Wednesday, November 26, 2008

[baader meinhof] ideology - nah - it's the joy of violence


I wasn't going to post again tonight but Tiberius Gracchus has come up with an excellent post on the theme I touched on earlier about the sympathy for the perpetrator and today's post on the political quadrant. Tiberius makes this point:

A film like the Baader Meinhof complex tells the story of the terrorists- in that sense it invites you to sympathise with them and it disregards the pain of their victims because that is not what it shows mostly on screen. The danger is glamourising terrorists and turning them into heroes- furthering the myth of their own creation, that they are in some sense the only principled ones standing against a society of compromise.

Tiberius does not think that this film is wholly guilty for that but he goes on to say, about the group itself:

They were convinced totalitarians - in a way the communism seems to me to have been less important to some of them (Mahler, Baader) than the violence it allowed them to commit- many of them could easily have gone the other way to the extreme right and quite a few (Mahler, Ensslinn) had flirted with it. Dispositionally as well as ideologically there may not be as much to choose between the extremes as we sometimes think.

1 comment:

  1. It's because of the closeness I chose the middle of the road and became Non-aligned.

    ReplyDelete

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