------------------------------------------------------------------- Fun site. Re-live those glory days when the radical German left made Weather look like a soft breeze.
http://www.baader-meinhof.com/
DP ----------------------------------------------------------------- They were totally insane. I think my cousin was vaguely slightly associated with them in some way when he was 16. He suddenly got sent over here for a year of high school in Seattle, I think for doing some graffiti for them or something. He got straight As in the high school here and went back to flunking out in Berlin. It's really amazing how germans can go from point zero to a violent demonstration so quickly - like at May day each year and at the yearly ritual of chaos days etc. In the U.S. it is taken for granted that nonviolence is the norm, and at any political event if a window gets broken, that is really shocking and crosses a line, and the majority of people present will probably strongly disagree. We would have so far to go before ever becoming like that. But there is just a different tradition in germany and some other parts of europe. 'Ordinary' people have been exposed to it so frequently that they shrug off the events, but adamantly support the political center. They also follow the reverse-broken-window theory of law enforcement. I noticed, and many other people I've talked to have noticed that there is about 5X as much graffiti in a lot of european cities, and police don't carry guns and don't crack down on a lot of minor quality of life crimes. And the result is that the society is much safer and lower in violent crime as a net sum. There is no location like 6th street in San Francisco. Germany's autonomen result from their fascist/communist history and in many ways are the foundation of the black blocs that exist in other european and north american locations recently.
I know a guy who works in the cafeteria of student housing and he lets me in to eat for free. He's an older guy who is really eloquent and knows a lot and has a history degree. He said he used to be in the NSA until he double crossed someone and went into semi-hiding, and since has rejected his previous very right wing politics- and I wasn't really aware of what that was until I looked it up in a search engine and found it to be at the heart of every Art Bell type of conspiracy theory floating around. I mentioned the above anecdote about my cousin, and he seemed to have really specific knowledge about the Bader Meinhof group and said that if they knew him, they would specifically want him dead. That totally creeped me out and I didn't ask further. It's like, the standing evidence, with the detailed information he was giving to me, would offer about 45% chance that he's telling the truth, and 55% that he's a delusional Art Bell aficionado. _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com