Germany's 'Baader-Meinhof' Sanitized: German Left remakes image of terrorist group.

FrontPageMagazine.com ^ | Saturday, October 25, 2003 | By Stephen Brown

[JohnHuang2]

Germany's 'Baader-Meinhof' Sanitized
By Stephen Brown
FrontPageMagazine.com | October 24, 2003

Just imagine a film about 1960s radical Kathy Boudin, in which she is portrayed as a misguided fighter for freedom and human rights. And the Weather Underground? Imagine a film depicting it as a noble entity for its opposition to racism and the Vietnam War.

Well, that might not be so far off if events in Germany are anything to go by. That country's notorious Baader-Meinhof terrorist group, aka the 'Red Army Faction', is currently undergoing a surge in popularity in the Federal Republic that has elevated it almost to pop status. And unsurprisingly, it is the German leftist cultural industry that is leading the charge in remaking the image of one of Europe's most deadly terrorist groups of the 1970s and 80s.

Like the Weather Underground, Baader-Meinhof was a radical, communist terrorist outfit, that sought to overthrow its country's existing social and political order in favor of a totalitarian socialist state. The terrorist group murdered 30 people and was responsible for a string of bombings and kidnappings that shook Germany to its core during its heyday in the 1970s.

Last year, a film was released about one of the RAF's founders, Andreas Baader, in which, one critic says, the petty criminal turned communist revolutionary is portrayed like a Jesse James-type figure, a dashing, social rebel, rather than the murderer that he really was. In this cheap glorification of a ruthless killer, the filmmaker has his subject dressed in a long, spaghetti-western style coat, and even allows him to die a 'cool' screen death, taking a bullet, while remaining standing and firing back with two pistols he pulled out of his leather jacket.

In reality, Baader's end was anything but glorious. This vile terrorist committed suicide in Stammheim Prison with a shot to the head from a smuggled pistol right after the passengers of a German airliner, hijacked in 1977 by Palestinian terrorists to force German authorities to free him, were rescued in Mogadishu. At the time, this movie 'hero' was serving a life sentence for murder, attempted murder, and for forming a terrorist organization. During his trial in 1976, his Baader-Meinhof comrades executed
the trial's prosecutor and his driver in their car at a red light.

Several other terrorist acts were later carried out to force Baader's, and other RAF terrorists', release. One such action, committed in the fall of 1977, is the subject of a film seen last summer on German television. Called 'Hanns-Martin Schleyer: A German Story', it is even more disgraceful than the one about Baader, since it seeks, in a subtle manner, to put forward a justification for the group's vicious behavior.

Hanns-Martin Schleyer was a prominent German industrialist who was kidnapped on September 5 and executed October 18 of that year after the ruling socialist government of Chancellor Helmut Schmidt refused to meet the terrorists' demands and release from prison 11 RAF members. Five masked gunmen had cold-bloodedly shot and killed three of Schleyer's bodyguards and driver during the kidnapping that started when a woman pushing a baby carriage suddenly appeared on the street, forcing Schleyer's car to stop. The car with the police escort then slammed into the rear of Schleyer's car, after which the terrorists executed its occupants.

The film, however, does not focus on the unconscionable deeds committed by the terrorists, that day but rather, as the title suggests, on Hanns-Martin Schleyer, or, more specifically, on his Nazi past. Schleyer had been an SS officer during the war who was sent to Czechoslovakia to help 'Germanize' the Czech economy. While there is no proof he was ever involved in war crimes, he did live in a house that once belonged to a deported and murdered Jewess. After 1945, he spent three years as a POW and was released in 1948 after his 'denazification'.

One critic has pointed out that Schleyer's story was indeed a German one, in that it resembled the lives of tens of thousands of other Germans at that time. However, by focusing on his Nazi past and that of Nazis in Czechoslovakia, the film subtly suggests that Schleyer got what he deserved. One critic says there is an unstated, but detectable message in the film that Schleyer was a legitimate target and the RAF's terrorism was, at least in this case, not unfounded. In other words, the victims of extremist murder are the guilty ones, while the murderers are fighters for justice and a better world. Not without justification, 'Hanns-Martin Schleyer: A German Story' has been called a posthumous execution.

Unfortunately, the sanitizing of the Baader-Meinhof criminals does not stop with the silver screen. An art exhibition about the RAF was to take place in Berlin this month, but protests, especially from members of the murdered victims' families, saw it postponed. Called 'Myth RAF', it was to receive $100,000 in taxpayers' money from the city.

The exhibition was to be a history of the RAF and how the group is reflected in artists' works. But since most of the artists are 'progressive', one can just imagine what would have been hanging on the walls, especially since one of the original concepts for the show was to explore what ideas and ideals the RAF had that are still valid today.

When one visits Germany today, it is not uncommon to see young Germans wearing T-shirts with the RAF logo of a sub-machine gun on a red star. But while youthful rebellion is partially responsible for this sad sight, dishonest, leftist cultural works such as these and others about the RAF also share the blame for leading them so morally astray.

[JohnHuang2]

Saturday, October 25, 2003

Quote of the Day by nonsporting

[IronJack]

Just imagine a film about 1960s radical Kathy Boudin, in which she is portrayed as a misguided fighter for freedom and human rights. And the Weather Underground? Imagine a film depicting it as a noble entity for its opposition to racism and the Vietnam War.

Doesn't take much imagination. Look what the Left has already done with Hurricane Carter and Wesley Cook (Mumia Abu-Jamal). They're nothing but thugs who have been elevated by revisionist history to heros.

[Tijeras_Slim]

Don't forget Ed ASSner saying "Stalin was misunderstood."

[OESY]

Just imagine a film about 1960s radical Kathy Boudin, in which she is portrayed as a misguided fighter for freedom and human rights. And the Weather Underground? Imagine a film depicting it as a noble entity for its opposition to racism and the Vietnam War.

No need to imagine. That film has been made. It's entitled: THE WEATHER UNDERGROUND.

Synpopsis:

In 1969, a radical splinter group broke off from SDS (Students for a Democratic Society), convinced that only militant action could end racism, the war in Vietnam and the inequalities they felt inherent in a capitalist society. The Weather Underground engaged in numerous bombings (and failed bombings) that landed them on the FBI’s Most Wanted list. Today - in light of a new age of terrorism - former members as well as their critics look back on the ’70s and reflect on what they did and why they did it.

The film re-examines the history of the infamous radical organization whose goal was the violent overthrow of the United States government. At the end of the 1960s, The Weathermen rose from the ashes of the Students for a Democratic Society in response to growing outrage at the Vietnam War, the Nixon administration, and racism in America. This group of several hundred young, white, and mostly middle-class, militants battled police in the streets, broke Timothy Leary out of prison and were responsible for over two dozen bombings including the US Capital. Evading one of the largest manhunts in US history, they lived underground for nearly a decade. Former members of the Weather Underground --including Bernardine Dohrn, Bill Ayers, Mark Rudd and many others-- speak candidly about their own thoughts and experiences, many for the first time ever, raising numerous questions about American white privilege, government reaction to political revolution and the ethics of the use of violence in pursuit of social change. Sam Green and Bill Siegel¹s Weather Underground received support from the Chicago Underground Film Fund.

"A great story…Terrifically smart!" – Elvis Mitchell, The New York Times

"A terrific movie, energetic and articulate. It¹s the don¹t miss documentary of the season."­ David Sterritt, Christian Science Monitor

Epilogue:

Clinton's Radical Pardons
FrontPageMagazine.com | March 5, 2001
by Ronald Radosh
URL: http://www.frontpagemag.com/columnists/radosh/2001/rr03-05-01p.htm

WITH PARDONGATE IN FULL STEAM, the attention is continually, and appropriately, on the factors behind Bill Clinton's last-minute pardons. These include those of the exiled billionaire and tax evader Marc Rich; the pardons in upstate New York of four Hasidic Rabbis who stole money from the State of New York, and whose congregation all voted in the New York Senate election for Hillary Clinton; and on the pardons of Carlos Vignali, a major drug dealer, and Glen Braswell, a man convicted of mail fraud and perjury. Hillary Clinton's brother, Hugh Rodham, was handsomely paid for his intervention on their behalf. But among the hundred-plus late-minute pardons signed by Bill Clinton before he left the White House were those of two 1960's radicals, unreconstructed advocates of revolutionary violence, Linda Evans and Susan Rosenberg.

Why did Clinton pardon them? In this case, both did not have benefactors giving large sums of money to Hillary's campaign, to the Democratic National Committee, or to the Clintons' personal legal defense fund. To date, I have not seen any investigative reports as to who recommended them, nor seen any comments from the former President as to what motivated him to grant these pardons. Let us look first at the record.

Susan Rosenberg was a former member of the Weather Underground the extremist faction that emerged from Students for a Democratic Society in the 1960's. The group was the major exponent of revolutionary violence, which they sought to carry out in a joint effort with black radicals in the Black Panther Party. Rosenberg was arrested in New Jersey in 1984, after she and a companion were found unloading pounds of dynamite and weapons, and a submachine gun, from their auto. These weapons were to be used by a Weather Underground cell in planned bombings, the key "tactic" favored by these revolutionaries at the time. Rosenberg was indicted and found guilty by a jury, and sentenced to 58 years in prison.

Among other crimes, Rosenberg was also accused in a nine-count indictment in 1982 of helping to engineer the 1979 prison escape of Black Liberation Army leader Joanne Chesimard, who was convicted of murder, assault, robbery and weapons charges in the May 2, 1973 murder of a New Jersey State Trooper, W. Foerster, and the wounding of another trooper while traveling on the New Jersey turnpike. Chesimard shot the second trooper, James Harper, as he was retreating to his police car. On November 2, 1979, Rosenberg helped Chesimard escape from a women's prison at which she was serving a life sentence, when visitors took a guard and prison driver hostage. Chesimard then managed to escape to Cuba, where Fidel Castro gave her sanctuary.

Appearing last December on "60 Minutes," Rosenberg presented her case for a pardon to a national audience. Essentially, she argued that she was incarcerated for a crime she never committed the 1981 Brinks robbery in Nanuet New York, in which two police officers and a security guard were murdered. At the time of her arrest, she had also been charged with planning to provide weapons for that robbery. But after her New Jersey conviction, Rudolph Giuliani, then US Attorney, dropped the charges as redundant since she had already been convicted and sentenced to a lengthy and severe sentence.

Rosenberg, like so many other prisoners seeking parole, argues that she is a new and different person. A model prisoner with no charges against her by prison authorities, she was up for parole. After her hearing, the US Parole Commission refused to pardon her, citing her role in the Brinks robbery as grounds for continued incarceration. Her attorneys appealed their ruling to a US District Court, which ruled that she could legally be kept in prison for fifteen more years on the basis of the Brinks charges. What Rosenberg is doing is citing a legal technicality that Giuliani had dropped the charges to save the government the cost and time of a trial as the grounds on which she says the Parole Commission had no right to reject her appeal. Moreover, she also argues that she was only a political activist, and not part of the Weather Underground group that committed the murder. When she was indicted, Rosenberg went underground as a fugitive, and would have remained free had the FBI not caught her in 1984, when she and a revolutionary associate were found, once again, stashing explosives and guns. She is innocent, she claims. "I supported the right of oppressed people to armed struggle," she told the news show. "That didn't mean I did it." Of course, in her lexicon, armed struggle is itself not a crime; simply a tactic to be used by the oppressed, of which she obviously includes herself a woman trapped in a hierarchical and patriarchal oppressive capitalist society. Therefore, even if she was guilty of supplying the Weather Underground Brinks terrorists with weapons by definition she would still say that she was not guilty. And as for the arms that government witnesses testified she had gathered for the Brinks job, she of course responds that those witnesses were lying.

Then there is the question of remorse. Rosenberg argues that she has had a change of heart about using violence to reach her proclaimed objectives. The US Attorney's office, however, argued to the Parole Commission that "even if Susan Rosenberg now professes a change of heart... the wreckage she has left in her wake is too enormous to overlook." Except, of course, for Bill Clinton. The Parole Commission, in refusing to release her, noted that it was appropriate to consider information about the Brinks robbery, even though an indictment for that crime had been dropped, and it did not find her denial of involvement in the crime credible. In addition, relatives of the murdered officer have publicly asked that she not be released, since she had never expressed any remorse for the murders.

As for Linda Evans, she too has record similar to Susan Rosenberg. Evans was once arrested in 1970 for conspiracy and crossing state lines to incite riot at SDS's so-called "Days of Rage" in Chicago, and for conspiracy and transportation of weapons and explosives in Detroit charges which were dropped because evidence was gained by illegal wiretaps. As her own biography puts it, "Linda began working to develop clandestine resistance capable of conducting armed struggle as part of a multi-level overall revolutionary strategy." She was again arrested in May of 1985 and charged with acquisition of weapons, using false ID's, and using safe houses and engaging in military training "to bring the war against US imperialism home to America." Her targets, proudly listed on one of her fan's websites, included the US Capitol building, the National War College, the Israeli Aircraft Industries, (she is also, of course, opposed to "zionism.") (sic) the FBI offices and the New York Patrolmen's Benevolent Association.Yet her forty-year sentence was also commuted by Bill Clinton in his last-minute pardon spree.

Reading Evans' articles makes it clear that she too has not changed her views one bit. An article she co-authored on "The Prison Industrial Complex" contains such gems as that incarceration's public rationale "is the fight against crime," while its real purpose is "profit and social control." Just as "communists were demonized" in the 1950's, she writes, "the demonization of criminals serves a similar ideological purpose;" to justify "repression" of poor people "who commit nonviolent crimes "out of economic need." Her world view is one of an America in which one sees "the flight of capital in search of cheaper labor markets," a continued "downward plight of American workers," of a war against drugs in Latin America meant to create "social control" in the hemisphere to be used to stop land reform and to enforce "the transnational corporate agenda."

Reading Evans is like perusing old copies of Ramparts or the Weather Underground's Prairie Fire, in which the "state's repressive apparatus" works around the clock to incarcerate poor people to prevent them from becoming revolutionaries. In a recent radio interview, Evans sounded like an unrepentant 60's revolutionary, who was proud to have beat the system and gained her freedom, despite not even having a bit of remorse for the terrorist activities for which she was convicted. Indeed, people like herself she calls them "political leaders from the liberation struggle," are in prison because the state wants to rob oppressed communities of "radical political leadership which might lead an opposition movement." Written while in prison, Evans identified herself as a "north american (sic) anti-imperialist political prisoner."

The question, then, is what motivated Bill Clinton to pardon these two self-proclaimed adherents of revolutionary violence, who pledge to use their regained freedom to carry on the struggle and provide the leadership they claim is missing. In these cases, there is no money trail to investigate no rich benefactors seeking favors. There were only two unreconstructed revolutionaries advocates of armed struggle who have shown no remorse for the lives of the working-class police officers that died as a result of Weather Underground terror.

Finally, there is one other reason that a President can pardon an individual found guilty. That reason, as Charles Krauthammer has argued in his syndicated column of March 2, is to "assuage deep national rifts." Thus, the incoming Republican President Warren G. Harding pardoned Socialist Party leader Eugene V.Debs in 1920. Debs had been found guilty of violating the Espionage and Sedition Act, by openly opposing American intervention in World War I, by speaking to a rally in Canton, Ohio. Debs argued that he did so to prove that an unconstitutional law unjustly curtailed the exercise of free speech. Running for President from prison, he received over 1 million votes. Woodrow Wilson, the Democratic wartime President, had shown extreme vindictiveness towards Debs. The war was unpopular in many levels of American society, and a clemency campaign for Debs drew wide popular support. Harding, a conservative, released Debs. The Socialist's first stop as he left prison was the White House, where Harding received him. "We understand each other perfectly," Debs said of the new President.

Debs was a true and legitimate political prisoner, imprisoned for expressing his ideas, openly and publicly. He engaged in no violent action; his only crime was to avail himself of his First Amendment rights. In this modern case, both Susan Rosenberg and Linda Evans dare to call themselves "political prisoners," when in fact; they were arrested, indicted and tried not for their ideas loathsome as they may be but for their terrorist actions. Indeed, as they see things, and constantly reiterate in their articles and speeches, every radical in prison, from Mumia Abu-Jamal on down, is to them a political prisoner. The violence they are guilty of is justified on political grounds, and hence they do not see their actions as criminal. Moreover, there is no widespread movement for clemency for them, as there was for Debs in 1919. Their continued incarceration would hardly have been noticed by anyone, save their family and extreme radical friends. I have studied Eugene V. Debs, and to put it bluntly, Rosenberg and Evans are no Gene Debs!

When Bill Clinton pardoned Puerto Rican terrorists last year, it was widely understood that the act was probably related to Hillary Clinton's forthcoming New York Senate race, and the hope that the pardons would gain her local New York Puerto Rican support. But in these two cases, no motive stares us in the face. Could it be that secretly, Bill Clinton in the depths of his heart, holds sympathy for these pathetic radicals as fellow anti-war comrades from the 60's, and that, in this final gesture, he has acted to show them solidarity, thinking that he is acting on behalf of ideals he too once held? Some journalist, at least, should also ask questions about these completely indefensible pardons.

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Ronald Radosh is a regular columnist and book reviewer for FrontPageMagazine.com. A former leftist and currently Professor Emeritus of History at City University of New York, Radosh has written many books, including The Rosenberg File (with Joyce Milton). His memoir Commies: A Journey Through the Old Left, the New Left and the Leftover Left is due out the first week in May, with the official publication date in June.