written 40 years ago. It may have some relevance to where we are now, with a world threatened by Islamic jihadism.
I skipped through a raving mad book by wild Laingian anti-psychiatrist David Cooper The Grammar of Living. It reads like a parody of Reich, Marcuse, Laing, Fanon, and Leary, all jumbled up together. He writes of committing suicide as a valuable form of orgasmic experience. He calls for total sexual millenarianism including paedophilia, coprophagy gerontophilia and all the rest. He recommends the Tibetan Book of the Dead as an aid to the heroic life of the revolutionary terrorist and advocates “deterrorising” death with the use of LSD.
I speculate that groups like Baader-Meinhof are as much criminals as serial sex murderer John Reginald Christie. They live as they do fundamentally because they enjoy it. “Deterrorising death” has been done before, by the Assassins, the SS, the samurai and other elite corps. To be a terrorist, fighting heroically for a cause is a form of gratification made possible in our peaceful wealthy consumer society by means of a peculiar, very irrational mishmash of self-justification and philosophy which is to hand. Being a mere criminal without an ideal would not be a tenth as satisfying. The one thing consumer society fails to provide is the heroic ideal, but lo! the forces of private enterprise create it. I myself have more respect for Christie and Jack the Ripper. They chose lives of criminal excitement but did not need a mass of false idealism to justify what they were doing. Presumably they were capable of admitting their true motives to themselves. When so many young people profess admiration for Baader-Meinhof it is often either stupidity or hypocrisy. But where are those who admire Christie? They would be shunned. The only real difference is individualistic versus gregarious crime and it is hard to see why the former should be so much more reprehensible . Certainly it seems braver.
Are Baader-Meinhof really so stupid as to suppose they are fighting for a better future? Probably not. Young people today achieve a romantic identification with the elite corps. Marxist theory is largely incidental. The real reason is the ennui that led people to welcome the First World War, product of peace and prosperity.
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