Clowns of terror: The Baader-Meinhof gang were hopelessly incompetent, befuddled

Hopelessly incompetent, these terrorists were products of the Left-wing counter-culture of the Sixties, a group who railed against the Establishment and had bonded around casual sex, rock music and the ingestion of massive quantities of illegal drugs. But despite their inadequacies, they left a trail of destruction and dead bodies in their struggle against the 'capitalist exploitation' of workers. What is most shocking, though, is the support they attracted from the liberal-Left not just in Germany but throughout the western world. The Baader-Meinhof story is a chilling lesson in the appeasement of terrorism by a Left-wing consensus so blinded by ideology that it glosses over horrendous crimes in support of its cause. These terrorists were the lethal face of the radical generation who went on to occupy the heights of the liberal establishment across the western world. In Britain, the Left-leaning universities, the arts, the BBC, and many more institutions are still dominated by survivors of an era whose ideologies - a disrespect for authority, contempt for the family unit, an emphasis on human rights not responsibilities - permeate every facet of our lives 40 years on. The group originated amid an international wave of student militancy which was strong in Germany, where spoiled middle-class kids revolted against parents who had arduously rebuilt the country from wartime rubble. They wanted a Marxist revolution, claiming that Germany's democracy was really a "Fascist" state perpetuated by surviving members of the Nazi party. Anyone who did not agree with them was shouted down as a "Nazi". Never mind that real German workers wanted a Volkswagen, holidays in Torremolinos, and new kitchens - ambitions which idle student Leftists despised. Or that real workers knew about communism - their relatives lived under it in a police state across the Berlin Wall - and had no time for the views of drug-fuelled layabouts. Read more: [view link]