay.

All that mattered to Max, however, was that Wiesel recognized the very real difference between Israel (which Max has referred to as JSIL – the Jewish State in the Levant) and its terrorist enemies. And so, on July 2, Max tweeted out the following:

Blumenthal and one of his most vocal critics, Rabbi Schmuley Boteach

Elie Wiesel is dead. He spent his last years inciting hatred, defending apartheid & palling around with fascists.

And:

Elie Wiesel went from a victim of war crimes to a supporter of those who commit them. He did more harm than good and should not be honored.

In a follow-up article, Max smeared Wiesel as a careerist who’d “secured his brand as the high priest of Holocaust theology, the quasi-religion he introduced.”

Joel Pollak had the perfect comment on all this: “Blumenthal’s bile,” he wrote, “is a perfect tribute to Wiesel, who was the living retort to such nonsense.”

clintonsid — Sid with Bill, back in the White House days

As it happens, Max’s dad, Sid, is a longtime Clinton functionary – confidante, adviser, fixer, bagman, snoop, go-between. Several of Hillary’s famous e-mails to Sid reference Max, praising his articles: “He’s so good.” “A very smart piece.” “[P]owerful and touching.” “Max strikes again!” Over the year, both Clintons have kept mum about Max’s vicious savaging of Israel. But his Wiesel tweets made headlines, and Hillary is running for president, and so she apparently felt compelled – finally – to distance herself from him, releasing a statement through her campaign rejecting his “offensive, hateful and patently absurd statements” about Wiesel, whom she described as a “hero.”

Better late than never. But it will take far more than this one incident, one suspects, for the Clintons to cut loose Max’s dad, whose utter lack of the kind of conscience that Wiesel embodied has made him the most useful of factotums.

Posted on August 5, 2016July 8, 2016 by usefulstooges 2

Owen Jones: covering for Islam

As we noted yesterday, gay Guardian commentator Owen Jones lost his temper and walked off of a TV program on the night of the Orlando nightclub massacre. His purported reason? The other two people on-screen had refused to call the killings homophobic. This was not, in fact, the case. What bothered him, apparently, was that if he hadn’t thrown a fit, he would have been forced to listen to a discussion of a topic he has been trying to avoid for years – namely, the fact that Islam, which he has defended fiercely against all comers, does in fact preach the murder of gay people such as himself.

The Telegraph‘s Julia Hartley-Brewer, who was on the TV show with Jones, accused him of making the massacre all about himself. Rod Liddle, writing in the Spectator, agreed: “the reliably idiotic left-wing columnist Owen Jones had a temper tantrum while reviewing the papers on Sky News — and stormed off the set, apparently because neither the presenter nor the other reviewer, Julia Hartley-Brewer, would accept that the tragedy was all about Owen.”

Liddle went on:

This was an attack upon an LGBT community, Jones insisted — needlessly, as it happens, because everybody had accepted that it was an attack upon an LGBT community….But none of it was enough for Owen. The only thing that mattered was that it was an attack upon gay people, and so it was a kind of singularity, an atrocity which Owen, being gay, could have to himself. The fact that a loathing of homosexuality is but one of the many problematic facets of Islam — along with misogyny, a contempt for those who are not Muslim, a hatred of Jewish people — was something which Jones could not accept. Presumably because this contradicted his resolutely fixed mindset that Muslims are oppressed people and are therefore as one in the struggle for liberation along with gay and transgendered people.

Indeed. In the Daily Mail, Katie Hopkins agreed with Liddle. While admitting that there was no love lost between her and Jones, she tried to be generous and sympathetic: “Owen is caught on a human fault line partly of his own making – he writes for the Guardian and is a cheerleader for Labour who prioritise Islam over the LGBT cause far closer to his own hurting heart.” She then read Jones the riot act:

Katie Hopkins

Someone has to call this thing. Until Islam is tolerant of gay rights, we cannot tolerate Islam. In any sense. You have to choose.

LGBT rights or Islam. Black or white. Yes or no. Stop or go. It is a binary thing. You need to decide.

Douglas Murray, a somewhat older and infinitely wiser gay British writer, who recognizes Islam for what it is, summed up his view in a single tweet:

I’m sorry for Owen Jones. I would also feel guilty if I’d spent my life covering for the ideology that just killed 50 LGBT people.

If Jones was feeling guilty the night of the Orlando massacre, it didn’t last for long. The day after, he recorded a video (see below) utterly ignoring the issue of Islam – except for a brief mention of London’s new Muslim mayor, Sadiq Khan, whom he praised, absurdly, as a staunch defender of gay rights. The useful stoogery, in short, goes on.

Posted on August 4, 2016July 6, 2016 by usefulstooges 1

Rewriting Rwanda: John Pilger

Who is John Pilger? Born in Australia in 1939, he worked as a reporter for the Sydney Daily Telegraph, then relocated in 1962 to Britain, where over the years he made a name for himself as a foreign correspondent, TV journalist, documentary maker – and, not least, as one of a small number of prominent scribes (among them Noam Chomsky, Robert Fisk, and Howard Zinn) who are famous for their anti-Western rancor. As is so often the case with such figures, his anti-Western rancor hasn’t kept Pilger from receiving honorary doctorates from several leading Western universities and from collecting a long list of major Western awards – an Emmy, a Peabody, a BAFTA, two nods for “Journalist of the Year,”multiple prizes from the UN, an award from Reporters without Borders, and a human-rights prize from Norway, among others.

Former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein yells at the court as the verdict is delivered during his trial held under tight security in Baghdad's heavily fortified Green Zone, Sunday Nov. 5, 2006. Iraq's High Tribunal on Sunday found Saddam Hussein guilty of crimes against humanity and sentence him to die by hanging. (AP Photo/David Furst, Pool) — Saddam Hussein

We saw yesterday that even after 9/11 Pilger couldn’t see Americans as ever, ever being victims. That atrocity and its aftermath evoked some of Pilger’s most wretched writings. It’s one thing to consider the whole “War on Terror” misguided or botched, and to deplore the collateral damage caused by coalition forces in Afghanistan and Iraq; it is quite another to look upon the utter savagery of Saddam or of Taliban jihadists, as Pilger did, with apparent indifference. (Indeed, Pilger openly declared that he was on Saddam’s side.) For him, as one critic wrote,

the people of Iraq, the terrorists, the psychopathic death squads, only exist in the dim and distant background. If they are mentioned at all…they are products of Western policy. They lack all agency. To all intents and purposes they are the absent party. They are non-persons; hapless nobodies…..There’s obviously a kind of racism at play here: only Westerners matter; and only then if they can be blamed.

It gets worse. In 2010, Pilger endorsed a book, The Politics of Genocide, in which Edward S. Herman and David Peterson denied the monstrous 1994 annihilation of the Tutsi in Rwanda by the Hutu majority. According to Herman and Peterson, the shoe was on the other foot: the Tutsi, in fact, had massacred the Hutu. Pilger called the book a “brilliant exposé of great power’s lethal industry of lies.” As one former admirer of Pilger commented: “In the Rwandan context, this is the equivalent of asserting that the Nazis never killed Jews in death camps – indeed, that it was really Jews who killed Germans.”

In Pilger’s view, we weren’t even the good guys in the Cold War: complaining in one 2005 essay about the history syllabi then in use at Oxford and Cambridge, he mocked the references to Soviet “expansionism” and the “spread” of Communism and protested the fact that “there is not a word about the ‘spread’ of rapacious America.”

(FILES) In this 04 September1999 file photo, Cuban President Fidel Castro discusses his request to the president of the International Olympic Committee in Havana for an investigation into the treatment of certain Cuban atheletes. Castro said the communist nation is not afraid of dialogue with the United States -- and not interested in continued confrontation with its powerful neighbor. The comments came as a group of US lawmakers visited Cuba this weekend to try to end nearly half a century of mutual distrust and amid reports that President Barack Obama was planning to ease economic sanctions on the island, including travel restrictions on Cuban-Americans. "We're not afraid to talk with the United States. We also don't need confrontation to exist, like some fools like to think," Castro, 82, said in an article on the Cubadebate website on April 5, 2009. AFP PHOTO/ADALBERTO ROQUE /FILES (Photo credit should read ADALBERTO ROQUE/AFP/Getty Images) Original Filename: Was672139.jpg — Fidel Castro

Of course he loves Cuba, which he first visited in 1967. In a 2011 article, he depicted that initial exposure to the Castros’ island as a fun, colorful, fiesta-like experience. The Cubans he met were uniformly delightful and friendly – but, he added, “the hardship of their imposed isolation left smiles diminished and eyes averted once the music had stopped.” And whose fault was that isolation? One guess. America’s, naturally. In fact, everything that went wrong with the Castro Revolution, it turns out, was America’s fault: the increasing poverty, the decrease in food supplies, the crumbling of infrastructure, etc., etc. Also, while America’s relations with the rest of the world are driven by a sheer lust for power, don’t you know, Cuba’s international relations are motivated by pure altruism: the “revolution,” Pilger maintained, echoing the Castros’ ludicrous propaganda, “sends tens of thousands of doctors across the world for the sole purpose of helping other human beings: an epic internationalism.”

And he was at least as fond of Hugo Chávez as he is of the Castros. More on that tomorrow.

Posted on July 26, 2016July 6, 2016 by usefulstooges 3

Selective omission: the world according to Ben Norton

We’ve been acquainting ourselves with Salon’s enfant terrible Ben Norton, a cherubic-looking enemy of America, Israel, and “neoliberalism” and ardent enthusiast for Islam and socialist economics.

One of Norton’s trademark activities is unfairly besmirching those who tell the truth about the darker aspects of Islamic ideology. In March, he smeared Islam expert Frank Gaffney, calling him an “extremist” and “Islamophobe” and mocking him for his throughly legitimate pushback against efforts to impose sharia-based restrictions in the West.

Norton has also gone after Sam Harris, the neuroscientist and bestselling author who has become one of the public faces of secularism (and who is about fifty times smarter than Norton). Accusing Harris of “virulent anti-Muslim bigotry and anti-Arab racism” and labeling him a “fascist,” Norton didn’t bother to serve up anything resembling an argument to support these charges; he simply quoted a series of statements that Harris has made about the disturbing demographic trends in Europe, about the disturbing tenets of Islam, and about the disturbing views about women, gays, and individual liberties held by disturbingly large percentages of Western Muslims. Every single one of the statements made by Harris that Norton quoted was 100% factual; but for Harris to have cited these facts was, in Norton’s eyes, simply unacceptable, and proof positive of prejudice.

Gaffney and Harris aren’t the only people whose writings about Islam have led to their being maligned as bigots by Norton. He actually marked the first anniversary of the Charlie Hebdo massacre by assailing the magazine’s writers (presumably including the ones who had been savagely slaughtered by Muslims a year earlier) as “racist.”

hebdo — Emergency workers with one of the victims of the Charlie Hebdo massacre

In an article published shortly before Christmas of last year, Norton explained to Salon readers how “to argue with your racist, Islamophobic uncle at Christmas dinner.” The piece served up the usual dishonest CAIR-style apologetics while neatly avoiding any mention of sharia law – e.g., the death penalty for homosexuality and apostasy – and it concluded with a truly nonsensical statement: “at the end of the day, Americans are much more likely to be killed by cars, suicide, bees, wasps, and even furniture than they are by Muslims.” In another piece that appeared shortly after Christmas, Norton made essentially the same point, writing that “[m]ore Americans were killed in Christmas weekend storms this year than in Islamic extremist attacks since 9/11.”

Amitai-Etzioni-courtesy-sase.org_ — Amitai Etzioni

The Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) has criticized Norton more than once for the anti-Israeli and pro-Islamic terrorism tilt of his “reporting.” In February, citing an article in which Norton offered an “apparently deliberate” misreading of an op-ed by sociologist Amitai Etzioni, CAMERA accused him of displaying “a dazzling skepticism of information from Israeli sources alongside a great acceptance of unfounded anti-Israel conspiracy theories.” (For instance, Norton expressed doubts that Hezbollah stored weapons in private homes, a practice well documented by Human Rights Watch and other groups.) CAMERA also noted that Norton’s work was riddled with errors – among them dating Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights at 1967 instead of 1981.

In March, CAMERA slammed a Norton article headlined “Israeli airstrikes kill 2 Palestinian children in the besieged Gaza Strip,” complaining that Norton didn’t mention until the fifth paragraph that Israel’s strikes had come “in response to four Palestinian rocket attacks targeting Israel.” The article, CAMERA maintained, was replete with examples of “selective omission” that turned reality upside down, depicting Israel as the aggressor in the Gaza Strip and Hamas as the victims.

We’ll wind up this long march through Norton’s short career tomorrow.

Posted on July 20, 2016July 19, 2016 by usefulstooges 3

Useful Stooges